"Since our world conditions have changed, we can do no other than to think our own thoughts about the redemptive significance of the death of Jesus and all that is connected with it, basing our thoughts, so far as possible, on the original and Primitive-Christian doctrine. But if we undertake this task, as we needs must, we ought to make clear to ourselves what we are doing. We ought not to bemuse ourselves with the belief that we are simply taking over the whole of the dogmatic conceptions of Jesus and of Primitive Christianity, seeing that this is, in fact, impossible. And we ought not to regard the obscurities and contradictions, in which we find ourselves involved, as originally attaching to Christian doctrine; we ought to be clearly conscious that they arise from the transformation of the historical and Primitive-Christian concepts into concepts necessary to adapt them to a later situation. Instead of simply being able to take over traditional material as we...
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“Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented." That is from Josiah Royce. We do tend to think of philosophers as "representing" -- as Socrates represents Periclean Athens and Leibniz represents the fragmented condition of the German speaking world as the Holy Roman Empire sank into irrelevance. Heck, the metaphysics of monadology might be linked to the inner-directedness of the various principalities of that world. Royce's statement was not plainly wrong though it may constitute an overstatement. The source of the quote is The Problem of Christianity (1913). For much of the book Royce follows the practice of philosophers as he defined it. That is, he takes himself to be a representative of a Christian civilization and he explores Christian theological concepts: sin, atonement, saving grace. B...
I today finish my laborious piece-by-piece road through PROCESS AND REALITY with you, dear reader, by my side. Near the end of PROCESS AND REALITY, our author gets systematic about presenting his conception of God. The underlying idea here is of the physical cosmos and God as partners, not Master and Slave, not Creator and Created, but partners on the dance floor of existence together. That is my way of putting it. Not his, This is his way of putting it. It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God is many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as it is to say that in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently. It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the world, ...
Yes, my vacation went well, thank you. (I'm optimistically assuming it will have gone well and have concluded uneventfully before you read this.) Happy Easter. For the religious Christians among you, some thoughts from Albert Schweitzer for this day. This is from The Mystery of the Kingdom of God . All italics are from the original. "Jesus, however, reached back after the fundamental conception of the prophetic period, and it is only the form in which he conceives of the emergence of the final event which bears the stamp of later Judaism. He no longer conceives of it as an intervention of God in the history of the nations, as did the Prophets; but rather as a final cosmical catastrophe. His eschatology is the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel, since the Kingdom is to be brought about by the Son of Man when he appears upon the clouds of heaven (Mark 8:38 - 9:1) . " The secret of the Kingdom of God is therefore the synthesis effected by a sovereign spirit bet...
About five years ago archaeologists studying the remains of a 7th century church in Sinope, Turkey, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, found a small stone box. Inside the box was a splinter of wood. This type of splinter, inside such a box, was a venerated feature of many churches through the High Middle Ages where it was regarded as a "piece of the True Cross," the cross on which Jesus was crucified. The 7th century dating of THIS find puts it a good deal earlier than most analogous splinters, though. Legend holds that it was Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, who on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land discovered the True Cross, and all the splinters that eventually found themselves to churches around Europe (enough to have rebuilt the whole city of Jerusalem, according to cynics) were said to have come from this Cross. Sort of like the use of two fish to feed multitudes? The historic significance of the find doesn't turn on whether one believes th...
Professor Ehrman teaches Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of MISQUOTING JESUS and HOW JESUS BECAME GOD, both NY Times best sellers. Ehrman's most recent book is THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY, which discusses the long period in Christianity's history between the conversion of Paul (some time before AD 36) and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in AD 312. Here are two brief paragraphs from Ehrman's discussion of Paul's post-conversion missionary activity. It is difficult to know for certain how Paul conducted his mission on the ground. He was moving to cities that, so far as we can tell, he had never visited before, and trying to convert strangers to the faith. He apparently succeeded a good deal. But how did he do it? We should not think that Paul staged 'tent revivals' like a traveling American evangelist in the nineteenth or twentieth century. There is no reference to any such undertaking...
Coptic Christians are in the news again, as targets of violence in Egypt. I'll just use today's post as a convenient format for leaving interested readers three links to sources for reading up on the history of the Copts. First, a basic encyclopedic discussion: http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/patrology/schoolofalex/I-Intro/chapter1.html Second, an admiring account of Coptic Christianity as the vessel that has preserved the Christian faith "in its earliest and purest form." http://www.coptic.net/articles/CoptsThroughTheAges.txt Finally, a discussion (by an evangelical-Protestant source) of a key distinction between Coptic Christianity and western Protestant Christianity. https://www.gotquestions.org/Coptic-Christianity.html That key distinction is: Miaphysitism. "Belief in mixed nature." Whereas the Chalcedon Creed of AD 451 declared that Christ was and is one person with two natures, both fully human and fully divine, the Copts, who di...
Some words from Tennyson for my readers, Christian or otherwise (theists or otherwise). Let me preface the verse with a bit of Ivyberry. Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape And Ivyberry, choose; and still depart From death to death through life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought Not matter, nor the finite-infinite, But this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world.
I write today in the line of my Jamesian interest in the varieties of religious experience. Terry Heaton, once executive producer at the Christian Broadcasting Network, the man responsible for getting Pat Robertson's The 700 Club on the air throughout the 1980s and early '90s, has a new book out. I haven't read it (and don't plan to) so I speak here only from mediating sources. But the book seems to be a memoir, a reflection, and at least in some part a recantation. It is called The Gospel of the Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP. There's an interview of Heaton on Vox. After discussing one of the editing decisions on which Robertson overruled him, Heaton says: "I knew that Pat’s rationale for all of this is that you don’t want to do anything on TV that will interfere with anybody’s faith. But I think you can take that to an extreme — and that’s what we did. We always showed people getting healed, overcoming the odds. The strong impression that the vi...
Back in 2010, the fellow portrayed here, Ken Pulliam, made a fascinating point. Pulliam was the proprietor of a blog with the autobiographical title, "Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity." Presumably he stopped adding new posts when he came to believe that he had said all he needed to say about that de-conversion. One of the posts of this blog in particular intrigues me. It is dated June 18th of that year. I'll provide a summary in a second but if you'd like to read the whole thing, here's a link: http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/06/defense-of-ethical-intuitionism-part.html Summary: Pulliam ceased to believe in the existence of the God of evangelical Christianity because he came to believe that the God depicted by that tradition would be a highly unethical being, if He existed. And that inference takes most of the point out of postulating His existence. In order to reach such a conclusion, one needs an Archimedean "place to st...
My recent reading includes THE QUESTION OF GOD (2002) by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr., a contrast of the worldviews of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, considered as exemplars of Christianity and secularism respectively. Early on there's a nice quote from Lewis' own memoir about his parents, I'll simply reproduce here. On his father's side were "true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness, men who laughed and cried a great deal and had not much talent for happiness." On his mother's side one encounters "a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree." The situation bred in Lewis, on his own reflection, "a certain dislike or distrust of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous." I'm not making any point here folks, I just enjoy the wording of that. But if you're curious whether th...
I was binge-watching THE WIRE recently, but the theme song "Way Down in the Hole," kept causing my mind to wander to theological questions. The lyrics end as follows, "Don't pay heed to temptation, for his hands are so cold, "You gotta help me keep the devil, Way down in the hole." Within post-biblical Christian theology, the role of the devil in cosmology is very ambiguous. Is he a servant of God, or is he an adversary? Is he sort of a frenemy? If, with Dante, you see Satan chiefly as a prison warden of hell, then Satan would seem to be a servant of God. He rules over a "kingdom" only in the sense that a warden does. He superintends the punishment that the higher authority has decided should be meted out. God is the Governor and the legislature, the judges and juries, all in one Being. Satan is the humble obedient prison warden. Yet Satan's presence there too is a punishment. The "warden" analogy falters here. You can ...
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy a famous/infamous work by George Santayana. a link: courtesy of Columbia University library. I won't argue with GS in this entry, I'll simply present his complaint against the tradition in question. This complaint was that three very conflicting strands made up this philosophy, which exists by fudging the differences among those strands. The "genteel tradition" in the US in the late 19th century consisted of one part Calvinist Christianity, one part Darwinian evolution, and one part Hegelian idealism. Darwin was taken as having provided empirical support for the dialectical progression to which Hegel gave world-constituting significance, and both were taken to vindicate the Reformation. The churches in the U.S.in Emerson's day, Santayana says, had left any rigorous adherence to Calvinism behind, but they had nothing else on offer philosophically except "a selection or a new emphasis on parts of what Calv...
Karen Armstrong has written again about St. Paul (she covered this ground in 1983 in THE FIRST CHRISTIAN). In this year's book, even more straightforwardly titled ST. PAUL: THE APOSTLE WE LOVE TO HATE, she treats the conversion of Saul into Paul, and the rise of Christianity itself, as a text within the context of the conflict between Greek speaking and Aramaic speaking Jews, the conflict over assimilation that one associates with Hanukkah. For pre-conversion Saul, she writes, "the Hellenistic followers of Jesus were insulting everything he believed to be most sacred, and he greatly feared that their devotion to a man executed so recently by the Roman authorities would put the entire community at risk. Paul ... would have been horrified to learn that Jesus had desecrated the Temple and argued that some of God's laws were more important than others. For a Pharisee with extreme views, like Paul, a Jew who did not observe every single one of the commandments was endanger...
A quote from Bart D. Ehrman, "One of the most interesting features of the early Christian debates over orthodoxy and heresy is the fact that views that were originally considered 'right' eventually came to be thought of as 'wrong'; that is, views originally deemed orthodox came to be declared heretical. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of the first heretical view of Christ -- the view that denies his divinity....the very first Christians held to exaltation Christologies which maintained that the man Jesus (who was nothing more than a man) had been exalted to the status and authority of God. The earliest Christians thought that this happened at the resurrection; eventually, some Christians came to believe it happened at his baptism. Both views came to be regarded as heretical by the second century CE, when it was widely held that whatever else one might say about Christ, it was clear that he was God by nature and always had been." HOW JESUS B...
My recent reading includes HOW THE BIBLE BECAME HOLY by Michael L. Satlow. Satlow is a professor at Brown University (portrayed above) and according to a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded him in 2007 his work focuses on "Jewish piety in late antiquity." In his introduction to this book he says that he first tried to read the bible (or what Christians would call the Old Testament) when he was 13, soon after receiving a 2-volume translation for his bar mitzvah. He had trouble getting very far beyond the early account of creation, sin, sex, and murder. Beyond that, there are lists of who begat whom, detailed descriptions of buildings, and the repetition of stories with odd variations. It can all become "boring and weird." Yet it did get the young Satlow's mind started on the issue of canon formation: how did these books become " the bible," included as parts in one divinely inspired whole. Much in his account turns on the struggle between Pharisee...
Somebody at Yahoo!Answers asks what is "dialectical materialism." When answering such a question I try to abstract from the whole question of my personal reaction to the thing to be defined and just ... well ... answer the question. Regular readers of this blog will know perfectly well that my reaction to DiaMat is negative. But that wasn't asked! So I went with this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dialectical materialism is the metaphysical side of Marxism. On the one hand there is Hegel, the Towering Figure of mid 19th century German thought. Hegel developed a system sometimes known as "dialectical idealism" which says that the world moves in zig-zags, and that the ultimate goal of the movement is an Absolute Idea that knows itself and is all in all. God, then, is not the Creator of the world but its summation and Judge, and the world moves in its zig zag (back-and-forth among contraries, but none...
From Albert Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God . All italics in the original. "Jesus, however, reached back after the fundamental conception of the prophetic period, and it is only the form in which he conceives of the emergence of the final event which bears the stamp of later Judaism. He no longer conceives of it as an intervention of God in the history of the nations, as did the Prophets; but rather as a final cosmical catastrophe. His eschatology is the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel, since the Kingdom is to be brought about by the Son of Man when he appears upon the clouds of heaven (Mark 8:38 - 9:1). " The secret of the Kingdom of God is therefore the synthesis effected by a sovereign spirit between the early prophetic ethics and the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel. Hence it is that Jesus' eschatology was rooted in his age and yet stands so high above it. For his contemporaries it was a question of waiting for the Kingdom, or excogitat...