Context – a brief sketch of the life of Evagrius.
#DIOGENES ALLEN ADAPTABILITY SERIES#
The first video in the series Dr Allen provides: Before approaching the content, Professor Allen would approach the context, the genesis of idea. Diogenes Allen adopts the same name for this series. “ The Eight Deadly Thoughts“, takes its name from one of the chapters in On Practice by Evagrius Ponticus (c 346-399), a Desert Father. Other videos will be linked to the outline below.ĭiogenes on Spiritual Theology – ” … one of the things I found … through all spiritual writers, that is people who are concerned with bringing to fullness, in our lives, the work of Christ, and that’s the work of God the Holy Spirit….all of them agree that after we are converted we can expect ourselves to be assailed by eight deadly thoughts.” The short video attached is the introduction to the video series, they are relatively short so easy to listen to, even if you are tight on time.
#DIOGENES ALLEN ADAPTABILITY FREE#
When we entertain these thoughts, our thoughts are not free to dwell on the things of God. The problem is when we dwell on, indulge, or act on these thoughts that they become sin. These thoughts assail us unbidden – It is important to realize that the thoughts themselves are not sin. Our de facto personality, with our self at the center of all reality, is innocent when we are an infant but ceases to be innocent as it is reinforced by society's way of life, encouraging us to walk away from God and so into evil.“These eight deadly thoughts are like cholesterol, they fill the arteries, so to speak, and the flow of the Spirit is not able to get through easily, and sometime, choked off all together.” This is when distortion in our hearts, minds, and desires begins to occur. So we do not take God into account in our lives. God is near us as our creator, generating us each moment of time but it is as if God is, so to speak, behind us, and we, by looking only in front of us, do not perceive God in our world at all. Otherwise, God, not human beings, would be responsible for our condition, and the goodness of creation would be fatally compromised.' My account does have a temporal dimension.Īll of us are born without an awareness of God in our lives. Some theologians are willing to grant that the story of an actual Adam and Eve is not necessary for Christian theology, but they still hold that there had to have been a historical situation of original righteousness or innocence and an actual fall from this state. I can easily apply it to myself and also use it to understand other people, as I have done in presenting Pascal's analysis of our condition. This ancient understanding of original sin and evil seems to me both illuminating and, with the evolutionary understanding that I have added to it, thoroughly defensible. But by historic times, human development is at a stage that the story of Adam and Eve is a fitting type or model of our situation in relation to God: human beings seeking to provide for themselves apart from God and God's purposes. When a fall occurred, when a prepeople or people did not live up to the intentions of God in their common life commensurate to their stage of development, it was probably not at any one specific time it may have occurred at different times for different groups until failure to be properly related to God was universal in all societies. By being formed and shaped by the inherited social network, each individual is "weakened" in its ability to wrestle with the temptations to which its ontological nature as finite creature is subject.
People born into a particular social group inherit that social network and act more or less in accord with it, and so inherit the effects of its sin. Network or other of social relations that are not as God intends. In the course of biological and social evolution, any group of creatures capable of any degree of relationship to God that fails to be properly related to God commensurate with their stage of development-any such group will have some “The story of Adam and Eve, as used by the Eastern church to account for our inherited weakness to withstand temptation as an effect of Adam and Eve's sin, can fruitfully be understood today without a historical Adam and Eve but instead with an evolutionary and social understanding of human beings.
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