/lit/ - Literature

>>21266113
Unironically the New Testament

>>20706364
Yes

>>20459510
>Can I just jump straight into reading the Bible or is some secondary text laying out the groundwork and themes more preferable?
Yes, start with the New Testament, cover to cover, then the Old Testament, cover to cover. You may or may not want to get a study Bible at some point to help you understand, that being said they are all theologically bound to one denomination or another so you might want to wait until you've matured as a Christian before buying one.
>Also why is the King James Bible the recommended Bible?
For historical reasons it became the most popular English Bible in America and then some schizo baptists started pretending it had advanced revelations over the original Greek and Hebrew and some of them eventually found themselves on 4chan. They're called the KJV-Only movement or KJV-Onlyists.
It's a good and beautiful translation but it's not "the" translation either. Since it's in old English it can be challenging to read but it's also what gives it charm.
My thoughts on some good English Bible translations:
Protestants: ESV, NKJV, NASB, NRSV, RSV, and KJV
Catholic: NRSV-CE, ESV-CE, Douay-Rheims
Orthodox: OSB, EOB
Stay away from any "easy to read" versions
I would also suggest you read an edition with the Deuterocanon/Apocrypha whether you are Protestant or not.

>>20026240
Theosis > Gnosis

>>18736688

>This was the Palamist position, right?

Right, but "Palamist" is a misnomer. If you read the pre-schism Church Fathers, and compare them to the writings of St Gregory Palamas, then it's clear that the only thing St Gregory is doing is being loyal to the tradition of the 1st millenium.

>I sometimes feel like in the middle ages the Church overdid it with the scholastic autism and now we have no room for different ideas

The opposite problem is actually true - scholastic autism results in *too much* fracturing into different ideas.

The fundamental problem is nominalism - the logical conclusion after saying that we can't personally know God, that the only things we can know about God are the logical inventions of our own mind. It's not much of a stretch to think, because we cannot personally know God, we also cannot personally know God's design in creation, and so there is no inherent meaning in anything - just the meaning we invent in our minds. Does this sound familiar? This is the foundation of postmodernist dogma, which is permeating everywhere now.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/cggvs6grwvhozwx/Palamas%252C_Gregory_-_Dialogue_Between_and_Orthodox_and_a_Barlaamite.pdf/file <- Here's a work that's a debate between St. Gregory Palamas, and a Barlaamite Scholastic Nominalist. Do you know what the Filioque is? It's a heresy regarding the Trinity, saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, instead of just the Father alone - Roman Catholics committed to this heresy as one of the main reasons for the great schism of 1054, along with the papacy. I won't go into details about it, but the nominalist in this linked debate has a very telling approach to it: He says that the theological question does not matter and cannot be settled, precisely because it is impossible to have a direct experience of God, and verify if the filioque is true or not.

So then, the doctrine that you are actually able to personally experience God, results in the stability of doctrine that Orthodoxy has had for the past 2000 years, whereas after diverting from Orthodoxy in 1054, the Roman Catholic Church has given birth to innumerable superficially different, and fundamentally contradictory philosophies within its Church, which one reason why Protestantism fractured off of the Roman Catholic Church (Orthodoxy never had a Protestant reformation), and that Protestantism fractured into millions of different sects - each with their own equally valid possible interpretation of the bible & tradition, because they're all based on equally invalid foundations.

A work that goes deeper into the history of the West after the Roman Catholic Church adapted nominalism, is this one, "Orthodox Survival Course" by Fr. Seraphim Rose, a transcribed series of lectures. It's 1000 years of Christian history, traced from the perspective of the results of the errors of Roman Catholicism: http://orthodoxaustralia.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/course.pdf

>>18720904

From the icons in the OP, I assume that OP is an Orthodox Christian - and you're right, that mainstream idea you see promoted abotu God is identical to atheism, and so we do not believe in that form of Absolute Divine Simplicity. We call what you have said "Absolute Divine Simplicity". We do believe that God is simple, since God is not composed of parts (since persons are not parts), but the kicker is that the reason we can say this is because we have retained the Essence/Energies distinction, the distinction between what something is, and what something does.

The heterodox Christians believing Absolute Divine Simplicity conflate the attributes/energies of God with the essence of God. The Orthodox Doctrine is that every attribute of God is an energy of God, and these energies are personally experienceable and knowable directly (like the light on Mt. Tabor, or appearing to Moses, not just by analogy from created effects) and that the essence of God is what is unknowable and utterly transcendent.

The unknowability of the essence of God is not a problem for actually getting to personally know God, since persons are experienced according to their energies.

The Orthodox Saint who is most famous for defending the true doctrine of God's essence & energies, and refuting Absolute Divine Simplicity, is St. Gregory Palamas. If you're curious about reading a refutation of the ideas you recognise as wrong from 700 years ago, read his works "The Triads" and "Dialogue between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite". Here's a link to the Triads, I can't seem to find a PDF of the dialogue at the moment.

The Triads: https://www.agape-biblia.org/orthodoxy/Gregory_Palamas_The_Triads_Classics_of_Western_Spirituality.pdf

>>14707201
There was a thread about hesychasm recently with a lot of knowledgeable people in it.

>>/lit/thread/S14672941