Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Dec 11, 2021 2:11 pm
So as it happens, and I say this in relation to your set of definitions, I define myself as christianesque.
I sense that.
And I can't help but wonder how it would strike your ear if I called myself, "Jewesque."
The christianesque is the norm and it is also in my view the needed and necessary.
Unless I misunderstand here, you mean "needed" for the improving of civilization, and "necessary" to save the Western world...or something like that, no? Well, as noble as such goals may be, they're merely instrumental and arbitrary, of course.
Will it work, if we encourage people to pretend to believe in that in which they do not
actually believe? If we tell them "act Christian but don't be a Christian," will we save civilization that way? Can we expect them to have a durable commitment to Christian moralizing, if they have no commitment at all to Christ?
I have my doubts, and think maybe you do, too.
In your way of seeing (which I regard as an *imposition* and an application of an idea you hold) the Jesus Christ you refer to is understood to be a specific thing,
That's the way He self-presented -- as a specific person, at a specific time, in a specific place, not as an abstraction.
...there is a problematic aspect to defining God as a specifically incarnated man. Because one imagines being in the presence of such a man, and as we all know a "person" responds personally, and through a specific set of 'lenses' and also 'biases'.
Well, God incarnate doesn't have to, of course. Perfect knowledge will do that. But you and I respond through "lenses," perhaps. Still, if He's in control of that, what's the problem?
...in my own view (putting aside the issue of *personal relationship* and *discipleship* that many Christian say they experience) God must remain abstract.
"Must"? Why "must"?
If He did not present himself in that way, and if many of us are convinced he does not today do so, why would we think that he "must" remain abstract? I think, rather, what you must be saying here is that a concrete, real, personal Jesus Christ is too conflictual with the assumptions that he's a sort of abstraction, a universal, a "Christesque" (to coin a new term) human moral ideal, instead of a real Person. But the Incarnation challenges that assumption, and challenges it directly.
Here we are, in the Christmas season. What was it all about, originally?
Well, some will point to Constantine or other pagan roots: fair enough, when we consider modern Christmas, of course. But I mean,
from the Christian perspective, what was the big deal with the birth of Jesus? Why did they think it merited a holiday? What made them so enthused about it?
It was a Christian distinctive:
"God was manifest in flesh." (1 Tim. 3:16) That's the startling claim of real Christians. God actually became a man, and lived among us (John 1:14). It was in the literal belief of that that Christianity was launched, and it was in the literal belief of that that all the larger social benefits of "christianesqueness" were generated.
The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul....spirituality of the soul.
I see what you're looking for. Really, you're looking for some locus of goodness within the human soul itself that is capable of generating the sort of goodness Christianity has produced, but without the Christianity.
But I think you'll find that hope is actually counter-Christian. Christianity itself begins with a moment of despair of all that. It begins with a recognition that
"in me, that is in my flesh, lives no good thing" (Romans 7:18), and that even all the good deeds, or we might say even the "christianesque" ones, are actually no more than "dirty rags," (an assessment on which both
Torah and the NT agree (Romans 3:10, Isaiah 64:6),in the view of a holy God, in the face of
Hashem.
In other words, there's no use in you and me coming before God to show off how great we are, or how marvelous the inner yearnings of the human race are: that's all polluted now. We can't impress Him with that. What has to happen instead is that we despair of our righteousness, and cry out to God who saves us from what we are.
So long as we cling to our "christianesque" moral adequacy, we're nothing but an insult against the very holiness of God, and rejectors of the way of salvation He has Himself made.
Additionally, I cannot, and will never be able to, discount or diminish the relevancy of the political-institutional forms.
They had their historical uses, of course. But what I'm suggesting about that is two things: firstly, that you might want to consider that the only reason they happened in the first place is that real people actually believed in Christianity, and that bad things happened to the extent they were merely "christianesque"; and secondly, that political and institutional forms never saved anybody from anything, ultimately. They, like human beings, are perishable and transient. When their uses are gone, history never reverses and reproduces them.
Again I place special emphasis on hermeneutics, but I take this term in a far wider sense (influenced by Frank Kermode). Each one of us has no choice but to *interpret* the world we find ourselves in.
That is, to a limited extent, a warranted thing to say. But to say that we all "interpret" is not to say, to imply or to warrant the conclusion that "all interpretations are valid." For there are plausible interpretations and unreasonable ones -- of any "text" or set of interpretable things. There are interpretations that respect the reality of the "text," and those that depart from the "text" in ways that contradict it radically, and reduce it's significance to almost nothing. And part of the task of hermeneutics is to discern which interpretation is really warranted by the chosen "text," and which sorts are wildly out of the realm of what the "text" allows.
For
intepretation is always
interpretation OF. There is always a fixed thing that is the inducement of the hermeneuticist to interpret. Something "makes" him do it, we might say, or that something "provokes" certain interpretive impulses in him. It's not simply anchored in his inner existential world; there's something "out there" to which he/she is responding. And it's the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted that has to be the subject of the hermeneutic assessment.
You say "christianesqueness" is a sufficient interpretation of Christianity. I simply maintain that it does such significant violence to the "text" in question that it cannot be called "Christian" at all, really. In other words, it's an interpretation outside the scope of what the "text" will legitimately permit.
And I would add that the interpretation of the "text" of Western history that supposes "christianesqueness" to be the real secret of whatever good came to the West through the beliefs of Christians is also something that does to much violence to the truth of history. I submit to you that it's an interpretation that just doesn't work, given the historical realities it aims to interpret.
I've run through the implication of what you mean here, where it comes from and why, and though I do believe that one can, specifically with Christianity, isolate and define certain specific notions about what it is, what it demands.
I see that you have.
To put it metaphorically, you're looking to "distill" the essence of Christian goodness out of the Christian. Those are the "specific notions." But when you distill anything, you must be careful not to extract those elements that make the thing what-it-is.
God in a way *speaks* through Scripture, but in another way God speaks through men, and if this is so the entire issue is complicated.
It is from the human side. From the divine side, it's not complicated at all.
Recognizing that all men "interpret" things, we might say, "Well, then, it must be impossible for God to speak clearly." But we forget we're dealing with God, who Himself made the ear to hear (Psalm 94:8-10). The very molecules of air and ear that pass and receive the truth, these things are created and held together by God Himself. God knows what a man needs to hear in order to understand aright. Such a one's understanding no longer depends on his human frailties and confusions if God speaks to Him; for God does not stutter. And He never fails to know exactly what a man is "receiving" and how he is "interpreting."
There are no filters that can block the Almighty.
We might say, "
Humanly speaking, the thing's impossible." And we'd be right. But here, we are not merely "humanly speaking." God is interested in the resolution of this question.
It was in fact the Dread Nietzsche himself who said (paraphrased) it might indeed be best to help people hold to their illusions, to their impositions, to their 'cherished beliefs', rather than to rudely, and disrputingly, mess up their entire belief structure.
Well, I don't remember him being to me a source of "dread,"
and I don't remember where he said such a thing. You'll maybe have to help me with that. It seems a little out of his character.
And here we arrive at the issue, the problem, of paideia -- what and how we teach our children.
That is an interesting question.
I suppose, then, we won't speak of
paideia in reference to adults, the way the Bible does? We'll confine it to literally "children" in our subsequent comments?
The conversation that I have, as it were, with myself and within myself, is quite different from the one I can freely talk about. Similarly, the inner relationship I have with 'the transcendental' or with God, is something that goes on uniquely with me. There is no shared experiencer and hardly a way to share such inner experience.
Of course, I have no access to your inner experience, and cannot comment. What you can do, though, is compare your subjective experience with the Word of God, and see how close or far that experience is from the hermeneutical grounding it claims from the text...assuming that's something it claims.
Good talking to you about this.
