Symbols are not material and scientific, but also not personal and subjective. They are universal.
If you want people to care about your story, use universal symbols.
Symbols are inescapable. Scientists are mediators between heaven (theory) and earth (physical).
Patterns repeated at different level of reality.
You can abstract yourself out to do some physical study, but there are limits. Quantum: observers impact observations.
What does it mean, "go up into heaven"? Doesn't mean float into space. Can't interpret materialistically.
Dante says the cosmology of spheres is a condescension of heavenly reality.
"Earth" meant matter. When we realized there was matter outside earth, we split those terms. Word meanings shift.
"Jonah didn't get swallowed by a whale, because the Bible says it was a fish, and whales aren't fish." Definition changed.
Snake in the garden is a symbol of time. Time is the cause of transformation. Time is change. Cyclical transformation of things to their opposites. Not a metaphor. The snake caused a change.
Symbols are not metaphors and not arbitrary.
Symbols are more important that "what really happened".
The Bible is communicating truth, not history.
The Flood, the Red Sea, the Rubicon, the Deleware: crossing water to symbolize change of power. Doesn't mean Washington didn't cross the Deleware, but the symbol is more important than the "fact". Arguing if it happened misses the point.
It's okay if some Bible stories are fictional.
Symbolism is the union of fact and meaning.
Modernism isn't disenchantment: it is deincarnation, the splitting of the physical and spiritual.
Scientists care about theory and fact, and so are best at preserving the union. But they are materialists, so theory is not real.
Mathematical pattern is more real and universal than any observable fact.
Criteria for a real symbol/connection: exactly the same as determining valid science.
Consistent: works everywhere
Comprehensive: many examples (if it's fundamental, it will appear many times)
Insightful: gives more understanding instead of just a code for something else
If Aquinas is Catholicism, Catholicism started in the 13th century
Catholicism is a response to Protestantism
Great Schism didn't change much in practice
"Much of the Catholic 'development of doctrine' that occurred after Thomas Aquinas and especially after the Reformation is an attempt to grapple with emergent modernity."
Angelina Stanford
Epic hero is semi-divine, fated for greatness, withstands the gods. Romantic hero is everyman, set apart by character not birth.
World War I was caused by Christian, classically-educated leaders. You still need virtue.
Since all knowledge is connected, there is no such thing as a sidetrack.
Picaresque is a wandering journey, not a quest.
Stories don't work mechanistically. You don't become a murderer by reading murder mysteries. Not everyone that reads the Bible becomes virtuous.
Modern Christians say we need to take sin more seriously: medievals said we take sin and ourselves to seriously. We should laugh at evil, like we do at Mr. Toad.
Cindy Rollins
Will reading about bad characters make children bad? Too late, they're already bad.
The Bible isn't a character study.
Bryce Young: Everyone is in Adam or Christ: a child cannot be un-elect and in Christ.
Alastair Roberts: Baptism compared to a wedding, a coronation, an adoption
Thomas Banks: If books can save your soul, Jesus should have become a novelist.
Peter Zeihan via Doug Wilson: The US has 17 thousand miles of navigable rivers. The rest of the world combined has 16 thousand.
Quotes
"How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?" -- Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm
Words
Amble: horse gait where both legs on side move at the same time
Avuncular: pertaining to an uncle
Bilious: pertaining to bile; disordered in bile; choleric, irascible, irritable, angry