Diogenes, I am not a Mormon; and if you do a search on the SDMB with my username and “mormon” you will find I have little to say that is positive about Mormonism in general.
I shall reserve my posting of the article about Mencken–which was from the late 1980s–for another time.
I would like to refer you to the first few verses of Revelation, Chapter 21. It would seem to me this is such a positive expression I am hard put to ignore it. On the other hand, any number of statements by Asimov, Gould, Hawking, Sagan, as so on, I am led to the ghastly conclusion that, with the future painted the way they have stated it, I’d do just as well to run out onto the freeway blindfolded…
Is it a little clearer now?
"a major gaffe for a scholar! "
I dunno, Mars,
maybe just an overlooked typo
About reading a book; there has been a habadigm shift here lately
might even qualify as a ‘non-heretical visionary’
THE ONE PURPOSE OF GOD: An Answer To The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment by Jan Bonda
I always knew existentially that God din wanna leave sumboddy burning endlessly – neither wink 'em out of existence altogether
like I knew it but never seen a real biblical justification for it
but it prolly won’t qualify as “non-heretical” to many
visionary it is though…
I am gon git uh extree copy today to mail out
if i git a snail mail; aye kin send it tew yuh
maybe Poly wanna reed it laytor i dunno
I though that was you, my frontier gibberish talking friend!
Send me an email to the one listed in my profile and we’ll talk 
Hawking, Sagan, et al are only describing the physical universe. They make no assertions about the metaphysical. I don’t want to get too caught up in trying to argue about the allegorical nature of apocalyptic literature, so I’ll just ask if you believe that this passage from Revelation will literally happen? If so, why do you choose to believe this end-of-the-world scenario over the hundereds of other scenarios projected by other religions? Is it just because you like it better, or is there some reasoned process by which you have arrived at the conclusion that your Bible is literally correct in every detail and all other “revealed” writings are fraudulent?
ah senchu wun, Mars
Diogenes, I am not interested in splitting hairs. I did not see, either in the Bible or in any of those scientists’ writings, anything about “metaphysics” and I don’t see how I could reconcile one with the other. And if you expect me to adopt a patronizing, condescending attitude toward Scripture, you’d have just as much success trying to push a cat out from under a porch with a wet rope.
And notice I was refferring to the first few verses only, not the entire twenty-first chapter. Do you have a problem with following directions?
dougie, you didn’t specify where you wanted the passage cut off, so I posted the whole chapter so that I would make sure nothing was ommitted, Also it seemed to me that the entire chapter had the same general tone.
Of course science doesn’t deal with metaphysics, it doesn’t pretend to, but if you don’t see it in the Bible then your just not trying. Do you believe that heaven is a physical place in the sky? Is the soul made of atoms? Is Hell underground?
What science can discover about the physical universe does not have any bearing on what is transcendent of the universe.
An analogy, if i may. Let’s say that you are playing a video game. By playing the game, exploring it’s enviromments, trying things, remembering things, etc., you are able to learn quite a bit about the game, about it’s rules, and about what you can and can’t do within the context of the game. No matter how much you learn about the game, though, you’re never going to learn anything about the hardware in the console. The specs of the hardware are not present in the game. The game doesn’t tell you anything about the system of the game. The game will not tell you who designed it, or why (let’s pretend there are no credits). The physical laws within the game may not have anything to do with the reality outside of the game.
I submit that the universe is the game. It’s what we perceive, and it’s all we can perceive. Science explores the game, experiments, compiles data, etc. Science can tell us all kinds of things about gameplay, environments, limits and rules. It cannot tell us about anything outside the game. It cannot even tell us if there is anything outside the game. We may be able to predict that the game will end, but that doesn’t mean that anything outside the game will end.
What I’m trying to say with all this is that it is possible that there is a meta-reality which overlays the physical universe which is not perceptable in the physical universe. It is at least a defensible belief. Science does not disprove God. Science cannot be applied to God. It does not have to be a choice between a big crunch or eternal Heaven. Both things are possible. The physical universe could die (or be turned off) and you can go to Heaven. If Heaven is not in the universe there is no contradiction.
His4Ever, your post would make things perfectly clear, except for one thing – no matter how firmly you believe that the Bible is the explicit Word of God in which there is no error whatsoever, that is your belief, not shared even by a majority of other Christians. It’s a human doctrine about Scripture, not a part of Scripture. And yes, I know the quotes from II Timothy and II Peter, and the warning in Revelation. But a couple of thoughts – “Scripture” to Paul meant the Tanakh, what we now know as the Old Testament (Protestant edition, without Judith, Maccabees, etc.). It’s not completely clear what Peter meant by it, but it was after the death of Peter that the New Testament was collected – at least two books (Mark and Revelation) we know to have been written after his death, and except for some of Paul’s letters, we are reasonably certain about most of the rest postdating Peter’s death, much less their being put together as “the New Testament” collection that we have today. And the warning in Revelation specifically refers to the book of Revelation – because it was not a part of the Bible at the time it was written.
Now, if for the sake of argument you grant the idea that, while God may have had something to do with their composition, the books of the Bible are the works of human beings, then it becomes only fair to start applying the standards of historical criticism to them, the same as one would do to any other books of some value written by human beings. And you can practice an extreme skepticism on them or anything in between – I tend to a fairly conservative view about them, myself, on the grounds that the things that scholarship has “discovered” about their origins are contrary to the respect in which they were held from very early times.
Dougie Monty, my sincere apologies for misattributing you as a LDS member. Obviously I have you confused with another poster, and I’m wracking my brains trying to figure out who it is I’ve confused you with and why I drew that erroneous conclusion.
Nonetheless, to both you and His, my comment is that I believe that while Spong is very polemic and more-or-less trollish towards conservative Christians in how he writes, what he has to say is a reflection of his sincere beliefs and what he actually thinks that Christianity actually started out to be. He’s not “making something up” or “rejecting the authority of the Scriptures” at least as they’re understood by modern scholarship.
Ben, with regard to your personal communication, I’m biding my time for the appropriate occasion – and I would hope you see me as possessed of enough integrity and good will to do the right thing at the right time. With regard to your question, I accept the Scriptural canon of my church, found in the Sixth Article of Religion on p. 868 of the Book of Common Prayer (link on request if you don’t have an Episcopal Prayer Book handy). How I understand them is as works of men “inspired” by God in the sense that they were doing their best to convey what they felt He wanted said as best they understood it. But the books, like their writers, are creatures of the time and place of their composition. They carry such authority as is consonant with how thoroughly “God sneaks past Paul” in their writing. And they must be studied with an eye to genre, time of composition, customs of the intended audience, intentional references to earlier Scripture and why, etc. – the stuff of modern Biblical scholarship.
I sense that that may not be the answer you’re looking for, but I’ll be more than willing to answer more pointed questions working from that rather generic answer, in an effort to clarify what you are questioning about my approach to Scripture.
I am sorry for the delay but I promised some quotes from Gandhi’s autobiography. FWIW now, here are some excerpts from his Life:
- He found the Sermon of the Mount in the NT similar to the Gita and was particularly delighted with the phrase which beseeched Man to turn his other cheek.
- He did read a book on atheism and discovered it a waste of time as he had already crossed the “sea of atheism”. (Clearly, he wasn’t an atheist which begets the question of his religious faith)
- Feeling that mere reading of religion is insufficient, he starts to experiment with some aspects of his life. It is important to note that his experiments are strongly influenced by the Hindu notion of austerity. He becomes frugal, starts to eat less including cutting down the emphasis on taste etc. At the same time, he also starts a dispassionate study of the main religions.
- This is the important part: He becomes friends with a Christian group where he starts to learn more about Christianity. In some of the books he reads, the argument that Jesus is the only “incarnation” of God leaves him unmoved. He is also utterly unconvinced by the notion of Jesus dying for Man’s sins as he firmly believes in self-purification. He decides not to be “prejudiced” by the beliefs of the members in the Christian group and writes that all Christians do not believe in the theory of atonement. (Any comments, Polycarp, RTFirefly?)
Let me provide some direct extracts from the book. Gandhi goes to a Christian convention. He writes:
“I could understand and appreciate the devoutness of those who attended it. But I saw no reason for changing my belief - my religion. It was impossible for me to believe that I could go to heaven or attain salvation only by becoming a Christian.” <snip>
"If God could have sons, all of us were his sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. "<snip>
“(I)…was not ready to believe that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically, there might be some truth in it. Again, according to Christianity, only human beings had souls” <snip> "while I held a contrary belief. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, but not as the most perfect man ever born. "
He believed Jesus to be as mortal as us and as a great example but nothing more. Also, it is worthwhile to note that this belief coincides with the Hindu notion of individuals rising above existence to achieve perfection and union with God. Of course, one can also see other clear differences he had with what many Christians consider pillars of their religion.
Finally:
“Philosophically, there was nothing extraordinary about Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians”.
As Polycarp noted, he approached Christianity from a strong Hindu bias.
Comparing religions threw him into a whirpool of thought for a period of time. One of his close friends wrote claiming that Hinduism was the most profound religion in his dispassionate view. Eventually, he came to believe in that too.
To conclude this post:
“Though I took a path my Christian friends had not intended for me, I have remained for ever indebted to them for the religious quest that they awakened in me.”
Well, ISTM that at the level of espousing the notion of God, he believed in all religions. He also found certain ideas appealing in many religions but was ultimately more convinced by Hinduism than any other religious faith.
Polycarp,
You said that a Christian in your eyes is one who strives to see God through Christ. Did Gandhi do so? IMHO, No. He wanted to see God through his own eyes, and considered Jesus to be one amongst many mortals who have seen God. In direct relevance to this thread, the big question is: What beliefs are indispensable to a Christian?
Litost, from a Hindu perspective, there is no problem viewing Jesus as an avatar of God. The sticking point is accepting that he is the only one. Gandhi viewed Jesus as at least an enlightened individual, and possibly a divine one, but as you said, he did not believe in the crucifixion as an atonement. From a Hindu perspective, there is no original sin in the first place, and nothing to atone for. There is no “salvation” as Christians think of it. The goal of escaping samsara, in Hinduism, can only be acheived by each individual. No teacher, or even a God, can “save” another soul by any act of sacrifice, or by any other act. They can guide, they can point, they can teach but they can’t do it for you. So accepting a sacrificial salvation was not possible in Gandhi’s estimation. It is easy to say that this was a cultural prejudice on his part, but it is no more so than a Christian who respects, admires and learns from Hindu teachings but cannot accept the ideas of karma or reincarnation.
The bigger point is that Gandhi did strive to see God through Christ, and perhaps even succeeded. He certainly admired the person of Jesus and incorporated his teachings into his own philosophy and political strategy. He did nor accept Christ as his “saviour,” but one of Spong’s major challenges is to consider that that may not be the definitive aspect of Christianity in the first place.
How do you define “striving to see God through Christ”? Let us assume that the life of Jesus is inspirational to me. If I am a Hindu believing in the concepts of salvation and Oneness with God, and I strive in my everyday Life to reach God, am I striving to reach God through Christ? What if I also draw inspiration from the life of Buddha or Shankaracharya?
ISTM that your definition of striving to see God through Christ only includes following some of Jesus’s teachings. By that definition, a villager in Tibet who unknowingly follows the teachings of Christ is a Christian? In fact, I would say there are thousands of people in the world who have not heard of Jesus Christ but believe in some of his teachings. If this is what you are getting at, it is a POV that I wholeheartedly endorse. But, as I mentioned before, at this level, the distinctions between religions become largely semantical.
For the earliest Christians, the key point was “In Christ, we see God.” Not a transcendent and remote, all-powerful deity with one-size-fits-all laws, but a Presence in human form, Emmanuel (God with, among us), up close and personal, and immanent after the Resurrection and Pentecost experiences. One of the most major problems with virtually every form of modern Christian practice is its tendency to convert the whole schmear into the Type A high, holy, and distant God, with specific laws that need to be followed and a carrot/stick model of human ethical behavior.
The Evangelical-school-of-thought standard for Salvation requires that you “know” Jesus, “take” Him as “Lord and Savior,” and “follow” Him and His commands. I’m throwing the phrases into quotation marks in order to flag them as terms carrying a bit of weight of meaning. How do we understand Gandhi’s experience of Him in these terms? Can it be understood in them? And are they the sine qua non of what Jesus intended? Any answer to these questions seems fraught with implications that quickly contradict something that He actually said (presuming the accuracy of the Gospels).
What’s the alternative scenario(s), the alternative paradigm in which to understand those words? And why is it (or they) an improvement?
I would say that one way Gandhi could have “seen God through Christ” would have been to understand his teachings as the Logos; the living word of God. The essential message of Jesus was that of love as the way to God. The beatitudes, the parables and other sayings of Jesus are all very compatible with Hinduism. Messages like “love your enemy,” and “turn the other cheek” have the same intentionally counterintuitive impact as many Hindu messages which press the individual to get beyond judgements and distinctions of “good and bad.” It’s a way to transcend the ego and achieve a state of higher consciousness. You could say that Jesus was an avatar who taught a yoga (a method) of love. It can perhaps be simplified thus (from a Hindu perspective): Love everything and everybody, without condition or exception, and you will be “saved” (enlightened).
Notice the work must still be done by the individual here, though, not by Christ. The crucifixion may be seen as a “sacrifice” in that Jesus died for his message, and there is no problem for Hindus believing the resurrection (happens all the time in Indian mythology), the problem is believing that the “sacrifice” can save them. They can only save themselves.
Spong’s words:
“Jesus is for me the ultimate God-presence.” Spong says that in him, God is fractured, but in Jesus he is unfractured. Spong continues, “I don’t ever want to be apart from the church,” which he calls a “purifying community.”
Thanks very much Poly,
The more I read of Spong the more I am convinced that he is not a Christian. This “ultimate God-presence” wording sounds much more like New Age thought than Christianity. In fact I think many New Agers would even agree with Spong’s wording on that.
And his comments about the church prove nothing. A person can be a church member all their life, yet not be a Christian. He calls the church (not sure which one, but I assume he means the one he attends) a “purifying community”. Huh? Sure it’s better to be at church than spending that time in some other places but again that has nothing to do with salvation. Hanging around with the supposedly “good” people at church might make a person feel good, or superior, or even somehow purified but it does not necessarily mean that person is a Christian.
Jesus is my Lord and Savior. Does Spong ever say that?
GOM, JFTR, the phrase “new age” doen’t actually meananything. There is no such thing as “new age thought.” “New age” is just sort of an umbrella term applied to any number of religious views or practices. The term is applied to everything from Buddhism to astrology to Paganism to pyramid power. Much of what is called “new age” is much older than Christianity. The term has no real definition and is really rather useless in a discussion such as this.
Is the the only way a Christian can be defined? Says who?
Well, GOM, on the second Sunday in November 2001, the Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong preached and celebrated the Eucharist at my home parish, at which he’d led a two-day teaching mission the Friday and Saturday immediately prior to it. In the course of this service, he led us in the Nicene Creed:
On the presumption that the man says what he means, which I think is amply borne out by his preaching and teaching style, and that I observed him with my own eyes reciting the Creed, I cannot see where you can judge him not to be a Christian. To be sure, his definitions of how he understands these affirmations will differ from yours – but so will mine.
Yet, Polycarp, in his books he has deconstructed the Nicene Creed and rejected almost all of it. I’m not able to ignore this, or believe that it’s all undone if he then recites the words publicly, unless, of course, he were to renounce what he’s previously written.
Allow me to quote myself a bit:
Spong on the Nicene Creed
All quotations from “Why Christianity Must Change Or Die.”
quote:
The words of the Apostles’ Creed, and its later expansion known as the Nicene Creed, were fashioned inside a worldview that no longer exists. Indeed, it is quite alien to the world in which I live. The way reality was perceived when the Christian creeds were formulated has been obliterated by the expansion of knowledge. That fact is so obvious that it hardly needs to be spoken. If the God I worship must be identified with these ancient creedal words in any literal sense, God would become for me not just unbelievable, but in fact no longer worthy of being the subject of my devotion. I am not alone in this conclusion. Indeed, I am one of a countless host of modern men and women for whom traditional religious understandings have lost most of their ancient power.
quote:
The opening phrase of the Apostles’ Creed speaks first of God as the “Father Almighty.” Both of these words offend me deeply. Here the mystery that I treasure in God begins to be filled with limiting cultural definitions. The word Father is such a human word – so male, so dated…
The word Almighty is equally troubling. Almighty has been translated theologically by the Church into such concepts as omnipotence (all-powerful) and omniscience (all-knowing). These two understandings constitute a provocative and disturbing claim. By attributing omnipotence to God, one also attributes to the deity the power to remedy any wrong or to prevent any disaster. Yet wrongs and disasters continue to be a part of life.
quote:
Next, this statement of faith calls God “the creator of heaven and earth.” What is heaven? Where is heaven? It is clear that in this ancient world the heaven that God created was thought of as God’s home, and it was located beyond the sky. But those of us in this generation know that the sky is neither the roof of the world nor the floor of heaven. So what are we referring to when we assert that this almighty God created heaven? Are we talking about that almost infinite universe that no one living knew anything about when the Bible was written?
To ascribe to God the power to have created the earth also presents modern men and women with difficulties. We can now date the birth of this planet, rather accurately, by radioactive particles to be four and one-half to five billion years old…
quote:
[Jesus] is first called God’s “only son.” Does this mean that none of the rest of us is or can be the son or the daughter of God? That kind of exclusive claim has been made throughout the ages with great power by the Christian Church.
quote:
“He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.” Certainly if that phrase is to be understood literally, it violates everything we know about biology. Do we not yet recognize that all virgin birth tales – and there have been many in human history – are legendary? They are human attempts to suggest that humanity alone did not have the ability to produce a life like the one being described. All virgin birth stories, including the ones about Jesus, were fully discredited as biological truths by the discovery in 1724 of the existence of an egg cell.
quote:
The primary assumption in the biblical story of the virgin birth – namely, that Jesus’ divine nature came to him directly from God through his mother’s impregnation by the Holy Spirit – is a hopelessly sexist idea born in a totally patriarchal world that denied the woman’s contribution to every new life.
quote:
Like the stories of his virgin birth, the stories of Jesus’ literal ascension have been equally discredited by the expansion of knowledge…
quote:
When those entry and departure adventures of Jesus are accompanied, as they are in the literal biblical texts, by a series of other wonders, which include both a star set in the sky, presumably by God, to mark the birthplace of Jesus (Matt. 2:1-12) and talking angels who inform us that Jesus will return in the same manner that the disciples had seen him depart (Acts 1:10, 11), it is impossible for me to find a believable faith.
quote:
What meaning can the phrase “He will come again to judge the living and the dead” have as the third millennium of the common era takes center stage? The New Testament clearly expected the almost momentary return of Jesus to this earth (John 14:3, Matt. 16:27, Mark 9:1). Yet that return has not yet occurred. Was that Gospel anticipation another example of inaccuracies in the biblical account?
Beyond that problem, however, we need to ask what the judgment of God means in the light of the way life is now understood. What is the basis on which what the Bible calls the final judgment will be conducted? When the Bible was written, the people knew little or nothing about social and psychological interdependence. Can anyone be judged today simply as an individual who is solely responsible for who he or she is or for what he or she has done?
quote:
I even favor the reopening of the debate between Arius and Athanasius on the nature of the Christ. I also support efforts to reexamine and perhaps even to transcend the trinitarian compromise, if those now-literalized words prove to be no longer capable of leading us into the experience of God towards which they originally pointed. I am increasingly unimpressed with what people call “orthodox” Christianity.
quote:
What I am requesting, however, is that modern believers be allowed, and even encouraged, to recognize that the words employed in the theological debate that formed the creeds so long ago have become empty and meaningless to this generation because the way we perceive the shape of reality has changed so dramatically… As a believer, I am not prepared to deny the reality of the underlying Christian experience. Yet I do recognize that the future understanding and the very shape of Christianity will inevitably be different, profoundly different, from that which has come down to us from the past. The real issue for me is whether or not that developing future is or still can be adequately attached to its Christian past.
I have been selective in quoting Spong, my point being to show some of what he believes of the Nicene Creed. Any misquotes, or things taken horribly out of context, are entirely my own fault.
(Back to 2003 here - )
Polycarp, by quoting the Creed as Spong recited it at your church, you seem to be presenting evidence of what Spong believes. How would you respond to what he’s written about the Creed, though?
Fair enough. My point was simply that Spong invests meaning in the creeds, and “believes” them in some sense best known to him. I’ve said more than once that while I consider that God is known in the roles of Creator, Almighty Judge and Ruler, and Loving Father; present in Christ as Savior, Redeemer, Lord, Head of the Church, and Elder Brother of all Christians; and in the Holy Spirit in (in the wise words of a Methodist bishop) the divine presence in our lives, where we find strength and help in time of need – while I adhere to all that, I find the Aristotelian/Aquinan system of describing the Holy Trinity as three hypostases in one ousia in which the human and divine natures in Christ are conmingled and homoousios with the Divine Nature – not to mention the filioque clause! – all this is moderately useless to me in attempting to conceptualize the ineffable Nature of God. I grasp what’s being said in it, and agree with it from a metaphysical worldview founded in Scholastic conceptualization – but to oblige any 21st Century person to subscribe to it or be considered “no true Scotsman” is a bit bizarre.
IMHO, Spong is asking some tough questions. I sincerely consider him to believe himself to be a Christian, committed to a God he knows and a Christ in whom he puts his trust. But he’s asking the tough questions that people do raise, find no honest answers in the churches, and leave because the traditional language has no meaning for them. I’ll offer you Mars Horizon’s spiritual journey as a paradigmatic example of just what I’m talking about.
And if the church is going to have relevance to the mass of modern people, thoughtful about what they believe, it must come up with new and better ways to express the eternal truths of what it believes, or it will fall into the hands of those few who either are fearfully capable of swallowing whole and uncritically the traditional forms of expression and those few who have thought it through and done the mental gymnastics involved in buying into the traditional formularies. I do not condemn either of these, but I would consider it a sin of the church against all the people who have a problem with some parts of the traditional formularies to reject them for failure to uncritically buy into them.
I hope you see what I’m saying and what I’m not saying in this. God’s Truth is real and eternal; the human conceptualizations that we use to describe it are not.
As a Christian with some understanding of other disciplines, I disagree with Spong on some of his concepts of theism and the divinity of Christ. I can say that to my concept, a person can perhaps interpret some of the bible, and perhaps toss some out, but if the revision gets too radical much of the concepts can be lost. At what point does your own judgment of the bible invalidate the work itself? As a concept of faith I believe Spong has a strong belief, and perhaps appeals to a broader range of individuals, but narrow is the way. . . It’s a tough call to make, and I don’t have to make it really.
A potentially divine street person once said something about knowing them by the fruits they bear. I’ll go with that, on faith alone.