PureX said:
I exist outside of organized religion and I am capable of letting God be God better than many religionists I know. And I also know I am not alone in this. So the assertion that one cannot live a humble and spiritual life outside of organized religion is absurd, and frankly, a little insulting.
It was you who one sidedly dismissed organized religion, I did not dismiss all individualist religion.
One of the reasons I wanted to have this discussion was that I thought you were illuminating the subtle but deeper conceptual nuances of the story of Jesus and the revelation of Christ. And not just spouting off "supernatural" religious mythology as if it were objective fact.
You speak of arrogance in relation to the church. But honestly, how much theological exposition have you read on these mysteries before coming to this conclusion? Have you read the fathers of the church or any systematic theology on the subject? Of course all believers dont have to do that, but if you are going to make such grand dismissals, you better know what you are talking about.
I have not claimed it was objective fact, I've claimed that it is the Christian teaching.
I am agreeing with your articulation of the gospel so long as I feel that you understand that we aren't talking about performing supernatural feats of magic, or divine human beings with super-powers, here. The wafer is not the physical body of Jesus, it's a piece of bread being used as a ritual metaphor for the spirit of Christ. As we ingest the bread, we are symbolically taking in the spirit of Christ that it represents. The wine is not Jesus' blood, but again, a physical metaphor for our relationship to God through Christ. As we drink the wine, we remind ourselves of our divine lineage, as the creations of God.
What are you basing this on?
Through the bread, we participate in the body of Christ (not a biological body, but a body nonetheless). The words of institution of the bread is: "
This is my body which is given for you" not "
This is my Spirit". Of course you can dismiss the words of institution, but then it rather begs the question what value the sacrament has at all.
The wine is not about our relationship to God through Christ, that would be closer to the bread. Once again, the words of institution:
"This cup is the New Testament in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins". Pretty hard to interpret that statement in terms symbolizing relationship to God. This language is unmistakenly biblical covenental language, referring to the new covenant of Jeremiah 31, the covenant of gathering of nations under the God of Israel. This is how the church understood the meal, as participation in the body and blood of Christ, his body being the body gathered around the bread, the body of the new covenant in his blood which was shed for the forgiveness of sins.
What the church affirms is that Christ is present in the bread and wine. That is not magic, it is a sacramental union, the work of the Spirit, which is why it is instituted by an epicletic prayer.
You can deny that if you want, but that is the meaning and purpose of the eucharistic meal.
And likewise, Jesus' arising from the dead is not a supernatural feat that physically happened so much as it's a symbolic metaphor for what can happen for us all, spiritually, if we take the revelation of Christ into our hearts, minds, and souls.
What does that mean?
There aren't just two options: Physical revivification or symbolism. A minimum position for this to have any continuity with Christianity must be that Christ as a person was raised and lives on as a subject that can be encountered, Christ is an everlasting personality, that is he is God himself.
"Incarnation of God"? Who here can claim to even know what that really means? Let alone claim to know that it's so? Let's say Jesus is the human manifestation of the Divine Spirit that we humans call "God"? Humans are not gods, and Jesus was human. So Jesus was not God. He was the human manifestation/exemplification of God's spirit. Let's try to be specific and leave out the magical thinking as best we can.
How is it anymore magical than claiming that he was the "exemplification of the divine spirit"? The Christian creed is that Jesus Christ was fully man and fully God, two natures in one person. If you are curious, go read the Christological discussions surrounding the councils that defined it. I can assure you that it is no mere appeal to magic. Whatever you think of their conclusions, you cannot claim that they did not seriously think the issue through.
We don't know what spirit is, exactly. An essential motivation of some sort? A kind of energy that controls the nature and character of our consciousness? Impetus, itself? But here's what it's not: an invisible man.
Who has made the absurd claim that Spirit is an invisble man?
Just as Jesus was God-like, but was not actually God. Sounds pretty symmetriculous to me!
God-like? So a pagan beach guru god, like Thor was a god? More interestingly, how do you make the evaluation that anyone was God-like without making quite a few postulates about who and what God is?
We can say anything we want to about anything we want to. But that doesn't make our claims, true. And neither does our claiming that our claims are true. So why don't we just stop wasting everyone's time and energy and stop making such claims about something that we all admit transcends us? That doesn't mean we can't share our perceptions, and conjectures, about it. It just means we stop trying to pretend that we can (and do) know that we're right.
Because a concept without content is absolutely meaningless.
Of course not. What follows is that we can't know if what we say about God is true or not. We can want it to be true. We can hope it's true. We can trust that it's true and live as if it's true. But we can't know it's true. Because God transcends our knowledge.
The problem is that what you call God is nothing but a sound coming out of your mouth or scribbles on a page. If the word refers to nothing, then it is meaningless.
And my friend Steve likes to have his cake and eat it, too. Yet the more of it he eats, the less it he has.
I don't think you understand analogical language. It claims that the claim "God is good" is analogical to the claim "Steve is good". That is Steve is good in a limited way, God is supremely good as in being the source of goodness itself. That is, God is the archetype of good, Steve is a limited image of God's goodness, an ectype.
I'm an observant fellow. Especially of human motivations as they show through our decisions/actions. It's the artist in me. To an artist, everything man a does is a recording of his spirit's intent: of his state of being when he did it. It's a fundamental tenet of modern art.
That would require a monstrous study of the church's 2000 year old history for it to have any validity at all. Have you done this?
If you can conceive of and refer to the church "she", I can assess her motives, through her actions. Neither are that difficult.
Me using a pronoun and you discerning the spirit of an institution that spans 2000 years is the same thing?
Thinking that an individual can do some things better than an organized collection of individuals can is not assuming that the individual is of superior value. It's just an observation based on common sense. All human organizations have enormous flaws, including human religious organizations. Many of those flaws can be overcome by an individual more quickly and effectively than they can be overcome by organized collections of individuals because the collective multiplies the complexity, and the confusion, that then has to be overcome to harness and focus the will to change, collectively.
Well, that is a profoundly one sided analysis if I ever saw one. Human cooperation, peer review and organized discussions have not exactly been insignifcant in human cultural evolution. Organizations have flaws, so does individuals. An organization or cooperation can give resistance when one person thinks he or she has grasped it all, by offering other perspectives and discussing it. Which is why the church determined its teachings by councils rather than the unilateral decision of an individual. And the councils did indeed argue, most of the defined doctrines are middle positions of the various positions that were present at the councils.
You don't think people living in Judeo-Christian cultures experience love? And express that love through forgiveness, kindness, and generosity toward others? You don't think that when they do so, in their respective cultures, that they find themselves being healed, spiritually, by this love expressed? Or that this love expressed may be helping to heal others, too? I do. I think it's a universal experience.
Christian love is not an experience or feeling. If that was the case, the call to love your enemy would be an absolute contradiction. It is not a call to have good feelings about your enemy, it is a call to act in your enemy's benefit, with their well being in mind, despite your feelings. It is agape love.
I think people are excellent at loving their friends, families and kinsfolk. They are generally horrible at extending it beyond that. In fact, loving your enemy was a vice in most ancient cultures, even in Hebrew culture: "Love your neighbor, hate your enemy". A command that the Romans could certainly get behind.
he choice is ours. Love will lead us to healing and salvation, if we will let it lead us there. If not, we will destroy ourselves and each other in a frenzy of fear, and selfishness, and the destruction that always results. That's the bottom line, like it or not. Everything else is just luck. Maybe I'll get lucky, and manage to live a charmed life even as a selfish prick. It happens every day. Or maybe I'll be eaten alive no matter how loving I am. That happens every day, too.
Which is why Christianity realized the necessity of eschatological judgment and restoration. Do you deny the eschaton as well? The resurrection of the dead in new creation? Is that too much magic as well?
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then it doesn't really matter what anyone chooses. The words of Ecclesiastes would be the final truth:
It is the same for all. There is one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; for the good, for the clean and for the unclean; for the man who offers a sacrifice and for the one who does not sacrifice. As the good man is, so is the sinner; as the swearer is, so is the one who is afraid to swear.
This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all men. Furthermore, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. Afterwards they go to the dead.
For whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion. Ecclesiastes 9:2-4
For surely a live dog is better than a dead lion. Those words would be the principle to live by if there are indeed no final guarantee of meaning. Of course the live dogs were put to shame when the dead lion was raised in glory.
If God is some incomprehensible absolute of which nothing can be said (although you make the dogmatic claim that his spirit is somehow manifested in Christ, seem you be making an exception for yourself there), what possible value does belief in God have? What is it a belief in?
Nietzsche is another suggested read. He understood very well the particularity of Christianity and the moral change it had caused. The difference was that he despised it, thought it was "the sheep complaining about the way of the hawk". The love which you claim is a universal experience was nothing but weakness to him, Christian love was nihilism. It was standing in the way of true nobility. The only thing more sad than the Christians to him, were the humanists who thought they could keep the slave morality of Christianity while dismissing its ontological claims.
I think you need to stop thinking that all the church does is just magic and superstition, while your own religious thought is the rational expression of the self-evident. The church has its sacraments, but sacraments are not magic, it is not the priest who conjures forth something out of his own worth, it is the work of the Spirit by the grace of God. There is a tactile anti-materialism in your criticism there, that the material is beneath of containing the divine. Also keep in mind that the same church produced the universities of Europe, it hosted the philosophical developments of the most sophisticated variety that laid the groundwork of modern science. In short, the church is the mother of a rather great intellectual tradition that formed our civilization. Sure, there have been problems and superstition, but it is an error to dismiss the best expressions together with the worst ones.
The challenge of theology today is not to dismiss the sacraments or the idea that Christ is the incarnation of God. It is to make a philosophical theology, where the doctrines of God and creation take the cosmology revealed by modern science seriously and does it justice, while maintaining the core Christian doctrines.
