C.H. Dodd wrote:We have seen that the prophets recognised a pattern in the history of their people, which betrayed its divine meaning. History, they said, means God confronting man in judgment and mercy, and challenging him with a call, to which he must respond. This pattern recurs in the story of the Gospels.
Greatest I Am wrote:We live in a history that God has set up and is fully responsible for.
I have suggested, and continue to suggest, that most of the folks who show up on this forum do so to:
- 1) enact their hack-job on Occidental metaphysics as well as the general Christian ethic and its influence in Occidental culture, and
- 2) (of us who defend religion or relationship with divinity) to make a defence of *something* they feel should be defended or that is worthy but which in most cases is some part of their own (subjective) experience ...
Yet it is a fact that we all seem to lack (enough) background in the factual history of the origins of Christianity and have insuffiecient understanding of the evolution of Christian theology. This can easily be understood given that Christian doctrines, and Christianity as a
bona fide religious path for an individual or a family, is under sustained attack from numerous sides. One can't really complain about this, since there are condemnable aspects to religiosity especially when it is mechanical and non-thinking, but yet one can certainly, and objectively, begin to understand how the destruction of the Christian foundations is also part of a general project of destructive (and mindless) undermining of much that is foundational to Occidental culture.
'GAI' seems a good example and, if I am right, he is more or less (to employ the popular phrase) 'talking out of his ass'. Just tossing up some random and half-baked thoughts that have a random and half-baked relationship to Christian thinking, theological stances in our present, and the importance of the questions and problems of dealing with the destruction of the logical base that supported Christian understanding in the Occident. The crisis is one of magnitude, yet the dullness of these 'questions' is really quite bothersome. When people who are not prepared to enter a discussion feel they can enter a discussion, they generally bring it very quickly down to their level. And most of the so-termed 'atheists' here desire it that way so they can perform their various hack-jobs. Too much thought, too much sane opposition, is of no use to them. They want their binary fights simple and non-complex.
This
is a forum dedicated to philosophy, and in this case a philosophy of religion. It is entirely appropriate to make sharp statements as mine, and so I take this liberty.
This statement: "We live in a history that God has set up and is fully responsible for" is, underneath the veneer, one that speaks to or responds to a cosmology. Primitive Christianity, as well as man's ancient conceptions of how the world came to be, can only appear to us now as quaint myths and fabulous tales. In the last 300 years or so a new paradigm for consideration of the question has come on the scene. Yet for all of history man has been informed by very different ideas about 'origins'. It is an inevitable question, and in that sense it is a question that a child would ask:
- How did all this come to be? Who made it and what for? Since I am here in this, how did that come about? And what am I to do here?
Early Christianity, as well as Judaism, and the various cultures of the Near and Far East, employed symbol-stories to encapsulate a cosmological situation to express an understanding of these Questions. They did not 'analyse' as we do and it is important to understand this. Symbols hold meaning-content in a very different way as compared to discursive rationality.
The Garden of Eden story is an example of a very ancient one. The story offers a way to orient one's relationship to this created world. One supposes that all of us no longer employ this story to orient ourselves within Reality, and yet it is possible that, still, the intuited sense of it is still operative. And that will bring up the idea of 'fallen condition of man'. Theologically, it is still a quite valid idea. Morally and ethically it certainly has its use (and abuse). But none of this is precisely the point. I would suggest that in one way or another, and with one level of intervening understanding or another, man has to respond to the question of origin and cosmology. Even if he does not *answer* the question with a nearly meaningless recitation that it all began with a Big Bang - which is not really a Cosmology as cosmologies are connected to definitions of 'Why' that interweave all existential questions - he will, inside of himself at some foundational level (psychologically one might say) have to confront and to answer all of the same major questions.
What I find interesting in Judaic and Christian religious philosophy, is that it begins in a relatively simple definition, a simple historical statement, or the awareness that stems from an event: God intervened to free a group of people from bondage. The same general idea is the one that operates straight through Jewish history and through Christian history. A consciousness different from my own impinged on me and offered me an opportunity to rise up out of a bad situation. This is the functional, the metaphysical, basis of Christian belief and it is quite similar to numerous other cosmological definition systems.
This paradigm, interestingly enough, is still totally present with us now. When we think, say, of poor ignorant people in bad circumstances we have to conceive of a top-down flow of energy and resources - ideas and power - that can enter into that situation, which of course also means into that *mind*, and that transforms it. One becomes aware - pushing forward the same example - that the ignorant poor have not only to be reached out to but they have to recognise that they are being reached out to, and they have to then come to understand their own condition, how they got there, and what they can do about it, and they have to respond to an influence, an offer. It becomes a cosmological exercise. But sticking with the example, an awareness and a consciousness not my own impinges on me and draws me to awareness and knowledge.
You are bright boys and girls and I am pretty sure you can extrapolate from this small example to the larger example of humanity or human consciousness as finding itself, discovering itself, having come to realise itself, in unfavourable conditions. The origins of Jewish thinking, the prophetic cycle, and then the Christian universalisation, have essentially to do with awareness, recognition, consciousness, seeing, locating, orienting and then devising strategies of activity in relation to a
Situation.
