The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Sword to the Heart: Ethics and the Third Person

SWORD TO THE HEART
(presented in its third edition as “JRP’s Bite-Sized Metaphysics” series, here on the EU forum)
Sword to the Heart (Full 3rd Edition).pdf (2.06 MB)

If you’ve received a free version of Sword to the Heart (and/or my novel Cry of Justice), feel free to tip me $10 here at Amazon. You can tip me for multiple books of course. (I’ll get $6.75 of any $9.99 tip, Amazon gets $3.24.) You may have to scroll down a page or two to find the $6.00 listing; last I looked Amazon put it in a weird place (probably because I’ve got two listings for the same ‘book’ for sale as New.)

OVERVIEW OF
SECTION FOUR: ETHICS AND THE THIRD PERSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

comment 1 (this one): TOC and links to other Section Overviews
comment 2: overview of the overviews
subsequent comments: links to, and topical summaries of, each series of entries in this section.

Section One (How Should I Be A Sceptic) can be found here.

Section Two (Reason and the First Person) can be found here.

Section Three (Creation and the Second Person) can be found here.

Section Five (The Story of Passion and Atonement) can be found here.

In order to provide a handy topical overview and linkset to the ongoing series of progressing metaphysical argument (which in my own past experience establishes the foundation of Christian universalism via orthodox trinitarian theism), I have created this series of “Overview” threads. Each comment will link to a particular series of entries, and will provide a quick topical description of that series. (Although due to illness and time constraints, I stopped doing topical summaries for each series a few hundred pages ago. :wink: I’ll catch up on that someday, probably after Easter 2011. I’m still providing links from the index pages to series threads, though.)

This thread topically summarizes and links to the series of entries for Section Four, “Ethics and the Third Person”. This is the longest section of chapters in the book, although (paradoxically) it doesn’t cover quite as many topics as Sections One or Three!

It starts with a brief overview of how I arrived at the topic of the logic of interpersonal relationships; then takes a break from progressing argument for a while in order to discuss the three broad categories of explanation for “ethical” behavior, looking at the strengths and weaknesses for each category (plus a special variant of the first category.) Having illustrated many serious and problematic issues with the three categories, I resume the progressing argument from Section Three to show how the positions I developed there uniquely solve the problems of ethical grounding. Having picked up binitarian theism to do so, I then begin addressing some other conceptual problems solved by binitarian and eventually trinitarian theism; and from there I arrive at the topics of justice and injustice, or righteousness and unrighteousness, or good and evil–focusing especially on my own evil, but also on what the history of humanity implies about evil in relation to God (and in relation to lesser supernatural entities!)

This Section of chapters ends by arriving at some conclusions about what I can expect God to do about derivative sinning creatures (such as myself!), and so will lead into the fifth and final Section on how I may expect God’s actions to play out in our history sooner or later.

New entries and links will be added below with the establishment of each new series of entries. Summary topical descriptions of each series, however, will be withheld until after that particular series is finished. (And probably until after Easter, due to time and energy constraints.)

Each series of entries represents a chapter or (far more likely) part of a chapter from the original SttH text composition. Chapter designations will be provided as I go along.

Chapter 31: “An Introduction to the Question of Ethics”

Chapter 32: “Ethics and Invented Rational Behavior”

Chapter 33: “Ethics and Discovered Non-rational Behavior”

Chapter 34: “Ethics and Discovered Rational Behavior”

Chapter 35: “The Terminal Problem with Ethical Theism”

Chapter 36 – “Discovered Rational Secular Ethics?”

Series 406: a return to secular ethics?

Series 407: the final problem and piece of the puzzle

Chapter 37 – “Returning to the God of Justice”

Series 408

This, not incidentally, is where I also first came to believe universal salvation to be true.

Chapter 38 – “Inferring the Third Person of God”

Series 409: procession and the overarching system

Series 410: an introduction to the Third Person of God

Chapter 39 – “The Role of the Third Person of God”

Series 411: some necessary requirements for personal interaction

Series 412: a minimum standard of communication

Chapter 40 – “An Introduction to the Concept of Sin”

Series 413: contradiction and ethical failure

Series 414: the choice of the Good, and other choices

Chapter 41 – “The Consequences of Sin”

Series 415: the waging, and the wages, of sin

Series 416: regarding the argument from evil

Chapter 42 – “Death”

Series 417: sin and death

Series 418: the death of sin, and other deaths