We did a Rubik's cube. We got a Star Wars mug filled with hard candies.

We didn't do Santa, but my kids of course heard about him in stories and such. When my oldest was 5, she was very focused on asking whether various things were real or not, and she absolutely wanted a truthful answer. So when she asked if Santa was real, we told her the truth. It was easier to do since we hadn't done Santa to begin with, but I think it would have caused real problems if we hadn't told her the truth. Especially wrt religion and our faith - if we said one invisible being was really real when we ourselves knew better, how could she ever trust us when we said that God was really real? OTOH, my middle dd never went through an intense stage of asking about the truth of things - she didn't have my oldest's burning need to know whether stories were "really real" or not. I can't remember if she ever asked directly about Santa's realness or not - it might have come up in a discussion about why don't *we* do Santa, but it wasn't the focus. (And fwiw, my oldest really wanted to do Santa around age 7, well after she knew he wasn't real, so knowing didn't destroy the appeal.) Anyway, I'm generally in favor of telling the truth when asked - a straightforward truth, not something that is "true from a certain point of view" ;), but not from the point of view of the child asking.

Thanks so much! I just got it - it will be a great present for my dd9 - she loves both LotR and audiobooks :).

My kids have seen all the Star Wars movies except Rogue One (and they won't be watching that one for a while), even Revenge of the Sith (which we didn't let them watch for a while). Dh and I saw Force Awakens before deciding that we'd take the older two to see it (and we watched part of Rogue One before deciding we *aren't* showing that one to the kids any time soon), and I expect we'll do the same with Last Jedi. Because ime there's no reliable way of telling ahead of time.

No btdt experience, but here's my two cents anyway ;): Latin-wise, we've done GSWL (end of 5th and beginning of 6th) and are now doing Visual Latin (supplemented with more explicit grammar work). My logic plans were to do the MP sequence or something like it, starting in 7th or 8th (probably when we're done with spelling, because that will open up a space for it). We haven't done any informal logic, except for fun - I suppose I've seen a good, solid foundation in LA and math as the best prep for both Latin and logic, and I hadn't really thought of Latin as prep for logic. Nor had I thought of Latin as partially replacing a formal study of logic. (Not sure which of those - Latin as logic *prep*, or Latin as logic *replacement* (or both) - was your focus.) Now that I *am* thinking of it ;), and attempted to use google-fu to uncover some relevant results from the board, I think a key assumption underlying Latin as (partial) logic *replacement* is seeing logic more as a skill - a way of thinking - than seeing it as having particular *content*. (And certainly it's common to view the value of Latin in general in how it teaches a way of thinking, instead of the primary value lying in learning the particular *content* of the Latin language.) So if "teaching logic" mostly means "teaching logical thinking" - attention to detail and making precise distinctions, not letting misplaced emotions or faulty thinking blind you to the facts on the ground, crafting an argument or procedure that makes everything explicit and states all assumptions - then certainly Latin can help with respect to learning to pay attention to details and make precise distinctions. Latin can also improve language skills and thinking skills in general. And Latin texts might provide good examples of logical thinking. I can definitely get behind Latin-as-logic-prep, though I hadn't thought of Latin that way. But I'm pretty skeptical about Latin-as-logic-replacement, since I take the position that formal logic involves specific *content*, not just a general "way of thinking". Although you were particularly referring to Latin as replacing *early* logic study, and it may be that early logic study is basically all prep-for-logic anyway. (And I never planned anything special for logic-prep - just planned to start with formal logic anyway.) In any case, I don't think of Latin *content* (and the habits of mind studying Latin develops) as a replacement for formal logic *content* (and the habits of mind studying formal logic develops). It's why I don't see computer programming or math proofs and such - other things that require logical thinking - as an equivalent replacement for the study of formal logic. The content is different, and that *matters*.

With your 12yo, you could go through the WWE Instructor Guide, which has an example week for each "difficulty step" in WWE, and use those examples as a placement test. (It's what I did when I started my 9yo.) Start at a section you're pretty sure she can handle, and keep going till she runs into difficulty. I think a lot of libraries have it - mine does - but if not, it's not too bad used. When you figure out where she needs to start, then you could either use the instructor guide to make up your own lessons or get whichever WWE level she places into. As far as WWS goes, my dd11 just started it (on week 5). We'd started WWE late (WWE2 in 4th) and were partway through WWE3 at the beginning of 6th (modified so that she was writing full narrations from notes I took when she gave her oral narration) when I decided she seemed to have the necessary summary skills and writing stamina to start WWS here in 6th. So far it's going fairly well - the outlining is going well, but she runs hot/cold on whether summaries (which I had thought she'd mastered) are easy or pulling teeth. It may be she's got some holes that the rest of WWE3 would have filled. (And if things get worse instead of better, I'll probably pause WWS, pull out the WWE instructor guide and do some targeted practice.) But by and large, as far as I can tell, the main prereq for WWS is the ability to write a 3-5 sentence summary from a 2-3 page narrative without help (plus a certain level of writing stamina and maturity) - I'd expect that an average 12yo would probably not need to go through the whole WWE progression to get there. WIth my middle, we're doing WWE1 at double speed (doing a week's worth of work in two days) in 3rd, and planning to start WWE2 sometime in January. My goal is to get through WWE3 by the end of 5th, so we're doing fine on that. My 3rd grader is an eager writer (unlike my oldest, who was very reluctant), and could probably do WWE2 right now, but the lit selections are so good that I'm finishing up WWE1 anyway.

:grouphug: Zero of my kids were reading anything at age 5. Heck, zero of my kids are/were doing more than slowly blending a handful of CVC word families at age 6. Learning to read hasn't come easily for any of my kids, but the two oldest have gotten it and now love reading, and I'm fairly confident my youngest and I will achieve the same. Just takes us longer than some, is all. My oldest knew all her letter sounds at age 2, but at age five still couldn't connect the individual sounds of the word (/c/ /a/ /t/) and the word (/cat/). We did CVC words from age 5.5 to age 6.5. I had a lot of angst with her, because she was very visual and would have learned to read so much faster via whole word teaching, but I stubbornly stuck out the phonics teaching. But she had a breakthrough during blends when she was 6.5 and jumped to reading level 2/3 readers. Her reading lessons started going much faster. A few months later, at the end of her first grade year (when she was almost seven), she jumped again and could read pretty much anything she wanted. And she did - she's an extremely prolific and voracious reader. I did all our content subjects (literature, history, science) via independent reading and I'm so pleased with how much she's learned and retained. I started again with my middle at 5.5, and again we spent a year working on blending and CVC words. But unlike her older sister - who hated reading individual words but loved to read connected text (more context for guessing) - my middle preferred individual words to connected text (less to decode). So after a year on CVC words, we moved to blends and spent about 4 months working on blending those. During the spring of first grade (and she was an older first grader, turned seven in the fall of first grade), we got to consonant digraphs. Over the summer I taught her the Dolch word list phonetically, so she could read more of what she came across in daily life. At the beginning of second grade, she was reading level 1 readers. We got through common vowel digraphs by Christmas, and somewhere in January she took off with reading - she could read level 2/3 readers. She moved to easy chapter books fairly soon (around 8.5yo), and by the end of the year she started working through the Harry Potter books (starting with ones we'd read to her, but eventually she tackled Order of the Phoenix, which was all new to her). She also read all the Narnia books (which I'd read loud to her first) and now is on her second time through Lord of the Rings (which we also read aloud to her first). She can read most anything that crosses her path, and she loves reading. It was harder on her, not being able to read at the beginning of second grade - she noticed that the other kids in her Sunday school class could - but she got there :thumbup:. I'm teaching ds6 right now (red-shirt Kinder), and he knows two word families (-an and -ad) - we've carefully and repeatedly blended each and every word in each family - he's not generalizing any faster than the girls. (Dd11 worked through probably 500 individual words before she could use that knowledge on new words; dd9 worked through 2000 individual words before she could use that knowledge on new words.) To teach blending, I use homemade magnetic sound picture tiles and phonogram tiles with the Phonics Pathways "train" method of blending.

I'm lighter in the earlier years and we start formal work later than a lot of people here. (I will say, I'm pretty pleased with how it's worked with my oldest, now that we are ramping up for middle school - there's only a few things I mean to tweak and start a bit earlier with the others - mostly grammar (start 3rd) and Latin (start beginning of 5th).) Work we do together: (takes about 1.0-1.5 hours) Math: SM 2B textbook (4x/wk) Grammar: FLL 3 (2x/wk) Composition: WWE 1 at double pace (do two days' worth each day, 4x/wk); after the new year, we'll be doing WWE 2 at double pace REWARDS: one lesson a week, spread over two days (2x/wk) Spelling: 20 words from phonics book, plus a lesson from Dictation Day-by-Day (4x/wk) Work she does independently: (takes 2-3 hours) Math: SM 2B workbook, SM IP 2A (4x/wk) Composition: the copywork from our work together (4x/wk) Cursive: four lines of copywork (4x/wk) Spelling: marking her spelling words with the Spelling-You-See marking system (4x/wk) Independent Reading: her choice from lit, history, or science (4x/wk) Piano: 15-20 min practice (6x/wk - she practices on the weekends, too) So far, third grade in our homeschool tends to be the first "ramping up" year, in terms of having more than reading/math/handwriting/read-alouds. We tend to spend about equal time on math (tb/wb and IP) as we do on LA (reading, handwriting, spelling, composition, grammar) - about 1.0-1.5 hours on each - plus read-alouds/independent reading. With my oldest, I pretty much did all elementary literature/history/science through read-alouds (K-2) and independent reading (3-5) - she was a voracious reader and would read most anything, and I've been extremely pleased with the results. We'll see how it goes with my middle - she doesn't read as widely as my oldest, and is more resistant to reading mom-picks. She prefers to re-read books we read aloud or that she listened to on audiobooks (plus she reads age-level twaddle) - which mostly means she reads and re-reads the Narnia books, the Harry Potter books, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (right now she's proudly on her second re-read of LotR). Which I'm mostly good with right now - the quality and difficulty are just great for her age - but if I'm going to "unschool" the content subjects, we're going to need to move past that, too. Still, she's only been fluently reading for less than a year - I'm still working on advanced phonics skills with her. And it might help if I read the first chapter or two of something new aloud - get her interested in it.

With my maybe-dyslexic/dysgraphic left-handed oldest (whose ability to either see or hear the details of words was about nil, and her atrocious spelling showed it), cursive went badly at first. Our program jumped from letters to words quickly, and it wasn't surprising that she couldn't spell cursive words that she couldn't spell in print, kwim? I've read that writing in cursive requires the ability to spell syllable-by-syllable (instead of letter-by-letter), and dd definitely couldn't do that - she was unable to break words into syllables, or break syllables into individual sounds. Also, despite my phonics teaching, she was a pure visual reader. I think contributed to her trouble with cursive, because the words all looked different in cursive and she was unable to sound them out. So after she learned individual letters, I had her practice all the phonograms and blends in cursive before proceeding to words. (She had a cursive model for these steps.) Then I had her work through all the CVC words in our phonics book, then all the blends, and then the basic two-letter phonogram words (about 1800 words in all - she did 20 per day). She did not have a cursive model in front of her for the words, though she had a cursive reference sheet. (I called it cursive practice, and it was, but it was also covert blending practice, to help remediate her whole-word reading. I actually ran her and her younger sister through the same set of words at the same time - cursive practice for the older and spelling-to-read practice for my younger.) At the same time I was working on her ability to break words into syllables and blend syllables together and to spell syllable-by-syllable; I also worked on her ability to visually notice the individual phonograms in words. By the end, she'd written 1800 one-syllable words and had plenty of practice with all the basic syllable types and variations, and had the ability to break words into syllables and spell them syllable-by-syllable, and was able to write in cursive anything she could write in print. (And her spelling was tremendously improved.) It took a decent bit of work for dd to learn cursive. I think we spent half a year on letters/phonograms/blends (practicing 4 a day and repeating until she felt solid on them) - I'd went through and wrote all the possible phonograms/blends/two-letter-combos she could do for each lesson with the letters she'd learned up till that point. And then probably close to a year working through one-syllable words, from simple to complex (again, repeating as needed till she felt solid). But I did think it was worth it, and certainly the underlying issues that made cursive hard also made other things hard - pretty much all writing and spelling - and so remediating them was worthwhile for lots of reasons, not just for cursive.

When my dd was having fraction troubles, I added in MUS fractions - but I still stayed with our regular math program (Singapore math, in our case). Our regular program worked for everything else, so why switch entirely, kwim? But we needed something more for fractions, so why not add in MUS just for fractions - didn't mean we needed to switch to MUS for everything. If Saxon is working in general for you, then I don't think you have to switch away from it entirely just to remediate fractions, unless you are wanting a change from Saxon for other reasons, too. MUS did wonders for helping dd understand fractions, though - I'm glad we did it. The fraction overlays in particular were a big help.

Can she break an oral word into oral sounds, but can't figure out how to spell those sounds? Or is she unable to break an oral word into oral sounds in the first place? IME (with native English speakers who have phonemic processing difficulties), I would not expect a child to be able to spell a word she can't sound out. So if she's sounding out CVC words with effort, then the best I'd expect out of her spelling is to spell those same CVC words - and that might be out of reach without explicit practice. It might help to do a Spalding-like spell-to-read thing. That's what I did with my kids - I broke a word into individual sounds, had them blend it together orally; then I had them spell each sound one-by-one, and then I had them read it back to me. The move from CVC words to blends was a tough one for my kids - we had to learn each and every blend individually - there was no independent generalization from individual sounds to the sounds together. (My kids also had to learn each and every CVC family separately, and practice each word in the family individually. We didn't get any generalization until after they'd mastered through CCVCC blends. Then, at some point as they were learning vowel and consonant digraphs, they started to generalize.) As far as ear training goes, if you have an ipad, or access to one, I found Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) to be absolutely wonderful for that. It's free online, both to print and in several user-friendly iPad apps. It teaches reading by first starting with the 44 *sounds* of English, with an intuitive sound picture associated with each one (hissing snake for /s/ and buzzing bee for /z/ and so on), which the program teaches via a cute rhyming story. So you start by reading and spelling with sound pictures - with a nice, simple one-for-one correspondence between aural sound and visual representation - and then learn the usual letter-sound correspondences. There's several different activities they can do. I actually didn't do too many of those activities - other than reading the sound picture story umpteen times :lol:. Instead, I made two sets of sound picture tiles, and used them with our phonics book to teach reading and spelling. Beginning readers first sound out the sound pictures, then they find the letter tiles that go with each sound and sound out the letters. Once they got relatively proficient in blending, I have them spell-to-read using word lists printed in sound pictures (I wrote them up in the sound picture font) - they sound it out aloud, spell the word sound-by-sound on their paper (using a sound-to-spelling chart I made), and then read it aloud. For spelling, I have the kids first spell the word with the sound picture tiles before spelling it with letters - even my sixth grader. I really, really sparkly pink heart love those sound pictures :wub:. Here's a link to a truetype sound picture font (converting the older font type on Dekodiphukan site took me awhile): https://www.dropbox.com/s/7h89fkopifwh8xv/engrea51.ttf?dl=0 And here's a link to the keyboard template: http://www.center.edu/DekodiphukanBook/Font/KeyboardTemplate.pdf And here's a link to a printable page to make sound picture tiles: http://www.center.edu/DekodiphukanBook/Font/CameraReadyStamps.pdf And since I already have them made, just in case they might help anyone, here's links to my sound-to-spelling charts and word lists (formatted for front-and-back flashcards, coded in a Spalding-like way that matches the charts, so kids can look up the correct spelling on their own - made working through the word lists independent): Sound-to-spelling chart, with a filled-in side for reference and a blank side for writing in spelling as they are learned; includes a blends list (because hearing blends was *so* hard for my girls): https://www.dropbox.com/s/oe2mlnbuduzjzpv/sound-spelling%20chart%20complete%20%28exported%20from%20speadsheet%29.pdf?dl=0 CVC word list: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d7ojitu1i78w4wp/Let%27s%20Read%20flashcards%2C%20lessons%2001-36%20%28CVC%20words%2C%20complete%29.pdf?dl=0 Blends word list: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mcbs6imwkp5qitn/Let%27s%20Read%20flashcards%2C%20lessons%2037-54%20%28blends%2C%20complete%29.pdf?dl=0 Consonant digraphs word list: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f6o4inxw9m6tf9g/Let%27s%20Read%20flashcards%2C%20lessons%2055-71%20complete%20%28ng%2C%20nk%2C%20sh%2C%20ch%2C%20th%2C%20wh%2C%20ck%2C%20tch%2C%20doubled%20consonants%2C%20qu%2C%20x%29.pdf?dl=0 Vowel digraphs word list (there's some empty spaces where I took out family names): https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ozlrn9trbl3jiv/Let%27s%20Read%20flashcards%2C%20lessons%2072-97%20complete%20%28ee%2C%20eer%2C%20ea%2C%20ear%2C%20oo%2C%20oor%2C%20ai%2C%20air%2C%20ay%2C%20oa%2C%20oar%2C%20ou%2C%20our%2C%20ow%2C%20aw%2C%20au%2C%20oy%2C%20oi%2C%20silent%20e%29.pdf?dl=0 Dolch sight words list, arranged by phonetic pattern (doesn't include CVC/CCVCC words): https://www.dropbox.com/s/x7xgsdupjgsag23/Dolch%20sight%20words%2C%20arranged%20phonetically%20%28complete%20at%20162%29.pdf?dl=0 (Hopefully the dropbox links work.)

Originally I thought the thread was about how changing when circumstances require it can become harder when one gets older. I know I was shocked, when dh switched from an iPhone to a Galaxy several years back, that I found myself really reluctant to learn it. Everything was different - and thus harder - and I found myself feeling helpless in the face of the (&^*&( phone. When I realized that I was starting to walk down the stereotypical helpless-in-the-face-of-new-tech "older person" path - at age 30 :jawdrop: - I *forced* myself to sit down and learn that stupid phone. But it shocked me, how *easy* it was to fall into a sort of learned helplessness with tech - especially as I'd been a techy person in my youth. At least for me, it's going to take CONSTANT VIGILANCE ;) to avoid developing a helpless attitude towards appears-confusing new tech, and I really didn't see that coming.

IDK, not all progress is positive, kwim? Just because something is new doesn't actually make it improved ;). And even when there is some genuine improvement, often there is a trade-off - the new ways are better in some ways, but worse in others - and some people are going to be impacted by the negatives more than the positives, at least at first. Learning new things takes time and energy (and often money), and it's extremely irritating to be *forced* to learn particular new things because the old ways disappeared out from under you. There is a difference between grousing but sucking it up and learning, or grousing *instead* of learning, though. Being able to change when circumstances require it is a survival skill - but one that does require certain resources to be in place. But I for one don't expect anyone to have to be *happy* about being *forced* to change. And there's a difference between making the best of a forced situation, or resenting it for the rest of your life - I think this might be what you are getting at - but *forced* change is still imo more of a suck it up and deal thing, not a happy, happy, joy, joy thing. Props to general you if your making the best of the situation can indeed turn it into a happy, happy, joy, joy thing. But not all change situations are actually *good* changes, and making a virtue of necessity doesn't have to mean calling necessity *good* if it *isn't*, kwim? So, yeah, I'm a lot more skeptical of the inherent goodness of progress ;). I don't think the key is whether one embraces change or not, but whether one makes the best of things (even painful things) or whether one reacts to painful things by being mad and resentful they have to deal with painful things in the first place. I mean, my maternal grandparents have not embraced tech, and are watching the changes tech makes to society with a bemused eye, but they are active, busy people in the ways they always have been. (Or were, till health caught up with them in their 90s.) They aren't "changing with the times", but they are still interested and interesting people. I don't think you have to *embrace* change - or even *appreciate* the effects of change around you - in order to *handle* change in a constructive way and continue to be a positive force in the world around you.

That's what I do with my kids, too. My oldest does independent work in the morning, while I teach the younger two (my middle also does independent work for a bit while I'm working with my youngest). And then after lunch it switches - my middle does independent work while I work with my oldest. Only issue so far is coming up with enough legitimate, non-busywork-yet-truly-independent work for my oldest to do that takes up the majority of the morning.

I use tb, wb, and IP, and I occasionally add on parts of Process Skills in Problem Solving when we are in between IP books (or when we hit a wall in IP), to learn bar diagrams. I have CWP, but I don't use it, because it seems superfluous since we've using IP. If I got tired of the time IP takes us (we spend 30-45 min/day), I'd probably do CWP instead. I do love how the IP books stretch the girls, which is why we stick with it. I do the "challenge" books approximately one semester behind the tb/wb, and at a separate time of the day from our tb/wb lesson. Generally I do just *one* extra book along with the tb/wb, which for us is the IP (and occasionally bits of the FAN math problem solving skills book). If I couldn't spare the time for IP, I'd do CWP. If my kids needed more practice than the wb provides, I'd use the EP books.

My oldest is like that with math, although somewhat less so as she is getting older. It's not usually an issue with the SM workbook, but happens regularly with IP. For her, it hits most when the problems are conceptually easy yet something about them is also hard. (If it's conceptually hard, she cries; if it's genuinely easy in all respects she whips them out. It's only when it's a combo of easy to see what needs doing, yet hard to actually *do* it that she goes off into daydreaming, doodle land.) I try to figure out what, exactly, is hard about it, and either remove the obstacle or explicitly teach dd11 how to work through it. For example, wrt removing the obstacle, I eventually figured out that one reason dd had more trouble with the Intensive Practice than the workbook was because the print was smaller - it meant there were more problems on the page and less space to write answers. Both of those things throw dd off. I deal with the number of problems by having her do one or two per page per day, and I dealt with the lack of space by getting her a graph paper notebook. Anytime she doesn't have enough space, she can write NB in the space (for notebook) and do the work there. WRT working through it, she is stronger conceptually than procedurally. When she was younger she found it hard to do problems that required more calculating than thinking - they were "boring" - and left to her own devices would have done only "thinking" sorts of problems. But eventually her lack of calculating skill was hampering her ability to do thinking problems, and that's when I decided she needed a lot more practice at rote calculation, boring or not. It was hard at first - I had to sit right by her and redirect her attention three zillion times. (And I thought a lot about whether I should change curricula.) But we both put in plenty of steady work, and now she can whip out most calculations without it being a thing. I know from my own experience that things that the things that feel "easy" yet are somehow painful to actually *do* - usually I'm missing some precursor skill. And with dd, I try to figure out what, exactly, she's missing, and either explicitly work on that skill or else find a different way to do it that doesn't require that particular skill. She definitely leans in the ADHD direction, although I don't think she is diagnosable. But I think she could use more explicit teaching on *how* to focus and sustain focus.

I would agree if he was just a nut with a three-person following. But he's a nut with thousands and thousands of followers - from what I understand he used to be considered part of respectable evangelicalism back in the day. He's *already* being heeded by a lot of people - it's not like serious criticism would be giving him an importance he doesn't already have. Also, wrt "warn[ing] others about...his dangerous and unorthodox teaching" - wouldn't that require a serious effort at understanding and refuting his teaching in order to do it well? Why should anyone pay any attention to shallow warnings that refuse to engage with the substance of what they warn against? I suppose I don't agree that a *serious* attempt at a refutation would *have* to be a respectful one. I mean, Irenaeus offered up a very substantive critique of Gnosticism in Against Heresies, but it was in no way a *respectful* critique. He openly mocked what they taught. He found it ridiculous and said so, but he nevertheless put serious effect into refuting it *because* it was deceiving and hurting so many people.

Adding a few more to my recommended reading list ;): The Righteousness of One, Christification: A Lutheran Approach to Theosis, and Hands of Faith, all by Jordan Cooper. Cooper has been instrumental for me in connecting key doctrines with their basis in reality. The Righteousness of One is an analysis of the new perspective on Paul in light of early patristic theology. Sounds unconnected to anything practical, right ;). Well, Cooper's take on the NPP is that they are trying to give justification a grounding in reality, let it be something more than a "legal fiction" (how they understand the Reformation take on justification as imputation). And Cooper's argument, informed by some of the patristic fathers, is that justification is *both* imputed *and* has a basis in reality - namely the reality of being united to Christ in faith. It really helped Luther's notion of justification as the joyous exchange become *real* to me. In Christification, Cooper gives sanctification a similar grounding in reality, focusing on how the doctrine of mystical union meshes with early patristic teachings on becoming more Christlike in a very metaphysically real way. And in Hands of Faith Cooper applies these realistic takes on justification and sanctification to the doctrine of the two kinds of righteousness (which I talked about in an earlier post) to describe how we grow in the practice of good works without those works contributing to our salvation. Cooper was a major link for me between all the previous sorts of books and key Christian doctrines - showing how prime doctrines have metaphysical primacy in our lives as well. Another one is a paper that's available free online :): "Why Luther is not Quite Protestant: the logic of faith in a sacramental promise", by Phillip Cary: http://www.academia.edu/185285/Why_Luther_is_not_Quite_Protestant_The_Logic_of_Faith_in_a_Sacramental_Promise It contrasts a standard Protestant view of how faith fits into salvation with Luther's sacramental view. The first time I read this, I 100% identified with the standard Protestant view and couldn't quite follow the logic of Luther's view (kind of an oops for a Lutheran ;)). But the paper opened my eyes to differences I didn't even know existed - particularly the difference between "having faith in Christ" and "having faith in my faith in Christ" - and helped me start to see what it *means* for the sacraments to be central in Lutheran piety.

Fwiw, you can do wwe in a notebook, instead of using the student pages. Esp for wwe3, which is dictations and narrations, there's really not anything to the student pages but blank lines and some cute line drawings, is there? I copied all the student pages for wwe2 with dd1, but got tired of it, and did wwe3 (dd1) and wwe1 (dd2) in notebooks. With wwe1 it does require that I write out the copywork in the notebook, but with wwe3 there really wasn't any inconvenience.

Re: John Walton - Interesting - I have one of his books in my "to read" pile. I have seen increasing acknowledgement in most all corners of Christianity that the assumed hard separation between creation and the spiritual bequeathed to us by modernity is a huge problem (certainly Pentecostalism makes quite an effort to overcome this, albeit in a non-sacramental way). And among traditions with a sacramental history it has resulted in an increased focus on recovering a sacramental view. I have noticed an uptick in interest in some kind of sacramental view of creation amongst Reformed-influenced evangelicals (makes sense since the Reformed have a sacramental history and are part of evangelicalism); I've seen a surge of interest in Jonathan Edwards, who worked really hard to fight the material-only mechanistic view of the universe. Mostly this seemed to open up the possibility of a sacramental understanding of sanctification and not justification, but some Presbyterians were trying to get back to Calvin's understanding of the sacraments. But yeah, rightly or not, I don't associate that with "mainstream" evangelicalism. But it doesn't surprise me overmuch that "evangelicalism as I've experienced it" misses the *possibilities* of evangelicalism. For all that I grew up in evangelical-adjacent Lutheranism and so imbibed several common evangelical assumptions (80s and 90s era), I'm still an outsider looking in wrt evangelicalism. I see more of the most common bits of evangelicalism (and evangelical missteps) than anything else. And all my actual *study* of theology has been within the confessional Lutheran corner of the tradition, as opposed to the evangelical-adjacent corner I grew up in. (Confessional Lutherans hold that, since we Lutherans hold that our confessions, the Book of Concord, are a correct explanation of Scripture, they should therefore *form* our theology and practice, instead of merely functioning as a "stay within these lines" theological boundary.) And confessional Lutherans have a habit of using evangelicalism as a go-to "how *not* to be Lutheran" example, since most American Lutherans are heavily influenced by evangelical assumptions (as was I). And that can warp one's impression. When we do X, and contrast the practice of X with someone else's X-contradicting practice of A - it's all-too-easy to assume that: (1) since we practice X *because* it is X, and we do not practice A *because* A contradicts X, (2) while they *are* practicing A, (3) they are practicing A *because* it contradicts X. (And we can also end up assuming the reverse, that *we* practice X *because* it contradicts A, and thus warp our understanding of *ourselves* in addition to warping our understanding of others.) In other words, it is all too easy to define *their* practice of A in terms of how it relates to *our* practice of X. We see the world in X/notX terms, and it blinds us to someone else's A/notA worldview. We interpret them as if they *shared* our X/notX premises, only they contrarily affirm the opposite, notX conclusion; and they likely return the favor, assuming we share their A/notA premises while contrarily affirming the opposite, notA conclusion. Here's an example: Let's say that I play music in the background in order to establish music as an omnipresent part of our lives. And let's say that you only play music when you and your family can devote their full attention to it, to establish the habit of giving music the attention it deserves. These practices *do* contradict, but they *aren't* opposites of each other. I'm not playing music in the background *because* I'm trying to establish the habit of giving music only half-attention. And you aren't limiting music to when you can give it full attention *because* you are trying to limit music to only a corner of your life. (Those may be unintentional consequences of our practices, but they aren't what either of us is setting out to do.) But it's awfully easy for me to assume that you are *purposely* doing the opposite of what I am doing because you *want* to accomplish the opposite of what I want to accomplish, and vice versa. And that means that while *I* am trying to accomplish a *good* thing, *you* apparently are *trying* to accomplish a *bad* thing, and vice versa. That doesn't really leave much room for seeing any potential common ground between us on this issue, kwim? (And in reverse, sometimes the acceptance of common ground between us and our different-but-both-good practices doesn't leave much room for considering the possibility that one practice may have more negative unintentional consequences than another - since we are "on the same side", we need to accept everything about each other as of equal value - any substantial criticism is treated as a veiled statement that "you aren't affiliated with me". It's the flip side of being on opposing sides and assuming there is *no* common ground at all.) So all that to say, I don't really understand evangelicalism from the inside, and I try to keep my statements appropriately humble, though sometimes I forget because evangelicalism's been a close neighbor for so long and so feels familiar - I think I know them better than I do. I am trying to learn to understand evangelicalism on its own terms, though I've a long ways to go. ~*~ WRT another example of immaterial creation: the other main category I can think of is that of universals - "what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities", such as truth, goodness, beauty. Namely, what is the nature of those universals - do they exist out there in the world independently or not? Realism says they do, anti-realism says they don't, and nominalism splits the difference. (Nominalism arose in the medieval church in response to the revival of Aristotle and arguably contributed strongly to Reformation theology.) Realism is basically the idea that reality exists independently of how people see it or understand it. Reality is what it is, regardless of whether we see it as it is. And when it comes to philosophy, realism is the idea that ideas - like goodness and beauty and human nature - are real things that exist independently of whatever anyone thinks of them, or even *whether* anyone thinks of them. Creation isn't just made up of material reality (like our flesh and bones and blood) but is also made up of immaterial reality (like souls and the essence of humanity and truth and goodness and beauty). However, nominalism rejects the idea of independently-existing immaterial moral essences like goodness and beauty and human nature - general ideas are just human-invented names for things that don't actually exist - only particular, concrete, material objects exist. So "human nature" as its own thing doesn't exist - only individual humans who have some things in common. We might *call* those things-all-humans-have "human nature", but that's just a name we use - there's no *actual* universal "human nature" that all humans *really* share. Now, the scientific revolution rests on nominalist assumptions, and kind of kicked pre-modern realism's butt - in our scientific, technocratic West, we're all swimming in nominalist assumptions. Is beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or inherent to what is being beheld? Is the question "can I use thing A to accomplish good purpose B?" a strictly *practical* question (will it work), or is it inherently a *moral* question, too (is it *right* to use thing A to accomplish purpose B)? The first answer to each is nominalist, the second one broadly realist. The original point of nominalism was to preserve God's sovereignty over His creation. Prior to the revival of Aristotle in the 12 and 13th centuries, the medieval church was more Platonic. The connection between creation and the spiritual was something like this: Spiritual | \/ Immaterial Creation | \/ Material Creation The material was encompassed and determined by the immaterial and the immaterial was in turn encompassed and determined by the spiritual. You could only understand material creation if you understood immaterial creation, and you could only understand immaterial creation if you understood God's spiritual work in creation. What creation was *for* determined what creation *was* and what it could *do*. Unbelievers, with no understanding of God's spiritual work, were therefore unable to truly understand the whys and wherefores of God's creation. But Aristotle had a different relationship between the material and immaterial. And the resulting synthesis between Aristotelianism and Christianity looked, to its opponents anyway, something like this (I am unclear how the scholastics themselves viewed it): -----------------------------Spiritual -----------------------------| -----------------------------\/ Material Creation <-> Immaterial Creation So you had immaterial creation formed by *both* material creation *and* the spiritual (and material creation as only indirectly affected by God's spiritual work). Unbelievers *could* understand the immaterial purposes of creation, since they were right there, embedded in material creation to be studied. But they couldn't understand the spiritual purposes of God. And to nominalists, this allowed the notions of unbelievers to define what was and wasn't possible for God to do in creation, and thus infringed on His absolute sovereignty. because it limited God to working out His spiritual good in ways that meshed with the inherent immaterial purposes of creation. To nominalists, it made God's ability to spiritually work in creation limited by the nature of creation itself - and thus claimed that God cannot change what He sets in motion, that He is limited by His past actions - which infringed on God's ability to do absolutely anything. And to top it off, since the purposes of creation were possible for unbelievers to learn, God was seen as limited to working in ways that unbelievers could conceive of - which is a false limitation, because unbelievers by definition are unable to understand the ways of God. (Heck, humans in general are unable by definition to fully understand the ways of God.) So, to preserve God's absolute sovereignty to do absolutely anything in creation He wanted, nominalists gutted the category of immaterial creation: Spiritual----------------------------- |----------------------------- \/----------------------------- Material Creation -> Immaterial Creation Material creation was brought right back under the direct control of the spiritual, while immaterial creation was left hanging off to the side, unable to influence much of anything. Immaterial creation existed in name only, not as really-existing things. (And all the important things that immaterial creation was responsible for ended up migrating eventually either to the spiritual or the material.) But the *nature* of the connection between the spiritual and material creation changed. Instead of the purposes of creation being embedded *within* creation itself, material creation *had* no inherent purpose. Instead, God imposed His spiritual purposes from outside creation onto a creation that was itself inherently purposeless - He could do anything He wanted with creation to accomplish His good goals. And this changed the nature of humanity's relationship to creation, too. Being God's stewards of creation means doing God's will in creation. When God's will was inherent in creation, that meant using creation as it was meant to be used. But once God's will was imposed from the outside on a purposeless creation, then we too did His will by imposing our wills on a purposeless creation to accomplish His good purposes. Under nominalism, nothing within creation tells us how creation should be lived in - only God's divine revelation can tell us. And then, per Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, nominalism and scholasticism's autonomous material creation, both Christian, combined to form a worldview quite antithetical to Christianity: Material Creation | Spiritual This kicked off the Scientific Revolution - the material world could profitably be studied in itself, regardless of what spiritual purposes may or may not exist, because nothing about those spiritual purposes would or could change the nature of material creation. Ever since Christians have been fighting to keep/regain the primacy of the spiritual and the ability of the spiritual to affect the material, but in practice, this often is reduced to accepting an inherently purposeless, spiritless creation, while maintaining that 1) God and His outside-creation spiritual purposes *do* exist and *should* be lived by, and 2) God reserves the right to intervene spiritually in His material creation in order to change its usual course at any time. This concedes almost everything - it *accepts* the materialistic view that the "usual course of things" inherently *excludes* all things spiritual; it accepts that "the usual course of things" are things that happen *without* God - that the usual way of the world is to be *without* God. And as those materialistic assumptions give the spiritual very little to do in our daily lives, it's hard to maintain the primacy of the spiritual. And I do think those assumptions affect most Western Christians, sacramental and non-sacramental alike, to a greater or lesser extent - it's in the air we breathe. ~*~ The gutting of immaterial creation, and the resulting migration of things from immaterial creation to either spiritual or material, changed the nature of natural law. And this is pretty important, because a lot of Christian ethical teaching has been based in natural law. Christians have generally held that natural law is written in creation and so is knowable to an extent by everyone. Scholasticism tended to see natural law as written into immaterial creation. But when nominalism followed by the scientific revolution gutted the category of immaterial creation, the only categories that were left were spiritual or material. So for natural law to be written into creation, it would have to be written into *material* creation - and therefore be discoverable by *science*. Which is quite a change from the based-in-an-objective-immaterial-creation morality of virtue ethics. For quite a while Christian and non-Christians alike sought to ground morality in scientifically-discoverable material facts - MacIntyre calls this "the Enlightenment Project" - but ultimately it failed philosophically, and the results of that failure have been extending into everyday life. And one of the impacts is that *Christian* morality - inasmuch as it is rooted in a scientifically-determined-material-only "natural" law - is rooted in a fiction. And a fiction that people are increasingly coming to realize *is* a fiction. One of the main points of MacIntyre's After Virtue is how what he calls "emotivism" (*not* the same thing as "emotional") is a direct result of the failure of modernity to ground morality in anything. Per MacIntyre, emotivists are people who believe there are *no* objective moral standards, and so all moral judgments are nothing more than covert expressions of personal preference. Most emotivists take this to be a fact about the inherent nature of moral judgment: just like we moderns say with certainty that no real witches were ever burned throughout history because there are no witches to be burned in the first place, emotivists say with confidence that no one in history has ever appealed to a real, objective moral standard in defending their moral judgment because there are *no* objective moral standards in the first place. But MacIntyre's point is that while emotivists *are* seeing something that is really there - that modern Western moral judgments *do* embody this mismatch between how a group of people make moral judgments (as if they are based on rational, objective criteria) and what those moral judgments are actually based on (feelings and attitudes) - they are *wrong* when they declare that the features of these *particular* moral judgments apply to *all* moral judgments everywhere. In fact, MacIntyre’s “After Virtue†is a book-length argument that the modern loss of objective moral foundations is not universal but historically contingent. I really appreciate MacIntyre here, because he offers an alternative between "upholding objective morality in general requires me to believe that *my* practice of it is still good" (an increasingly untenable position) and "rejecting objective morality in general because *my* practice of it is bad" (a common overreaction to a personal lack of foundation in beliefs). Aka, it gives me the space to acknowledge that there *is* some truth to observations that many *contemporary* Christians and Christian churches (including me) do indeed suffer from hollowed-out beliefs (including moral beliefs) - beliefs that claim the status of objective, rational truth without any sort of objective, rational foundation – but this doesn’t have to mean that there *never was* any sort of objective, rational foundation for Christianity, only that that foundation has been lost to many of us contemporary Christians. You can realize that you and your tradition are (currently) lacking in important ways and decide that the problem is with you and your tradition’s *current* understanding of Christianity, instead of deciding that the problem isn’t with you and your tradition’s understanding of Christianity, but with Christianity itself. ~*~ Books that I found helpful re: the changing nature of morality: Well, MacIntyre, for one. After Virtue was mindblowing, as I said. He has some sequels that are in my Great Unread that answer questions raised by After Virtue: Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals. He has a new book out that is supposed to provide a capstone summary of his work on virtue: Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity that is reputed to provide a good one-volume summary of his thought, though I haven't seen it in person. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is more on the changing nature of the relationship of the spiritual to creation. It's epic in both scope and length ;). Its goal is to describe why it was that belief in God was the default in 1500 Western Christendom, while now in the West *dis*belief in God is the default. I haven't finished this one yet. I read the first hundred pages probably four times - it's where he describes what it was like to see the world as a medieval Catholic in 1500 - and I read it over and over till I could *feel* what he was describing. Then I took those medieval assumptions and read the Lutheran Confessions in light of *them* - instead of in light of my modern assumptions - in order to better understand what they were saying and responding to. James K. A. Smith has a book that summarizes and comments upon Taylor's book: How Not to Be Secular, which I've read and enjoyed. I quibble some with Smith's take, but it is an accessible, helpful introduction to Taylor. David Wells has a four book series on the effects of modernity on the church: No Place For Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue, and Above All Earthly Powers. I'm only in the first one, but it's been packed with great stuff. He also has a more popular, summary book of the above quartet: The Courage to Be Protestant, but I've not seen it. In a more popular vein, I really enjoyed Nancy Pearcey's Saving Leonardo. It's an analysis of various artists and artistic movements that looks at how their work embodied what they believed. And it also works as a survey of the dominant beliefs from Kant till today and how artists lived them out in there work. I found the introduction a little too strident for my tastes, but the analysis was excellent. In a different vein, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr was a wonderful look at the ethics of technology - how every technology has a view of how the world is and how humans are embedded in it. There are tons of other books - many are in my Great Unread - I have probably a half dozen books that analyze how we got from pre-modernity to modernity alone - but I'm trying to stick to books I've read or mostly read. I'm going to throw in two exceptions here, though. One is The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher. I'm just in chapter four, but it's a readable, accessible intro to the broad threads of the above books, plus it spends most of its time proposing *solutions*. The other is Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, Hans Boersma. I have it, but I'm still working through his scholarly work on sacramental ontology (which is awesome). But it's a popular presentation of a sacramental view by an evangelical. (He has a new book on Scripture as Real Presence that is going on my to buy list.) Also, virtue ethics people here have recommended these three books as a trio: (1) C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man - explains the problem (lack of virtue) and why it's a problem (2) Joseph Pieper, Leisure as the Basis of Culture - explains the solution philosophically (3) David Hicks, Norms and Nobility - explains how to put the solution into practice wrt education I've read (1) several times and loved it (didn't truly follow his argument till the third time through, though), and I'm partway through (2) and appreciating it. ((3) is languishing still among the Great Unread.) ~*~ Hope all the above helps and isn't too overwhelming :shifty. (I've now spilled over 10,000 words on this thread :yikes.) Really quick (too late ;)), I agree with pp that one's view of sin is important - it's one place where I strongly differ from medieval scholastics and it does change my metaphysics relative to theirs (and also relative to modernity). Plus another theological difference that affects a sacramental view of reality is an analogical vs univocal view of the relationship between human qualities like love, truth, etc and God's possession of the same qualities. Sacramental people tend to have an analogical view - humans and God are radically different, and so describing God using qualities that are in creation (love, etc) is only an *analogy* to what God is actually like. However, a univocal view of those qualities means that there is no difference in *kind* between human love and God's love (for example), but only in *degree* (God's love is infinitely *greater* than ours, but it looks like ours). (Nominalists tended to have a univocal view of universals, which contributed to their view that how those universals appeared in creation necessarily defined how those universals existed in God.) Anyway, an analogical view maintains a huge gulf between the *nature* of God and creation, which paradoxically allows for a closer union between God and creation without subsuming God into creation (pantheism). A univocal view erases some of the differences in essence between God and creation, and so it has to impose a greater metaphysical distance to maintain the innate difference between God and creation.

I think having difficulty with understanding sacramental views of reality and with not equating the immaterial and spiritual are both related to how modern Western culture has a sharp division between the material, scientific world and everything else. It kind of smooshes everything that is "not material" into the same box - treats some very dissimilar things as effectively the same. And as both immaterial creation (like the soul) and God (who is spirit) are "not material", they are thrown together into the same box. And mostly religious people are quite busy with just trying to maintain that "not material" doesn't mean "not real", and the details kind of get lost in the shuffle. Which is a shame, because imo the details are pretty key to establishing that the immaterial and the spiritual are indeed as real as the material. With respect to not equating the immaterial and the spiritual, let's consider the soul as an example. On the one hand, it is very much *not* material - can't weigh it, can't measure it. On the other hand, as Christians, we affirm that our souls, like the rest of us, are *created* by God. And God, as our Creator, is *not* part of creation. That means he's not material, of course - but it *also* means that He's not *immaterial* in the way we think of the soul, because our souls are just as created as our bodies. So if God is spirit, then "spirit" and "spiritual" (meaning "of God") must be a quite different thing than "immaterial creation". The way I've come to think of it is as two separate, but related, distinctions. The top-level distinction is between the spiritual and creation (and is largely drawn from the Bible), while the secondary distinction is between immaterial and material creation (informed both by the Bible and by Greek philosophy). But if you smoosh those two distinctions together into one - the spiritual on one hand, and material creation on the other (and no good place for immaterial creation as both immaterial *and* created), it warps how one considers both creation and the spiritual. Particularly it lends itself to gnosticism, which considers salvation to apply to the soul only, and considers the material body to be either irrelevant to salvation (so go nuts with fleshly living) or the chief enemy of salvation (so you need to beat it into submission to be saved). (I've a book, Against the Protestant Gnostics, that argues that there's a ton of gnostic influences in contemporary American evangelicalism.) Now, virtue ethics rests on a particular view of the relationship between material and immaterial creation (that's largely Aristotelian). And sacramental views of reality rest on certain views of the relationship between the spiritual and creation - where the connection between the spiritual and creation applies to both material and immaterial creation alike. (You know, I keep saying "sacramental view of reality" as if there's only one of them, when actually there's a lot of different views, some of which are mutually exclusive. Thus the change to sacramental views of reality.) And they aren't the same thing, although how one views the nature of the relationship between the spiritual and creation affects how one views the nature of creation, and vice versa. And when the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment adopted the assumption that creation=nature=material, it excluded *both* immaterial reality *and* spiritual reality from having any objective, material effect on material reality. The effects of both immaterial reality and spiritual reality were limited to affecting immaterial and spiritual realities only - the only point of contact with the material world was through the human soul. This places a sharp division between between material reality and non-material reality - it generates the assumption that the usual way of things is either to be material-only or to be non-material-only. And that messed with *both* Aristotelian views of reality *and* sacramental views of reality, both of which hold the opposite: that the usual way of things is for creation to be *both* material and immaterial, that the usual way of things is for the spiritual to suffuse *all* of creation. Aristotle believed that everything in the material world had inherent-in-nature immaterial qualities and purposes - not just humanity, but everything. And sacramental views of reality hold that God spiritually sustains *all* of creation - and thus the spiritual suffuses every part of creation - that it is *impossible* for *anything* to be "material-only" - material creation would fall apart and blow away the *instant* God wasn't supernaturally, spiritually upholding it. "In Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). That's a key difference in assumptions: do you assume the spiritual is inherently *absent* from creation (unless and until proven otherwise (modern)), or do you assume the spiritual is inherently *present* in creation (pre-modern)? Does something extra have to happen in order to have the spiritual be present in the material world? Or is the spiritual *inherently* present all the time? Pre-moderns aren't trying to tell *whether* the something non-material is present - something non-material is *always* present. Instead, the key question is: what is the *nature* of the non-material thing present? Is it from God, or is it from something evil? But moderns have added a third category: is something from God, from evil, or just mundane material reality only? And we've gotten so used to explaining the world in mundane material terms that we assume the natural state of things is to be mundanely material - that's probably *the* non-sacramental assumption. And it places a ton of distance between our lives in creation and the spiritual, to the point that we wonder if we are just imagining the existence of the spiritual :(. But sacramental views of reality assume the opposite: that reality *is* inherently spiritual just as much as it is inherently created. Now, of course sin is messing all this up. Because of sin, the spiritual is hidden from us. We sinful people cannot see the hidden spiritual work of God except with eyes of faith. But what is the nature of that hidden spiritual work? Is it merely hidden from our sight but actually all around us, embedded in every corner of creation - right *there* to be seen if only we could see it? Or is it hidden at a great distance from where we are? Are those eyes of faith seeing *what is really there* (sacramental view) or are those eyes of faith seeing the *results* of what *should* be there and what *will* be there when Jesus comes again, but what *isn't* there right now but instead is working from a distance (non-sacramental view)? Does sin make it impossible to *see* the spiritual in creation, or does sin also make it impossible for the spiritual to *be* in creation? IOW, is the reason that sinful man is incapable of seeing the spiritual apart from God due to a deficiency in *man* (he cannot see what is really there) or is it also due to a deficiency in reality (because of sin, there can be nothing spiritual in creation to see)? Is God's spiritual work hidden from us because *God* can't hack being in the same place as sin, or is God's spiritual work hidden from us because *we* sinful beings can't hack being in the same place as a righteous God? We sinful beings experience our separation from God in all our lives - we feel a distance physically, relationally, morally, temporally, metaphysically, practically. But is God really so thoroughly absent from our mundane lives as we think and feel He is? Modern assumptions about the inherent separateness of the material and everything non-material place everything spiritual - including God - at a distance from the material world. Those assumptions lead us to assume that God's *absence* is the default reality - and we blame sin for the necessity of His absence. But what if He's really much more *present* than we give Him credit for - and it's because of sin that we don't *notice* that reality for what it is? ~*~ The question I posed in my previous post - how do we know if something is spiritual or if it's strictly material - only comes up when you assume that it's not just possible but *normal* for things to be strictly material. And I think it also relates to assumptions about how non-material (spiritual) justification strictly affects the non-material soul, and sanctification is the physical working out in the body of the already-achieved spiritual salvation of the soul - which itself assumes that the only way for the spiritual/non-material to affect the material world is through how the soul affects the body. In other words, I think that many modern Protestants assume that anything that attempts to affect the soul other than salvation is by definition an attempt at works righteousness. Also, I think that many modern Protestants assume that for our actions to stem from our justification, they have to stem from the soul, and not start with bodily actions. Otherwise they are "merely" physical actions done apart from Christ, and so also works righteousness. In other words, "inward" actions stemming from salvation go like this: Spirit->soul->body. Any actions that *start* with the body *cannot* be prompted by the Spirit, since the (non-material) Spirit only affects the (material) body through the (non-material) soul - so they are "outward" only actions and thus done apart from God. And virtue ethics runs afoul of both of those positions. Virtue ethics allows for an outside-in approach to building character, where the actions of the body shape the character of the soul just as much as the reverse: Body <-> Soul. So with the above assumptions, you end up with Spirit->soul<->body, which isn't exactly what Protestants are looking for. But if you separate out immaterial creation from the spiritual, then virtue ethics slots in like this: Spirit | \|/ Body <-> Soul Which keeps the relationship between creation and the spiritual one-way, from God to us - there's no place for *any* changes to the body *or* soul to add to what God is giving us. Plus, combined with sacramental views of reality, there's a place to understand *all* good works - whether done by Christians or non-Christians - to be spiritually, supernaturally wrought by God. (In such a way as to be to *no one's* spiritual merit, although they *are* of spiritual effect to those who are *already* spiritual - i.e those who are *already* made spiritually alive. It's *our* sinful separateness from God that makes God's spiritual creation be of no spiritual effect to us, not any inherent spiritual lack in God's work in creation.)

OK, I have no idea what your last paragraph means, but I'm gonna keep trying! Lol Lol, there's a ton of theological assumptions underlying it which probably deserved some attention, plus the "temporal, logical, metaphysical, and practical connection" bit by rights should have been fleshed out. But that post was getting horrifically long and unwieldy, so I took out all the Highly Pertinent Backstory sort of info that I never know if anyone but me cares about ;). Thus rendering it frustratingly opaque, probably. Can't win for losing, eh ;). So, here's some of the theological bits I used fleshed out. One is how justification and sanctification are related to each other. You said earlier that you were wondering if Protestants have a bit more difficulty dealing with virtue ethics, and I think this is one of those places. I have the impression that sanctification as its own separate category is maybe something of a post-Reformation thing. Even the earlier documents in the Lutheran Confessions refer just to "justification" (meaning all of salvation) and "the new obedience" (carefully defined as an effect of justification and not its cause). But the second generation documents (written largely to clarify similarities/differences between Lutherans and other Reformation Christians) did use the justification/sanctification distinction. And once you break the two aspects of salvation apart, then you have to figure out how they fit - and don't fit - together. Anyway, Lutherans relate justification and sanctification differently than do the Reformed, in a way that relates to how salvation fits into the Christian life. Lutherans place sanctification as the daughter of justification, while I believe the Reformed consider justification and sanctification as two separate fruits of union with Christ. So for Lutherans, sanctification flows from justification. If your sanctification in this life isn't what it ought to be (and no one's is), then you should first seek forgiveness and receive God's saving grace - aka be justified anew - before building on that foundation by seeking to do good and avoid evil. (And when you fail in your attempts to do good and avoid evil, as is inevitable, then you once again seek to be justified anew before embarking on any fresh attempts to do better.). God's saving grace is the foundation for all sanctification - and we can and should receive God's forgiveness over and over, each and every time we fail in our sanctification. Whereas my understanding is that most Protestants consider being justified as a one-time thing only. The only reason they'd seek to be justified again in response to sanctification failures is if they considered them to be evidence of a "justification failure" - aka evidence they hadn't ever been truly converted in the first place, evidence that they hadn't actually been a Christian at all. Otherwise, for most Protestants, the only significance justification has for the Christian life is that it exists - there's no *ongoing* active role for justification. If they are seeking to be more fully sanctified, they mostly aren't going to see any reason to look back toward justification, but instead will look forward toward sanctification - you seek sanctification by seeking sanctification, full stop. (From the Lutheran perspective, responding to sinning by jumping straight to attempting to prevent future sins is effectively trying to fix your past sins via future good behavior - aka it's works righteousness. And I know first hand how *easy* it is to pray that God helps me do better while forgetting to ask Him to forgive me for having previously done bad. But no amount of good works can erase even one sin - we can never make up for our sins - and that's just as true *after* we are saved as it is *before*. The Gospel is for Christians, too :).) And that brings me to the "temporal, logical, metaphysical, and practical connection" bit. I think most all Protestants - most all Christians - would consider "being saved" to be THE ultimate goal of Christianity. But the doctrinal primacy of "being saved" needs to be reinforced in all other aspects of life, too - such as temporal, logical, metaphysical, and practical - for that doctrinal primacy to have not just doctrinal force, but temporal, logical, metaphysical and practical force, too. (Another difference crops up here. I think Protestants have a tendency to equate "faith alone" with "doctrine alone". "Faith" can both refer to: "1. Objectively, body of truth found in creeds (fides quae creditur; Lat. “the faith that is believedâ€). 2. The human response to divine activity (fides qua creditur; Lat. “the faith by which one believesâ€)". "Faith alone" refers to definition two (and is a supernaturally-wrought response to definition-one-faith, worked by the God confessed in definition one). And the faith we confess in creeds isn't just true doctrinally, but is true temporally, logically, metaphysically and practically, too. And we're not just doctrinal people, but temporal, logical, metaphysical and practical people, too. And so we need to confess the faith not just doctrinally, but with all our lives.) When salvation is seen strictly as a single moment in time, then the Christian life, instead of being a continual rhythm of receiving grace and responding with good works (and sinning and realizing we need grace and confessing and receiving grace), is instead broken into two distinct and separate parts: justification-in-the-past and totally-not-salvific-at-all-sanctification-in-the-present-and-future. This temporally, logically, metaphysically, and practically puts distance between salvation and good works. Temporal distance because salvation is one moment in the past, while good works are done throughout the present and future - there is an ever-growing time gap between salvation and our present life. Logical distance because there's no clear, direct connection between having salvation because of faith and doing good works because of faith outside of both requiring faith as a precondition. Metaphysical distance because the moment of salvation, for non-sacramental Christians, is an exclusively spiritual work, while our good works are inherently physical. Practical distance because the vast majority of the Christian life is spent in doing good works, not in being saved, and it is very hard to keep salvation an active, ongoing focus when so little time is spent in *being saved*. But it's quite different with sanctification as the daughter of justification, with our good works in creation as the fruit of our restored relationship with God (and our continued sins as the ongoing fruit of our sinful nature, though it is already destroyed spiritually, and will be destroyed physically when we die). Especially when paired with a sense of being continually justified anew every time we receive God's forgiveness in Christ through Word and Sacrament. Temporally, there's a tight connection between receiving the physical sign (hearing God's Word of forgiveness, receiving the physical element in the Sacrament) and receiving the spiritual gift attached to the sign (forgiveness of sins) - namely, they happen simultaneously. As well, a tight connection between "seek forgiveness" and "receive forgiveness" is maintained - each and every time we seek God's forgiveness, we receive that forgiveness anew right then. Logically, there's a tight connection between justification and our life of good works. We are to seek to do good and avoid evil - not in order to gain God's favor (such a thing is impossible), but because we have *already* received God's favor. We have no need to justify ourselves through our works *because* we are already forgiven and justified by God. But in our life of good works, we continually stumble and fall, which reinforces our *ongoing* need to be justified in Christ. And so we confess our sin and receive God's forgiveness, justified anew, resting in God's grace, ready to do good and avoid evil, not in order to *gain* God's favor, but because we already *have* God's favor. Metaphysically, there's a tight connection between the physical sign and the spiritual reality it embodies - to receive one is to receive the other - the spiritual gift is Right There, in, with, and under the physical sign. In Holy Communion, for example, when we receive the consecrated bread, we are holding Christ's very body in our hand. "To receive Christ" is quite real. When we hear the Scriptures read, we are truly hearing Christ, the Word of God, truly present and speaking to us in, with, and under the voice of the speaker. He is *there* and we can *know* it, because we very concretely hear the words with our ears and in faith we trust the Bible's promise that the words of Scripture are the Word of God. Practically, there's a tight connection between "doctrinally most important thing" and the practical focus of the Christian life. The Divine Service each week is centered around receiving God's gift of forgiveness in Word and Sacrament. Devotional practice is centered around considering where we have fallen short of God's will and then not just continually *realizing* that we need Christ and His forgiveness, but actually *seeking* and *receiving* His forgiveness right then. All that reinforces the proper place of our good works as in *response* to God's saving grace. Good works flow "downhill" from God's grace given to us; they don't flow "uphill" to add anything to God's saving grace. When we sin and fail to show the fruit we should, we can and should once again receive God's forgiveness, be justified anew. And while good works are a sign that God is working in us, a sign of sanctification, they are *not* a sign that we have been justified (and thank goodness, as they are too fledgling and weak for that). Rather, the promises of the Word and the physical sign of the Sacraments are our proof that God has worked in us. We can *know* quite concretely that we were baptized, or that we received Holy Communion, or that we heard the Scriptures read. And we trust that God's promises are true: that when we were baptized we really *were* baptized into Christ's death and resurrection like God said (Rom 6:3-6). And that the cup of blessing that we bless really *is* a participation in the blood of Christ and the bread that we break really *is* a participation in the body of Christ (1 Cor 10:16). So all that changes how pursuing virtue is viewed. When justification is evidence of sanctification - while sanctification is *not* evidence of justification - then improving our ability to do good works doesn't impinge on our justification in any way. While our justification proves God *is* working to sanctify us (whether we notice it or not), our good works do *not* prove anything one way or another about our justification. A high level of virtue is good, but it's not evidence of justification - a person can be very virtuous without being saved. The proper order of things is that our justification is proof of our sanctification - not the other way around. ~*~ There's a related issue: worrying whether a given effort to improve our good works is a spiritual effort that stems from our justification (and so good) or whether it is a merely-physical effort that is quite separate from our justification (and so is an attempt to be good without God and thus is bad). This one related to sacramental/non-sacramental differences, and I'll tackle it in another post, as I respond to the rest of your comments - because this post is long enough as it is ;).

Well, I guess spoke sloppily - I suppose I meant conversion to refer to *everything* involved in the moving-from-unbeliever-to-believer start of the Christian life, not any one bit in particular. Which was sloppy of me since iirc conversion is a particular step in the ordo salutis (sp). All I really meant by that was that, from our perspective, there's a start to the Christian life - at some point, whether we were aware of it occurring or not, we were initially made spiritually alive, when before we were spiritually dead. Whether salvation is a moment in time or a lifelong process, either way it still has a starting point, kwim?

I think there's something to this. I do think most Christians would agree that salvation *begins* at a single moment in time (conversion). And that most would also agree that the Christian life involves a lifelong process of "working out our salvation with fear and trembling". So I think most Christians would see the Christian life as involving *both* a single moment in time *and* a lifelong process. As well, I think most Christians would see the Christian life as involving *both* God's grace *and* our responding with good works done in faith. But does *salvation* involve both a single moment in time and a lifelong process? Or is it both started *and* completed in that single moment? Do we receive God's saving grace throughout our Christian life? Or is God's saving grace given just once at our conversion? Does *salvation* involve both God's grace plus our works-done-in-faith? Or does it involve God's grace alone? Is the Christian life (which involves *all* of *life*) centered around salvation alone? Or does the Christian life involve salvation plus works-done-in-faith? When salvation is a lifelong process, it functions naturally as the sole top-level category of Christian life, encompassing both God's grace and our response of good-works-done-in-faith. But when salvation is a moment in time, then for all its doctrinal primacy, there is substantial temporal, logical, metaphysical, and practical distance between salvation and the rest of Christian life, between salvation and good works. And in practice this seems to go hand-in-hand with rejecting a sacramental view of reality. It certainly weakens sacramental practice, because why receive the sacraments frequently when you've no idea how the saving grace given in and through them fits into the Christian life? My experience is that non-sacramental views of reality changes how legalism and works righteousness are understood. In talking with non-sacramental Protestants, I've found that many of them have no idea how the sacraments could be anything *but* works-righteousness. Is a human physically doing something in Holy Baptism? Check. Then Baptism involves works and thus to say Baptism saves is to say that works contribute to salvation. For grace to be grace *alone*, it has to be given immediately (without physical means); grace given through physical means (water and Word) and so received by physical means (hearing the words, having water poured over you) is inherently grace mixed with works. There's this assumption that anything that a human does physically is a "work" in the works righteousness sense. So for something to be 100% God's work, there cannot be any human action involved at all (not just no *meritorious* human activity) - which means there can't be any physical *means* involved at all. Which pretty much eliminates a sacramental understanding of the sacraments as well as a sacramental understanding of creation (where the spiritual is united to the material). I'm not sure a "salvation as a single moment of time" theology, that has that sort of big, huge separation between spiritual salvation and physical good works, would have a clear place for virtue ethics, which assumes a tight connection between our material bodies and our immaterial souls. (Also, I think the rejection of a sacramental view of reality can lead to equating the immaterial and the spiritual, and separating the two is pretty essential imo to keeping virtue ethics from going hardcore legalistic.) However, I think we Protestants can distinguish (not put distance between, but distinguish) God's work of salvation and our response to His work of salvation while still holding that we receive God's saving grace continually in our Christian lives - and thus keep salvation as the sole top-level category of Christian life. This, along with a sacramental view of reality, helps to maintain the primacy of God's saving work along with its tight connection to the important-yet-secondary nature of our response to salvation in our Christian lives not just doctrinally, but also temporally, logically, metaphysically, and practically. The issue of how our works (done body-and-soul) relate to our salvation (which likewise affects both body and soul) has already been worked out, and there's a natural place to slot in virtue ethics, with its tight connection between our material bodies and immaterial souls, under "important-yet-secondary".

I think not connecting our physical lives with our spiritual lives would be a foreign thought to most all Christians, sacramental and non-sacramental alike. Ime most Christians yearn for the deepest, strongest connection between the two they can conceive of. But I do agree that non-sacramental assumptions about the nature of reality tend to place much greater limits on what sort of connection can be conceived of than sacramental assumptions. My own experience is that modern assumptions about the separateness of the physical and spiritual can deeply affect even sacramental Christians, warping their understanding of their tradition, making sacramental practices less and less comprehensible and less and less central to living as a Christian. (It certainly did me - I've always been as sacramental as I could imagine, but for most of my life I labored unknowing under modern assumptions that seriously limited what I was capable of imagining. And those false assumptions that weakened my understanding and practice of the sacraments weakened a lot of other central Christian beliefs and practices, too.). But even a weak and tenuous limited understanding of the sacraments provides a qualitatively different starting point for viewing the world than does a rejection of the sacraments. The sacraments are one of the last parts of the pre-modern view of reality still alive and viable in the modern West - being part of a sacramental tradition still gives a stronger line to the past than most non-sacramental Christians have available to them. And it can give general you a leg up in understanding other pre-modern beliefs, like virtue ethics, because it's not entirely foreign to you. My experience has been that most proponents of virtue ethics in classical Christian education have been from sacramental traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian) and I do think there's a connection.