Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Thursday, April 04, 2002 More Merely Christianity C.S. Lewis is a great mainstay and starting place for many beginning Christians (along with G.K. Chesterton). His book Mere Christianity boiled down for his time and since what basic Christianity is that Christians can agree on and still talk to each other. That work was pivotal in helping to break down barriers between Confessions that had lasted for centuries. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, and Evangelicals are now able to dialog with one another (in the West, at least) without much animosity or proselytizing of each other. There is still a lot of mistrust and suspicion toward Catholics by Evangelicals, but most of that is caused by lack of contact, I believe. When Evangelicals meet me and find out I love the same Jesus as they do, they relax considerably. Just as the Reformation led to a serious examination of what Christianity must believe, I think there is a fresh opportunity to do the same today to Protestant Confession and traditional beliefs. One reason this is necessary, I believe, is because intellectual honesty requires it. Doctrines based on certain premises no longer persuade enough serious people in the West. Scholarship and criticism have eliminated many previous bulwarks of faith for those who ask rigorous questions and refuse to accept answers based on Authority. We've all encountered the missionary who demands belief from a skeptic based on the fact that it's all proven by the Bible. But when people don't believe that the Bible is anything more than another text, the persuasion fails badly. I believe the Word is effective, but few "take up and read" as Augustine heard. Most avoid the Bible like a toothache; and having never been exposed to it in the general culture, are militantly resistant. I think we need to become even more basic than the first apostles in proclaiming our Truth. What Follows from Faith The Resurrection of Jesus did two particular things. One, it created a series of natural deductions about the nature of God, our relation to him, and the nature of immortality. Two, it created a series of interpretations of the event and its meaning. Interpretations that must be seen in the light of what people already thought and suspected about God. We always interpret from what we know and not from radically new perceptions. Thus, Abraham's covenant with God is identical to the way covenants are made between people in his time; or Jesus is a sacrifice because that is how atonement is made in Jesus' time. When it came time to wonder why or how God had acted as he did through Jesus, people were looking backwards for clues and not forwards where there were none. Everything was seen in light of the Hebrew Scriptures. Some of the New Testament was a commentary, midrash, or exegesis on what was in the previous Scriptures; while now, our experience of God is filtered through the witness of the New Testament which is taken to be normative (however different groups view such norms). What naturally follows from Faith, though? If someone has had the seminal experience of a direct encounter (or convincing experience) with God as he is in Jesus, then certain truths must follow. 1) God is good, holy, and obviously real. 2) Death is not death. Humans are immortal. 3) God intervenes in human life. Love is essential. 4) God has a will (or natural quality of being) that can be discovered. This is pretty much all that can be concluded from deduction and inference about God (and Jesus). Anything else becomes interpretation or speculation. Paul tells us in 1 Cor. that Jesus is God, rose from the dead after being crucified (to prove it), and if you believe that, that's all you need to transform your life; because Paul understood that that knowledge changed everything about one's life and perceptions. But then Paul added (along with the Church and what he'd been taught) that Jesus' death was an Atonement for our sins, a voluntary sacrifice. He lived in a sacrificial culture, though. Everyone believed without a second thought that God required sacrifices in one form or another as recompense for our evil. There is absolutely no justification for this belief other than tradition. The more spiritual and enlightened a child of God becomes, the more he believes that God "requires mercy, not sacrifices." Nevertheless, Atonement was the first notion that seemed to occur to the Apostles to explain how God could have let himself be cruelly executed. Reliability of Scripture. I don't wish to go the Jesus Seminar route, but the fact is that Scripture is not a reliable source of history. Many do not also realize that many sayings of Jesus can only be recognized as either post- resurrection sayings or interpretations such as anything prophesying his death, resurrection, and the reason for the Passion. Nor do many people seem to understand that "locutions" from the risen Jesus are not reliable sources of information about God. People enjoy speaking to Jesus today and swear by his instructions and conversations. I've read the dialogues that many saints or candidates for sainthood claim to have come directly from Jesus' mouth to their perception. A lot of it is simply ludicrous. Much of it purports to reveal Mary's place in Heaven and the Cosmos, or why praying the Rosary is so important. This is silly, and the "dialogue" must be originating more from a person's unconscious than from God. I believe that people may be experiencing grace, but not direct instructions. The NT is full of such direct instructions from Jesus, though, that could only have come after his death and reappearances. People will say that the period of "public" revelation is over, but that's nonsense. All revelation is private. Until God descends on a cloud to all people at all times at once, anything we perceive about God is personal, private, and isolated (even if shared in a small group). As the late, great scholar Raymond Brown wrote, "God doesn't write books. People write books." The same is true about churches and sacraments. People create such things. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't use or inspire human institutions. My parents and society directed me through 12 years of school, but I did not come to believe that school was created and sustained by God and that I must remain in it for my whole life. The Church (or churches) are like that. Facilitators of holiness and improvement. Whether we ever become wise enough to graduate in this life from them is debatable, but the fact remains, church is our school for faith. The Trinity The Christian identification of God in three persons is well known, of course. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The encounter with Abba as Jesus had produces that identity for God without question (to any one who has "met" him that way). The appellation of the Holy Spirit is all we have to describe a very vague quality of another actual form of encounter with God which is Truth. The label of the Son, is completely misleading, though. The encounter with Jesus is the meeting of a human who is also God. The Creed which tries to distinguish "begotten not made" is hopelessly inadequate since the words are synonyms - begotten means created or made. We have no possible way to distinguish the relationship of Jesus and the Father since they are One and yet separate. Co-eternal. We call Jesus the Son because it is convenient to do so, but it's an otherwise meaningless term. It's an analogy that immediately breaks down with examination. (We also call him Son since it's in Scripture and the early church made it analogous. It's the only way they could wrap their minds around these apparent paradoxes. Essentialism in Jesus So a list of the things we can strip away from our Dogma and doctrines without harming Faith in the least are these: 1) Atonement. We don't need God's death to redeem us. We simply need to know God to be redeemed. Meet him and you love him and will have been "saved" from the Self. 2) God doesn't write books. Or form churches. People do. Inspiration is not dictation. The desire to organize and proclaim is natural. Love is like that. 3) Mary need not have been a virgin at any time in order to produce Jesus. There is no reason at all why God could not manifest himself through both Joseph and Mary bodies. 4) Jesus does not mystically appear in bread and wine transformed. Our faith does not depend on that at all. 5) Peter was not the first Pope. 6) Mary was sinlessly conceived and rose to heaven mysteriously. I could go on about a few other things, but I think I've pretty well offended just about every kind of Christian there is with this brief list. Absurdity In conclusion, there is one great thing which is Absurd. A human being arose from death, manifesting himself to other human beings with the additional knowledge that it was God they were seeing and meeting. A man/God. If one accepts this Absurd notion, one has discovered the essential seed of all Truth and Wisdom, Hope and Charity, Guidance and Joy. What God doesn't do is gild the lily and try to get us to accept furthermore absurdities as if to say - if you'll swallow that whopper, have I got a list of others for you! Why do Christians go along with the other notions, pious as they are? The first Absurdity is so wonderful and transforming that we want to belong to such a group that shares such stupendous and marvelous Truth. We thus submit to accept what the group wants us to in order to join and belong. Now, maybe Essentialism will do nothing to remove obstacles from people who reject the lesser absurdities of Christian doctrines (God does get people to Faith anyway through the ages); but I can't help knowing that it would remove much infantilism from the church and believers themselves and improve their progress. We should always focus on what's important rather than having to try to explain doctrines that add nothing (really) to believe and practice. If anyone should discover that God is Love and his name is Jesus, they will have grasped the most important thing of all from which transformation must follow (if the person chooses to act on his belief and seek help for improvement). I will stop there for the time being. posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:22 PM | |
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