Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Nov 03, 2021 2:32 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Nov 02, 2021 5:44 pmI think that if you look to the "Occidental Paideia," then what you're looking to is the same variation of alleged "Christianity" that allowed Hitler to bring institutional religious and moral elements into his program....namely, a soulless religiosity devoid of the life of God. And no, I don't suppose this will "renovate" Europe or anywhere else, though I have no doubt it will promise it will.
I guess this proves the assertion that all roads in their winding eventually lead to a confrontation with Hitler?
As you know, they do if you're Jewish.
I understand that you will likely link Werner Jaeger with German and Hitlerian policies, and with fascist and conservative movements in Europe prior to the Second World War;
I didn't. But it's interesting that you suspect that.
...and you will (unless I am wrong) make the assertion that unless the entire culture becomes the sort of Christian that you define yourself as being, that the end result will be a Hitlerian hell.
No, that's not an assertion I've made.
Christianity -- real Christianity -- has no political ambitions, no desire to take over the culture or the political system. Yeshua Himself said, "
My kingdom is not of this world." So any version of Christianity that forgets that has gone off the tracks.
Yet what I think contradicts this assertion — which is I think connected to your own apologetics — is that there was a similar and related school of thought which is represented by Christopher Dawson, RW Livingstone and WR Inge. And they developed ideas that resisted the sort of madness that overtook Germany and possessed the lunatic you refer to.
"Righteous Gentiles," the Jewish people call them: most particularly, those who actively rescued people from the Holocaust.
...the sober-headedness of those in the Greek tradition we admire...
Greek culture was only "sober minded" in the imagination of people who read Socrates, and think his cool dialogue represents the general cultural tone. I think you'll find that the ancient Greeks were just as wild, xenophobic, polytheistic, perverted, homicidal and generally vicioius as, say, the Romans. They just lived on a different patch of ground.
Remember that they killed Socrates.
Now, if we could speak of some "Ideal Greek" culture, a sort of "universal university" or something, one unlike the Greek culture that actually existed, I think you might have reason for hope. But a more realistic look at history won't permit that sort of idealizing, I would say.
I also believe that each people and each region of the world — my chief concern is Europe (and I obviously extend this to the US, Canada, Australia, etc. and exclude to a certain degree Latin America, for reasons that I can explain) — will and must develop a unique relationship through their own matrix and traditions to Christianity. And in that process they will define, in some sense, a different and distinct Christianity. European Christianity is different from African Christianity, or Latin American Christianity, and these different people (or nations if you will) have different ways of being.
Christianity itself is trans-cultural, in that it does not liquidate the cultures in which it arrives; far from it, it tends to meld with them and sustain them, as sociologists like Lamin Saneh have shown in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance. At the same time, there are elements of Christianity (just as there are in Judaism, say) that are non-negotiables: supercultural features that the receptor culture must surrender, in order to be authentically Christian.
So, for example, there's no problem with whether or not baptism is performed in a special tank or a public swimming pool, in a lake, a wadi, a ditch, a river, a culvert, the ocean...all are options, with the only question being, what's on hand? There is no special "Christianness" to any of those answers, and any culture is free to innovate, in that regard.
In contrast, consider something like polytheism. No Christian and no Jew can be a polytheist. It's simply outside of the basic definition of what it means to be a Christian, and it's outside what it means to be an observant or devout Jew, even if the genetic link remains. That's what I mean by "supercultural non-negotiables."
One problem with Christianity is that it proposes a sort of sameness — that everyone must come under the influence of s specific unity in a very specific and indeed regimented way.
That's a very Catholic perspective. "Catholic," as you may know, means "universal": it's a group whose prime claim is to universal authority. I have made no such claim, and wouldn't. What I would say, which the Catholics would not, is that the authority is Scripture, and that any "universality" of the truth must be by free belief of what is the truth. I do not believe in imposing a culture on anyone, nor any political program.
That's why your concern and mine are also a little different: your interest seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong) in saving a culture. Mine is in saving a soul.
I will always tend to throw-off any sort of constraining yoke that I sense in certain Christian forms (the mad Pentecostals for example, or the ‘possession’ that seems to come about in the Southern churches.)
So you should. Likewise, I'm sure.
I define an ‘intellectual Christianity’ but obviously incline to a more Johannine and logos-based or logos-oriented definition. I do not think there is another option, for me in any case.
Christianity, I would say, can certainly be "intellectual" in the best sense: after all, it's occupied much scholarship, intelligence and theorizing in the Western tradition for 2,000 years -- far longer, when one considers the Jewish tradition, too. There is no subject matter upon which the human race has expended more thought, care and attention, and no force which has contributed so much to things like the arts, law, charity, technology and morality. Fair enough.
But in another sense, Christianity can never be merely "intellectual." That is, in the cold, distant sense of the word, where one tries to stand all the way back and take stock of a thing as if it were an alien object. Any understanding of Christianity that does not get to the heart, and which requires no personal decisions, is just bound to be empty, dead and ultimately superficial.
And I think that's deliberate, on God's part. He does not let human beings ever treat Him like a mere object for their inspection, or as a lab specimen. He will not let you hear His voice and remain unmoved. Instead, one always has the alternative of hearing His voice, or hearing nothing at all.
If one wants to know God, one always has to let the truth hit home with oneself. One has to listen to obey, not merely listen to reason-out. That is becaust the thing God most fervently requires of us is our personal relationship to Him. And that relationship is entirely contingent on us coming to him on the terms that make such a relationship even possible.
I think that you will always find that those who refuse that get no knowledge worth having.