Lacewing wrote: ↑Fri Oct 29, 2021 7:13 pmI read and studied the Bible a lot while growing up. I actually find value in the teachings as I interpreted them.
It did not make sense to me to take the stories literally -- but rather to recognize that they were influenced by those who experienced or imagined them,
and the limited understandings and agendas of the people at that time. I remember large lettering on the wall over the preacher's podium:
'Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever'. That didn't make sense to me. Statements like that seemed to be for convincing ourselves -- even brainwashing ourselves -- by repeating things over and over.
Everything to do with life evolves and expands... including our understanding and awareness.
To lock ourselves down to ideas of long ago, and to claim to 'know the mind or purpose' of an infinitely capable god, simply makes NO SENSE. It even sounds ridiculously self-serving.
You have brought up some very interesting things here. I have bolded what most interests me and will attempt some comments. (The background to my comments is that I have been reading some commentary by CH Dodd on the Johannine Epistles.)
I am especially interested if I take what you wrote [“it does not make sense to take the stories literally’] as a statement of truth. That is, that you make a claim or a suggestion that these stories should not be taken as ‘real’ but as allegories or myths (stories, narratives).
The reason I put it like this is because (if my understanding is correct) the earliest Christian scriptures were written by people who did in fact know Jesus. That is, according to their claims. And though I do understand that when you refer to *stories* you likely mean some of the more traditional Biblical stories, it is interesting to consider that the early writers wrote, according to they themselves, from a perspective of first-hand knowledge. The experience they had then was so transformative that it molded the lives they lived and all that they did. So if this is true at least one aspect of the Christian story — the advent of Jesus and the time he spent among these people — took place in ‘literal time’ and ‘literal history’.
The other thing that you wrote also interested me: what was written on the podium: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever”. From a Johannine perspective, which is to say from a Greco-Christian perspective from those very early days, what they tried to say, or what they defined as important to believe and understand, was the notion of Eternal Logos. This idea is contrasted with an observation of the manifest world as being ‘mutable’ and transitory (a Platonic idea obviously). The world shifts and changes constantly and there is no ‘solid foundation’ in it except that it constantly shifts and changes. But philosophically, and thus religiously, the idea of immutable, eternal idea (the Word) arises as a counter-postulate. In the Greek sense of things if there was to be any foundation to Ideas there had to exist a base in Logos. And that base or foundation had to be eternal, and was understood to be eternal, and in this sense something that preexisted the entire manifestation of the Universe. In fact (in this mode of conception) the Universe is a creation out of this ‘eternal logos’. It becomes a ‘necessary and unavoidable idea’ as one meditates on existence.
Also what interested me was your statement about “the limited understandings and agendas of the people at that time”. To understand what that meant for John (whoever wrote the Johannine Gospel and the Epistles) requires some understanding of the existential and philosophical perspectives of those alive at that time. It is rather involved really. Obviously, the traces of Greek philosophy and concept are highly evident, and that the early Christians saw Jesus Christ as the literal advent of a new set of possibilities, and to *become a Christian* was to abandon not the world of incarnated being (life on the planet), but to take a definite stand against what they saw as destructive ways of being in the world. So, to be ‘born from above’ is to die to an outmoded way of being and to become born into a new set of possibilities.
The other thing you wrote that interested me is your statement about “lock[ing] ourselves down to ideas of long ago”. I believe that I understand in some sense what you are getting at, but I am not sure if you realize that what they (early Christians and the Greco-Christians) were trying to define was a set of ideas and values that could be said to be foundational, eternally relevant, ever-enduring, constant and, finally, ‘eternal’ in the sense that they would never change and in this sense could never change. What interests me is to experiment with an attempt to
subtract these proposed values from the definitions that we have, work with and live with. What I mean is that if we no longer have solid definitions that underpin
value itself, then we really and truly have no choice but to define an order of understanding our own being that has no definition, that has no solidity. We then abandon all foundation altogether. Then on what do we predicate *what is true*? (Or what has value).
These ideas (the definition of something eternal in Man but also something eternal and constant in the manifest universe) are of course bound up with their
definition of Man (I mean this in the sense of an anthropology: a way to define and understand mankind, and also existence and being).
Finally, the other part that interests me is when you say: “and to claim to 'know the mind or purpose' of an infinitely capable god, simply makes
NO SENSE” is a curious statement in a few different ways. In the Greek world, in the Platonic world, the school of philosophy of that time was based on attempting some large Definitions that were rationally sound. The only way to do this was, obviously, to cultivate reason. But to propose *reason* means that one is proposing the possibility of
sense —
that sense can be made. So any idea that we do have, any statement that we do make, is really an attempt to apply the same logical principles! Even when we make the statement “It is not possible to say anything true”.
In all fairness to the early Christians — though my own bias enters in here — I think that they can be highly commended for the attempts that they made to establish the *foundations* in value that I refer to. It
is true that they very much did make an effort to ‘define God’ in the sense of defining what is valuable, true and constant and worthwhile to live in accord with, but really when one examines these definitions carefully it is not hard to see that all of us, in fact, share those valuations. They infuse us all through and through.
(I formerly wrote on this forum under the name Gustav Bjornstrand and now write under the name Alexis Jacobi).
(The one difference, of course, is that "Jewish" is not merely a credal declaration but also a genetic heritage; so there the analogy stops. Christianity is not genetic or cultural, but strictly credal.)