OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
12d ago
What is the utility of the creeds if not to define who is Christian? Again, that is what they are for. They were created for that specific purpose - to clearly mark orthodox Christians apart from heretics. You could, I suppose, take one of two views. You could suggest that this purpose is laudable but the actually-existing creeds do it wrongly, and instead lock in heresy or error. (I understand this to be the historical Mormon position.) The creeds are in the wrong place or cement the wrong views. Alternatively, you could suggest that this whole endeavour is a mistake. That seems like it would have pretty big implications to me - should Christians not seek to delineate Christianity from heresy?
I interpret your position to be that a basic, perhaps creedal, definition of Christianity is reasonable, but that the actually-existing creeds are too narrow. Perhaps a more minimal creed, one that encompasses not only Nicene orthodoxy but even the likes of Arianism or perhaps even some Gnostic belief systems, would have been better, in your view?
As regards Mormon beliefs - well, I would say that the early church seems to have believed that Christ being one in substance with the Father was a core part of Christianity. They believed that enough to put it into the creeds, and to exclude people who denied it. Presumably you take the view that they were wrong, and you can do that, but I don't think it's absurd or uncharitable of me to suggest that, by doing so, you have removed yourself from community with the people who believed that.
As a final note:
in the end what it boils down to is that you believe God will damn me and my family for eternity because, while we accept his divinity and worship him, and accept his Son as our Savior, we don't have the nature of the relationship between them quite right, and unlike others with those same misunderstandings we're not part of a creedal Christian community. Does this not strike you as obviously wrong?
I previously said, twice, that I don't think that Christianity is coextensive with the community of the saved. "You are not Christian" does not mean "you are damned to hell for eternity". I also said "I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that".
Personally I consider it usually inappropriate to speculate on who is saved or not saved. That is a matter for God. What I do in life is hope for the salvation of all peoples - as in the Nunc Dimittis: "for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all nations". That is the part given to me.
I therefore, at least, knowing that God desires to save everyone, hope for the salvation of all who earnestly seek God, and who show proof of that desire in their love of neighbour. This does, for what it's worth, put me in company with the Catholics, who teach (para. 15-16, and at more length here) that though all salvation comes from God through Christ, this is possible for those of other religions. If I have given you reason in this conversation to think that I don't sincerely hope for your salvation as well, then I apologise.
The creeds are, definitionally, an attempt to set a boundary of some kind. The function of the Nicene Creed is to define, as the 4th century councils understood it, the true faith over against heresy. One is free to disagree with the creeds, but surely to use the creeds as setting the boundaries of acceptable faith is simply to use the creeds as they are designed to be used.
I don't think the 60 IQ's person's belief system can be both creedal Christianity and Mormonism in the absence of some sort of deep confusion, at least insofar as we agree that creedal Christianity and Mormonism are mutually exclusive. I grant that deep confusion of this kind frequently occurs in real life, and in practice people of many religions often believe in idiosyncratic fusions unique to themselves, but the fact of human confusion and vagueness does not seem to me to be a reason to abandon the project of clarification entirely.
When it comes to belief, I think that people can implicitly assent to positions that they are not consciously aware of. A person who recites and assents to the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass does, in sense, believe the content of the creed, even if he or she cannot articulate the meaning of every line. If you read much catechetical material, even across different religions, I think this is understood. I have read, for instance, both Catholic and Islamic books that frame themselves as "explaining your faith". As (presumably, for I am neither) a good Catholic or Muslim you have assented to this large body of doctrine, some explicitly (e.g. by reciting creeds), some by extension (e.g. "I assent to everything that the church holds necessary for salvation"), and some only implicitly (e.g. as logical corollary of something explicitly assented to), and I see how there is value, catechetically, in exploring and spelling out what that means.
The Trinity is, in principle, something like this. I think the average Catholic or Protestant knows that the Father is God, that Jesus Christ is God, and that the Spirit is God, but is probably less than wholly clear on what that means or how it's possible. They know these things in the same way that the New Testament states them. The developed doctrine teases out and says explicitly that which is necessarily implied by the top-level beliefs, so when a theologian of the Trinity presents the doctrine, it is not being presented as something additional for belief, but rather as an explication of that which the church already believes.
I think something like this is the case when we consider ignorant Joe Catholic and ignorant Bob Mormon in the pews. Probably neither of them are capable of defining the fundamental differences in doctrine between them. But Joe believes that developed Catholic theology expresses, in a more refined way, that which he holds in his heart; and likewise Bob for the leaders of his own tradition. The difference is that if I ask Joe what all these doctrines he believes really mean, Joe will point at the bishop or the pope or someone and say, "Ask him, he knows", and if I ask Bob, he will point at a Mormon authority. And at that point it is certainly meaningful to compare the mature doctrines that those authorities will explain.
They are, in other words, members of communities of faith. They assent to what their community presents for belief - and levels of personal ignorance, however lamentable in practice, don't remove that sense of communal loyalty and identification. In some cases we say this holds even in cases of individual defiance or disagreement - I think it's meaningful to say "Catholics hold that contraception is morally wrong" even though most individual Catholics (in the US at least) observably don't. In the same way, it's meaningful to say "Christians believe X about God, Mormons believe Y about God, and these are not compatible", even if particular individuals in each tradition may be ignorant or even defiant of those particular beliefs.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I'm pretty sure I grew out of, "Joke's on you, I was only pretending to be stupid!" when I was in primary school, yes.
But who knows, maybe there will be something surprising down the line. I suppose we will see.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I think you're muddling two things here. With the good thief, the question you asked was, "is he a Christian?" With the 60 IQ believer, the question you ask is, "Is that belief system Christianity?" Those are different types of question, and their answers don't necessarily always correlate. In almost all real cases they will, but I can imagine scenarios where they do not.
(One example might be someone in a coma or someone who has suffered significant age-related cognitive decline and is no longer capable of understanding or of holding propositional belief. Can such a person be a Christian? I'm inclined to say yes. On the other end of things, we can imagine a person who believes that all of a particular mass of Christian doctrine is true, but who, notwithstanding, renounces any kind of loyalty or obedience towards God, and in fact hates God. Satan is presumably such a figure - aware of all the facts of Christian doctrine, but nonetheless not a Christian himself.)
I'll also note that even granting that this 60 IQ individual is both a Christian (he is, to the best of his ability, seeking to know, love, and follow Christ) and a Mormon (he is likewise attempting to conform to Mormon doctrine and practice as best he can), it does not therefore follow that Mormonism is a form of Christianity. "If someone can be both a practicing Christian and a practicing Mormon, then Mormonism is a form of Christianity" seems like a mistake. For a counterexample, as I understand it, Mormons are religiously required to be teetotallers. It is obviously possible to be both a practicing teetotaller and a practicing Mormon. Would you say that Mormonism is a form of teetotalling? Or we can go past that - Mormons are not required to be vegetarians, but it is certainly possible to be both a practicing vegetarian and a practicing Mormon. It is possible to be both a practicing socialist and a practicing Mormon. That it is possible to be something else alongside a Mormon does not show that Mormonism is a form of that something else.
In this particular case, the argument would be that the Mormon understandings of who Christ is and who God is are sufficiently different to the Christian understandings of the same that it is misleading to describe them as instances of the same belief. It is possible to combine the two - that is, to believe in Christ in the Christian sense, and to believe in Christ in the Mormon sense - only through conceptual confusion. Our poor 60 IQ believer might be, through no failure of his own, one such case.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
One could argue, actually, that 1 Corinthians 1:12 condemns the name 'Christian', at least implicitly. The word 'Christian' suggests the party of Christ, as it were, over against other parties or factions, and Paul expressly condemns people quarrelling and identifying themselves as belonging to Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or Christ.
The endonyms that we hear for early believers in the New Testament are terms like 'the believers', 'the brothers', 'the saints', 'the disciples', and so on. These are not terms that would be used by outsiders, or which might lead to confusion.
(I believe that the most common term the Qur'an uses for Muslims is not in fact Muslim, but mu'min, from iman, faith, and means 'believer' or 'faithful'. If Christians and Muslims both publicly called themselves the Believers, it would be unnecessarily confusing.)
OliveTapenade
12d ago
All right, fair point. If a person intends to attack Christians, and attacks a group based on his perception that that group is Christian, then it is an anti-Christian attack regardless of whether or not the group is actually Christian.
I suppose a more obvious example of that principle is when people attack Sikhs in the mistaken belief that they are Muslims.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Yes, this is correct, and for all that I have been drawn into a long (and genuinely interesting!) discussion about whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity below this, I want to remember that the context of a shooting is not the appropriate place for that dispute.
I think I'm safe having it here, because this isn't a public space, but if I were a public figure or if I were local to the victims, I would not be bring it up out of the blue, and I think it was inappropriate for Trump to.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I am trying to be nice here, and I genuinely do appreciate this guy's level of politeness when dealing with hostile comments. He always thanks and compliments commenters, and that's worth something. That said, I did accuse him of writing "a variant on the Gobineau/Grant Nordicist theory", and from what I've seen since then, I think that holds up. This reads to me like a 21st century update of The Passing of the Great Race. Is there a brilliantly clever twist lurking in the background somewhere? All I'll say right now is that it doesn't look like it to me.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
He mentioned it here. Professional obligations of some sort. He'll be back in a few months.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I... don't see how one can comment on the meaning of the word 'Christian' without being primarily theological. 'Christian' is a theological term.
I am actually, like C. S. Lewis, willing to bite the bullet on many, or even most, self-proclaimed Christians not really being Christians. I'm not hugely strict about this in practice where I tend to think that any good-faith attempt to genuinely know and follow God, to the best of one's limited ability, is acceptable worship, and in that light, sure, there are no doubt individual Mormons who render that worship. I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that. But if you ask me to accept that most Americans who call themselves Christians are not meaningfully Christian, then I will do that. That is probably and unfortunately the case.
(I am not quite as pessimistic as your linked study - I think survey design can be unreliable, most people struggle with theological language, and there is often a sensus fidei that exceeds the ability of people to explicate their faith. If a Catholic says the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass, sincerely intending to believe it, but when asked to define the Trinity during the week descends into waffle, I would extend some charity. The linked paper doesn't include the questions themselves and has some red flags for me - who the heck are 'Integrated Disciples'? they possess a 'biblical worldview'? huh? - so I'm skeptical. Nonetheless, no one could deny that ignorance or confusion around the Trinity is very common.)
So perhaps it would be helpful to refine a little. I claim that Mormonism, which is to say that which the Mormon church presents for belief, is not a form of Christianity.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Sunni and Shia have absolutely killed each other over the distinction, yes. There are rivers of blood between those parties. I'm just not aware of cases of Sunni or Shia declaring the other party not Muslims.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I don't think one needs a detailed knowledge of theology to be a Christian. The good thief addressed Jesus directly and appears to have perceived him to be the messiah and believed that he would be the ruler of the kingdom. The reference to the kingdom of God as well as the good thief's confidence that Jesus had done nothing wrong suggests that the thief was aware of at least the basic outline of Jesus' preaching. At any rate, he put his faith in Christ to the best of his ability. That would appear to meet most minimal definitions of Christian faith. (Some definitions might add something like "faith in Christ as God", but I think we can safely presume that the thief had that.)
I don't think that scenario is directly comparable to Mormons, though. The thief would naturally have been unaware of doctrines formally laid out after him - doctrines intended to clarify and explain the nature of what the good thief was privileged to witness directly - but ignorance does not constitute denial. Likewise for, even today, the Catholic or Protestant in the pews who happens to be theologically ignorant. The issue with Mormons is not ignorance, but rather denial of core doctrines.
For what it's worth, I specifically do not use the word 'Christian' to mean people that I believe are saved. I do not think that the categories 'Christian' and 'saved' are coextensive. There are Christians who are not saved (cf. Matthew 7:22-23), and there are non-Christians who are saved (cf. Luke 16:22).
You could draw a distinction whereby people who call themselves Christians, are recognised as Christians by the world, and appear in good standing in the church are not real Christians if they are rejected by Christ, and likewise that people who in their lives were never aware of Christ or put any explicit faith in him (like Abraham) are in some way implicitly Christian, but I think that does too much damage to the everyday uses of the words. My understanding is that all salvation is from Christ (cf. John 14:6), but that not all who are called by the name Christian partake of this, and that some who do not call themselves Christians do. The power of God is not constrained by human labels or categorisations.
My main use of the word 'Christian' is to identify members of the church. I believe Peter van Inwagen once argued that the word 'Christianity' is itself a mistake - there is no such thing as Christianity. There is only the church, and its various members. I'm not as rigid about the word as he is, and I'm happy to use the word 'Christianity' to mean 'that which the church professes', but I think there's something to be said for the basic point. Christians are the fellowship or the community of those who follow Christ - or perhaps more properly, those who follow the triune God, because I would probably exclude Christian atheists. I exclude Mormons because I do not understand them to follow Christ in the sense that Christians do. As the Catholic document you cited says, the Mormon understanding of who 'the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit' are is so divergent 'from the Christian meaning' as to not even be heresy. The utility of the ecumenical creeds is as guardrails - they lay out a basic minimum understanding of who God is and of the economy of salvation.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Nitpick: in my experience Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims do not try to exclude each other from Islam. In Islam there is a very strong consensus that anybody who says and sincerely believes the shahada is a Muslim. Sunni-Shia differences are obviously very important and a major driver of violence even today, and heaven help you if try to change from one to the other, but I have never heard a Muslim trying to suggest that a member of the other party is not a Muslim.
That said, I don't like the analogy to early Christianity that much because I think what we're looking at in early Christianity is a young tradition forming itself, and as part of that formation, it went through a process of debating and coming to understand its own doctrine. 'Christianity' as we know it today is largely a product of that process.
I'd suggest that most people have an intuitive sense that there is a point at which a Christian-derived or Christian-influenced religious movement ceases to be Christianity. The most famous example is probably Islam itself. We know that the first Christians to come into contact with Islam understood it to be a heresy - Muhammad was a deluded man who misunderstood the scriptures and preached his own revelation. I think we have a spectrum of dissent where, say, Protestantism is clearly Christianity, Islam is clearly not Christianity, and in the middle there's a grey area. Pentecostals? Christian. Adventists? Christian. Jehovah's Witnesses? Ehh, getting pretty heretical. Mormons? A bit further out. Candomblé? Influenced by Christianity but definitely not. And so on. I understand that different people will, in good faith, draw the Christian/non-Christian line in different places.
My personal model would be concentric circles, if that makes sense? At the centre we have 'Christianity', which I define in terms of the ecumenical creeds. It contains Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and maybe Oriental Orthodoxy. The next circle out is what I term 'Jesusism', which includes any religious tradition in which Jesus Christ is the central or decisive figure: this includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Iglesia ni Cristo, Hong Xiuquan, and so on. The next circle after that is 'Jesus-influenced': this includes any religious tradition in which Jesus is a major figure, but not the central one. This would include Islam, the Baha'i Faith, CaoDai, and so on. Finally, beyond that, we have religions that have nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever: Hinduism, Daoism, Scientology, and so forth.
But I grant that there are plenty of people for whom 'Christianity' means everything within my 'Jesusist' circle.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
As a Protestant, this matches a complaint I have with many of my Protestant friends - there is such a temptation to water down the faith, to boil it down to the thinnest possible gruel, on the logic that anything beyond that constitutes a kind of obstacle. But praxis does not merely repel; it can also attract! And the Protestant tradition if you actually look at it is not an anti-intellectual one, nor one hostile to unique practice. There is thickness and depth here, if you dare to offer it! I find it extremely frustrating.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I suppose what this boils down to is the question of what you think is important in defining Christianity. I take faith and belief to be central. If Christianity is about, as I would argue it is, who God is, then a group's position on the Trinity or on Christology is extremely important.
I certainly grant that Mormonism is what you call 'sociologically Christian'. They are Christian-ish - they gather in buildings that look like church buildings (mostly; they reject crosses), they read from the Bible, they talk a lot about Jesus. I just don't think that any of that is enough to make a person or a group Christian. They themselves presumably agree on this principle, because as you note, they believe that all traditional churches have fallen from the faith.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I do agree with the comparison to other 19th century restorationists. It seems to me that Mormons are part of a family of 19th century American Protestant offshoots or spin-offs - Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christadelphianism, and so on. They generally share a common method (charismatic leader/writer and reinterpreter, extremely strong emphasis on scripture and dismissal of tradition, etc.), and frequently some doctrinal conclusions (nontrinitarianism, narrative of general apostasy, etc.). Go back a bit further and there are Europeans following the same model as well - the Swedenborgian New Church, for instance. Likewise there are more recent examples - Iglesia ni Cristo in the Philippines is another instance of the same model, and perhaps even the Unification Church.
At any rate, I don't think all the groups in that category are non-Christian - Adventists, for instance, seem pretty clearly inside the tent. However, I think some of them have placed themselves outside the bounds of orthodoxy.
I think you're probably correct that there's a scissor statement here. I am particularly interested in doctrine, but most American Christians are extremely ignorant of theology and embrace a number of heresies. (Though I should say that Ligonier, the people doing the State of Theology survey, themselves have a rather narrow and tendentious view of orthodoxy.) As long as Mormonism looks like church on the outside, only weird nerds like me will get stressed about what they actually believe.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
A heresy, I would say, is something that emerges out of Christianity but is destructive to Christianity. Does that seem a fair definition to you?
You don't think that the claim that Hajnalis aren't whites and Tropicals aren't blacks is undermined a bit by the post itself? In the top-level post you describe very specific elements of Tropical culture and phenotype - you suggest that there are 'eastern' Tropicals with slightly lighter skins who are clearly Asians, but it's clear that your central example of a Tropical is a sub-Saharan African.
Likewise you describe Hajnalis with a very specific cultural and religious history - you cite, more-or-less unchanged, Henrich's argument that the medieval Catholic ban on cousin marriage shaped the Hajnalis. It is transparent that Hajnalis are Europeans - even if some Europeans have moderately darker skin, the identification is clear enough. You describe both World Wars and the American Civil War, attribute both to Hajnalis, and say that the latter concerned "the imported Tropicals". You then go on to describe 20th and 21st century troubles in American education in a way that clearly maps to African-Americans - yes, you've said that Asians are a type of Tropical, but these violent schoolchildren reaching puberty earlier and making schools less safe certainly do not sound like Chinese-Americans.
Look, I'm not blind, and this is the Motte, where you are allowed to just speak plainly. It just feels like needless pussyfooting.
On your goals more generally:
If I were you I'd worry that this isn't a practical way to make your point. It's not clear that you need all these digressions in order to explain your tiger. A skeptical reader like myself is not nodding along to all these points you're making in earlier posts and will then happily be led to your conclusion. The less credible the earlier posts seem, the less credible the eventual conclusion will seem.
I understand and connect with the general theme of order emerging out of chaos - I'm not disposed to be skeptical of that, or of the idea that the large, invisible forces under the surface might be drawing civilisation back towards chaos, or that we are in a time of collapse. But when you bundle that up with a lot of extremely tenuous theories about prehistory which, when examined more closely, seem to reduce to just 19th and early 20th century racialism, maybe that makes people less willing to take that journey with you.
Put it this way: if you want to convince people that Western commitment to the idea that everyone is equal will lead to disaster, I think you can make that case more strongly, persuasively, and succinctly without the grand historical narrative. You don't need a millennia-long just-so story to make this point. I applaud your patience and your very high level of courtesy and kindness to commenters through this project, but I'd gently suggest that the project is misconceived.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Well, I don't think that being American has anything to do with anything, and imitating the form of a Protestant worship service doesn't seem relevant to me either? Unitarian Universalists are non-Christian. Sunday Assembly are non-Christian. At some point Christianity has to be about what a person believes.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Surely the whole point of heresy, as a category, is to declare something non-Christian.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I mean, I'm happy to use the word 'heretic' as well. I think there is a meaningful difference in that in Arius' time, the boundary was not yet well-defined, whereas today that line has been clearly drawn for well over a millennium and a half, but I'm not going to fight too hard over words as long as it is clearly understood that, whatever words you use, Mormonism does not belong to the same category as, broadly speaking, 'Christianity'. Mormonism is not the same kind of thing as Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism. That's the hill I'll defend.
Personally I don't like to use 'saved' as a synonym here because I think that means something different. There are Christians who are not saved, and there are non-Christians who are saved. The saved and Christianity are overlapping but distinct categories.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Over the last fifty years or so, Mormons have also made a concerted effort to rehabilitate their image. Mormons used to be widely hated in America, and in turn they explicitly held that all non-Mormon society and especially religion is corrupted and of darkness. Since then Mormons themselves have softened a lot on the supposedly apostate Christian churches, and made a big effort to present themselves as friendly, respectable, and trustworthy - to the extent that nowadays they have a reputation for being clean-cut and nice to an almost Stepford-esque degree.
I'm in Australia, not America, but anecdotally all of my in-person interactions with Mormons have been incredibly polite, and the Mormons have almost been falling over themselves to emphasise, "We're just like you, we believe in Jesus too, Jesus is at the absolute centre of our faith, we have so much in common", and they never bring up any disagreements. That's probably why I overcompensate a little in return, as I want to make clear that I do not consider them to hold the same faith that I do.
I'm probably also biased because, while all my in-person interactions with Mormons have been friendly and kind (and I don't argue "you're not Christians" to their faces, out of politeness), I have also been close friends with a number of ex-Mormons, typically people raised Mormon who got away as an adult, and that has acquainted me with a lot of horror stories from the inside. I'm sure that former Mormons aren't exactly the most impartial people either, but I am at least aware that the sunny, white-picket-fence version of Mormonism is not the most fair representation either.
I'm also conscious that most of those ex-Mormons have had the very idea of Christianity poisoned for them, or loaded with so much negative affect by the way the idea of Jesus is linked with their (frequently abusive or borderline-abusive) Mormon upbringing, that there is no longer any chance of them approaching Christianity on other terms. I don't hold this against them - the Catholics have a concept of 'psychological impossibility' that I find useful, and I applaud the way these friends have been able to find and explore spirituality on other terms - but I can't help being angry at the tradition that did that to them. Matthew 18:6-7. I try not to let that bias me too much - every tradition will have some practitioners who are so fanatical as to be abusive, or to poison the entire tradition, we all know about Protestants or Catholics who are this extreme - but I can't in good conscience deny that the anger is there.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Well, I think I was implicitly tabooing 'Christianity' here. What I assert is that there is a broad category of belief into which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants generally fit, but which Mormons do not fit into. I assert that Mormon belief and doctrine is significantly qualitatively dissimilar to that of these other groups.
It seems to me that two things are going on when people say "Mormons aren't Christian". The first thing is just "you don't believe what I believe" or "you don't worship what I worship". There are implicit claims about differences in doctrine and practice. The second is "you are not my people". They are attempting to differentiate themselves from Mormons in a tribal sense.
Thus when I, for instance, say "Mormons aren't Christianity", what I'm actually saying is "you're not affiliated with me!"
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Because I think that historically the Christian community has defined and policed its boundaries in ways that place Mormons outside of it - I apologise if that was not clear.
Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?
It seems to me that the United States needs to be able to exercise a wide range of levels of military force in order to compel its enemies, including both the extremely high (destroying civilisations with the power of suns) and the moderate to low. As in Starship Troopers:
Is any level of force short of complete annihilation 'half ass shit'? Do we need to either cut the baby's head off, or let the baby act out for as long as it likes?
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