IS CHRISTIANITY SIMPLE

Is Christianity a simple religion? Is it simple as religions go? The short answer is that the AXIOMS of (no doubt all) religions are simple and few:

1. One axiom defines whether God is premised as all-powerful and is a Person or Something else—an infinite Mind or Will or Word or some combination of these. (God is usually a spiritual Being but may be material in some outlooks.)

2. Another axiom may assume—or, if you wish, specify—that God is the Creator of all that is and is to be worshiped as such. (The reason given or explained later may be that we owe our being to God or something else.)

3. There needs to be an axiom concerning revelation telling how one knows about God, his Worship, and his worshipers' behavior, especially Salvation.

4. There will always be another axiom that establishes the religious and latreutic (i.e. what has to do with Worship) rôle of creation—i.e. matter and time.

5. An axiom will state the basis of morality—whether it is reality-based (nature-based) or purely command-based, e.g. based on divine commands that are arbitrary with respect to ontic reality, or not..

6. Some—especially self-invented, religions (St. Paul's ethelothrēskeía in Col. 2:23)—posit that the teachings and/or commands of a religion have got to be simple. The axioms will generally be as simple as these six.

What many otherwise intelligent people fail to realize is that axioms, like definitions, are neither true nor false: They are arbi- trary acts of intention (that is a will, perhaps volition governed by some thinking). In short, axioms fence in what can be allowed as true and what cannot be true without themselves being either true or false. The word ethelothrēskeía cited from Col. 2:23 above is based on the Greek word for "will." It has to do with an arbitrary embrace of a given set of axioms rather than those of earlier thinkers or whatever; as already emphasized, axioms are in them- selves neither true nor false. Will-based ("moral") axioms are called DEONTIC in modal logic; axioms based on perceptual reality are ONTIC.

The axioms determine (by definition, so to speak) how the words and events of revelation get interpreted. From the axioms are derived the seldom simple but often elaborate beliefs of Christians East or West and the beliefs of members of other religions.

Eastern Christianity accepts ontic senses of the energy terms in Gen. 1:26 and in connection with the Apostle Paul's 26 uses of enérgeia and words derived from the CAUSATIVE verb (its Greek morphology shows it to be such as much as the endings of moisten, energize, and codify do in English) energeîn . . . the sense that every writer in Greek of Paul's time would had in mind. For historical reasons explained elsewhere on this web- site, Western Christianity accepts DEONTIC (volitional, juridical and/or forensic) translations of the same terminology. (SEE HERE for the most crucial terms.) The causes underlying such differ- ences are paradigm differences in East and West. (SEE HERE.)

An example is Phlp. 2:13, where two occurrences of the word for "energize" are found: "For it is God (wh is) energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of [His] being well-pleased."

SO READING THE BIBLE or its many English mistranslations (because of using words according to the import of the wrong paradigm) IS ANYTHING BUT SIMPLE!!!

Of course, a rather philosophical-ethical religion (e.g. those indigenous to China) may emphasize behavior more than other things. Others may reduce behavior to the avoidance of taboos or simply to participating in magic (the idea that matter or an action under certain conditions operates automatically, i.e. without the intervention of anyone's will other than the will of the performer of the ceremony).

The answer to the question posed in the title of this page is that your Christianity and my Christianity are about equally simple (or complex) if attention is paid only to the axioms . . . though few members of any religion are aware of their assumptions, especially those concerning a "simple religion."

When we look at the beliefs derived from the axioms, however, the list may long or short, simple or elaborate. Worship may be ontic, i.e. offering the best of creation back to God (the central part of traditional—Eastern and Western— Christian Worship); or it may be non-ontic, entirely verbal (e.g. praise, confession).

And so with other aspects of religion. What is morally acceptable will be
be ontic-based—on what accords with human nature—or deontic—a list of commands that are arbitrary so far as concerns the nature of WHAT IS

Intelligent worshipers eschew silly arguments over whether your religion or my religion is simple . . . until we agree on whether we are talking about the axioms or items derived from and based on those axioms.

No matter how elaborate the teachings of a religion may be—the gigantic corpus of an Augustine or Aquinas in the West; or the shorter works of the Apostle Paul or the early apologetes—they have all got to conform with the
short list of axioms that define a religion or a given form of a religion.
A complication arises when it is notice that axioms fall into two categories, those that constitute the matter and those that constitute the form of a paradigm or conceptual world view that (unless one is aware and flexible enough to escape from it) pre-determines what one can or will think about a given subject.

There are two, functionally different, categories of axioms that structure a paradigm or axiomatic worldview, or thought world, namely, its matter and the conceptual (i.e. interpretative) form. Semitic and the three Christian paradigms are constituted of different combinations of differences concerning the rôle of creation (matter and time) in RELIGION, REVELATON, and SALVATION. It must not be forgotten that the axioms are ASSUMPTIONS; their rôle is not to be true or false but to determine what can or may be true or false.

√ In the category of the MATTER of a religious worldview, created matter and time
    play a necessary and good rôle in religion, revelation, and Salvation; or they
    play an unnecessary rôle (or even an evil or magical rôle) in the revelatory and
    soterial aspects of a GNOSTIC religion.

√ In the category of the conceptual-interpretative FORM of a religious paradigm or
    thought world, the interpretation can be ONTIC (being- or nature-related) or
     DEONTIC —i.e. moral, which is to say, based on will and commands or law (e.g.
    the Ten Commandments). The concept of nature or being will play a minimal
    rôle if any. How all of this plays out is dealt with on the page linked above (and
    the pages linked to it).

The reader is encouraged not to indulge in a simple-minded (not the same as "simple") view of religion that muddles the distinctions that have been made in the foregoing; for they determine what words mean and what is true or false. Orthodox Christians and those considering what the worth of holy Orthodox Christanity need to bemade aware that the Apostolic paradigm of St. Paul was structured with the following axiomatic matter and axiomatic form:

MATTER	MATERIALITY (Mysteries) and TIME (Trad- ition) play vital rôles in Christianity—as also in Hebrew religion
FORM	ENERGY (as understood in Hellenism) plays a vital rôle in understanding—not juridicality, so formative in Semitic (Jewish, Islamic) religions

St. Paul used energy terms 26 times (not counting synergy terms), not counting nouns and adjectives indicating energetic concepts. If a reader belongs to a religion that embraces any of the following views, one's outlook is not con-
sistent with that of St. Paul and the Apostles and early Greek-language writers:

√ If one arbitrarily (i.e. axiomatically) treats the Incarnation as just incidental
    to the Crucifixion as the "crucial" act of Christian Salvation; and if one treats
    the Resurrection as not being the essence of Salvation, i.e. as just a d
    demonstration of divine power or the like; in short, if one understands
    Salvation non-ontically as other than bodily Resurrection, which the Gnostics
    of the Apostolic Age rejected as not compatible with a sane outlook;

√ If one views Grace as not energetic—or worse, as not even ontic;
    various non-Apostolic options include viewing Grace as nothing but divine
    Volition or as divine help that is non-energetic (Scholastic Latin non-operativa)
    and/or  not uncreated (Scholastic Latin non increata), even though
    "supernatural";

√ If one arbitrarily (that is, axiomatically) views water, bread, wine, oil,
    icons (including the Cross), tongues of fire, as incapable of conveying Grace—
    say if these material items are held to be incapable of ever conveying saving
    Energy to a properly disposed worshiper

. . . then that person has embraced the wrong Trinity and not read the Greek New Testament IN THE PARADIGM of the materially Semitic and formally HELLENISTIC (energetic) PARADIGM of St. Paul, but rather in the GNOSTIC PARADIGM that the Apostolic proclamation of the Resurrection was so at odds with.

Gnosticism derives via Platonism from Indo-Iranian religion; Indic religion is anti- material (anti-sacramental); Zoroasterianism is dualistic, understanding matter to be the product of an evil Deity, whereas time (e.g. a revelatory tradition) is spiraling down hill, corrupting pristine truth.

Doing one's thinking in a paradigm invented over twelve hundred years after Christ's Birth (on the basis of Arabic interpretations of Hellenic philosophy) . . . or even—the result of scholars' migrating to Europe at the fall of Constantinople to the Turks—fifteen hundred years after the Birth of our Savior!

The Gnostics of Hellenism held—contrary to the Jewish and Christian Apostles, bishops like St. Ignatios of Antioch and St. Eirēnaíos, and early apologetes—that matter cannot play a valid rôle in religion, and that time (tradition) is spiraling downhill to ever greater decay (phthorá "[perishability"])— corrupting rather than revealing greater knowledge of God.

From the point of view of the Apostolic (ontic-energetic) paradigm, the worst possible scenario, the worst choice of axioms to constitute the matter and form of one's religious paradigm would be

√ to reject the mysteric (sacramental; anti-Gnostic) axioms (approved
    by the early apologetes and bishops) in favor of spiritualistic and "wordy"
    "(non-ceremonial) view of religion . . . forming a paradigm whose"matter"
    is gnostic, that is rejecting sacraments and evolution in creation,
    revelation (tradition), and salvation . . .

√ to keep the forensic (juridical) Hebrew paradigm that the Apostle Paul
so emphatically rejected as the interpretative "form" of one's paradigm,
say, espousing a forensic view of non-ontic "grace" and "justification."

CLICK HERE for tables showing how East-West paradigm differences cause crucial Christian terms to be understood in conflicting ways: Eastern Christians treat the terms ontically (including energetically in accord with the Apostle Paul's frequent uses of energy and synergy terminology); Western Christians treat the same terms deontically, i.e. juridically-morally. Once these semantic differences are understood, things should be clearer for seekers, critics, would-be ecumenists, etc.

It's a free world, even though some American Christians try to force their views of concerning various matters (not least a view of the onset of vegetative life, animate life, and rational human life in a fœtus; or the death of rational and animate life in a brain- dead person or animal) on everyone . . . and through political law. It is possible to interpret religious ideas in the Apostolic para- digm; it is possible to understand and MISTRANSLATE the words of the Greek Bible according to some paradigm invented a dozen years after 700-750 years of Western Dark Ages or even fifteen centuries later, after the Fall of Constantinople. One might even invent an ethelothreskeutic paradigm, though it would be hard to think what choices you could invent over and above those that have already been invented —and you would have to interpret the following verses non-literally: Col. 2:23, John 1:16, 3:5, 6:53-54, not to speak of Phlp. 2:912-)13. It would be patently dishonest to claim to be a literalist while interpreting any part of the Bible non-literally!! But when logos "reason" is drowned by sentiment, it happens, . . . and when the Creator is God's LÓGOS, the cosmos is logikós ("intelligible"); but if the Creator is a Word, then religion is more wordy than logical!!

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