I’m teaching on Christology and the Council of Chalcedon in the morning. In honor of the occasion, I’m posting this picture (from the Nuremberg Chronicle) of the Council, which (I trust) perfectly captures how the proceedings went down.
The Definition of Chalcedon (451) states,
In agreement, therefore, with the holy fathers, we all unanimously teach that we should confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, the same perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a rational soul and body, consubstantial with the Father in Godhead, and the same consubstantial with us in manhood, like us in all things except sin; begotten from the Father before the ages as regards His Godhead, and in the last days, the same, because of us and because of our salvation begotten from the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, as regards His manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures being by no means removed because of the union, but the property of each nature being preserved and coalescing in one Person (prosopon) and one subsistence (hupostasis)–not parted or divided into two persons (prosopa), but one and the same Son, only-begotten, divine Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets of old and Jesus Christ Himself have taught us about Him and the creed of our fathers had handed down.
I really shouldn’t aspire to anything beyond what Jake describes in this piece: You Must Never Wish for Another Life.
Rob Horning, on “the emergent way of seeing” encouraged by generative AI:
No one is entitled to a unique experience, or at least to a unique representation of it. The photo that one takes of some event doesn’t belong to the picture taker; it belongs to the “field of what is representable,” which once was the shared possession of an entire culture but is becoming the property of AI companies, who are trying to turn that field into a closed, proprietary model. Then, every image you take of “your” experience will be quickly demonstrated to be derived from an existing idea already latent in the total model of all possible experiences. […]
[We end up with] the sense that “a model could have generated this” whether it had or not. It projects a subjectlessness onto a scene, subtracts the specific intentionality from any point of view, and sees the average, the predictable, the over-seen, exalted into a kind of glossy, mediocre sublime. No one is missing out on anything. Behind everything distinctive is an ordinary pattern if you scale up enough. And that is the scale at which tech companies want us to situate our consuming selves, where we plug into a feed not to “connect with people we know” — a local and financially inconsequential level that can only sustain so much time on device, and which is readily revealed as an inadequate substitute for better and more secure ways of keeping in touch — but to connect with the machine and to learn how to see the way it sees and enjoy its endless bounty.
What percentage of my life is taken up with re-staging the pillows on our living room couches? I shudder to think…
What takes place in the modern era…is a reconfiguration of space that is much more profound than the creation of an expanded common space through the gathering up and coordination of formerly scattered elements into one. What happens is a shift from “complex space”—varied communal contexts with overlapping jurisdictions and levels of authority—to a “simple space,” characterized by a duality of individual and state. There is an enfeebling of local common spaces by the power of the center and a simultaneous parochialization of the imagination of Christendom into that of the sovereign state. To say that the state “creates” society is not to deny that families, guilds, clans, and other social groups existed before the state. Rather, the state “creates” society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiances.
This seems like an extremely important point—one that will take me quite some time to fully, if ever, assimilate into my thinking. Cavanaugh explains a little further on, “This creation of a unitary space requires the church’s absorption into the sovereign and the absorption of any other bodies that would threaten the unity of Leviathan.” This clarifies why he had said in the Introduction that, in order to “resist the colonization of the Christian imagination by a nation-state that wants to subordinate all other attachments to itself,” it will be necessary “to complexify political space.” Cavanaugh counsels that we need “to create forms of local and translocal community that disperse and resist the powers invested in the state and corporation,” ultimately expressed in “a kind of Christian micro politics that comes first and foremost from grass-roots groups of Christians.” I’m intrigued, to say the least, though I really have no idea what such proposals would look like in concrete terms.
The story of the death of the sovereign God and his rebirth in the sovereign state is not a story of the progressive stripping of the sacred from some secular remainder. It is instead the transfer of care for the holy from church to state. We not only expect the state to provide technical solutions to market imbalances. In a deeper sense, we want the state to absorb the risk involved in living a mortal human life. We want the state to defer the consequences of our actions to some undefined future. In other words, we want the state to help us cheat death.
Keller, Center Church, pt. 0 (Intro: Theological Vision)
As I previously alluded to, this is the first installment in what will be roughly nine posts in which I summarize and reflect on the contents of Tim Keller’s Center Church. With this first post, I merely want to look at the introduction and Keller’s notion of “theological vision.” Each of the following eight posts will deal with the eight “parts” of the book, which span the three larger sections of the work: Gospel, City, and Movement.