So William Lane Craig, who among other things thinks Matthew has completely mucked up Jesus' eschatology, now rejects the eternal generation of the Son from the Father in the Nicene Creed

First the liberal Lutherans ditch the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son from the Nicene Creed, and now a prominent evangelical ditches "begotten of His Father before all worlds", which is actually the language of the Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 doubling down on the Nicene Creed of 325.

Good to know! 

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. 

-- John 8:58

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

-- Exodus 3:14

Become what you are . . .!  

-- Nietzsche, Pindar, . . . 

 

Lecturer in theology says Christians can learn existential gratitude from the spiritual but not religious, who are evidently the reincarnation of Augustine lol

 

The Critique of Religion

King-Ho Leung, Plough

 

... At the heart of “religion,” in Augustine’s portrayal, is what we might call existential gratitude: recognizing our existence as a gift given by God, that we are ourselves created as gifts of God, and that we are called to give to God “the gift of ourselves” – the gifts that we are – as an act of thanks-giving. 

... many who are “spiritual but not religious” or even atheistic may say they are grateful for their existence, as if their existence is a gift given to them, even though they may not believe in a divine gift-giver to whom they feel grateful.

This “spiritual but not religious” attitude of existential gratitude is not about following certain rules or cultural conventions, nor is it about identifying oneself with a particular tribe or social group. It is, rather, as Robert Bellah memorably put it, a “habit of the heart.” And from this kind of gratitude, Christians, perhaps, have something to learn. ...

Right, right, Jesus' message wasn't about doing something in relation to the world. It wasn't about leaving your life and family behind to follow him, or selling everything and giving it to the poor, or forgiving the debts owed to you or the wrongs done to you.

Nay, nay, it was about a feeling in relation to God! It was about thanking God for your beautiful wife and beautiful house, your large automobile, your successful career, and your secure retirement.

True religion is thanking God for the gift of you, the gift that you are.

 

 

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.

 

-- Luke 18:11  

Oswald Spengler: The opposite of noble is not poor, but vulgar

Pride and quietly borne poverty, silent fulfilment of duty, renunciation for the sake of a task or conviction, greatness in enduring one's fate, loyalty, honour, responsibility, achievement: All this is a constant reproach to the "humiliated and insulted".

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), p. 94.

Nietzsche's anti-intellectual response to his own gaslighting: Become what you are

"Werde, der Du bist", but tellingly minus the learning:

γένοι' οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών -- Pindar, Pythian 2.72.

Gaslighting your own son

From The New York Times, January 24, 1999, here:

The bare-bones account of Nietzsche's life begins not so much with his birth in 1844 as with the death of his father five years later. Carl Nietzsche was a Lutheran pastor who died of ''softening of the brain,'' which sounds very like a dementia caused by the syphilitic infection that killed his son. Responding to his mother's urgings, Nietzsche became a child prodigy, and he also began to suffer from the nightmares and headaches that plagued him all his life.

What brought him to the state of ardent discipleship in which he met Wagner in 1868 is obscure. He had known about Wagner from his teens, but had disliked the music even while he admired the mythic themes of operas like ''Tristan und Isolde'' and tried himself to write an opera based on Nordic legends. It is clearer what he admired once he had become intoxicated: Wagner promised to re-create for the Germans the cultural climate in which the classical Greek world had created the tragedies of Aeschylus. It was this that ''The Birth of Tragedy'' spelled out in 1872 to its astonished readers.