But what's the reason?

The Stoics assume our task is to reduce our estrangement from our nature, but they give no reason for this estrangement as a feature of human existence, the condition under which all humans come to be and must exist. They talk much about our ability to return to nature and not at all about why the human being qua human being is estranged from its nature in the first place. There are symptoms (passions, for example) but no disease, effects but no cause. In light of the Christian narrative, one might say that the Stoics do not have an account of the human problem that does the work the Fall does for Christians.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 255

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Well, that's the final excerpt from One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions. I hope you learned something from it. I certainly did. As I said at the time, the chapter on epistemology was worth the price of the book. The windows it opened in my mind will be with me for a long time. And the idea of a "second-first language" was extremely interesting.

Next up will be Emil Brunner's The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, the second in his three-volume Church Dogmatics. I was so happy when Wipf & Stock brought it back into print in 2014. But, if you prefer electronic, The Internet Archive has a copy and there are other legal ones out there as well. Personally, when reading theology, I prefer the hard copy.

I'm looking forward to this; I haven't done any serious reading in Brunner since seminary where his The Christian Doctrine of God was used in the introductory theology class (along w/the compendium of Calvin's Institutes and an assortment of John Wesley's sermons). I fought with understanding Brunner for the first hundred or so pages, but once I "got it," I loved it. I thank Dennis Kinlaw to this day for teaching me to read theology—and not using some vapid introduction to theology text, but instead forcing us to read the originals. Ad fontes, as they say ("to the sources").
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