2 of 5 - Addressing David's seeming consternation with the Incarnation as not adequately wrapped up in scripture (but really more like an interlude)
Well, after reading David’s exchange with Dan at Dan’s site, this may be ultimately unhelpful to David’s consternation with scripture passages that present Jesus as Godlike but then elsewhere Human. But we press on.
David and Dan are having a good old fashioned protestant dialogue about reading scripture and with what kinds of hermeneutics to read scripture: “Jesus’ goodness”, “common sense notions of love and goodness”, etc., with an effort to be historically aware. They may not – and almost all if not all of your will not – think of these notions as a hermeneutics. But they are. They are apriori preferences on how to interpret scripture in order to make sense of its vast span and mysterious depths. A kind of inherited seat-of-your-pants is the state of things in American agrarian protestantism, and has been since the Puritans broke up into 2, then 3, then 7, then 12, then 50 factions, each split requiring a move westward.
The general blindness of protestantism, though, has been induced by a stubborn refusal to admit the evidence of all this splintering: the scriptures do not give us practical explanations or practical material on… the Incarnation; Salvation; the Holy Spirit; the body of Christ; the eucharist; orders of ministry, etc. So, while protestants like to be practical (even to the point of a dominance of being transactional) and disdain the value of effort to attain an intellectual AND practical explanation of these things, even so and just so they are left without direction on understanding by faith and for the sake of faith regarding, among other things, the Incarnation; Salvation; the Holy Spirit; the body of Christ; the eucharist; orders of ministry, etc. Thus there are 300+ protestant denominations in the US alone. C’est la vie. Seems to be the attitude.
None of these things are fully explained in the New Testament. All of these things were sought to be grasped in the life of the Church AFTER the apostolic era. In the first five centuries after the Apostles themselves, we begin to see a great deal of effort by the church to work out understanding of its faith, first by fashioning ritual for the group's participation in the eucharist; then baptism; and on it goes. Fashioning ritual to best experience the presence of Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, the love and saving graces of God.
In the lectionary recently, the longest conversation in the NT took place between Jesus and the disgraced Samaritan woman at the well. At the end of which Jesus says that the time is coming and, in fact, is upon them when the faithful would worship God in spirit and in truth.
Theology is the church’s exertion of our minds (that part that is most like God and most in God’s image) to express the inexpressible in the most truthful way. And whether Dan or David know this, when we read the New Testament, we are reading writers who are trying to do the same thing. Paul uses stoic philosophy to craft his Christocentric message of ethics for the early church. Heraclitus’ Logos philosophy gives John his language for the revelation of the Incarnation.
What does Paul say about love and spiritual gifts?
“Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy… those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation…. Now I would like all of you to speak in tongues but even more to prophesy. One who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be built up… if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I speak to you in some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching?
Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS, DO NOT BE CHILDREN IN YOUR THINKING; RATHER, BE INFANTS IN EVIL, BUT IN THINKING BE ADULTS."
So, pursuing love means, for Paul, chiefly teaching. It is not enough to care for each other. Apparently.
We must also learn what is the reason for our hope. First, because our spiritual life will wither if we cannot find words for our experience of the ineffable presence and work of God. Second, because we are not loving our brothers and sisters if we find them a bed but do not join with them in lifting our minds. Third, because faith seeks understanding in order to face, confront, and transform the violence and trauma of sin.
In whom is our faith? One who is God and us. If he is not fully God, then he has no ultimate ability to redeem us. If he is not fully a human being, then he has not ultimate ability to represent us. To save us.
That seems pretty important.
How can we love if we cannot hope to be saved? How can we be saved unless our nature is transformed from death to glory in heaven? Who has the power to change us AND the nature to represent us?
Last section on the Incarnation comes later this week.
To answer some of your questions:
ReplyDeleteIn whom is our faith? One who is God and us. If he is not fully God, then he has no ultimate ability to redeem us. If he is not fully a human being, then he has not ultimate ability to represent us. To save us.
That seems pretty important.
Okay. I agree.
How can we love if we cannot hope to be saved?
I hope to be saved and believe that the salvation process is not confusing or hard to understand. I do NOT believe that salvation comes from affirming a certain group of religious tenets and not getting it wrong. I do NOT believe that salvation is dependent on "accepting Jesus" in just the right way.
I believe salvation comes by grace, love and forgiveness.
How can we be saved unless our nature is transformed from death to glory in heaven?
Well, as a point of fact, we don't have any objectively known data about any afterlife heaven. I affirm heaven and believe it, but I just recognize none of us can "prove" heaven.
I DO believe our nature is transformed in the ways of Love and Grace... in the path of Jesus. Do you disagree?
Who has the power to change us AND the nature to represent us?
God, love, grace, forgiveness, justice... ie, God, THIS has the power to change us. Do you disagree?
Those last two are from me, Dan.
ReplyDeleteYou keep connecting me with agrarian protestantism - not a belief I've studied specifically. But the AI summary of AP:
AI Overview
Agrarian Protestantism blends rural life with Christian theology, emphasizing stewardship of the land, the moral superiority of small-scale family farming over industrialization, and a direct spiritual connection to God through nature
I don't necessarily blend specifically rural life with Christian theology. I am, after all, a life-long urban dweller. BUT, I do emphasize stewardship/care for the land and for humanity. But this seems just rational.
I do affirm that generally, small scale efforts - including but not limited to farming - that are not exploitative or damaging tend to be better than large scale industrialization. I do believe that large scale efforts are difficult to do responsibly. I believe in a Beloved Community and a Beloved Economy, and that those tend to be most easily found at smaller scales.
But again, this just seems rational. Do you disagree?
It promotes self-sufficiency, community cooperation, and a simpler, localized way of life as essential to spiritual and social health.
These seem reasonable ideals to shoot for, recognizing mutual sufficiency, however, over isolationized self-sufficiency.
Key tenets include:
Stewardship of Creation: Viewing land as a divine gift to be tended responsibly rather than a commodity, emphasizing caring for natural resources.
Yes. Of course. Do you disagree?
The Family Farm as Ideal: Promoting the family-owned, small-scale farm as the healthiest, most moral, and most productive unit for community life and economic stability.
I don't think the family farm is the only way of moral life. I DO think the healthy family farm is a good model, as well as urbanists making connections with local farmers, as well as, when they can, urbanists growing some food, too. I've mostly failed at that latter, though. Full disclosure!
The Spirituality of Soil: Direct contact with nature and soil cultivation is seen as spiritually rewarding and a pathway to a closer relationship with God.
I believe in the Spiritual, interconnected nature of all creation, that recognizing this good creation is a gift from God. I think destroying nature - through pollution, through exploitation and extraction, etc - is harmful to a good connection with God and humanity.
Do you disagree?
Opposition to Industrialism/Urbanism: Critical of corporate agribusiness, technological dependency, and urban capitalism, which are seen as eroding moral virtue, family strength, and community interdependence.
There certainly are problems with big business and much of industrialism. I do not think that "urbanism" is, itself, a problem. Breakdown of community - whether it happens in urban or rural or other settings, is a problem.
Community and Cooperation: Prioritizing local, rural communities that share labor and maintain close-knit relationships.
This is not me. I prioritize community and cooperation, wherever it happens. But again, this just seems morally common sense.
Sabbath and Celebration: Practicing rest and communal thanksgiving, emphasizing a purposeful break from industrial pacing.
Agree largely with this. Do you disagree with this?
Social Responsibility: Ensuring fair and stable incomes for farmers while feeding the local population with healthy food.
I agree with this.
I'm not sure what you're objecting to, but maybe you have some different understanding of agricultural protestantism than this AI summary. The emphasis on ONLY rural farming and against urbanism is not anything I believe.
Feodor...
ReplyDeleteThe general blindness of protestantism, though, has been induced by a stubborn refusal to admit the evidence of all this splintering...
Here again, I'm unsure of your point. Since the days of Jesus, then Peter and Paul, the humans in the beloved community... the church of God... have been good about splintering, about dividing from within. Who is blind to that?
Also, presumably, you don't count yourself amongst the Protestants. Does that mean you're Roman Catholic? Eastern orthodox? Other?
Theology is the church’s exertion of our minds (that part that is most like God and most in God’s image) to express the inexpressible in the most truthful way.
Agreed.
And whether Dan or David know this, when we read the New Testament, we are reading writers who are trying to do the same thing.
Agreed.
I still don't know where you're disagreeing with anything I've said.
Dan, you say, "salvation process is not confusing or hard to understand. I do NOT believe that salvation comes from affirming a certain group of religious tenets..." But then you claim "salvation comes by grace, love and forgiveness." But God's grace; not human grace, God's love, not human love; God's forgiveness, not human forgiveness... is a lifelong process; one that we will never fully understand; but one that we must pursue wisdom from through our lifelong faith. Wisdom is sought throughout the OT and NT; the Christ is called God's Wisdom by Christians reading the OT life of the characterized Wisdom in creation and judgement, in exile and return of Israel - foreshadowing the exile of human beings from God in Eden and the return to God Christ. Since life is a process and human beings are made to desire God and given the capacity to meet God by virtue of our being made in God's likeness, salvation is a lifelong process of relationship with God. A loving relationship. Worked out as long as we breathe. And one - the only one in right christian thinking - that sustains and lifts and immeasurably extends all loving acts we do by our own Will in the world for all our siblings, all the human family. You speak about a curriculum and a law. That is precisely the dangerous anti-intellectual laziness of American primitivism. No belief that the supernatural can be experienced each morning by devotion driven by our innate drive to know God and to know how to love God and creatures every day.
ReplyDelete___
Perhaps you should look up the addresses of big businesses and industries. Most seem no longer - for 50 years now - to want to be in cities. Too much life for their majority White respectable employees to feel comfortable.
My point is that anxious White spirituality seeks out human-desolate places. Instead of streams, I suggest a week's retreat to a sidewalk chair by the bodega. The body of Christ passes by the bodega.
DeleteFor protestants who can't think outside scripture, I'd suggest living in the same proportion of nature/civilization as Jesus. But I find that protestant or catholic, when White churches want to "deep dive" into racism, they like to go the woods. Ask a black friend why black folks don't go to camping in the woods in any significant numbers. And, raise the idea in your faith community of a retreat to go camp out in black Louisville. Not to help out. But to meet and get to know. Helping is most productive when it comes out of actual friendship. Ask a black friend about how they feel cared for by White people. Or ask a psychologist how relationship is the far better foundation that changes White beneficence into soul changing relationship for all involved.
At the very beginning of the Gospel of John, he affirms that all things came into being through the Word, the Son; not one thing was made except through him; and what has come into being through him is life. Creation, all of it, reveals God. To your point. And yet, he goes on to underline that the life he brought into being become light to human beings. Light that shines in darkness for us in a special way.
Rational beings require enlightenment if we are grow not just biologically, but to grow in love, to grow in all the beatitudes in fact: temperance and generosity, humility, care for injustice, seeking righteousness, mercy, pure devotion, making peace, and suffering for love.
And God does not shine light on people seeking to live in these ways through graces. But understanding graces only comes with life experience and spending time in devotion and contemplation - aided by sacraments and community - which necessarily includes the community of Saints like Athanasius, Anselm, Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Bonaventure, Teresa of Avila, Alphonsus Ligouri, Martin de Porres, MLK, etc, - in order to grasp the presence of grace.
But you have written in denial of the beauty of the grace of the christian life lived in committed devotion... WITH THE WHOLE SELF. You have written unconsciously with the immediate, inner, unmediated assumptions of value that are American protestant primitivism: anti-historical, anti-Incarnational, world distancing, Holy Spirit distancing, faith in sola scripture + sola American agrarian life between the coasts. Your sources of authority are no different than the Thugs. But your heart reads those minimal sources by the light of love.
I assume it is my contention and yours and David' that the love that is greater than death is God's work. But it is my contention to you and David that each believer and each community and our Christian society can only add truly sustainable and truly effectual aid to the work by drawing on our whole self to love. And that includes knowing. Not intellectual laziness. Contemplative being with God drives all our desires, including knowing.
"And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."
___
More later
Feodor:
DeleteInstead of streams, I suggest a week's retreat to a sidewalk chair by the bodega.
Why either/or? Why not both/and?
Consider rural poet, bell hooks (for just one), who had a love for our shared Kentucky land.
"When we love the earth,
we are able to love ourselves more fully.
I believe this.
The ancestors taught me it was so.
As a child I loved playing in dirt, in
that rich Kentucky soil, that was a source of life.
Before I understood anything about the
pain and exploitation of the
Southern system of sharecropping,
I understood that grown up black folks loved the land.
I could stand with my grandfather Daddy Jerry
and look out at fields of growing vegetables,
tomatoes, corn, collards, and
know that this was his handiwork.
I could see the look of pride on his face as I
expressed wonder and awe at the magic of growing things.
I knew that my grandmother Baba's backyard garden would
yield beans, sweet potatoes, cabbage, and yellow squash, that
she too would walk with pride among the rows and rows of
growing vegetables showing us what the earth will give when
tended lovingly..."
etc, etc.
or Alice Walker...
""Encouraging others to love nature, to respect other human beings and animals, to adore this earth, is part of my work in this world."
Or Frank X Walker, Nikki Giovanni... my God, the great Langston Hughes and his soul "grown deep like the rivers..."
I'm not clear on what there is to disagree with here. Yes, nature, rural, struggle, poverty and beauty... and yes, urban, struggle, poverty and beauty. Both/and, not either/or.
The three women are eminently educated and none of the four are burdened by White anxiety. And by education, it’s important to contextualize their direction of their own superlative education toward mining the psychological, sociological, and political depths of Blackness as the most remarkable mass resiliency in the face of centuries of horrors perpetrated against them.
DeleteThe anxiety of Whiteness, on the other hand, drives White people to angrier and increasingly irrational paths of thrilling to brutality or an unconscious collusion with passivity by idealizing their connection with a more primitive, I.e., mythically innocent, beginning and “true” nature. Which is barely benevolent irrationality