Harry Baird wrote: ↑Wed Jul 13, 2022 10:02 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:38 pm
I've been after [AJ] to define his most important term, "Christian." But he won't.
Yeah. Just like I've been after him for (literally) years to describe - in detail - the truths that he sees behind Christianity despite his criticisms of Christianity. All I ever get in response is (roughly) "Do your own work and read this book". Weak.
As I said it is not an easy thing, in my own case, to express what I feel is the 'essential' important thing, or even a set of important things that would define the importance and value of Christianity. The reason is, I am now thinking, because the essence which I feel is the most relevant is an
effervescence; because it is metaphysical it is also mercurial; because it is spiritual, and because the spiritual is also metaphysical, it is that much harder to describe concretely.
So let me here mention a notion I came across in my present reading (
Mysticism, 1899 by WR Inge). Let's say that there are three aspects of dimensions to historical Christianity or three different foci: 1) the incarnation of 'the Word' into the sphere of the world, 2) the cross and the crucifixion, and 3) the resurrection. My particular preference, or is it attraction? is to the notion of
Incarnation. That is, everything that has does or can 'become manifest' in our world that is seen as coming 'from above'. It is in this area, this zone, where I find my thoughts and my imagination turn. But it is not entirely exclusive to Christianity nor Hebrew revelation. That which (and this is metaphor) comes down into the world is expressed, I think impressively, in Isaiah:
For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.
So as it turns out -- and this is sort of an answer to the Devil Immanuel -- I am more or less exclusively interested in, and lets say taken by, this idea but applied in a very wide and universal sense. The Word, the Logos, must be absolutely universal. And similar patterns (I speculate) must occur on any planet or
loka where there is advanced and advancing consciousness similar to that of ourselves. In those billions of galaxies I suspect there are such forms of life. And how within life and evolution on those (speculative) planets would a similar pattern show itself? That is, as presented through Isaiah? My assumption? That the larger and most essential, and most metaphysical, patterns of evolution in consciousness will and necessarily must repeat themselves everywhere. Thus I take the Gospel of John (In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God) as such a universal declaration.
Therefore I am interested in all accounts, all stories, all mythologies, where the notion of Incarnation is expressed. If I do anything at all I both expand the way that this *pattern* is expressed in Christianity through an extension of 'what is possible' into all places, all zones, all worlds, all possible worlds, as well as I take it out of a 'specific context' (which is emblematic of
the mutable) and extend it back to where it came from, the Universal and in this sense the Absolute.
In the beginning . . .
That eternal life, which was with the Father, has been manifested unto us.
Or another translation (KJV) "For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us".
The message of John, which is a unique message and quite strange in comparison to other messaging in the NT, opens up into an area, a possibility, which allows for an interaction, a productive and creative relationship, between the Third Person of the Trinity and, let's say, the human spirit as awareness & consciousness. So what I would express to you when you ask me to present to you a mechanic's list of 'Christianity's benefits' is what you more or less hold in contempt for being non-specific, non-clarified, and difficult to put one's finger on.
And what is that or where can *it* be found? Well, I did explain but you could not and you cannot
hear. I said that the best outcome of Christian thought, which is an entire existential manifestation, could be described as occurring in Hamlet. If I had to find a theologian who could best describe life in all its dimension, its lightness and darkness, its good and evil, as well as the joy and luminousness and too the darkness and horror of all that we have to live here (and God knows why!) it would be through
a voice like Hamlet's. So if there is an 'invention of the human' as Harold Bloom professes in his work on Shakespeare, one has to become aware of what came about and how it came about:
So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.
So what I would say is that no matter how low and vile and
ruin (in the Spanish sense) Christians may allow themselves to become, that this has no bearing at all on the sense of the possibilities expressed in those amazing words of Isaiah.
What this expansive spirituality allows, and what it evokes, can best be understood not through a fucking parts list for a modern motor, but through the very best of man's spiritual creations: music, poetry, art generally. But since here, on this forum, we deal with the written word I would sugest that poetry is one of the areas where *higher meanings* of a spiritual sort are communicated. But who can
hear poetry anymore? Who gets it? who is concerned?
So within this strange World which, in Christian perception, is a world of mysterious estrangement where the World came under the dominion of the Prince of Darkness, and which light, beautiy and effervescence which is always the higher longing of all men, all people, had been obscured and quenched -- but not permanently! and never permanently! -- into that world the Word incarnated. And this means, of course, into ourselves
as possibility. So that when Christ is defined as the way, the truth, the life, the door, the living bread, the juice of the living vine, the revealer and the revealed, the guide and the way, the enlightener and the light -- I believe that all of these *things* (which are metaphors of possibility) are what can be focused on as 'the most important thing'.
What is it that *opens up* consciousness and awareness? What is it that 'quickens' it? You see, my view is that everyone hungers for and longs for just one single drop of some sort of elixir which enlivens life and resuscitates the sense of life and being alive. So in this, a symbolic sense, we are submerged into a Dark World (ruled it seems by a Prince of Darkness, your metaphysics of duality) but we can
call down an antidotal power which, as we describe it, is of light and brightness ...
There are
myriad ways that this can occur.
If a phrase better than "wishy-washy" were to be chosen to describe it - in contrast to IC's definition, which is the context in which I used it - then it might be something more like "broad and inclusive", which is mostly only problematic for Christians such as IC who formulate much narrower and more exclusive definitions.