Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jan 05, 2022 2:35 pm
Christianity is deeply infused with *mysticism* and indeed a practitioner of Christianity is best understood as a mystic-of-sorts. It is a question of degree.
An interesting claim. Can you substantiate it?
I do not have a source to link to but I would wager that you could find, in Jewish mystical thought, links to cyclical views of history (and the emanations) just as you might find linear views of history (and time).
Well, that would link Judaism to Gnosticism, but not at all to Christianity, since Christianity denies the existence of "emanations" and "the Demiurge," does not support the GCB, and, of course, like traditional Judaism and science itself, denies that cyclical time is a reality.
That's a whole lot of big, important differences. But it's not even all of the most important ones.
One thing I have always remarked about your position IC is that you avail yourself of the ability, the *right* as it were, to jump over all of Christian history,
No, not at all.
I merely interrogate the question of whether secular historians have proved adequately informed to know what a "Christian" actually is. That's a profound theological question, and not one that a historian can simply take for granted, or take on the basis of mere self-identification. But without a correct definition of "Christian," how does any historian know what "Christian history" is actually comprised of?
A good illustration would be Nick here. Nick sees Gnosticism as a branch of the "Christian." But since Gnostics disagree with Christians on just about every important theological matter, it would badly skew our data to include Gnostics under the category of "Christian history." In fact, the Bible itself explicitly rejects Gnostic cosmology in Ephesians 1. Similarly, the Roman Catholic hierarchy call themselves "Christian": but are they? The answer to that question depends 100% on the comparability of their beliefs to those of Christ. And it's really not hard to see what conclusions such a comparison compels...not for anybody who knows theology, anyway.
The problem for secular historians is that they are prone to think the designation "Christian" is pretty much devoid of important content. Since, in their view, theology is on parallel with unicorn farming, they are often not persuaded to regard it seriously at all. Even among those secular historians who know the major controversies within the professing "Christian" groups, they tend to interpret these matters as mere "in-house" debates, not as definitive ones. So they tend, for secular convenience's sake, to meld all the various groups that have claimed the name "Christian," as if it never mattered; and because Catholicism is the largest and most political of the bodies in question, and left us the most manuscript evidence and political impacts, then tend to organize their thinking about "Christian history" around that body.
So they say, "Christians" caused the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Pogroms, the Wars of Religion, or whatever, using nothing more than the self-identification criterion to generate such a claim, and totally disregarding the specific ideological, political and historical derivations of such events. It suits them to dismiss Christianity, and in this goal, keeping it in fuzzy focus serves their turn admirably.
This is wrong historiographically and morally, of course; but it's not easy to convince a secular historian, who tends to treat theology lightly and to gravitate to the easiest definitions for study purposes, that he should be making his distinctions more precisely.
Nevertheless, he should.
...which has been constructed through idea-processes that are often highly mystical, and to anchor yourself, as a modern Christian, infused with utterly modernist ideas, in a 'new' relationship with the Gospel texts.
I think you've got the wrong characterization here. My ideas are no more "highly mystical" than
Torah. And as for Modernism, I regard it as a failed experiment in the secularizing of the world...as do the Postmodernists, of course. There's nothing really "new" about my ideas...they are just the Biblical ones, and hence have as much time behind them as the two Testaments have.
My *way*, so to speak, is to go back into the roots of Christian thought by researching the real sources of it, the actual historical sources, not what I could make of it now were I to similarly *jump over* the entire history of Christianity.
Sort of. But it seems to me that you, like the secular historians, are disconcerted by the thought of having to extert more intellectual effort to parse out carefully what "Christian" really means, and prefer to lapse into the convention definitions sponsored traditionally by secular historiography, as a matter of convenience. It certainly makes the production of broad generalizations about what "Christianity" has done much easier than actually having to drill down into the data.
Clearly, you have a theory of civilizational development: and in that theory, questioning the nature of the truly "Christian" is unhelpful and would possibly unravel it. So I can quite understand why you might now want to go there. Nevertheless, I don't think you're intellectually dishonest, so I think you'll find that eventually you have to go there anyway...that, or live with a theory founded on sand; and I don't think you're ultimately going to be content to do that.
-- it was your reaction of launching into your trip which I was not interested in sorting through. No offense. We're all here to say what we want to express. We can challenge the claims or ideas of others, but I'm not personally into arguing a particular point. People can think what they think, and I pretty much don't care unless they impose or project it onto me. I don't need to have 'the right answer' that everybody agrees with. I simply offer my perspective to hopefully demonstrate the existence of 'more' to consider and experience (as compared with someone who claims what is or must be). I find value within and beyond conventions, based on the circumstances at hand. What position is that? 
congrats 
