I appreciate you saying so. I’m still learning the people here, but I remember reading a couple of your messages and liking them very much.
Yes, there can even be a correlation between how loftily one speaks and how viciously one acts. I remember withdrawing from people who told me, right off, what a good Christian they were.
Everyone should watch The Righteous Gemstones and take it as a documentary, I think.
If there is such a thing as truth, I think you are speaking it right now.
You asked earlier why ‘you’ would care if there’s an essential survivor, and that seems right to me.
If there’s nothing of your consciousness in it, why would you care about that survivor differently than you’d care about all other survivors?
With your permission, would it be possible to give me accsess to a PDF that I can download? i’d love to save this to my digital library.
I could never get into Bultmann. He talks a lot about “demythologizing” Christianity and I think that takes the interest out of it (and the study of comparative religion in general).
Heidegger, I must admit, wrote a lot of profound things. But I just feel at times he is terribly unclear because of the terminology he creates in order to discuss his ideas. If I was forced to pick a book by either Husserl and Heidegger, I’d have to go with Husserl. I found Being and Time absolutely frustrating but after rereading it twice I get what he’s saying. I absolutely loved his Heraclitus Seminar. Keiji Nishitani studied briefly under Heidegger and you can see his thinking in him. If you’ve never read him, I highly suggest The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism and Religion and Nothingness.
My pleasure. You should be able to save the .pdf file — I just verified that in an anonymous browser session in which I was able to save it.
I can relate. I had a love/hate thing with Heidegger for years. I think Kisiel’s The Genesis of Being and Time was crucial for me, because it led me to the early lectures that are far more direct than B&T. For instance, Ontology : Hermeneutics of Facticity is great. As far as B&T goes, the “first draft” published as The Concept of Time — only 100 pages and translated by Ingo Farin — is what I tend to recommend to people who want to start reading Heidegger. On this forum, I try to paraphrase Heidegger in an English inspired by Hobbes and William James, etc.
Husserl is also great. His analysis of the spatial object in terms of its adumbrations continues to dazzle me with its rich simplicity. To me he’s plugging in to the core visions of Plato and Heraclitus. I’m delighted that my sense of the continuity of the tradition has increased as I dig into it more and more. It’s as if a basic insight is being tuned or played in different keys.
Thanks ! I have sniffed around the Japanese thinkers of nothingness. I think they deserve more time. I’ve been lucky at bookstores lately, so I’m piling up books that I hope to get a chance to read. I react intensely to the physical qualities of certain books. I can’t pass up a nice typesetting, etc., of a classic. And I can hardly stand to read an ugly book.
I’d only point out that the primacy you give faith in religiousity is Christian-centric, being even more extreme in Protestant belief systems than Catholic. That is, if there is someone going about the behaviors of being religious but not intimately beleiving in the theological underpinnings for those behaviors, that person is not necessarily “pretending” unless you’ve premised the validity of the behavior on the underlying belief.
That is, it might be that giving charity is in fact good because God decreed it so and it might be that God was the creative force behind the entire universe, but it does not therefore follow you have to believe in all those things to be a good person. If you give charity, for example, and you do it based upon secular humanistic principles, and you further curse God and claim him a fraud, that does not mean you are necessarily a bad person even in the eyes of the religion you curse. Not every religion demands faith as a pre-requisite to goodness, nor does every religion negate the goodness of the act due to an impure heart.
Given the importance you seem to put on the inner transformation of the individual, would think that you would be all for abandoning Christianity for the gospel preached by Jesus. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Perhaps the following will put things in perspective for you.
With passages from later OT prophets such as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Hosea, the message is clear: God is sick of rituals and substitutionary atonement. What he wants is absolute loyalty and will no longer accept anything less. The unrighteous must make themselves righteous - that is, they must cease to commit sin. This serves as the foundation for the gospel preached by Jesus.
Jesus divides everyone into two discrete groups. The righteous and the unrighteous. It’s a strict dichotomy determined by whether or not the individual commits sin.
The righteous never commit sin. The righteous have “life”. They are “good trees”. “Good trees cannot bear bad fruit”.
The unrighteous commit sin. The unrighteous are “dead”. They are “bad trees”. “Bad trees cannot bear good fruit”.
Jesus came to call the unrighteous to make themselves righteous. They must cease to commit sin. It is required for salvation, for eternal life, to live in the Kingdom, even to receive the “Holy Spirit”.
The transformation from unrighteous to righteous is what is meant by “born from above”, “the resurrection to life”, etc.
Then along came Paul who did a 180. No one can make themselves righteous. Substitutionary atonement is back. The resurrection becomes the literal rather than figurative. Only faith is required for salvation, for eternal life, to live in the Kingdom, to receive the “Holy Spirit”. While there are variations to this across the various denominations, they are distinctions without a difference for all intents and purposes. Especially when compared to the gospel preached by Jesus.
This is what I had in mind when I wrote that Christianity is a factory for whitewashed tombs if not wolves in sheeps clothing. Like the Pharisees, making themselves look righteous on the outside to cover up the unrighteousness on the inside. Attempts at transformation are part and parcel of the whitewash. They are performative. Christianity is built upon an unsound foundation. If they loved God, if they loved Jesus, as they claim they would never commit sin as Jesus commanded. Instead they believe the Pauline gospel which affords them a way to feel they can remain unrighteous, yet be right with God. In other words remain untransformed.
I see where you are coming from, but I really think the writings of Paul are misinterpreted and misrepresented by a lot of Christian denominations that follow a strict legalist theology. I think he does say a lot regarding the transformation of the person. But I get it. Many people who study Early Christianity want to get down to what Jesus actually said and commanded his disciples to do rather than rely on testimonies written by the disciples about what they thought. I truly get it. But I do think the Pauline and other apostolic epistles have, as a consequence of a legalist theology, been misunderstood.
Given that we have no direct writings or recorded words from the person who inspired Christianity, but only copies and translations of texts attributed to anonymous authors, written decades after the apparent death of its founder, would trying to determine what this figure may have taught not be a rather futile enterprise?
It sounds more like we are approaching the New Testament as though it were a novel, trying to provide a deep reading of the main character to determine what they actually did within the story.
@Wayfarer sorry this was not meant for you. Not sure what happened.
Never mind, I have something to add. There’s been a huge amount of work in the ‘critical scholarship’ field which tries to ascertain the historical basis of the Gospel stories - carbon dating, comparative philological analysis, and so on. (Bart Ehrlmann is up on all of that. So too Marcus Borg albeit from a less sceptical perspective.) I have not read up all that much on it, but personally I cannot be persuaded that Jesus’ life was mere mythology, or that what we have of the recorded sayings are not representative of what Jesus said and did. (The problem I have with mainstream Christianity has never been because of me rejecting the facts of Jesus’ life, teaching and resurrection but as always what it means.)
You’ve now claimed a couple of times that you know where I’m coming from, yet the content of your posts clearly show that you do not.
As an example the thrust of my posts have been aimed at all of Christendom, yet both times you have responded as if it were Paul. Or this time the Pauline and other apostolic epistles which amounts to the same thing. Insofar as your claim that they are misunderstood goes, Paul talked out both sides of his mouth. Seems that you fail to recognize this.
How about we try this? Respond to my previous posts as a whole instead of focusing on only that point. Also if you believe the Orthodox Church (or other denominations) are so different, then make your best case as to how they are. I had them in mind when I wrote, “While there are variations to this across the various denominations, they are distinctions without a difference for all intents and purposes. Especially when compared to the gospel preached by Jesus.”
I’m not a mythicist. I don’t think anyone here is saying there was no one who inspired the stories. The problem (and Ehrman is good on this) is that we have nothing outside the New Testament to substantiate the lessons or stories. Which bits are true, and which words are accurate, we simply cannot say.
Yes. Peer-reviewed science it ain’t. But reproducing further examples for analysis is problematical in this case.
Here’s my take on that. My focus has been on the gospel preached by Jesus which is contained in the words attributed to him in the four gospels from the beginning of his ministry through the crucifixion. By and large, it forms a coherent whole that is deep and profound. It points to a great conceptual thinker. That’s where it’s value lies. Not in individual verses, but in the whole. It’s highly, highly unlikely that that kind of depth was borne of happenstance. Much more likely that the q-source and/or other documents existed at the time the four gospels were written and the writers of the four gospels took thse words and wrapped a mythology around them.
By eliminating whatever isn’t logically consistent, determining what parts Jesus taught and didn’t teach can be derived with a reasonably high degree of accuracy using only the NT.
I was simply responding about Paul because I find the Pauline epistles interesting. I do, respectfully, see a problem with categorizing all of Christendom as a byproduct of “the theology of Paul and not the Gospel of Jesus” if that is what you’re arguing.
Which brings me to my next point. The traditional branches of Western Christendom have, historically, introduced ideas into the Christian world that are not in line with the New Testament. The Early Church did not believe that the Pope was the “Vicar of Christ on earth.” They did not include the phrase filioque, that is to say, “and the Son,” in the Nicene Creed. They did not believe in salvation by faith alone, as the Reformers taught, nor did they necessarily believe in faith and works, as Catholicism teaches. Rather, they emphasized living a life in Christ by actually taking to heart His teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, unceasing prayer, receiving the sacraments, and metanoia, that is to say, repentance, conversion, or having a change of heart. Paul writes:
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:2)
What is “the renewing of the mind?” This is, in my opinion, proof that the Gospel calls for a radical change in one’s consciousness.
The Early Church most definitely did not accept the Anselmian idea of the satisfaction theory of atonement, as Catholicism teaches, where God needs to redeem His honor (I have never at all understood this), and they definitely did not accept the Reformers’ idea of substitutionary atonement, where God punishes Jesus instead of the individual and the individual is forgiven by accepting this as a presuppositional fact (this has always to me seemed just immoral and contradictory). Rather, they believed in a theory of recapitulation, which the Lutheran theologian Gustaf Aulen revived as the Christus Victor theory. This is where the death and resurrection of Christ defeat the powers of sin and evil that keep the human person in a state of slavery to the passions, originating from Satan, classically understood as the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. If we are all flawed and carry this inclination, we also carry God’s image, the yetzer hatov, the good inclination, within ourselves. The Early Church believed that the death and resurrection are about a raising up of humanity unto God.
The Early Church did not believe that all non-Christians burned in a pit of fire and brimstone, either. St. Justin Martyr believed that people like Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and followers of Stoicism and Neoplatonism were all “Unknown Christians” because of their belief in the Logos as akin to Providence or God, and that the identity of the Logos, unbeknownst to them, is Christ. Because of this, they also were called Virtuous Pagans, akin to the Judaic idea of the Righteous Gentile who will have a place in the World to Come. People like Karl Rahner revived this as “Anonymous Christianity.” While I think Rahner was stretching it a bit, the idea still stands, and I personally think anyone who trusts in the Logos, or the Dao, Dharma, Asha, or some other metaphysical principle can be saved. But the Early Church could not speak in absolutes because, simply, the Church is not God. None of us is. Scholastics like Aquinas were all for this idea and even wrote in the Summa Contra Gentiles about why forced conversion is immoral. But he did get some things wrong; There is no need to have heretics and apostates put to death simply for having a difference of opinion, and Calvin wrote all about the death penalty for apostates and heretics being ok.
To conclude, I bring up Orthodoxy. Everything I have stated that the Early Church accepted at a basic level Eastern Christendom never deviated from, except for the Russian Church persecuting the Old Believers for political reasons, which is inconsistent with the teachings of Orthodoxy. Eastern Christianity was a church that thrived and fought to survive despite being persecuted, be it by the Ottomans or by Communism, while Western Christianity kind of got lost in the weeds and needed change. Yes, Catholics did practice forced conversion in certain parts of the world, notably the Americas and Spain after the Reconquista; Luther wrote awful things about Jews, and Calvin preached a form of theological determinism guided by an angry god. Ultimately, the Reformation paved the way for the Enlightenment, which paved the way for the modern world. Eastern Christendom did not need an age of reform and still doesn’t because it is true to the message of the Gospel preached by Christ. I think that through denominational dialogue and through the field of biblical studies, Western Christendom is attempting to return to what the Early Church actually believed.
If you allow me, I’ll try to answer. But my answer won’t be proof either of their differences or of their similarities. I’ll try to answer from my perspective, as a parishioner.
First, a little background. As I wrote before, I am an Orthodox Christian by baptism and by tradition. But my faith is a dialogue: there have been periods of closeness to the church, and periods of distance. And it’s always an attempt to understand the doctrine.
The thing is, there’s a Catholic church right near my house. And, as a parishioner, I’ve recently started attending Sunday services there. Why? An Orthodox church is too far to travel to. However, on Easter and Christmas, and also just from time to time, I go to an Orthodox church.
But I’d like to share my own experience of being in a Catholic and Orthodox church. In a Catholic church, during the service, ordinary parishioners take turns reading passages from the Bible. Between readings, they pray, the organ plays, and the choir sings. Toward the end of the service, the priest distills the readings into a general sense, a common idea, and preaches it vividly. Catholic churches have comfortable benches, and a comfortable, softly padded step specifically for kneeling during prayer. In a Catholic church, as a parishioner, I relax; I receive the sermon, the teaching, the comfortable environment, and the pleasant music. I reflect on God and the teaching, trying to grasp both the content of the sermon itself and the meta-level: something more general—for example, “why is it this way in Christianity and not another way?” Here, I enjoy rational thinking.
In an Orthodox church, things are somewhat different. There are no comfortable benches in the center of the hall; the clergy conduct the service, seemingly oblivious to the parishioners. The service itself (in my case) is conducted in Old Church Slavonic. The lights are dim, the walls are adorned with icons and holy images, candles burning near them, the scent of incense fills the air, and the choir sings. No one here presents anything rationally or understandably (only a short sermon at the end). To be at home here, you need to prepare well in advance (perform rituals, fast, etc.). Here, I reason less, but I’m more immersed in the service. That is, I reach a state in which the desire to process information rationally seems to disappear. I simply feel what’s happening here, and that’s it.
That’s the difference from a parishioner’s perspective. And you know what? I enjoy going to both churches. It’s a completely different experience, internally.
Of course, if Orthodox and Catholics find out that I go to both churches, they look at me with disapproval. Each one starts trying to convince me that their understanding of Christ is truer. I avoid arguing about this. But internally, a question arises: guys, what if both the Orthodox and Catholic views of God are not true? But on the other hand, does it really matter? I’m not interested in consuming religious forms, but in the ability to stand before God without turning my own understanding of God into a definitive theory of God.
To be honest, I don’t care at all what one or the other thinks, or how their views differ. Of course, from the perspective of their own teachings, where is their love for each other? Why did their pride lead to this division and maintain it?
I call this a leap from a relationship with the Absolute—to the appropriation of the right to speak on behalf of the Absolute. After all, you can stand before God, pray, experience His presence, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to say, “Now I know exactly what God is like, and therefore it’s everyone else’s responsibility to accept my description.”
Let them figure it out for themselves; I’ll continue to go where I please.