Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Dec 08, 2021 10:00 pm
I've already named nominal or pseudo-Christianity as a view I find improper, but which people practice. Another I've pointed out as inadequate is the political-institutional form, which has no basis in Scripture and has historically done a lot of things no real Christian could ever agree to do. The other alternative, the gnostic option, I would simply say is not up to being considered seriously. It's just not "Christian" in any reasonable way. It's actually a kind of revived paganism, whether in its Eastern or its Jungian form. It "co-opts" Christianity for its own mythic purposes, and makes no reasonable effort to discipline itself to the premises that Christianity actually offers, and interprets in direct contradiction to the explicit words of Christ, in various ways. It's just another pseudo-Christianity, in other words.
I'm really only concerned with the "Christianity "that is Christian. And I do think it's the only version worth considering. It's the version whose parameters are not spelled out by me, but by God Himself, in the Person of Christ. What else could a "Christian," be?
I say, let God speak, and men be silent. God can say who He is. He is not subject to our human frailties of knowledge.
So as it happens, and I say this in relation to your set of definitions, I define myself as christianesque. I think that you have taken this term, as would be logical and necessary for you, as negative. I don't regard it at all like that. The christianesque is the norm and it is also in my view the needed and necessary. However, and I guess this complicates my set of assertions, I do appreciate and hold in some esteem those, in different factions, traditions and also sects, who work to strongly define their 'belief system'. So when I turn to those who have done so I notice that each of them has done so within a *context*. And for this reason context (time and place, region, nation, race) is in my view not something to put aside, fail to recognize, fail to emphasize, but in fact the starting-point to build, as it were, one's Christian (or christianesque) view and ethics.
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, in a specific transcendental *space*, that like a metaphysical computer server responds to all those who turn, spiritually (in prayer, through transcendent tuning-in) who turn toward *it*. I think that when one expresses it like this one both points to the true way that most religious persons, and sects, see the God they define. As I say 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'.
In the old days, in the old days of Christian representation (if I am correct in my understanding) when Jesus Christ was portrayed it was through a very simple image: the god who had incarnated. If I need to I will try to find one of these old representations as post it. But what I noticed about these representations is that God remained somewhat abstract in the image. And in my own view (putting aside the issue of *personal relationship* and *discipleship* that many Christian say they experience) God must remain abstract. In any case, there is that aspect to the Trinity-concept. An abstract God outside of time and causation, an incarnated God who enters time and space (and specifically our time and space as a tangible person into historical time that really was pretty recent), and then a mysterious Spirit of God, portrayed as corresponding to wind (or fire) that inspires and also teaches and instructs those who *tune-in*.
Obviously, and to anyone paying attention to my definitions in the course of this exchange, I definitely define myself as an *intellectual Christian* but remember that
intellectus was a very important term in former times:
The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.
Additionally, I cannot, and will never be able to, discount or diminish the relevancy of the
political-institutional forms. In fact, and in relation to your assertions, I can only (intellectually) double-down on the importance.
And as I say there is no alternative, in this shifting world, but to employ gnosis in processes of self-analysis toward what one thinks and believes, and why one thinks and believes it, and I think this implies a very real restraint in arriving at *absolutely defined definitions*. In this context, I think, some Christian forms demand an absolute, if also rigid, set of definitions. My position is strange: I do not deny that the core elements of Christian belief are grounded in fixed metaphysical assertions, because they are, but I do recognize that all who approach these do so in their context, in their time & place, and for this reason I stress again that the Tenets of Christianity, and indeed the Christian Story, operate like an Epic: fixed in precision in time, as if encased in amber. But a given Christian person, and a Christian community, live their Christian faith within political and social contexts, and they live these out in a manner corresponding to
the novel. The novel is written, and then it is rewritten in successive generations. One deals with the *material of life* within specific contexts, and no context is like any other, and thus a christianesque interpretation is required.
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. We have to say *it is thus-and-such*, it means thus-and-such, and my purpose is thus-and-such. It does not matter if one is, say, a Christian, or something else, one still has the hermeneutical task before one. And we certainly are going to have to interpret the time and the age (and the moment) we are in right now. Through whatever lenses one has installed or which have been installed in one.
I'm really only concerned with the "Christianity "that is Christian. And I do think it's the only version worth considering. It's the version whose parameters are not spelled out by me, but by God Himself, in the Person of Christ. What else could a "Christian," be?
I say, let God speak, and men be silent. God can say who He is. He is not subject to our human frailties of knowledge.
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., what is necessary, and though I also believe that Scripture can be approached with reverence and an understanding of what *inspiration* is (in ourselves and in our world), and though I do respect revelation as the way that ideas and orders of inteligence make themselves known in our human world, still all of this, always, comes through the human person as a filter or transmitter. So yes, 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.
In this sense it is not possible for 'man to be silent' and it is not possible for "god to speak' unless that God were, literally, to speak and announce (somehow) tot he whole world in some mysterious event. So to even say 'God speaks' is a tricky, and also a potentially dangerous metaphor. To the mystics God speaks. And God also 'speaks' to me through my intuition, through my consciousness and intelligence, and possibly also through my conscience, except that if we refer to *modern social conscience* we might be able to see that it is unclear, murky, infused with personal concerns, biases, emotionalism, sentimentalism and whole sets of ideas/ntions that may, on close analysis, be merely determined by
social context.
So here I have spelled out (in the context of a philosophical forum that asks for no less) what I think are the *inner dimensions* of my understanding. I do not think I would speak this way to someone struggling to find faith, or to an evangelical, or to a Catholic, or to any fragile person whose concept-structure was not soundly grounded and established. In this sense many many people need 'definite' things, concrete and absolute things, to 'believe in'. And the best way for them to get at least something like a base in that is through a Child's Story. It has to be reduced to
archplot.
Archplot = Classical Design
Classical Design means a story built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute, irreversible change.
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.
And here we arrive at the issue, the problem, of
paideia -- what and how we teach our children.
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.