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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The hermeneutics of disagreement

Disagreement, says Stout, is limited precisely to the extent that we recognize it as disagreement at all. Absent a larger background of agreement, difference would show up as unintelligibility, not disagreement: “Our disagreements … to be, intelligible, require a background of truths taken for granted” (59, cf. 19-21, 43, et passim). To say “that another society has a moral language is to say that it has Views on at least some of the topics we denominate as moral” (69). It is this larger background of agreement that makes disagreement disagreement and simultaneously affords the promise of translation. Hermeneutical enrichment is a real possibility exactly to the extent that disagreement is parasitic upon a deeper agreement and does not—indeed, it apparently cannot—“go all the way down” (20). We inevitably understand something of those with whom we disagree. Articulating this something, finding its linguistic shape and expounding it, discloses the agreement and simultaneously points the way toward the mutually intelligible judgments that are translation in action.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 241–42

One sentence sums it up

Jesus is Lord above all lords is the shape of Christian political life.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 233

It's all intertwined

It is difficult, of course, to think of politics in the ancient world, since the ancients did not distinguish between politics and things such as religion or family life. The dichotomies that have become ours in the late-modern West were not theirs. When we ask them what we think of as political questions, their replies immediately range beyond the shape of our modern questions and into the full breadth of ancient life. To be political in this or that way was also to be religious in this or that way and to be a husband or a father—or a wife or a mother (think only of Agrippina!)—or a master or a slave in this or that way, and much else besides.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 232

The sticking point

It is an obvious but often overlooked point in the comparison of Stoicism with early Christianity that the sticking point of any claims to similarity is Jesus of Nazareth. But it is only by ignoring or somehow attempting to minimize the fact that Christianity’s existence is directly dependent upon—indeed, utterly inconceivable without—Jesus of Nazareth that one can posit shared philosophical agreement between wide or deeply important patterns of speech.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 230

And it doesn't translate the other way either

When we pose the question in reverse and ask how the Christians might render the Stoic sense of anthropos within a Christian grammar, we immediately confront an impossibility. Though the Stoic texts do not give an account of the origin of our propensity to disregard our nature and live contra the order of reason, they do assume that our undisciplined tendencies move us in damaging ways away from our nature. And in this one might be lured into seeing promise for synonymy. But as great as it may be, due to our weakness in passion or ignorance of reasons direction, the Stoics judge our damage not to be so great as to be beyond self-repair and the future direction of self-care. As long as we learn the habits of Stoic life and build well the fortress of reason within, there is no need to receive help of any other kind than what we can offer ourselves. It is true that we learn from human exempla how Stoic lives look, but our use for them is only illustrative; we do not depend on them in any fundamental way for the possibility of self-repair and future self-care.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 229–30

<idle musing>
As I've said before, no wonder the gospel was seen as good news! It's a lot of work to try to improve yourself—and it's never-ending, as the continuing publication of self-help books illustrates!

I'll take the infilling of the Holy Spirit as animating power any day over the continual grind of self-improvement! The Spirit motivates via love, which I find much better and easier than self-flagellation, whether literal or metaphorical/verbal.
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It just doesn't translate

When we pose the question about God in reverse—how to “translate" the Christian use of the word theos into Stoic usage so that the Stoics would say the same thing with the word God in their grammar that the Christians said in theirs—we are immediately confronted with this problem: the linguistic/conceptual resources needed to render the Christian use of God in Stoic grammar do not exist. There is no word for the Christian use of God because the thought that would entail what God means vis-a-vis the cosmos did not exist within the Stoic take on the whole of things. Moreover, there is no possible way to get the Christian sense of God as “God-as-determined-by-the-history-of-the-Jews-and-Jesus-of-Nazareth” into Stoic grammar. One might as well simply tell the entire Christian story. And, in fact, that is the point: to render God and all that this word entails is to render the narrative that makes the word God mean what it does to both Christians and Stoics. Were the Christian and the Stoic stories the same, the word God would refer to the same thing. But they are not, and the word God is not “translatable.”—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 227

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And therein lies the reason why the Gospels are narratives and why the speeches in the book of Acts are always historical narratives. You have to tell the story in order for people to understand what Rowe calls the grammar. God doesn't mean the same thing to different worldviews. You have to define it, but the way to define it best is via narrative—and even then you risk misunderstandings.
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The goal

To be sure, there will be judgment; neither the wicked nor their works will have further sway. But the accent of the final chapter of the Christian story is not upon our just deserts but upon the culmination of the glorious, liberating work of God to set his redeemed creation free. Or to be more precise, the consummation is when the world is finally and completely taken up in the work wrought in Christ from beginning to end.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 223

It's the resurrection, silly

Had Jesus not been raised bodily, who knows how the Christian story would have run—or, rather, whether there would have been one at all (1 Cor 15). But in fact he had, and a fortiori so shall we: the story thus runs in the direction from him to us. Paul’s argument that we shall receive spiritual bodies upon our resurrection, Luke’s ordering of the church’s kerygma from Jesus’ resurrection to the hope of our own (see Acts 23:6; 24:15; 26:23), and Justin’s insistence that the immortality of the soul is insufficiently Christian precisely because it discards our bodies, all presuppose the fundamental importance of Jesus bodily resurrection for what we make of our end. To say it slightly differently, the way the Christian story runs to its end is unintelligible without the bodily resurrection of Jesus.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 222

Counterrevolutionary

When and where the wider world sees governmentally obedient Christians, it will simultaneously witness the obstinate refusal to confess anyone other than Christ as Lord. When and where the wider world sees a Christian community that works within the jurisprudential norms of the land, it will simultaneously witness a community that turns such norms toward the truth of its political life. In short, the Christian story of the meantime tells of a distinction between church and world and of the different ways of knowing that are interwoven with this distinction itself.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 221

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Would that that were true today, when so many who call themselves Christian are more interested in establishing a dominion here on earth than they are in living the kingdom in their own life!
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Embodied image

Were one to ask what allows such remarkable claims to be made about the new possibilities for human life, the Christians would tell of Jesus as the one who was the image of God. In some contrast to modern understandings of the word image, they did not mean that Jesus “reflected” God as if he were a copy of some other reality. They meant instead that precisely as the human that he was—and in the “scheme” of the human life that he thus lived—he enfleshed the God who made the world (see Phil 2:2, 5–11). The Lord of Israel has come as the Lord in the life of Jesus. When Luke speaks of the Lord of all, he means both the Lord of heaven and earth and the resurrected Jesus (Acts 4:24; 10:36; 17:24). And for Justin [Martyr], God’s very Word has taken flesh in Jesus; the speech of the Lord of Israel turns out to be the human life of the Nazarene.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 218–19

But, it's not the final word

Indeed, in the Christian story Jesus is the second Adam, the Son of God sent forth not one day after the next but in the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4). In the Christian telling of it, the fact that Jesus was the “son of Adam, the son of God” meant that he could restart the story, write the first chapter of human life—again. Where the First human being was tempted and failed, the Second resisted temptation and began things anew: you shall not, he says to the Tempter, tempt the Lord thy God. He who “knew no sin” was able to redo creation itself, to set on a new foundation that which human life had become. “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything—but new creation!” (Gal 6:15). “If anyone is in Christ—new creation! The old things have gone away and, behold!, new things have come!” (2 Cor 5:17).—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 218

The final enemy

Moreover, our bodies are destined for death and decay. Sooner or later but one and all, we are mastered by the power of death. Try to overcome death, the Christian story says, and you will see how it, too, is a power more powerful than you. Demons, unclean spirits, Beelzebul, other “gods and lords” (1 Cor 8:5)—all these, too, are more powerful than the human creature. But death is that against which we finally fight and to which we inevitably lose. Against all those both ancient and modern who would say we can become cozy with death, the Christians say otherwise. Death is the final enemy.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 217

All that is not God

For the Christians, as for the Jews, the story did not begin with all that is but with God’s creation of all that is not God. The world had a beginning. It had not always been here but was instead created by the one and only God and was distinct from him. The story that unfolds in Scripture is thus the story of God’s dealings with all that is not God.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 216

The Stoic paradox

At the heart of the Stoic story as it is expressed in Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus there is thus a profound tension, dialectic, or, perhaps, paradox. To learn what we are and how to become what we are—rational mortals—we must be inducted into the Stoic way of being. Reason is not what we think for ourselves but a specifically traditioned communal craft. And yet to learn the Stoic craft of reason is to go into ourselves, to become solitary, self-sufficient fortresses of right judgment. There remain other Stoics—and there is the need to teach and be apprenticed—but exactly to the extent that we succeed in the Stoic life, even other Stoics are finally removed from us by the same life that initially drew us together in the common task of learning how to love wisdom.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 215

On the merry-go-round

Ultimately, however, in the Stoic narrative of repair, these three focal points were not fully separate things, each with its own independent logic and modus operandi. They were, rather, tightly interwoven and interdependent ways of talking about the defining contours of the philosophical life: by getting impressions sorted into the right columns we extirpate the passions and grow in virtue; by extirpating the passions we can sort impressions correctly and grow in virtue; and by growing in virtue we can sort impressions correctly and extirpate the passions. Only by developing these three skills simultaneously will we return to our nature.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 213

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Right. No wonder the early Christians found a fertile field! Once you are on the merry-go-round of self-improvement, it's only too easy to get discouraged—which is why in our social media age we curate our appearance. What you see isn't who you are is the watchword. Of course, Stoicism is more honest than that! They were actually working on changing and becoming. We, on the other hand, simply chase a virtual reality and try our best to ignore the real one.

How's that working for you?

Yeah. That's what I thought. Come home to Jesus and let him heal the broken self. As it says in Isa 55:

All of you who are thirsty,
come to the water!
Whoever has no money,
come, buy food and eat!
Without money, at no cost,
buy wine and milk!
2 Why spend money for what isn’t food,
and your earnings
for what doesn’t satisfy?
Listen carefully to me
and eat what is good;
enjoy the richest of feasts. (Isa 55:1–2 CEB)

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Give it time

The Stoic story of human damage presumes that not even reading Stoic works can be done well without reason’s repair. Unlike Augustine’s story of his encounter with Paul’s Romans, we cannot just pick up and read, but must instead be taught how to read. Reading has an order to it, and this order corresponds to the repair that is necessary to make one into a good reader. Which is to say that we can’t be good readers until we become the kind of person who can read well. If the story here tells of a seeming paradox—right reading requires reason’s repair but reason’s repair requires right reading—the Stoics assumed that there was time enough to work it out.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 211

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Sorry. Doesn't work for me. I'm glad the Holy Spirit gives light to the blind; no need to go stumbling around and trying to fix yourself so you can fix yourself. The Holy Spirit does the fixing—and the teaching.
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A variation on a theme of discipleship

Internal to the Stoic way of reasoning is the claim that its pattern is visible in a human life and not apart from it. The particulars of the exercise that is Stoic reasoning are not analytically verifiable statements but lived shapes. Or, perhaps, the statements of logic that are analytically enticing find their analysis in the course of a Stoic life. A Cato, a Musonius, a Seneca, an Epictetus—these are necessary in the strictest sense to what Stoic reasoning is taken to be. Get an exemplum, says Seneca to Lucilius, so that you see reason in the flesh. Call it to mind so that you know how to become what you seek (Ep. 11.10). According to the Stoic story, the path to nature that is reason’s repair involves imitation of those who have gone before and shown the way.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 211

<idle musing>
There's a lot to be said for examples. But as Christians, we are told to imitate Jesus, which is a far higher ideal than a Seneca or a Cato or an Epictetus or a Marcus Aurelius. And, we are given the Holy Spirit to empower and guide us in that path.

Yep. I'll take the Christian way over the Stoic way, even while acknowledging that they have much of value. But, it is more a stream of light in a darkened corner than the flood of light in the revelation of God in Jesus.
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Not a lot of hope in that…

In stark contrast to both the modern scientific sense of evolutionary time and the Jewish or Christian sense that God precedes his creation, the Stoic story has no part without humanity. It is simply assumed that human beings are part of what the cosmic cycle produces or contains. We do not “come on the scene," nor do we go off it. As a thing, though not in its individual parts of course, we have always been here and always will be. The cosmic context in which our collective being is lived is thus eternal. Time may be marked in this or that linear way concurrently with our more limited existence (for example, “We will gather next Thursday after sunrise”), but in the big picture time is not a measurement that corresponds to progress or, for that matter, regress. It is, rather, only a local marker in the eternal pulsation that is our movement to and from the conflagration.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 208

And even then…

This inability to live more than one tradition at a time means that in a crucial and, truth be told, rather sobering sense, even the central patterns of reasoning in one tradition—as that tradition understands them—will not be understood in another. Moreover, insofar as we do not participate in the alien tradition we seek to query, we cannot know what it is that we do not know. Short of conversion, we are literally shut out of one by the life we live in another. Rival rationalities are not surmountable by learning.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 204

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And that should make us humble. And cause us to lower our expectations on what we can discover about the past. Part of it will always be unretrievable. No matter how much we dig up or how much we read, the past is still the past and much of it is beyond our grasp.
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