Medieval Civilization: Millennia in Microcosm Week 163

Join us for a candid and penetrating discussion of Kenneth Smith’s exploration of the irony and extremity of faith in a sovereign God. In this segment, Smith shows how early religious seekers looked to God for protection from the chaos of the world—only to confront a theology in which God authors both fortune and affliction. Wealth, poverty, health, sickness, joy, and catastrophe are not accidents but appointments of divine will. Under such a vision, prayer is not a request for favors but a plea for understanding what one has already been dealt. Theodicy—the attempt to “justify the ways of God to man”—rests on the axiom that whatever God does is justice by definition.
From here, Smith turns to Christ’s teaching of the kingdom of God, not as a worldly event but as an inner transformation. The divine does not erupt in spectacle but reshapes the conscience, the will, and the deep tides of the soul. Yet early Christians, and even Christ’s listeners, struggled to break free of material expectations—still equating wealth with God’s approval and imagining heaven as a celestial vault. Figures like Paul and Ambrose had to jolt their communities out of these assumptions, insisting that Christianity’s revolution was aimed first at perception and value, not outer circumstance. This meeting will unpack that tension between inner transvaluation and outer expectation—and the enduring difficulty of shifting the human imagination away from “thingly goods” toward spiritual change.
D. Divine Teleology, Heaven and Hell
https://kennethsmithphilosophy.com/end08.php