Talk:Religious ground motive

Latest comment: 3 years ago by Cognitator in topic [Untitled]

[Untitled] edit

These are not the four RGMs Dooyeweerd discusses! This article improperly distinguishes the "synthesis" RGM and the "nature/grace" RGM. They are identical in Dooyeweerd's usage. The genuine 4th RGM is the Christian (or "biblical") one of "creation, fall, and redemption in Christ Jesus". Accordingly, Dooyeweerd sees the Nature/Grace RGM as a "synthesis" groundmotive because it is a result of an attempted synthesis between the ancient Greek groundmotive of Matter/Form and the Christian RGM.

This should be corrected. That the 4th RGM is the Christian one, and that "Synthesis" and "Nature/Grace" are identical can easily be seen in Dooyeweerd's book Roots of Western Culture.

Indeed - the paragraph on "the Synthetist RGM of the slowly Christianizing Age" seems to contain items of speculation and irrelevant material that distract from the description of ground motives. Reference to the Creation-Fall-Redemption RGM has been inserted which, as noted above, should be described under a separate heading.

I propose to shorten this paragraph and merge it with the following one, "The Nature/Grace RGM", and to add a new paragraph for the "Creation - Fall - Redemption" RGM.

RMGunton (talk) 20:06, 14 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

This page has been flagged for poor citation of its sources, and a key problem was the material below, which I am removing from the article since it doesn't seem to be derived from Dooyeweerd's work. If I am wrong, it could easily be reinstated with proper citations. RMGunton (talk) 22:50, 9 February 2013 (UTC) " The Synthetist RGM of the slowly Christianizing Age As the Form/Matter RGM continued from Ancient Greek times (Homer, Hesiod, Musaios) through Classical times (Heraclitus, Parmenides, the Sophists and Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) and then into the times of the Cynics, Skeptics, and Stoics; another RGM arose slowly and spread by winning converts and generating a system of internal self-governance. That self-governance was always subordinate in the public arena to the state power of the Roman Empire, but as the Christian Church grew and its churches and dioceses arose in ever more areas, the Emperor Constantine the Great, born and raised by a Christian mother Helen, granted the Christians toleration. That meant more and more people underwent conversion, although Constantine himself did not become a Christian until on his death bed. Prior to that, however, he decided that the pagan religious system of temples supported by the Roman Imperial state, were not adequate to their task. So, he called together the leaders of the Christian Church/es to a council in the city of Nicaea to decide what the official teachings of the Church would be, and thereby established a consistent uniform doctrine - on his part, as a necessity of state. In the meantime, over the three hundred or so years between the life of Jesus regarded as the Messiah become the Christ, and the establishment of the Christian Church as the official religion of the Empire, the religious ground motive of Christianity contested the hold of the Greek Form/Matter motif, in many respects blended with it, and on this view produced a synthesis of the two RGMs. "Reply

Cognitator (talk) 19:27, 22 November 2020 (UTC) Thank you RGM for your contribution. I've added a web and book citation from Dr. J. Glenn Friesen's work on Dooyeweerd. The content of Friesen's cited web page is very similar to the book content cited. I've also added web citations to the relevant Wikipedia content in an online html version of Dooyeweerd's magnum opus. I believe the citations and your changes will satisfy the conditions of the January, 2012, maintenance template. I will therefore remove the template message.Reply