Battle of the Beasts (part 3)

In my last two posts I’ve discussed four of the biggest beasts in Torrey. In my first post I discussed Frankenstein’s monster and Melville’s Moby Dick. In my last post I looked at Spencer’s great dragon and Dante’s Satan, all the while comparing the beasts to one another. Finally I have arrived at the final beast. This beast is so great that it has beasts beneath him that he empowers. It is Satan, the Dragon of Revelation.

Revelation’s Dragon

In Revelation, John writes down the images and visions that Jesus shows him. After seeing many different things, he sees another sign.

And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems.  His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. (Rev 12:3-4)

The great red dragon of revelation does not have long descriptors like those of the other monsters, but he is much greater. John sees him in heave and witnesses his magnitude. The dragon has seven heads (more than Dante’s three faces), ten horns, and seven diadems on each head. The diadems show that the beast is royally adorned and the horns denote power, more power than he has heads even. His tail is larger than Moby-Dick’s or Spencer’s dragon as it wipes out a third of the stars in the heavens and casts them down to earth (this may or may not be the angels, which still shows that he has power since he was able to deceive them to follow him).

The vision continues:

Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world— he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Rev 12:7-10)

The dragon was in heaven and fought the great angel Michael. The dragon, who is revealed to be the serpent Satan, looses and is cast down out of heaven to the earth. But even here he is shown with power. He is called ancient and the deceiver of the whole world. How powerful does he have to be to deceive the whole world? Even ancient is a display of strength as he is not some young force. Even being cast down out of heaven, he has strength.

The Smudge of Sin: Athanasius and Anselm

God expresses his beauty through creation. There is no doubt of the beauty of the lilies that do not toil or spin. One can only stand in awe when looking up at the night sky full of stars and galaxies. The complexities of even the smallest cells, molecules, atoms, and everything smaller show the immense detail of creation while the world, stars, and galaxies show the vastness of his power. Yet in all of creation, nothing is so unique as man who bears the image of God. He is God’s masterpiece of creation.

Yet something has happened. Anselm of Canterbury writes, “The human race, clearly his most precious piece of workmanship, has been completely ruined” (A, 269).  Sin has contaminated the great masterpiece and ruined it.

Athanasius and Anselm both refer to sin as a smudge on the masterpiece of God.

Athanasius focuses on the incarnation in his work so aptly named On the Incarnation. He delves into the purposes of the incarnation and why it was necessary. As he talks about man’s redemption, he compares it to an artist and an old portrait.

Bishops, Presbyters, and Deacons, Oh My -Ignatius

Bishops, presbyters, deacons. To many of us these words are associated with the Roman Catholic Church, inciting ideas of legalism, corruption, and strange doctrines. While I’m not here to defend Roman Catholicism, I do think it is unwise to jump to such conclusions. The ideas of Bishops, presbyters, and deacons come from the early church fathers, those who came directly after the apostles. One of these, St. Ignatius of Antioch, wrote to many churches on the importance of bishops and obeying them.

Saint Ignatius

Ignatius of Antioch, the name sake of my Torrey group, lived during the first century and was bishop of Antioch. It is said that he was the third bishop of the church, following St. Peter and St. Evodius. Scholars agree that he was likely a disciple of Peter and that Peter himself appointed him to this position. Ignatius does not appear in history till right before his death when he writes several letters to churches. He was imprisoned for some unknown reason and was led to Rome to be martyred.

His icon is easily distinguished as a man being eaten by two lions. I got to go to Rome this January where three of us from Ignatius got to see the church dedicated to him and where his remains were likely stored. He firmly believed that his martyrdom was for him to be found pure. Fox writes in his Book of Martyrs

The Call to Love

The two authors we spend the most time discussing in Torrey are Plato and Augustine, and rightly so as both have deeply affected Western thought. Much of the development of theology, East and West, has come out of Augustine. I’ve already stressed the importance of Plato in an earlier post, which I’ll be referencing throughout this one.

Loving God

During my freshmen and sophomore years I wrote two papers on “The Call to Love” which took Plato and connected him to Christ’s command to love. While I am a better writer now, I believe the ideas in it have been the most important and fundamental to my spiritual growth as well as how I interact with the world around me. My thought forms around Plato’s tripartite soul and Christ’s command to love him and love others.

My theory originates from Mark 12:30.

Bacchus: God of Wine

Wine. Ritual Madness. Ecstasy. Not things that are normally associated with Christianity, rather Bacchus (Dionysus) is the god over them. He was a bastard son of Zeus who brought drunkenness and death. He was a rebel. And yet  C. S. Lewis tries to redeem him. Why would a giant in the Christian world defend such a god or try to redeem him? To answer that question we should see who this god was.

Origin

Bacchus was the son of Jove (Zeus) and one of his many mistresses Semele. Ovid, the famed poet, wrote about it in his Metamorphoses about the same time that Christ was born. Juno (Hera), the wife of Zeus discovers Semele’s pregnancy and desires revenge. She disguises herself and appears to Semele as her old maid, telling her to ask Jove to reveal his whole glory to prove he is truly Jove. Semele agrees and traps Jove in a promise to do whatever she asks. Semele asks to see Jove’s glory, and Jove complies, sadly. When he comes to Semele she is overpowered by his

Justin’s Apology for Plato

One of the purposes of this blog is to find the redemptive portions of texts that aren’t about God or Christianity. What are the universal truths that we can find in works like Machiavelli’s The Prince or things that can speak into our lives as Christians such as Homer’s gods in the Iliad?  The idea of redeeming other works is not new. One early Christian apologist, Justin Martyr, did this with Plato. Justin Martyr believed that Plato went to heaven because he knew God, the logos. While I cannot argue myself for Plato’s salvation, I will show how Justin, in his First and Second Apologies, can extend salvation to Plato. Justin has personal investment in his project as he is a philosopher himself who studied Plato’s works and seeks to show Christianity as the true religion and philosophy. He was martyred under Marcus Aurelius, another Torrey author.

The Logos

Justin believes that Socrates (and Plato) had received revelation from the Logos. The Logos in Greek philosophy was the idea of knowledge or discourse. In the Bible and Christian thought, it is