Celtic Christians changed their world. Will we change ours?

For Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” - Matthew 14:3, 4

Cure all harmful ailments through the power of the good Lord, establish peace among the people, restrain the noble kings.

Nominalism 2

In the first article of this series, I briefly mentioned about the English Friar, William of Ockham. Building on the work of Aquinas’s contemporary Duns Scotus (1250–1308) and his own contemporary Petrus Aureolus (1280 –1322), Ockham helped to pioneer a school of thought to rival the realism of men like Aquinas.

Review of Realism
Realists like Aquinas had asserted that things have an inherent purpose according to their nature. Channeling Aristotle, they suggested that everything which exists has an end or telos which defines the natural perfection of that thing. The example I gave in the first article of this series was that the end or purpose of a hammer is to bang things while the end or purpose of a seed is an adult plant. Of course, this assumed the real existence of universals, so that we can make meaningful generalizations about classes of things like hammers, seeds, lions, etc.

Nominalism I

“So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which lit is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.” Hebrews 6:17-18

Ideas have consequences
It is reported that William Temple, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, once asked his father, who was then the Archbishop, “Daddy, why don’t the philosophers rule the world?” His father looked down at the boy and replied, “Of course they do, silly—two hundred years after they’re dead!”

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
Genesis 2:21-25

A recent newspaper headline arrested my attention: “Marriage began among Stone Age ancestors.” It was emblazoned above a question-and-answer column in which a local columnist fields all sorts of inquiries from readers. The lead question that day was, “When in the Bible or in time did people start to get married — what year was it?” The columnist responded by presenting the view of one scholar and by printing the text of Genesis 2:21-25 without comment. The result was a juxtaposition of views about marriage that exemplifies the difference between Christian and secular worldviews. Reflecting on the two approaches can help believers know how to speak up for marriage in a culture where it is under attack.

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, even the word of the LORD from Jerusalem...
- Micah 4:1,2

Here then the excellent man began to build a monastery. At the news of this people streamed in from all directions in order to consecrate themselves to the practice of religion, so that the large number of monks scarcely had sufficient room. The children of the nobles from all directions strove to come thither; despising the trappings of the world and the pomp of present wealth, they sought eternal rewards.
The Monk Jonas, Life of St. Columban (Italian, 7th century)

“Tear down this wall!”
On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, where the Berlin Wall separated the free world from the communist empire.

In one of the most remarkable speeches in living memory, Reagan offered a direct challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, general-secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Gorbachev had claimed that he wanted to reform the Communist party on the principles of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). However, Reagan believed that there was one thing left for Gorbachev to do to prove his earnestness.