Quotes That I Have Gathered – W

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Waking up

In the Thomas gospel that was dug up in Egypt some forty years ago, Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.” Now, that is exactly Buddhism. The word “Buddha” means “the one who waked up.” We are all to do that ‑ to wake up to the Christ or Buddha consciousness within us.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

War

Survival of the fittest: a pitiless struggle for domination between individual and individual, between group and group. Who is going to devour whom? . . . Such is the fundamental law of fuller being. In consequence, overriding every other principle of action and morality, we have the law of force, transposed uncharted into the human sphere. External force: war, therefore, does not represent a residual accident which will become less important as time goes on, but is the first agent of evolution and the very form in which it is expressed. And, to match this, internal force: citizens welded together in the iron grip of a totalitarian regime.

It is against this barbaric ideal that we have spontaneously rebelled: and it is to escape slavery that we too have had to have recourse to force. It is to destroy the ‘divine right’ of war that we are fighting.

Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy pp. 15, 16.

War, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that we saw in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower. That is the beginning of war.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Genghis Khan and his Mongol dynasty brought that thieving way of life into our own millennium. . . Yet that attempt failed. And it failed because in the end there was nothing for the Mongols to do except themselves to adopt the way of life of the people that they had conquered. . . . The fact is that agriculture and the settled way of life were established steps now in the ascent of man, and had set a new level for a form of human harmony which was to bear fruit into the far future: the organization of the city.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable, provided that it is a victorious war and there is not too much interference with rape and plunder. This is a great help in persuading people that wars are righteous. . . . If we could feel genuinely that we are the equals of our neighbors, neither their betters nor their inferiors, perhaps life would become less of a battle, and we should need less in the way of intoxicating myth to give us Dutch courage.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Wisdom

After instinct and intellectual ferment have done their work there is a decision which determines the mode of coalescence of instinct with intelligence. I will term this factor Wisdom.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Wisdom is persistent pursuit of the deeper understanding, ever confronting intellectual system with the importance of its omissions.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

These three elements, Instinct, Intelligence, Wisdom, cannot be torn apart.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Wisdom, the point of

Campbell believed in a “point of wisdom beyond the conflict of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again.”

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure Work

The principles that Gandhi derived from Rusking:

1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

2. That a lawyer’s work has the same value as the barber’s, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihoods from their work.

3. That a life of labor ‑ the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman ‑ is the life worth living.

Work and Rest

When I am at rest, I accuse myself of neglecting mywork; and when I am at work, of having disturbed my repose. The only remedy in these uncertainties is prayer, entreating tobe shown God’s holy Will at evry moment, that He may tell us what to do and when and how to do it.

Bernard of Clairvaux

Works

It is always good to be doing what we can, for then God is wont to pity our weakness and assist our feeble endeavors. . . . Thus should we exercise ourselves unto godliness; and when we are employing the powers that we have, the Spirit of god is wont to strike in and elevate these acts of our soul beyond the pitch of nature and give them a divine impression; and after the frequent reiteration of these, we shall find ourselves more inclined unto them, they flowing with greater freedom and ease.

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – T, U, V

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Theism

In my view, when theistic faith is equated with uncritical supernaturalism, there is an inevitable conflict between science and religion, because a theistic understanding of man and nature is an interpretation of the meaning of God’s relationship to the world and is not “fact” (in the empirically verifiable sense that science uses the term).

J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic

Theodicy

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit, says there are two types of theodicy:

1. “Scale of nature” tracing line from Nature to Man to God

2. Intellectual and moral factors in man pointing to God, e.g. existentialists

Corte says Teilhard was of the first category as a scientist in direct contact with the evidence. The same evidence pointing to evolution points to the continuity of principle all the way up the scale.

Theologies, in conflict

Those grasped by a fresh and convincing insight are likely to believe that all those who do not join them are against them.

John B. Cobb, Jr., An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Cobb cites two passages: Jesus is reported to have said: “Anyone who is not for me is against me” (Mt. 12:30), and “Anyone who is not against us is for us” (Lk. 9:50). He notes that the former reflects an attitude that arises with an early stage of theological development, and the latter reflects that of a latter stage of development. As an example, “process theologians have learned to find points of agreement and mutual support in the counterculture, in the ecological movement, in the “new physics”, among the feminists, among Roman Catholics inspired by Teilhard de Chardin and the Second Vatican Counsel, among those seeking inter‑religious dialogues, and in the various movements for indigenization of Christianity and for liberation of oppressed people around the world.”

Theology

Theology is a living thing, having to do with our very existence as Christians and as churches . . . A living theology must speak to the actual questions men in Asia are asking in the midst of their dilemmas; their hopes, aspirations and achievements; their doubts, despair and suffering. . . . A living theology is born out of the meeting of a living church and its world. East Asia Christian Conference statement, quoted in Minjung Theology

Theology is a form of reflection that is secondary to the primary activity of the community of faith: prayer, witness, service, prophecy, martyrdom, and celebration. Theology does not create itself. It is a critical, constructive commentary on something else.

Harvey Cox, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

The object of theology “must be the Ground of our being. . . . Although reason cannot grasp being‑itself, it is essentially related to being‑itself. This formulation enables Tillich to maintain that revelation does not destroy reason, but fulfills it.

Guyton B. Hammond on Tillich’s theology, Man in Estrangement

For Bultman, the task of theology is that of developing an understanding of human existence in faith.

Norman Perrin, The Promise of Bultmann

If mythology offers a way of narrating experience, giving it the power of story, theology provides a way of testing that experience. Furthermore, Christian theology ‑ because of the incarnation ‑ will always want to root an experience of the sacred in the particular and down‑to‑earth, being wary of vague, undifferentiated encounters with the profound.

Belden C. Lane, “The Power of Myth: Lessons from Joseph Campbell,” The Christian Century, July 5‑12, 1989

The present with its contemporary empirical models has to be the place where we, as Christians, must make our Christological response. Proclamation and theology must always have a time index. Unless we recognize this, we are putting our faith in a purely ideological, abstract or magical kerygma: “Jesus is the Lord.”

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

One finds that he can authentically abandon neither his faith in the modern experiment nor his faith in the God of Jesus Christ. Anyone who experiences at all such a seemingly unenviable condition finds the attempt to theologize pure necessity.

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order

Linguists (e.g. Ian Ramsey, Frederick Ferre, and Max Black) [distinguish] between ‘picture (or scale) models’ and ‘disclosure (or analogue) models.’ Such a distinction allows one to affirm that theological models do not purport to provide exact pictures of the realities they disclose (picture models). Rather, theological models serve to disclose or re‑present the realities which they interpret (disclosure models). . . Theologies do not ‑ or would not ‑ claim to provide pictures of the realities they describe ‑ God, humanity, and world; they can be shown to disclose such realities with varying degrees of adequacy.

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order

[8‑24‑90: Again, this seems to be true for the reason that we perceive nothing directly. All that we perceive is “received” even as raw data through the filter of the physical properties of light, sound, or chemical or physical structure, it is transmitted to the brain through the bodily sense network, and even when the data is recorded, it is never pure, but is attached to attendant existing and preexisting data and interpretations in the light of experience and present emotion. Any perception, therefore, is not a direct imprint of the original event perceived, but more an apprehension of that event, and always to some degree remote from that event. It is always an approximation, and it is always personal. To forget that perception is part of the life process, a becoming, approaches idolatry and dogmatism. Knowledge is never an equation with the world. That is why I believe knowledge is most accurate when it approaches the dynamic of life through a dialectic which recognizes its limitations as well as its life.]

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, quotes Wilhelm Pauck: “Orthodox theologies give rise to more orthodoxies; liberal theologies give rise to neo‑orthodoxies.”

I have the feeling that the Christian theologians are reluctant to come in through the door I have tried to open. I have tried to relate Chrstianity to the sacredness of all life. It seems to me this is a vital part Christianity as I understand it. But the Christian theologians, many of them, confine Christianity to the human form of life. It does not seem to me to be correct. It lacks the essential universalization that I associate with Jesus. Why limit reverence for life to the human form?

Albert Schweitzer

Theology, academic

Academic theology is hardly able to address even the most massive and pressing issues of our day, such as those of justice and peace lifted up for focused attention by the World Council of Churches.

John B. Cobb, Jr., An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

No doubt it was once liberating for theology to get out from under rigid ecclesial control. But being housed in the mental world of the modern university presents its own, often less visible, restrictions and obstacles.

Harvey Cox, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Theology, consequences of the enlightenment

The polish writer Czeslaw Milosz believes that Russian writers, especially Dostoyevski, saw the long‑term consequences of the Enlightenment, of a rationalism, faith in science, and progress. He claims that Dostoyevski, writing from a kind of Russian minjung perspective, foresaw an inevitable collision between these “enlightened” ideas and Christian truth. One hundred years after Dostoyevski, we live in a period in which it seems quite evident that ideas he warned us about are leading toward something unspeakably destructive. The palace of science has not been our salvation. Technology has been put to demonic purposes. Hope for progress is something that hardly anybody seriously affirms anymore. And we’re left with a kind of emptiness, a spiritual hunger that Dostoyevski himself felt and anticipated, and a sense that his message of Christianity, which is the coming of God into the life of humankind, in a man who suffered and died to infuse humanity with the spirit of God, is what has to be reclaimed. Would it not be ironic if in the next century a revival of Christianity occurred stemming from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?

Harvey Cox, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Theology, contextual

Theology has to be contextual.

Jung Young Lee, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

If scholarship and theology were as ‘objective’ as they sometimes appear, one might argue for a division of labor. But it has been black theology, Latin American theology, and feminist theology in particular that have taught us that this solution is inadequate. By Western theology’s very excellence it inhibits Christians in other situations from affirming the different understanding and wisdom gained through diverse situations.

John B. Cobb, Jr., An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Theology, and faith

Those who study theology, some say, must face hard battles because of the doubts that arise when they engage in close study and research into Christian doctrine and its history. I cannot speak of this from experience, for I myself have never for a moment known such a state of mind. I always told myself: Should everything else fail, one thing will remain. We poor weak men may continue his work, and our life, our thought, our aims, and all our actions will thus be hallowed. Isn’t that enough ‑ more than enough ‑ for true joy true blessedness and peace? Because I have been so certain of his spiritual presence, doubts and temptations have never assailed me. Now you will say: Such religion is lacking in humility. You are treating the Savior as an equal; you are not a broken and contrite man. I believe that contrition and humility come imperceptibly. Who could step into the shadow of a great mountain without feeling insignificant?

Schweitzer, Sermon, “Christ in Our Life,” 1904

Theology, method of correlation

Tillich’s “method of correlation” is an attempt to correlate Christian concepts of man with modern culture’s interpretation of the human situation.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

Tillich’s theological method seeks to correlate the “answers” of the Christian message with the “questions” posed by man’s contemporary self‑analysis.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

“Yet, . . . Christian theology should not surrender to modern thought. . . . She should reconcile them by elevating them at the same time beyond themselves as agape does, and as great apologetic theology has always done. There are questions left in each of the ideas of estrangement and reconciliation, questions for which the Christian message is the ultimate answer.”

Tillich quoted by Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

Theology, Liberation

Liberation theology is principally a way of looking at the gospel and the Christian tradition from the perspective of the poor, so everything in that tradition ‑modes of discipline, forms of prayer, sacraments, devotional exercises and so on ‑ can all be seen and reclaimed and purified.

Harvey Cox, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Dr. Vincent Harding, Illif School of Theology, asks in his seminar presentation January 1989, “From Central America with Love,” “How can one remain a follower of Christ and a member of the number one nation?” And “There is great power in being vulnerable, poor, and oppressed: it leaves one freer to express love.” [And in my experience as judge, freer for others to give expression of love.]

Theology, liberative

Over the past twenty‑five years, I have come to believe that the religion of ordinary people, the “simple folk,” though often misused for domination, holds enormous potential for liberation. This means a principle theological task becomes sorting out the liberative from the manipulative elements in a religious heritage.

Harvey Cox, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Theology, Revisionist

The revisionist model holds that a contemporary fundamental Christian theology can best be described as philosophical reflection upon the meanings present in common human experience and language, and upon the meanings present in the Christian fact.

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, proposes a critical correlation of the result of the investigation of the two principal sources of theology: Christian texts and common human experience and language. He criticizes Tillich as coming up short in correlating only Christian answers to contemporary situations: “If the “situation” is to be taken with full seriousness, then its answers to its own questions must also be investigated critically. . . . Tillich’s method does not actually correlate; it juxtaposes questions from the “situation” with answers from the “message”.

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, sets out five theses of a revisionist model of theology:

1. The two principal sources for theology are Christian texts and common human experience and language.

2. The theological task will involve a critical correlation of the results of the investigation of the two sources of theology.

3. The principal method of investigation of the source “common human experience and language” can be described as a phenomenology of the “religious dimension” present in everyday and scientific experience and language.

4. The principal method of investigation of the source “The Christian tradition” can be described as an historical and hermeneutical investigation of classical Christian texts. [This recognizes that textual sources had as their own sources other textual sources, human experience and language.]

5. To determine the truth‑status of the results of one’s investigations into the meaning of both common human experience and Christian texts the theologian should emply an explicitly transcendental or metaphysical mode of reflection.

Theology, Western

The “De‑Europeanizing” of Christianity is one of the things at stake in the emergence of minjung theology. Emerging from this shell reminds us how once a basically Hebrew perspective on reality, having to do with love and faith and community, became translated into the Hellenistic perspective. Christianity was thus understood primarily in terms of doctrinal formulations; this has become so commonplace it seems completely natural to us. “What is it to be a Christian? It’s to believe ABCD.”

Harvey Cox, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Thou

The Indians addressed all of life as a “thou” ‑ the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a “thou,” and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology.

Joseph Campbell

Thought

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

Albert Schweitzer

Tolerance

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervor. The first important pronouncement in which tolerance is associated with moral fervor, is in the Parable of the Tares and Wheat.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Plato above all men introduced into the world this further essential element of civilization. . . . The moral of his writings is that all points of view, reasonably coherent and in some sense with an application, have something to contribute to our understanding of the universe, and also involve omissions whereby they fail to include the totality of evident fact. The duty of tolerance is our finite homage to the abundance of inexhaustible novelty which is awaiting the future, and to the complexity of accomplished fact which exceeds our stretch of insight.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Consider some of Plato’s phrases about his own ideas:

If, then, Socrates, we find ourselves in many points unable to make our discourse of the generation of gods and the universe in every way wholly consistent and exact, you must not be surprised. Nay, we must be well content if we can provide an account not less likely than another’s; we must remember that I who speak, and you who are my audience, are but men and should be satisfied to ask for no more than the likely story.

Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

“For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god” (Micah 4:5) Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods, speaks of the messianic time as a next step in history, not its abolition, in which there will be peace: peace between men and peace of man with nature (Isaiah 11:6‑9, 35:5‑10; Hosea 2:18) and an end even to religious fanaticism, the source of so much strife and destruction. Even peace among nations: The idea that all nations are to be equally loved by God and that there is no favorite son is beautifully expressed also by Isaiah 19:23‑25.”

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, speaks of Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty as to the speed and direction of the electron, and says it is a poor choice of name:

We should call it the principle of tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First in the engineering sense. Science has progressed step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word passionately about the real world. All knowledge, all information between human beings can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. . . . It is a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that here in Gottingen, scientists were refining to the most exquisite precision the Principle of Tolerance, and turning their backs on the fact that all around them tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. . . .

It is an irony of history that at the very time this [realization that all knowledge is limited] was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter‑conception: a principle of monstrous certainty.

Transcendence

Transcendent properly means that which is beyond all concepts, all thought, beyond the categories of being and non‑being.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

In the Sanskrit there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping‑off place to the ocean of transcendence: “Sat”: being; “Chit”: consciousness; “Ananda”: bliss or rapture. Campbell says he was unsure of being and consciousness but knew his bliss, so he hung onto bliss that it would bring him both consciousness and being. “I think it worked.”

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

The effect of the experience of transcendence can be either negative or positive. When transcendence becomes a mere escape from this world into “another world”, it is negative because that transcendence, while cathartic, produces no changes in the concrete everyday life. The minjung thus become fatalistic.

The experience of transcendence can also produce positive effects. First it produces among the minjung the wisdom and the power to survive. To see the world as it is, may give power to endure its hardships. Second, the experience gives the minjung the courage to fight for change and freedom. The minjung possess the capacity both to be involved in political revolutionary activities and to transcend them at the same time.

Suh Kwang‑Sun David, Minjung Theology

Transcendence is not movement into some metaphysical world out there or into “Spirit,” but is deeply rooted in the historical experience of the human. The previously presumed dichotomy between body and spirit had to be reexamined. His understanding of God’s incarnation was deepened in more concrete and existential terms. God was not carried piggy‑back to Korea by the first missionaries. Rather God is working and revealing his will in and through the minjung of Korea, especially the minjung’s history and culture. Beginning to do theology in this way is exciting “for you feel theology with your body and dance with it before you think it.”

Suh Kwang‑Sun David, Minjung Theology

Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened. An identity must be established before it can be transcended. One must find one’s self before one can lose it.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Tillich: “The ability to transcend any given situation implies the possibility of losing one’s self in the infinity of transcending one’s self.”

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

The immanence of God might be identified with such human qualities as the presence of love, the quality of life and the affirmation of being. One touches God first in that very human experience. But once we cross the barrier from the limitations of our humanity into the infinity of the source of being itself, then transcendence becomes the word that symbolizes the endless depths of life that are then available. Immanence stands for the point of contact between the human and the divine. . . . Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, pp. 130, 131.

Transcendent authority

If meanings and values were just something emerging from the subject himself ‑ that is to say, if they were not something that stems from a sphere beyond man and above man ‑ they would instantly lose their demand quality. They could not longer be real challenges to man, they would never be able to summon him up, to call him forth.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy quoting Viktor Frankl

The life of the individual is not determined solely by the ego and its opinions or social factors, but quite as much, if not more, by a transcendent authority. . . . I do not hold myself responsible for the fact that man has, everywhere and always, spontaneously developed religious forms of expression, and that the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind and whoever chooses to explain it away, or to “enlighten” it away, has no sense or reality.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy quoting Carl Jung

Trinity

[Joachim of Floris, twelfth century] viewed the Trinity in a historical perspective as revealed in three successive historical periods: the period of the Holy Father, the period of the Holy Son and the period of the Holy Spirit. He developed a clear historical theology. He said that man was a slave in the period of the Holy Father, and was a son in the period of the Holy son, and then became a friend who had spiritual freedom in the period of the Holy Spirit. Thus, in the third spiritual period, all the people surpass the institutional church and the literal word of the Bible, and their souls and bodies become filled with wisdom and happiness in the historical reality of this world. . . . His statement that “the poor must suffer from hunger again whenever the altar is adorned” reveals his deep insight into the irrational entanglement between the ruler and the oppressed minjung.

Suh Nam‑Dong, Minjung Theology

More recently, historical theology has been presented in terms of the activity rather than just the presence of the three persons of the Trinity by the English theologian R.P.C. Hanson. For him, God develops his own presence and activity in this way: the Holy Son surpasses the Holy Father, and in turn the Holy Spirit surpasses the Holy Son, and moves in an eschatological direction. Finally, he says that the Holy Spirit will be poured out over all the people at the end. This is the paradigm of minjung theology.

Truth

But for truth we must turn our backs on the “false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions” and feel intimately the pulsing movement of life itself.”

Bergson, Introduction to Creative Evolution

Truth is one; the sages call it by many names.

Hindu scripture, quoted by Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong. Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Maurice Merleau‑Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, spoke of the “immense task” which faced him in showing that “ideal truth” was founded in “perceived truth” ‑ and that the idea of truth itself is an “ideal” implied in the least perception and is not the free creation or independent intuition of a “pure,” fully reflexive consciousness detached from the real world of perceptual experience. Merleau‑Ponty’s world is not a dualism of idea and real, but a “dialectic of ambiguity.”

8‑27‑90 Precisely because of the limits of man, and the fact that he receives all contact with the world through a filter and interprets it through symbols, always inexact, never equations, we have in our experience “paradox” and “mystery”. How can knowledge, with language as its base, ever adequately apprehend reality, including the reality of the experience of power greater than ourselves ‑ God. Therefore paradox and mystery may most dynamically represent the power and becoming that embodies life.

9‑27‑90 For many of the reasons Bergson points out, truth can never be an equation between an idea and reality. We need our ideas about reality to apprehend in some aspect that reality for purposes of thinking about reality and talking about it. But truth is more than talking about reality. It is living in consonance with reality and not in opposition to it ‑ it is more than thought, although it includes thought. To approximate truth, it must not contain reality by definition, but it must become one with reality. To relegate truth to an all‑encompassing definition is to wring from reality its vitality and make of our truth an idol. Here science, philosophy and religion should not conflict if each understands its limits. To the extent that each recognizes its compartmentalization of reality for its own changing and incomplete purposes, it can leave open our receptivity to reality.

Satyagrah is an Indian word used by Gandhi for his nonviolent resistence of oppression. It means “firm insistence upon truth and love.”

My countrymen impute the evils of modern civilization to the English people and, therefore, believe that the English people are bad, and not the civilization they represent. My countrymen, therefore, believe that they should adopt modern civilization and modern methods of violence to drive out the British.

Gandhi

My personal faith is absolutely clear. I cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less fellow human beings, even though theymay do the greatest wrong to me and mine. Whilst,therefore, Ihold the British rule to be a curse, I do not intend harm to a single Englishman or to any legitimate interest he may have in India. . . . I know that in embarking on nonviolence I shall be running what might be termed a mad risk. But the victories of truth have never been wonwithout risks, often of the gravest character. Conversion of a nation that has consciously or unconsciously preyed upon another, far more numerous, far more ancient and no less cultured than itself, is worth any amount of risk.

Gandhi

I believe it is possible to introduce uncompromising truth and honesty in the political life of the country. . . . I would strain every nerve to make Truth and Nonviolence accepted in all national activities.

Gandhi

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour isnow, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances.

Albert Schweitzer

No less strong than the will to truth must be the will to sincerity. Only an age which can show the courage of sincerity can possess truth which works as a spiritual force within it.

Albert Schweitzer

No one who opens the sluices to let a flood of skepticism pour itself over the land must expect to be able to bring it back within its proper bounds. Of those who let themselves get too disheartened to try any longer to discover truth by their own thinking, only a few find a substitute for it in truth taken from others. The mass of people remain skeptical They lose all feeling for truth, and all sense of need for it as well, finding themselves quite comfortable in a life without thought, driven now here, now there, from one opinion to another.

Albert Schweitzer

Examine different philosophical measures of truth: correspondence, utility, logical proof, etc. How can we know truth? What role faith?

See Perception

Truth, and the church

According to Augustine the absolute and permanent truth is the monopoly of the church, and only the church spreads the absolute truth. But, according to Joachim of Floris, the truth grows and spreads itself from a bud to a stem and then to flowers and fruits as history develops. . . . In accepting the viewpoint of Augustine the church turned away from the Holy Spirit and the minjung.

Suh Nam‑Dong, Minjung Theology

Truth, withholding

The expression of opinions, feelings, ideas and even knowledge must be suppressed from time to time in the course of human affairs. What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth?

1. Never speak falsehood.

2. Bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required.

3. The decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one’s map from challenge.

4. Conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld.

5. The assessment of another’s needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other.

6. The primary factor in the assessment of another’s needs is the assessment of that person’s capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth.

7. In assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Values

Being human means being in the face of meaning to fulfill and values to realize. It means living in the polar field of tension established between reality and ideals to materialize. Man lives by ideals and values. Human existence is into authentic unless it is lived in terms of self‑transcendence.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy quoting Viktor Frankl

Values become integrative forces in life only when an individual exercises his or her freedom and responsibility. . . . Refusing to exercises one’s freedom to make choices about values is synonymous with refusing to be responsible. Indeed, habitually irresponsible behavior is one of the signs of disintegrating mental health.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

What man actually needs is not homeostasis, but what I call Noodynamics, i.e., that kind of appropriate tension that holds him steadily oriented toward concrete values to be actualized, toward the meaning of his personal existence. This is also what guarantees and sustains his mental health; escaping from stress situations would even precipitate his falling prey to the existential vacuum.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy quoting Viktor Frankl

Virtue

. . . [T]hough a man may know very well what is virtue or wickedness, yet if he does not love virtue, he is not virtuous, for he obeys vice. But if he loves virtue he follows after it . . . And to him virtue is its own reward, and he is content therewith, and would take no treasure or riches in exchange for it.

Theologia Germanica

Let your conduct be single, moderate, and without affectation of either good or evil, but be really firm in the cause of virtue, and so decided that no one can hope to lead you astray.

Francois Fenelon

For virtue is nought else but an ordained and a measured affection, plainly directed unto God for Himself.

The Cloud of Unknowing

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – S

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Sacred place

A sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room or a certain hour or so a day . . . where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is a place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. . . .You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Put on music . . . read a book. In your sacred place you get the “thou” feeling of life that these people had for the whole world.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Salvation

The human needs salvation. Salvation is possible only when the individual accepts his or her need to be liberated from inhibiting idols. . . . Salvation is a state achieved through the integrating forces of both the human and the holy. Philomena

Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

Right living, and not right belief, are the essence of salvation. Those who accept that will find themselves closest to the Buddhists, and to those Christians who, like Abbe Pire, say “What matters today is not the difference between believers and nonbelievers, but that between those who care and those who do not care.”

Schillebeeckx?

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus, sees a dilemma: “Is ‘Christian salvation’ vested in the Jesus who lived here on earth, or solely in the crucified‑and‑risen one?”

Satyagraha

Rom, here in Broken Bow, told me November 21, 1991 the meaning of Satyagraha. I had understood it to be “soul‑force”. That word, however, lacks concreteness which can speak to concrete experience. What is the soul? How does one promote it? How does it relate to forgiveness? What is forgiveness? Rom defined Satyagraha as satya ‑ truth and love + graha ‑ firm insistence: a firm insistence upon truth and love.

Schlesinger, in his series on world leaders, Gandhi, remarks how Gandhi was introduced to South Africa by being thrown out of the first class compartment of the train and off the train:

He spent that night in the unlit waiting room of the Maritzburg station, shivering fromthe cold but too afraid to ask the baggage attendant for his coat. Should he stay and fight for his rights, or should he give up and go back to India, or should he just swallow the insults and complete his legal case? He chose to stay and fight against race prejudice. It was a night that changed the course of his life. . . .

When Gandhi arrived in Pretoria he immediately sent a letter of protest to the railway company and called a meeting of the Indian community. Now, burning with the urgency of his cause, he was no longer too frightened to speak in public. Yet, strangely, his emphasis was not on protest but self‑improvement. Indians must combat the accusations made against them on the grounds of their way of life by proving the charges false. They must be as sanitary as possible, learn English (he offered to teach them), and cooperate with each other.

To see the universal and all‑pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest creatures as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford tokeep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics and . . . those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.

Gandhi

Gandhi’s policy as a Satyagrahi, or someone who practices Satyagraha, was not only to refrain from violence but also to be courteous to and think well of opponents, officials and jailers. This, he said, could be the hardest part of Satyagraha. They were not fighting against individuals, however, only against the evils of the system.

Schlesinger on Gandhi

A Satyagrahi is not afraid to trust his opponent, Gandhi said. . . . Neither does he take advantage of his opponent’s weaknesses.

Schlesinger on Gandhi

Science and Faith

The restless modern search for increased accuracy of observation and for increased detailed explanation is based upon unquestioning faith in the reign of Law. Apart from such faith, the enterprise of science is foolish, hopeless.

Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Galileo had always held that the ultimate test of a theory must be found in nature:

“I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense‑experiences and necessary demonstrations. . . Nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.

Urban VIII objected that there can be no ultimate test of God’s design, and insisted that Galileo must say that in his book: “It would be an extravagant boldness for anyone to go about to limit and confine the Divine power and wisdom to some one particular conjecture or his own.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature.

Alfred North Whitehead, “Science and the Modern World,” Lowell Institute Lectures 1925, from Alfred North Whitehead, An Anthology, MacMillan.

Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate nature of things lie together in harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. . . . This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalization. It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate past experience.

Alfred North Whitehead, “Science and the Modern World,” Lowell Institute Lectures 1925, from Alfred North Whitehead, An Anthology, MacMillan.

Science and God

It is almost impertinent to talk of the ascent of man in the presence of two men, Newton and Einstein, who stride like gods. Of the two Newton is the Old Testament god; it is Einstein who is the New Testament figure. He was full of humanity, pity, a sense of enormous sympathy. His vision of nature herself was that of a human being in the presence of something god‑like, and that is what he always said about nature. He was fond of talking about God: “God does not play dice,” “God is not malicious.” Finally Niels Bohr one day said to him, “Stop telling God what to do.” But that is not quite fair. Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his life showed, and his work, is that when the answers are simple too, then you hear God thinking.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man Paul

Davies, God and the New Physics, ends his book:

I began by making the claim that science offers a surer path than religion in the search of God. It is my deep conviction that only by understanding the world in all its many aspects ‑ reductionist and holistic, mathematical and poetical, through forces, fields, and particles as well as through good and evil [his notion of religion?] ‑ that we will comet o understand ourselves and the meanign behind this universe, our home.

[Is this what Bergson decried in Creative Evolution when he criticised such reductionistic thinking as reducing all of life to objects, shapes and forms and ignoring other forms of knowledge? What about also coming to God through our experiences, both the experience of the wonder of the world and in experience of our own limitations, through our recognition that we are out of control and through seeing the work of God in the lives of others.? Davies’ notion of religion seems overly restrictive, especially if viewed with Eric Fromm’s definition of religion.]

Science, and Philosophy

If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.

Alfred North Whitehead, “Science and the Modern World,” Lowell Institute Lectures 1925, from Alfred North Whitehead, An Anthology, MacMillan.

With scientific thought being based upon quantification, it is no wonder that scientists placed their principles upon a materialistic basis and thereafter ceased to worry about philosophy.

Whitehead

Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development: “Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific.”

Science and Spirituality

Science has not diminished human beings nor divorced us from divinity. The new discoveries of science “rejoin us to the ancients” by enabling us to recognize in this whole universe “a reflection magnified of our own inward nature; so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech ‑ or, in theological terms, God’s ears, God’s eyes, God’s thinking, and God’s Word.”

Joseph Campbell, Introduction to The Hero’s Adventure

Science and mythology do not conflict. Science is breaking through now into the mystery dimension. It has pushed itself to the edge between what can be known and that which cannot because it is a mystery transcending all human research: the source of life. We speak of the divine as the transcendent energy source.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, quotes William Blake in Augeries of Innocense:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Only recently has science discovered the reality of paradox. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled. He quotes J. Robert Oppenheimer on the necessity of a paradoxical answer to the question of whether an electron’s position changes with time: If we ask whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say “no”; if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say “no”; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say “no”; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say “no”. The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of a man’s self after his death; but they are not the familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth century science.

Having been successful in discovering natural laws, scientists in their world view have made an idol out of the concept of natural law, just as they made an idol out of the notion of measurement. . . . The religious have not wanted their religion shaken by science, just as the scientific have not wanted their science to be shaken by religion.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Science, Matter and Spirit, Physics and Biology

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, explores the example of Syetard, who first conceived of chain reaction, patented it to preclude publication, then wrote to Roosevelt concerning the nuclear age and inevitability of war, and finally unsuccessfully strove to demonstrate to Japan the power of the bomb without loss of life. At that point Syetard gave up physics and turned to biology at the Salk institute. “Physics had been the passion of the last 50 years, and their masterpiece. But now we knew that it was high time to bring to the understanding of life, particularly human life, the same singleness of mind that we had given to understanding the physical world.”

Scripture

Scripture is not a textbook of systematic theology despite the attempt of countless generations of scholars to make it so. Rather, it is an account of the historical experiences of a people. When asked about God, the biblical writer answers, “Here is a story. . . . ” Robert McAfee Brown, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective.

The sayings of the New Testament and of Christian writers like Augustine are true if taken phenomenologically and dialectically; namely, as expressing one side of the actual, concrete experience which men have of the world. But they have been interpreted undialectically as if they were the total expression of man’s relationship with the world.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

To continue to believe a literalist theory of scriptural inspiration seems no longer an option to anyone who has investigated the results of modern historical study of the scriptures.

Secular religion

For Muentzer, the struggle for social reformation needs the inner purification of the person, and personal religious salvation itself cannot be realized without revolutionary action. . . . He moved toward an understanding of the universal church of the Holy Spirit. In this respect, he is a pioneer of the theology of secularization and of the contemporary theology of the minjung.

Suh Nam‑Dong, Minjung Theology

Bonhoeffer stands by the Old Testament and John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” He is not prepared to have the virgin birth, the Trinity or anything else boldly stated as revelation ‑ without relating their meaning to the present world in a fully incarnational Christology. It is thus, not only mythological concepts based upon the matrix of thought in the first century that trouble him, but the need to reinterpret in a secular sense the concepts of ‘repentance, faith, justification, rebirth and sanctification’.

Edwin Robertson, The Shame and the Sacrifice

There are varied forms of secularism:

1. materialistic secularism: wealth and possessions bring us happiness (e.g. advertisements for goods and services)

2. hedonistic secularism: fulfillment of life through pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain

3. pragmatic secularism: that which is workable is good (the theme, “Don’t set your sights too high, but be realistic in your goals” marks the value to be sought)

4. spiritual secularism: places emphasis on the life of the creative mind with stress on the arts ‑ a religion of culture.

Secularism has in common that man and nature form the whole of reality.

J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic

The ‘faith of secularity’ is that fundamental attitude which affirms the ultimate significance and final worth of our lives, our thoughts, and actions, here and now, in nature and in history.

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order

Christian faith can render intellectually coherent and symbolically powerful that common secular faith which we share.

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order

Compare “Humanism”

Self, and other

Schweitzer was asked why he gave up theology and music: “I decided early that my life up to the age of about thirty would be to do as I wished; but that after that, it would be for my fellow man. . . . I wanted to apply in a material way a Christian concept of love, and medicine seemed the obvious course.

Best of Playboy Interviews, Dec. 1963

8‑25‑90 Campbell speaks of following one’s bliss, and he also speaks of self‑denial, integrity of self necessary for integrity of relationship. Dr. Peck also speaks of the need to have a healthy ego before one can perforate (in Dr. Suchocki’s language) those boundaries both into the subconscious and in union with the world. Asimov also speaks of the brain being first an instrument of preparation before it can be an instrument of service. Finally, AA speaks of the need to give to self before one can have anything to give to others.

Self‑denial

Kim Chi‑ha: “I separate my body and mind from every comfort and easy life, circles of petit bourgeois dreams, and secular swamps without depth. This is the total content of my faith ‑ I know that only vigorous self‑denial is my way. Let us leave as a wayfarer, leaving everything behind. This is the revolution which I have to show and realize with my life itself. The delusion is finished, ‘Ah, a sad and painful act of a spider which goes up in a single line in the air. . . . ‘”

Suh Kwang‑Sun David, Minjung Theology

The secret to life is that satisfaction comes from abandoning the self. . . . The most miserable people are self‑focused. They worry about getting their share. They keep checking themselves.

David K. Reynolds, Constructive Living

It may seem to many that the ultimate requirement ‑ to give up one’s self and one’s life ‑ represents a kind of cruelty on the part of God or fate, which makes our existence a sort of bad joke and which can never be completely accepted. Yet the exact opposite is the reality. It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy in life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This “secret” is the central wisdom of religion.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

You must forge yourself an identity before you can give it up. You must develop an ego before you can lose it. There are many people who possess a vision of evolution yet seem to lack the will for it. They want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy shortcut to sainthood.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Self‑examination

When the light of truth has risen within us, then we see clearly what is there. Then we love ourselves without partiality,without flattery, as we love our neighbor. In the meantime, God spares us by revealing our weakness to us just in proportion as our strength tosupport the view of it increases. We discover our imperfections one by one as we are able to cure them. Without this merciful preparation that adapts our strength to the light within, we should be indespair. Those who correct others ought towatch the moment when God touches their hearts; they must bear a fault with patience til they perceive His spirit reproaching them within. Then theymust follow His providence that gently reproaches them, so that theymay feel that it is less God than their own hearts that condemns them. The more self‑love we have, the more severe are our censures. . . . The less we love ourselves, the more considerate we are of others.

Francois Fenelon

We are beginning to realize that the sources of danger to the world lie more within us than outside, and that the process of constant self‑examination and contemplation is essential for ultimate survival.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Self‑government

To prepare for home‑rule, individuals must cultivate the spirit of service, renunciation, truth, nonviolence, self‑restraint, patience.

Gandhi

Political self‑government . . . is no better than individual self‑government and therefore is to be attained by precisely the same means that are required fro individual self‑government or self‑rule.

Gandhi

Self‑love

Self‑love must be uprooted, and the love of God take its place in our hearts before we can see ourselves as we are. Then the same principle that enables us to see our imperfections will destroy them. When the light of truth has risen within us, then we see clearly what is there. Then we love ourselves without partiality, without flattery, as we love our neighbor.

Francois Fenelon

Sex

Sex is not a matter of commitment but one of self‑expression and play and exploration and learning and joyful abandon.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

The supposed uncontrollable sexual urges of the body are in fact the reflection of the compulsive drives of an empty, isolated, threatened ego, trying to fill up its emptiness or protect its unstable, unreal self and the world against the shattering impact of genuine feeling. What are called sexual problems are problems of the total personality . . . When genuine, sex is a privileged expression of love. . . . Sex in its genuine form as sensuous love is sacramental in its power to move persons out of self‑centeredness into an openness in which they meet God.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

That longing for the other as a lost part of oneself is not the same as the desire to possess another in order to fill one’s own emptiness. . . . Sexual love, then, is not a remedy for an inadequacy of the self in its individual being, but a going beyond the individual self once securely established.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

As sensuous, we allow the spontaneous sexual responsiveness of the body to hold sway and suspend the controlling and driving empetus of the rational mind and will.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

When the value of human sexuality is repressed, it returns as pornography. When we try to take sex away from love, we succeed only in taking love away from sex. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 160

Sexual love and God

Since indeed God cannot be apprehended as an object, the love of God arises in us only as a vista, an endlessly receding horizon, beyound some human love. It is the transcendent dynamic of human love itself that makes it appropriate to speak of love of God. So, without the reality of human love, love of God would have no meaning.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Speaking of traditional Christian commentary on Song of Solomon, but rejection of physical sexuality, Charles Davis, Body as Spirit, responds: “There is nothing unhealthy in an eroticism that sees in sexual love a dynamic that both expresses and mediates man’s highest aspirations as a bodily person. But there is something unhealthy and corrupt in an eroticism that shrinks from the reality of sex while using its language and imagery.”

See “Symbol”

Sexual love, then, made into a symbol of divine love, may be a fantasy replacing the reality of s4exual love itself. This makes divine love a phatasmal relation, to be left behind as one grows toward maturity and health. But sexual love as a symbol of divine love may be the very reality of sexual love when rendered transparent in its meaning as the embodiment and expression, the felt dynamism of the love of God.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Sexual love is of its nature a symbol of union with God, because for bodily persons it is a liberating force that leads to God.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit, speaks of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as representative of the traditional attitude of preoccupation of control, sex, as our instinct gone wrong; as an appetite that must be brought under control, as also seen in Lewis’ book The Great Divorce. If there is to be a rich and genuine human responsiveness to reality in feeling; an openness to the joys and delights, the pain, suffering, and stress of human bodily experience; and an ability to relate to others in a free communication; then there must be a basic acceptance of sexuality and of the tone and quality with which it marks the totality of human living. This basic acceptance implies being in harmony and at ease with manifestations of sex more specific thatn the sexual coloring of all human experience.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Sex and Marriage

Christianity, and more particularly St. Paul, introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed not primarily for the procreation of children, but to prevent the sin of fornication. (I Cor. vii. 1‑9.)

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Sexual love is of its nature a symbol of union with God, because for bodily persons it is a liberating force that leads to God. . . . Genuine eros or sexual love is only possible where there is a degree of maturity. That longing for the other as a lost part of oneself is not the same as the desire to possess another in order to fill one’s own emptiness. . . . Sexual love, then, is not a remedy for an inadequacy of the self in its individual being, but a going beyond the individual self once securely established.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Sexual mores

Sexual love, unconditioned culturally and untrammeled by institutions, is not a reality but a creation of fantasy. . . . While I consider “free love” or “natural sex” without laws or institutions immature fantasies, I do not regard any of the laws, institutions, and customs regulating sexual activity as absolute. Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Skepticism

See “Man, Hope for”, “Dogma”, “Certainty” and “Tolerance”

Sin

Sin is anything which separates us from the love of God.

Melvin Nida

Edwin Robertson, writing of Bonhoeffer’s later concept of sin: “Man is certainly a sinner, but his sin lies not in those weaknesses which can be spied out, but in his strength. Goethe and Napoleon were sinners, not because they were unfaithful husbands, but because of the use of their strength. The Bible never spies out little sins, it deals with more serious issues than the scandal columns of the newspapers.

The Shame and the Sacrifice

A simple definition of sin is behavior that tends to destroy oneself and others.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

Sin means ‑ to quote John Wren‑Lewis ‑ that ‘human beings have voluntarily used those higher potentialities to create false ways of living in which the higher potentialities are denied.’

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

The Bible uses several words for sin. The most important is hata, “to miss” (a goal or the road; for instance, Prov. 19:2, “He who makes haste with his feet misses”). Another, avon, means “iniquity,” “guilt,” or “punishment” and has its root meaning “to err” (from the road). A third term is pesha, usually translated as “transgression,” used in the sense of rebellion.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

[See also “Repentance” and “God, Forgiveness”]

The real sin of the world is not the little moral wrongs we do, but a total reality we get caught in: structural or systemic sin; that which is done to us, by reason of our condition ‑ the traditional notion of original sin.

Friar Richard Rohr, “Breathing Under Water”, Twelve Steps and Spirituality

We got preoccupied with imputing guilt, we should confess the sin. But the original use of “sin”was simply naming a reality: what is happening that is so blinding, so addicting, keeping people from feeling, thinking their thoughts, keeping them addicted?

Friar Richard Rohr, “Breathing Under Water”, Twelve Steps and Spirituality

Until the demon is named, the darkness is recognized, it will trap us.

Friar Richard Rohr, “Breathing Under Water”, Twelve Steps and Spirituality

Romans 7: “Why do I do what I don’t want to do?” Romans 8: “This I know, in Christ there is no condemnation.”

John Bunyan on sin:

No sin is little itself; because it is a contradiction of the nature and majesty of God.

Sins go not alone, but folow one another as do the links of a chain.

One leak will sink a ship; and one sin will destroy a sinner.

He that lives in sin and hopes for happiess hereafter, is like him that soweth cockle and thinks to fill his barn with wheat and barley.

Crush sin in the conception, lest it bring forth death in thy soul.

Sin is nothing else than that the creature wills other than God wills, and contrary to Him.

Theologia Germanica

See also “Certainty” and “Tolerance”

Sin, Confession of

To confess our sins is to name them: this is what I am doing, this is what I am, this is what I am becoming. . . . Confession is a fearless moral inventory: Admit to God, admit to self, admit to another.

Friar Richard Rhor, “Breathing Under Water”, Twelve Steps and Spirituality

We do not come to God by getting rid of sin; rather we come to God through our sin and our brokenness.

Friar Richard Rhor, “Breathing Under Water”, Twelve Steps and Spirituality

Sin, Original

We human beings do not live in sin. We are not born in sin. We do not need to have the stain of our original sin washed away in baptism. We are not fallen creatures who will lose salvation if we are not baptized. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 98

Song of Songs

Bonhoeffer said he would rather read Song of Songs as a straight love poem, “that is probably the best “Christological” exposition.

Soul

Jung: the soul cannot exist in peace until it finds its other.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

This soul which is a synthetic unity in action, escapes the grasp of Science, whose work is essentially that of analyzing things in their elements and their material antecedents; only intuition and philosophical reflection can discover it.

Nicolas Corte quoting Teilhard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

According to St. Thomas the soul is not transmitted with the semen, but is created afresh with each man. There is, it is true, a difficulty: when a man is born out of wedlock, this seems to make God an accomplice in adultery. This objection, however, is only specious. There is a grave objection which troubled St. Augustine, and that is as to the transmission of original sin. It is the soul that sins, and if the soul is not transmitted, but created afresh, how can it inherit the sin of Adam? This is not discussed by St. Thomas.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

You know the disease in Central Africa called sleeping sickness. . . . There also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Its most dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take it as a warning. You should realize that your soul suffers if you live superficially. People need times in which to concentrate, when they can search their inmost selves. It is tragic that most men have not achieved this feeling of self‑awareness. And finally when they hear the inner voice they do not want to listen anymore. They carry on as before so as not to be constantly reminded of what they have lost. But as for you, resolve to keep a quiet time both in your homes and here within these peaceful walls when the bells ring on Sundays. Then your souls can speak to you without being drowned out by the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Albert Schweitzer

It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won’t realize until it will be too late. And others harm their souls even without being exposed to great temptations. They simply let their souls wither.

Albert Schweitzer

What does the word “soul” mean? . . . No one can give a definition of the soul. But we know what it feels like. The soul is the sense of something higher than ourselves, something that stirs in us thoughts, hopes, and aspirations which go out to the world of goodness, truth and beauty. The soul is the burning desire to breathe in this world of light and never to lose it ‑ to remain children of light.

Albert Schweitzer

Soul, its seat

Novalis said, “The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Spirit

Jung: it is no accident so many languages use the form of “spirit” for liquor.

Friar Richard Rhor, “Breathing Under Water”, Twelve Steps and Spirituality

Spirit means breath, and mind means measure, and thinking points to a thing; nevertheless these are the crass media thrugh which the sould must express itself. ‑Durant on Bergson Spirituality, and the center The shift from a geocentric to heliocentric world view seemed to have removed man from the center ‑ and the center seemed so important. Spiritually, however, the center is where sight is. The result is an unprecedented expansion of horizon.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Spirit, and determinism

Spirit will always, as it has so far, succeed in standing up to determinism and chance. It represents the indestructible part of the universe.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin quoting Teilhard.

Spirit, and Matter

“The cosmic Sense and the Christly Sense definitely coexisted in my heart and irresistibly drew towards each other.” In later life Teilhard wrote, “In fact, and even at the highest point of my spiritual trajectory, I only find myself completely at ease when bathed in an ocean of Matter.”

Teilhard quoted by Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Teilhard de Chardin outlines “The Atomism of Spirit” pp. 21‑57 (1941):

A starting point: the fact and the problem of the plurality of man
First preliminary observations: the dimensional zones of the universe
Second preliminary observation: the complexity of living matter
The shaft of light: complexity and consciousness Consciousness as an effect of complexity
Moleculization and hominization: noogenesis ‘Complexity = Centricity = Consciousness’ (1) ‘Synthesis = Centration = Interiorization’ (2)
The continuation of the movement: the spirit of the earth VII. The breakthrough ahead, and
reversal upon omega point
Atom‑consciousness and ‘omegalization’

Ever since man reflected, and the more he reflected, the opposition between spirit and matter has constantly risen up as an ever higher barrier across the road that climbs up to a better awareness of the universe: and in this lies the deep‑rooted origin of all our troubles.

Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy p. 23

The senses are the organs through which the live creature participates directly in the goings of the world about him. Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of the interaction of the organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication. Oppositions of mind and body, soul and matter, spirit and flesh all have their origin, fundamentally, in fear of what life may bring forth.

John Dewey, Art as Experience

Note also the “Mass upon Things” of Teilhard de Chardin to which Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: his Life and Spirit refers in his quote of Teilhard at page 26: “As I pray, I gradually work out a bit better my ‘Mass upon Things.’ It seems to me that in a sense the true elements that have to be consecrated every day are the growth of the world that day: the bread symbolizing appropriately what creation manages to produce, the wine (blood) what it loses, through exhaustion and suffering in its labor.”

The introduction of the supernatural into belief and the all too human easy reversion to the supernatural is much more an affair of the psychology that generates works of art than of effort at scientific and philosophic explanation. Theologies and cosmogonies have laid hold of imagination because they have been attended with solemn processions, incense, embroidered robes, music, the radiance of colored lights, with stories that stir wonder and induce hypnotic admiration. That is, they have come to man through a direct appeal to sense and to sensuous imagination.

John Dewey, Art as Experience

Henry Adams made it clear that the theology of the middle ages is a demonstration of the power of sense to absorb the most highly spiritualized ideas. Pater is quoted to say, “The Christianity of the middle ages made its way partly by its esthetic beauty, a thing so profoundly felt by the Latin hymn writers, who for one moral or spiritual sentiment had a hundred sensuous images. [See Aguido, who would affirm the sensuous.]

John Dewey, Art as Experience

John Dewey, Art as Experience, cites Keats to make the following point: all reasoning in search of truth must include imagination; otherwise, it becomes sterile. Keats:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty ‑ that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

For Bergson, the propulsive life was best known in the living of it, “bathing in the full stream of experience.”

Foreword to Creative Evolution

Quotes That I Have Gathered – R

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Realism and illness

In their unsuccessful effort to fulfill their needs, no matter what behavior they choose, all patients have a common characteristic: they all deny the reality of the world around them.

Scott Peck? Or reality therapy, Glasser?

Relativity

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, speaks of relativity:

For Newton, time and space formed an absolute framework within which the material events of the world ran their course in imperturbable order. His is a God’s eye view of the world: it looks the same way to every observer, wherever he is and however he travels. By contrast, Einstein’s is a man’s eye view, in which what you see and what I see is relative to each of us, that is, to our place and speed. And this relativity cannot be removed. We cannot know what the world is like in itself, we can only compare what it looks like to each of us, by the practical procedure of exchanging messages.

Like Newton and all scientific thinkers, Einstein was in a deep sense a unitarian. That comes from a profound insight into the processes of nature herself, but particularly into the relations between man, knowledge, nature. Physics is not events but observations. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.

Religion

Eric Fromm defined it as that which gives man orientation and an object of devotion.

Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion

J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic, defines religion as an attitude toward that which is believed to be ultimate evoking responses of awe and reverence which in turn effect and set standards for behavior.

Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads as long as we reach the same goal. In reality there are as many different religions as there are individuals.

Gandhi

To connect with the great river we all need a path, but when you get down there there’s only one river.

Matthew Fox

I cannot speak of religion but I must lament that among so many pretenders to it so few understand what it means; some placing it in the understanding, in orthodox notions and opinions; and all the account they can give of their religion is that they are of this or the other persuasion. . . . Others place it in the outward man, in a constant course of external duties and a model of performances; if they live peaceably with their neighbors, keep a temperate diet, observe the returns of worship, frequenting the church or their closet, and sometimes extend their hands to the relief of the poor, they think they have sufficiently acquitted themselves. Others again put all religion in the affections, in rapturous hearts and ecstatic devotion; and all they aim at is to pry with passion and to think of heaven with pleasure, and to be affected with those kind and melting expressions wherewith they court their Savior til they persuade themselves that they are mightily in love with him, and from thence assume a great confidence of their salvation, which they esteem the chief of Christian graces.

Thus are those things which have any resemblance of piety, and at the best are but means of obtaining it or particular exercises of it, frequently mistaken for the whole of religion; nay, sometimes widkedness and vice pretend to that name. . . . [T]here are too many Christians who would consecrate their vices and hallow their corrupt affections . . .

True religion is a union of the sould with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upothe sould, or, in the apostle’s phrase, it is Christ formed within us. Briefly, I know not how the nature of religion can be more fully expressed than by calling it a divine life. . . .

I choose to express it by the name of life; First, because of its permanence and stability. Religion is not a sudden start or passion of the mind; not though it should rise to the height of a rapture and seem to transport a man to extraordinary performances.

Henry Scougal

Religion and language

Paul Tillich was acutely aware that contemporary Protestantism is moribund, largely because the language of tradition speaks little to believers, let alone those outside the church. He asserts protestantism has almost exhausted itself by its identification with dominant powers in the environment: convulsive nationalism and bourgeois interests. Hence the need for radical protest, which must include rejection of outdated terminology. We must speak to our present condition.

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion, summarizes, “New life demands new words ‑ first to slay death and then to summon daring novelty.”

Tillich opined that the traditional language of theology, despite any value it may have to the expert, tends to create a gulf between church and world, theologian and layman. That language often obscures and even perverts the essential message of the church.

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion.

Tillich says, “Insofar as our understanding of the words of the Bible requires us to separate ourselves from the here‑and‑now, from our own contemporaneity, they are not the Word of God.”

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

Tillich stated, “This method is intended only as an attempt that will be followed by other and better ones, so that we may see with our own eyes and name with our own words that which is not bound to any time or any eye or any word.”

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

Religion and life

“In our family there was no clear line between religion and a trout line.”

The opening line to his book, A River Runs Through It

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. . . . Fear is the basis of the whole thing ‑ fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. . . . Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the Churches in all these centuries have made it.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Tillich, “Religious knowledge is knowledge of reality.” James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

Tillich: “Something very tragic tends to happen in all periods of man’s spiritual life: truths once deep and powerful, discovered by the great geniuses with profound suffering and incredible labor, become shallow and superficial when used in daily conversation. How can this happen? It can happen and it unavoidably happens, because there is no depth without the way to depth. Truth without the way to truth is dead; and if it is still used, in detachment, it contributes only to the surface of things.”

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

Tillich would approach reality by an immediate approach through “phenomenological intuition.” “We turn neither to the authorities nor to religious consciousness, but immediately to the whole of reality, and endeavor to uncover the level of reality which is intended by the religious act.”

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

I should classify as pre‑religious all those feelings that express an awareness of human limits or finitude.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Religion and mysticism

Religions are addressing social problems and ethics instead of the mystical experience.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Religion and science

It is fashionable to state that religion and science can never clash because they deal with different topics. I believe that solution is entirely mistaken.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

See also Kuhn’s Does God Exist which deals with faith at the limits of knowledge; also Hawkin’s A Brief History of Time

Religion, progress in

The progress of religion is defined by the denunciation of gods. The keynote of idolatry is contentment with the prevalent gods. . . . The factor of human life provocative of noble discontent is the gradual emergence into prominence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciations of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

I hazard the prophecy that that religion will conquer which can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness incarnate in the passage of temporal fact.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Religion and the secular

Paul Tillich’s theological writings are almost secular so that Tillich is sometimes spoken of as an apostle to the Gentiles.

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

In “Belief‑ful Realism,” Tillich sets out his ideas without the use of “religious” symbols. The method of phenomenological intuition insists that the real basis of theological thought is human existence itself and not certain sacrosanct words fixed by the crust of habit or the tradition of schools. The methods of the schools derive concepts from concepts instead of from objects.

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

See, also Bonhoeffer

Religion and Social Change

While Luther received his inspiration regarding the reformation in a cloistered room, Muentzer received the need for revolution by participating in the social movements of his time. Consequently, while Luther’s reformation, by disregarding the dimension of social reformation, brought into being a church for citizens of the middle class, Muentzer pushed simultaneously for a religious reformation and for a social reformation which would secure the rights of the urban poor and the peasants. He said, “All the members of society must have the power of the word. Then the minjung become free and only God remains the Lord of the minjung.”

Suh Nam‑Dong, Minjung Theology

Religion and Supernaturalism

The fact that Barth, though his supernaturalism and his static confessionalism, has set himself against everything theology concerned with “the actual state of reality and with its transformation: is for Tillich “the most painful and downright disastrous event in recent Protestant theology.”

James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion

Religion and truth

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

In his book Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell reaffirmed his basic conviction that ‘all religions are both harmful and untrue’. Religion, if it is not to be harmful, must be free of dangerous elements ‑ suspicion, fear, and hate ‑ which lead step by step to escalate organized persecution.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Religion, its highest message

There is the highest message of religion: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these. . . . ”

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Repentance

The meaning of sin as missing the right road corresponds to the term for repent, which is shuv, meaning to return. There is no need for contrition or self‑accusation in the Jewish concept. Man is free and independent. He is even independent from God. Hence his sin is his sin, his return is his return, and there is no reason for self‑accusatory submission.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

See also “Sin” and “God, Forgiveness”

Ezekiel 18:23 expresses the principle beautifully: “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? says the Lord God, and not rather that he should return from his ways and live?”

Responsibility

Responsibility is the ability to fulfill one’s needs in a way that does not deprive others of the ability to fulfill their needs.

Glasser, Reality Therapy.

The problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved. To make this assessment and reassessment requires a willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self‑examination.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity, be it “fate” or “society” or the government or the corporation or our boss. It is for this reason that Eric Fromm so aptly titled his study of Nazism and authoritarianism Escape from Freedom.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Frequently our choices lie between the lesser of two evils, but it is still within our power to make these choices.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

(See Bonhoeffer: “Sin and sin boldly, but love Christ more boldly still.”)

Responsibility and illness

People do not act irresponsibly because they are ill; they are ill because they act irresponsibly.

Dr. Wm. Glasser, Reality Therapy

Responsibility, parental

Parents who are willing to suffer the pain of the child’s intense anger by firmly holding him to the responsible course are teaching him a lesson that will help him all his life.

Glasser, Reality Therapy

Taking the responsible course will never permanently alienate the child.

Glasser, Reality Therapy

Responsibility, personal

Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the short‑comings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class or our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of Karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Revelation

Revelation as a real “public disclosure” is actually accomplished only in the response of faith from within a very concrete situation with its own conceptual horizon and field of questioning. And our questioning is other than those of times past.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Reverence for Life

The deeper we look intonature the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly weknow that all life is a secret, and we are all united to all this life.

Albert Schweitzer

All thinking must renounce the attempt to explain the universe. . . . The spirit of the universe is at once destructive and creative ‑ it creates while it destroys, and destroys while it creates . . . and we must inevitably resign ourselves to this. ‑ Albert Schweitzer Reverence for life comprises the whole ethic of love in its deepest and highest sense. It is the source of constant renewal for the individual and for mankind.

Albert Schweitzer

Just as white light consists of colored rays, so Reverence for Life contains all the components of ethics; love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness, power to forgive.

Albert Schweitzer

Nature looks beautiful and marvelous when youview it fromthe outside. But when you read its pages like a book, it is horrible. And its cruelty is so senseless! The most precious form of life is sacrificed to the lowliest.

Albert Schweitzer

We, too, are under the painful law of necessity when, to prolong our own existence, we must bring other creatures to a painful end. But we should never cease to consider this as something tragic and incomprehensible.

Albert Schweitzer

Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called in diminishing the pain of others.

Albert Schweitzer [Schweitzer refers to the “fellowship of those who bear the Mark of Pain.”]

Ritual

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, speaks of the making of the Japanese sword since AD 800: “The making of the sword, like all ancient metallurgy, is surrounded with ritual, and that is for a clear reason. When you have no written language, when you have nothing that can be called a chemical formula, then you must have a precise ceremonial which fixes the sequence of operations so that they are exact and memorable. . . . So there is a kind of laying on of hands, an apostolic succession, by which one generation blesses and gives to the next the materials, blesses the fire, and blesses the sword‑maker.

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Quotes That I Have Gathered – P

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Paradise

What is Paradise? All things that are; for all are goodly and pleasant, and therefore may fitly be called a paradise. It is said also that Paradise is an outer court of heaven. Even so, this world is verily an outer court of the Eternal or of eternity, and especially whatever in time or any temporal things or creatures manifests or reminds us of God or eternity; for the creatures are a guide and a path unto God and eternity. thus this world is an outer court of eternity, and therefore it may well be called a paradise, for it is such in truth. . . . [o]f all things that are, nothing is forbidden and nothing is contrary to God but one thing only: that is self‑will, or to will otherwise than as the Eternal Will would have it.

Theologia Germanica.

Peace

Pope’s Peace Points of Christmas, 1940, as extended by letter in The Times 21 December 1940 of the English church leaders:

1. The crying inequality in the standard of life and possessions must be abolished;

2. Every child, of whatever race or color, is to have the same opportunities for education;

3. The family is to be protected as a social unit;

4. The consciousness of divine calling is to be restored to human work;

5. The natural treasures of the earth are to be safeguarded, with due regard to future generations, as God’s gifts to all mankind.

Edwin Robertson, The Shame and the Sacrifice

The perfect state of mind and body and speech . . . is always a case of intense mental struggle.

Gandhi

Philosophy

There can be no successful democratic society till general education conveys a philosophic outlook.

Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

[Philosophy] is a survey of possibilities and their comparison with actualities. . . . Its gifts are insight and foresight, and a sense of the worth of life, in short, that sense of importance which nerves all civilized effort. . . . But when civilization culminates, the absence of a coordinating philosophy of life, spread throughout the community, spells decadence, boredom, and the slackening of effort.

Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Rideau says in The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin we should remember, however, that one of the properties of every philosophy is that it bears the mark of one man’s character, and reflects a personal choice.

Philosophy is an attempt to develop a coherent understanding of the whole of human experience as reflected in man’s relationship to the world. J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic

J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic, quotes E.S. Brighton: “Philosophy differs from religion in that religion consists of attitudes of concern, devotion or worship, and conduct, whereas philosophy is a rational understanding. . . .

” It is not the function of philosophy ‑ so they maintain ‑ teach something that uneducated people do not know; on the contrary, its function is to teach superior persons that they are not as superior as they thought they were, and those who are REALLY superior can show their skill by making sense of common sense.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Love and knowledge and delight in beauty are not negations; they are enough to fill the lives of the great men that have ever lived.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Philosophy, catch phrases

One would think that Descartes lived just to emit a line of staggering profundity: “I think, therefore I am.” . . . I find it difficult to be impressed by “I think, therefore I am.” One might as well say, “I have a toothache, therefore I exist.” These catchwords are tricky things, I don’t think they serve the cause of creative thought in philosophy.

Albert Schweitzer

Philosophy, definition of

[Philosophy is in the field of speculation where one goes out to look for oneself what the world is, and what it is about. It asks the following questions:]

1. . . . [W]hat is the meaning of life, if indeed it have any at all. Has the world a purpose, does the unfolding of history lead somewhere, or are these senseless questions?

2. There there are problems such as whether nature really is ruled by laws, or whether we merely think this is so because we we like to see things in some order. Again, there is the general query whether the world is divided into two disparate parts, mind and matter, and, if so, how they hang together.

3. And what are we to say of man? Is he a speck of dust crawling helplessly on a small and unimportant planet, as the astronomers see it? Or is he, as the chemist might hold, a heap of chemicals put together in some cunning way? Or finally, is a man what he appears to Hamlet, noble in reason, infinite in faculty? Is man, perhaps, all of these at once?

4. Along with this are the ethical questions about good and evil. Is there a way of life that is good, and another that is bad, or is it indifferent how we live?

Bertrand Russell

Philosophy, and observation

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, is critical of philosophers who claim they have a better road to knowledge than that of observation. He particularly attacked Hegel, who had attempted to prove philosophically there could only be seven planets ‑ as the eight was discovered.

Philosophy, universal phenomenology

Reality presents itself to experience as an immense sum of phenomena, belonging to different levels of beings, and forming one organic structural whole, potentially intelligible. . . . Phenomenology is positive and scientific. But it goes beyond to the logical reason for the real and finds the ultimate criterion of truth in the “total coherence of the universe. . . . It is inspired by fundamental choice: the affirmation of being.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

The time of the world, far from being an indefinite oscillation or flow, is a genesis and its passage is not the logical unfolding of something pre‑contained but the creative new production of an increase of being.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Phenomenology must necessarily be universal and synthetic of the whole. It rejects dualism of matter and spirit: it affirms a fundamental link between man and the world, body to soul.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard de Chardin’s phenomenology includes

1. cosmology ‑ natural philosophy of matter and life based upon data of science

2. anthropology ‑ science of man, his nature and existential vocation

3. metaphysics ‑ science of the origin of being and the absolute conditions of existence: here philosophy affirms God by reason

4. Ontology ‑ science of being, of its degrees or levels (Teilhard calls them spheres)

5. Theology ‑ science of what we receive from revelation. In Teilhard, theology is carried further by spirituality

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard’s quest has an existential character in that it centers on the problem of men’s fulfillment in solidarity with the universe, and defines the conditions of that fulfillment.

Teilhard rejects from the outset the Kantian inquiry, “What can we know?” The world is presented to knowledge, subject to the necessary methods. . . . His ideas do not exist in a world apart from matter, but emanate from observations of matter and experience.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Piety

I acknowledge that you ought not to act before the public a scene of ostentatious conversion, which might produce ill‑natured remarks. True piety never demands these demonstrations. Two things only are necessary; the one is, not to set a bad example, that we may never have to blush for the religion of Jesus; the other is to do without affectation and without eclat whatever a sincere love to God demands.

Francois Fenelon

Power, coercive power and the messianic time

The prophets are revolutionaries who rob force and power of their moral and religious disguises:

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer: you shall cry, and he will say, Here I am.

“If you take away from the midst of you the yoke, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.”

Isaiah 58:1‑10 quoted by Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Prayer

You are your prayers. This is why we can pray without ceasing. It is a will toward conformity with God.

Margaret Suchocki

So praying and living deeply, richly, and fully have become for me almost indistinguishable. Perhaps, I conclude, that is what the apostle Paul meant when he said, “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17 KJV) or “constantly” (RSV). We are to llive as if everything we say and do is a prayer, calling others to life, to love, and to being.

I can only imagine, I could never guarantee, that when life is lived this way, an enormous amount of spiritual energy is loosened into the body politic of the whole society. I can imagine that this energy is an agent in bringing wholeness and even healing. . . . All I know is that when I express my love, concern, and caring in thought, in word, and in deed, then somehow that expression has the opportunity to make a difference. . . .

Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, pp. 144, 145.

Unnamed sin is perpetuated sin.

Margaret Suchocki

Do not be discouraged at your faults; bear with yourself in correcting them, as you would with your neighbor. Lay aside this ardor of mind which exhausts your body and leads you to commit errors. Accustom yourself gradually to carry prayer into your daily occupations. Speak, move, act in peace, as if you were in prayer. In truth, this is prayer.

Do everything without eagerness, as if by the spirit of God. As soon as you perceive your natural impetuosity impelling you, retire into the sanctuary, where dwells the Father of spirits. Listen to what you hear there, and then neither say nor do anything but what He dictates to your heart.

You will find that you will become more tranquil; that your words will be fewer and more to the purpose, and that with less effort you will accomplish more good. I do not recommend here a perpetual struggle of the understanding for something impracticable, but a habit of quietness and peace in which you may take counsel of God with regard to duty. . . . [W]ait for the favorable moment when the voice within may speak. . . . Endeavor to acquire a habit of looking to this light within you; then all your life will gradually become a prayer. You may suffer, but you will find peace in suffering.

Francois Fenelon

Kinds of prayer:

1. [T]here is one sort of prayer wherein we make use of the voice, which is necessary in public, and may sometimes have its own advantages in private; and

2. another wherein, though we utter no sound, yet we conceive the expressions and form the words, as it were, in our minds;

3. so there is a third and more sublime kind of prayer wherein the soul takes a higher flight, and having collected all its forces by long and serious meditation, it darts (if I may so speak) toward God in sighs and groans and thoughts too big for expression. This mental prayer is of all others the most effectual to purify the soul and dispose it unto a holy and religious temper . . . Yet I do not recommend this sort of prayer to supersede the use of the other; for we have so many things to pray for . . .

Henry Scougal

Prayer of Confession

Sin is a lie. Confessional prayer clears the path. To fail to consciously acknowledge our sin is to endorse the sin by omission.

Margaret Suchocki

The problem with confessing sin is that we must now do something about it. Confession calls us to restitution, correction.

Margaret Suchocki

Preaching

Preaching and teaching are subversive in the best sense: they strike at the roots of what we are.

Bill McElvaney, “Worship and Literature”, Fellowship of Learning, January 1989.

“Preferential option for the poor.”

Friar Richard Rohr, “Breathing Under Water”, Twelve Steps and Spirituality, uses the phrase “preferential option for the poor” in relation to the twelve steps: “Until we recognize, love, forgive and embrace the poor part of yourself, you will not hear the gospel.” . . . The Church rediscovers Christ in the “least of these.” ‑ the only description Christ gave of the end days says we will be judged on the extent in which we saw Christ in “the least of these.” . . . We must discover the “hole in the sole (soul) where we are powerless/life is unmanageable, “I cannot do it.” What is not received is not redeemed. Until the hole in the soul is recognized, named, and owned, we cannot be redeemed.

Prejudice

Perhaps there is scarce any child of man that is not at some time a little touched by prejudice, so far at least as to be troubled, though not wounded. But it does not hurt unless it fixes upon the mind. It is not strength of understanding which can prevent this. The heart, which otherwise suffers most by it,makes the resistance which only is effectual. I cannot easily be prejudiced against any person whom I tenderly love till that love declines.

John Wesley

[Education is not the complete answer to prejudice. Witness Germany. I have said that values are at the root of it. Wesley says it is the heart. Priority of values is determined by need and desire.

RW 3‑28‑92]

Problems

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them. We must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it. . . . Many avoid the pain of their problems by saying to themselves: “This problem was caused me by other people, or by social circumstances beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people or society to solve this problem for me. It is not really my personal problem.”

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Quotes That I Have Gathered – O

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Omega Point

Teilhard’s goal was to bridge science and philosophy. Biologists on the whole would likely accept the following propositions:

1. the increase of unification in structures as advance of life is achieved;

2. the correspondence between external complexity and level of interiority;

3. the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity: matter, life and mankind, although bound together as one are yet separated by thresholds.

For the majority of scientists these laws, which imply a belief in transformism, hold no difficulty in principle. The real quarrel comes when these propositions are taken to their extreme limit: Omega Point. This is contested not only by materialistic atheism, but by the scientific method itself. This affirmance is very important to Teilhard: a dynamic finality of the ascending movement of the cosmos implies a transcendent being. Pere Danielson was right in congratulating Teilhard on having, in the face of modern skepticism and the crisis that threatened truth (even scientific), laid down the metaphysical basis of truth.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Links to my site:

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Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – N

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Nations, strife

Schweitzer, noting two chickens fighting: “Big nations are like those chickens. They also like to make big noises.”

Best of Playboy Interviews, December 1963

Needs

Whereas Freud saw unmet needs in the neurotic to be sex and aggression, Glasser says they are needs of relatedness and respect. One effectively satisfies these needs by doing what is realistic, responsible and right.

Dr. Wm. Glasser, Reality Therapy

Responsibility is the ability to fulfill one’s needs in a way that does not deprive others of the ability to fulfill their needs.

Dr. Wm. Glasser, Reality Therapy

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – M

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Man, and God

A human being is not God but the image of God.

Jung Young Lee, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

The most fundamental statement of the Bible in regard to the nature of man is that man is made in the image of God.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

“Thou hast made him [man] little lower than God [or gods, or the angels; in Hebrew elohim].”

Psalm 8, quoted by Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Man is to acquire and practice the main qualities that characterize God: justice and love. Micah 6:8 states, “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness [or steadfast love], and to walk humbly with your God?” Man is not God, but if he acquires God’s qualities, he is not beneath God, but walks with him.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

The idea that man has been created in the image of God leads not only to the concept of man’s equality with God, or even freedom from God, it also leads to a central humanist conviction that every man carries within himself all of humanity.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Man, as basically good

Schweitzer, when asked whether man’s historical predilection toward warfare belies the concept that he is basically good: “Why should man exist if he is bad? All living things have an elemental goodness, but in mankind, his true nature is often largely submerged, like a log in the river, by the environment he has created about him. But simply because it is submerged does not mean that idealism does not exist and despite times of pessimism I think the day will come when the idealism is allowed its full function and flowering.”

Schweitzer, Best of Playboy Interviews, Dec. 1963

8‑25‑90 Why is man basically good if he does so much that is bad. From a secular point of view, perhaps it can be explained starting from Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of human life as matter aware of itself, the apex of that continuum of self‑awareness, as far as we know. Fromm speaks of the problem of self‑awareness and alienation: the transcendental dilemma. Until we recognize that the very structures that give rise to individual (and even social) being, is dependent upon and related to the universe. When viewed in this way, there is no total independence, but we are all dependent. As matter directing its own energies, what we do effects other matter and other life. If we act AS IF we were independent of the universe, we hurt ourselves by depriving ourselves of the support of that universe, and we hurt the universe by disrupting the mutual relationship. Evil can exist only where there is will that disrupts relationship: sin as separation from the love of God. The good cannot be separated from the evil, indeed our very action is for some good, and for others evil. As Schweitzer noted, his philosophy of “reverence for life” does not mean that we never harm life. To use an antibiotic destroys microbic life. That does not mean that we refuse to act to the save the life of a man, but it must be done recognizing its effect upon other life, and with respect for that life. In the sense of Luther, and more so Bonhoeffer, “Sin and sin boldly, but love Christ more boldly still.” Christ as the messiah, the true messiah, is the bringer of harmonious relationship in the world as the ultimate goal of our lives.

Man, as Nature aware of itself

Fromm sees a basic contradiction within man: “that of being in nature and at the same time of transcending nature by the fact that he is life aware of itself.”

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

See, also, Teilhard de Chardin, in his concept of consciousness in nature deepened with increasing complexity of organization of nature.

Man is beset by the existential dichotomy of being within nature and yet transcending it by the fact of having self‑awareness and choice; he can solve this dicotomy only by going forward.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

To see, to perceive, is more than to recognize. . . . All deliberation, all conscious intent, grows out of things once performed organically through the interplay of natural energies. The distinguishing contribution of man is consciousness of the relations found in nature.

John Dewey, Art as Experience

Man, Autonomy of

Bonhoeffer noted in prison a concept of “man come of age”, occurring about the thirteenth century: “Man has learnt to deal with himself in all important questions without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God.'” We do not need God to solve scientific problems. “For the last hundred years or so it has become increasingly true of religious questions also; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without ‘God’ ‑ and in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, ‘God’ is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground.’

Man, awakened

Fromm holds that a fully “awakened” man is possible only as a philosophical and religious insight. “. . . One must keep in mind that any such concept as the art of living grows from the soil of a spiritual humanistic orientation, as it underlies the teachings of Buddha, of the prophets, of Jesus, of Meister Eckhart, or of men such as Blake, Walt Whitman, or Bucke.”

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

Man, foresight

We have to put off the decision‑making process in order to accumulate enough knowledge as a preparation for the future. . . . That is what childhood is about, that is what puberty is about, that is what youth is about. . . . [Example of Hamlet is used.] . .. In man, before the brain is an instrument of action, it has to be an instrument for preparation.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Man, hope for

Bertrand Russell was asked about his old age and what he had not achieved:

Since boyhood, my life has been devoted to two different objectives which for a long time remained separate . . . One has been to discover whether anything could actually be known; this was a matter of philosophical inquiry. The other has been to do whatever I could to help create a happier world. . . . It is easier to have an immense effect if you dogmatically preach a precise gospel such as communism. But I do not believe that mankind needs anything dogmatic. I think it essential to teach a certain hesitancy about dogma. Whatever you believe, you must have reservations. You must envisage the possibility that you may be wrong. I have lived in pursuit of a vision, both personal and social, noble, beautiful, . . . gentle, . . . insight, . . . imagination, . . . attainable society in which hate and greed and envy would die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I still believe. So you can see that the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

Best of Playboy Interviews, March 1963

Man, in estrangement

Concept of estrangement: man’s separation or alienation from something with which he “ought” to be united.

Hammond on Tillich’s method of theology, Man in Estrangement.

Fromm sought to combine the “science of man” with a philosophical perspective with roots in Rennaisance, Enlightenment, and 19th century existentialist sources.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

Hegel noted man’s original unity of “life”, including God, nature and man. This life loses its “immature” unity as it develops, becoming differentiated into various oppositions: man and nature, master and slave, duty and inclination, divinity and humanity. These opposites persist as estrangements until life in the one discovers life in the other, through love.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

Feurbach (1804‑1872) maintains that man (as “nature” a natural being) projects his own essence into objectivity and view it as God. Estrangement for Feurbach becomes a movement within man’s self‑consciousness rather than God’s.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

For Marx, man’s loss of himself in the objects which he creates is the primary alienation; religious estrangement is merely a reflection in consciousness of this alienation in real life. . . . Marx’s criticisms of Hegel and Feurbach are essentially the same: both view estrangement abstractly as a movement within consciousness rather than concretely as a movement which has an objective reality. . . . For Marx, man creates the world in which he lives; he “produces” nature itself The external world becomes alien to man when man’s own productive activity with regard to the world is alienated activity.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

For Tillich, estrangement is the separation of a being from its “essential nature,” as an alienation of existence from “essence.” This is reminiscent of both Hegel and Plato. Sartre, on the other hand, is usually interpreted as having rejected the idea that man has a fixed nature.

Tillich essentially reproduces the Hegelian understanding of man’s separation from and reunion with God: “man discovers himself when he discovers God; he discovers something that is identical with himself although it transcends him infinitely, something from which he is estranged, but from which he never has been and never can be separated. . . . This is what is meant in Tillich’s usage by the term self‑estrangement: man is separated from his own true being.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement

Man, Self‑determination

Man is never fully conditioned in the sense of being determined by any facts or forces. Rather man is ultimately self‑determining ‑ determining not only his fate but even his own self for man is not only forming and shaping the course of his life but also his very self. . . Man is not only responsible for what he does but also for what he is, inasmuch as man does not only behave according to what he is but also becomes according to how he behaves.

Philomena Agudo quoting Victor Frankl, Affirming the Human and the Holy

We are not computers that follows routines laid down at birth.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Man, Nature of Man

The secret of Man does not lie in the early stages of his embryonic (ontogenetic or phylogenetic) life which he has now passed beyond; it lies in the spiritual nature of his soul. But this soul which is a synthetic unity in action, escapes the grasp of Science, whose work is essentially that of analyzing things in their elements and their material antecedents; only intuition and philosophical reflection can discover it.

Nicolas Corte quoting Teilhard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Marriage

Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in relationship.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Marriage is not a love affair. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. You and the other are one.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

The Puritans called marriage “the little church with the Church.” In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament ‑ love and forgiveness. Sacrifice in marriage is not to the other, but to the relationship.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Matter, and Spirit

There are two traditions of explanation that march side by side in the ascent of man. One is the analysis of the physical structure of the world. The other is the study of the processes of life: their delicacy, their diversity, the wavering cycles from life to death in the individual and the species. And these traditions do not come together until the theory of evolution.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Teilhard quoted by Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Corte says Teilhard first studied geology and geography. There Teilhard found “the primacy of Matter ‑ Matter expressing itself in Mineral and Rock.” Later he developed interests in Palaentology and then in Prehistory. And then to physics. “On each side of Matter stood Life and Energy: the three pillars of my vision and happiness.”

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Teilhard said of his development of the notion of evolution: “just at the right moment, like a seed sprung from In don’t know where.” This notion, says Corte, was stirred by Bergson’s Creative Evolution, 1906. It is much broader than that of Darwin and Lamarck, more like, as Corte describes it “the very law of the Universe created in Space‑Time.”

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

In a letter to Abbe Breuil, Teilhard noted that despite his absorption in Science, he continually, on reflection, comes back to the clear realization and conviction “that the Science of Christ in all things, that is the true science of mysticism, is the only one that matters . . . As I pray, I gradually work out a bit better my “Mass on Things.” It seems to me that in a sense the true elements that have to be consecrated every day are the growth of the world that day: the bread symbolizing appropriately what creation manages to produce, the wine (blood) what it loses, through exhaustion and suffering in its labor.”

See also “Duality” and “Evolution”

Meekness

Meekness in itself is nought else, but a true knowing and feeling of a man’s self as he is.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Messiah, and hope

The rabbinical literature gave warning again and again against trying to “force the messiah.” The attitude required is neither one of rash impatience nor of passive waiting; it is one of dynamic hope. This hope is, indeed, paradoxical.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Messiah, false messiahs

The US inherits and perpetuates the doctrines of manifest destiny, the exploitative mentality. The message of minjung theology to North Americans may be a warning against the evil consequences of arrogating to ourselves a messianic role. The message about true messianic zeal also contains a warning about false messiahs.

Robert McAfee Brown, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective.

Messianic politics

The 1973 Korean Christian Declaration states:

Jesus the Messiah, our Lord, lived and dwelt among the oppressed, poverty‑stricken, and sick in Judea. He boldly confronted Pontius Pilate, a representative of the Roman Empire, and he was crucified while witnessing to the truth. He has risen from the dead, releasing the power to transform and set the people free. We resolve that we will follow the footsteps of our Lord, living among our oppressed and poor people, standing against political oppression, and participating in the transformation of history, for this is the only way to the Messianic Kingdom.

Choo Chai‑Yong, Minjung Theology

Metaphysics

Speculative extension beyond direct observation spells some trust in metaphysics, however vaguely these metaphysical notions may be entertained in explicit thought. Our metaphysical knowledge is slight, superficial, incomplete. Thus errors creep in. But, such as it is, metaphysical understanding guides imagination and justifies purpose. Apart from metaphysical presupposition there can be no civilization.

Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Millennianism, and the Messiah

Jesus is the true messiah, but he did not actualize the Messianic Kingdom while he was on earth. Its actualization is implicit in his second coming. Minjung theologians, therefore, stress the second coming of Christ. [They also stress the Holy Spirit over a christology, succession of Holy Spirit after Holy Son ‑ is this the incarnation of the second coming of Christ, in process now and every day?]

Jung Young Lee, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Millennianism, vs. Kingdom of God

Suh Nam‑dong argues a difference between biblical symbols of the Millennium and the Kingdom of God: While the Kingdom of God is a heavenly and ultimate symbol (the place the believer, individually, enters when he dies), the Millenium is a historical, earthly, and semi‑ultimate symbol (a point at which history and society are renewed, securing the salvation of the whole social reality of humankind.) Consequently, while the Kingdom of God is used in the ideology of the ruler, the Millennium is the symbol of the aspiration of the minjung.

Suh Nam‑Dong, Minjung Theology

Mind

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues. The instant is more than the recognition of a mere point in time. It is the focal culmination of long, slow processes of maturation, the past.

Thomas Dewey, Art as Experience

Minjung

Minjung is a theology of the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

James H. Cone, Introduction to Minjung Theology

Minjung theology is the theology of han. Christ came to relieve the minjung from their han.

Jung Young Lee, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

Minjung theology belongs to the church, not to the university, and accordingly its purpose is to respond appropriately to the situation rather than to supply systems that are intellectually satisfying chiefly to the creators.

John B. Cobb, Jr., An Emerging Theology in World Perspective

There are three types of minjung. The first type is those who have been brain‑washed by the intellectual apparatus of the system and the rulers to being subservient. The second is those who see and know what is really happening. Of this group some become opportunistic and serve the ruler, other pretend to serve the ruler. The third type is those who are conscious of what is happening and are ready to act when the occasion calls for it. They become activists and revolutionaries.

Suh Kwang‑Sun David, Minjung Theology

Minjung, messianic politics and self‑transcendence

The minjung are the permanent reality of history. Kingdoms, dynasties, and states rise and fall; but the minjung remain as a concrete reality in history, experiencing the comings and goings of political powers. . . . The minjung transcend the power structures which attempt to confine them through the unfolding of their stories. Power has its basis in the minjung. But power as it expresses itself in political powers does not belong to the minjung.

Kim Young‑bock quoted by Suh Kwang‑Sun David, Minjung Theology

Miracle

Melvin Nida defines miracle: when the eye of faith sees the hand of God at work.

Perception of the miraculous requires no faith or assumptions. It is simply a matter of paying full and close attention to the givens of life. . . . We are part of a finely balanced ecosystem in which interdependency goes hand‑in‑hand with individuation. We are all individuals, but we are also parts of a greater whole, united in something vast and beautiful beyond description. Perception of the miraculous is the subjective essence of self‑realization, the root from which man’s highest features and experiences grow.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Missions

For me, missionary work in itself is not primarily a religious matter. Far from it. It is first and foremost a duty of humanity never realized or acted upon by our states and nations. Only religious people, only simple souls, have undertaken it in the name of Jesus. . . . We are robber states. And were are the people in our civilized states who will undertake long‑term selfless labor to educate other peoles and bring them the blesings of our culture? Where are the workmen, tradesmen, teachers, professors, and doctors who will go to these countries and work there to achieve the blessings of culture? What efforts does our society make inthat direction? None at all. . .

. . . .

. . . True religion is also true humanitarianism. So the missions stepped in the breach for our culture, for our civilization, for our society ‑ and they did for other people what all the other agencies should have done.

Jesus has welded religion and humanity so close together that religion no longer exists as a separate entity; without true humanity, there is no religion. And the challenge of true humanity can no longer be heard without religion.

Schweitzer, Sermon, “The Call to Mission”, 1905

Once, in the mid‑nineties, Professor Lucius, a devoted friend of missions who died tragically at a young age, was lecturing about the hstory of missions on a summer afternoon . .. It was very hot, and barely a half dozen students were present. In his words that day I heard, for the first time, the idea of atonement. It was so strange. Dogmatics and New Testament exegesis found it difficult to explain why Jesus died for the sins of the world. Everything we had been told about the crucifixion was cut and dried, lifeless. And we could tell that those who lectured on the subject were not too confident about its meaning themselves. But now, as a call to service in Jesus’ name, the significance of missions became alive. The word cried so loudly that we could not escape understandig and graspig it. And from that day on, I understood Christianity better and knew why we must work in the mission field.

And now, when you speak about missions, let this be your message: We must make atonement for all the terrible crimes we read of inthe newspapers. We must make atonement for the still worse ones, which we do not read about in the papers, crimes that are shrouded in the silence of the jungle night. Then you preach Christianity and missionary work at the same time. I implore you to preach it.

Schweitzer, Sermon, “The Call to Mission”, 1905

Myth

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination inspired by the energies of the body.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Myth is a manifestation of symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, this organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Myth is incarnation: it is the celebration of the “Ideal” in the concrete by way of symbolism; it is the celebration of truth, the sacred, in our personal lives through a generalized story that we recognize as our own story. It recognizes that truth, reality, although not coextensive and limited to our own existence, is contained within this existence, and it thereby validates our experience. 8‑10‑90

Myth, as false religious belief

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that these opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Myths, need for them

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – L

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Love, cathexis

One’s limits are one’s ego boundaries. When we extend our limits through love, we do so by reaching out, so to speak, toward the beloved, whose growth we wish to nurture. To be able to do this we must be attracted toward, invested in and committed to an object outside ourselves, beyond the boundaries of self. Psychiatrists call this process of attraction, investment and commitment “cathexis” and say that we “cathect” the beloved object. (See Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak‑Experiences, (New York: Viking, 1970).

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Cathexis without love: M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, says that when objects we cathect become a substitute rather than a means of self‑development it becomes cathexis without love. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Love, erotic love

Bonhoeffer’s letter to Eberhard: “There is always a danger in all strong, erotic love that one may love what I might call the polyphony of life.” He goes on to explain that what he means is that we should love God with all our heart, eternally, and that this provides the cantus firma, to which all the melodies of life can relate as counterpoint. One of those counterpoint themes is earthly affection. “When the cantus firma is plain and clear, the counterpoint can be developed to its limits.” He recognizes the agony Eberhard is experiencing as a result of his separation from Renate, one he himself is experiencing in his separation from Maria. He tries to help Eberhard, and himself, to realize that the desires of earthly love are not gross or to be contrasted with spiritual love. “Eberhard, do not fear and hate the separation, if it comes again with all its dangers, but rely on the cantus firma.”

Edwin Robertson, The Shame and the Sacrifice

Love, falling in

Falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in wholehearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

While falling in love is not itself love, it is a part of the great and mysterious scheme of love.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Love, “making love”

In itself, making love is not an act of love. Nonetheless the experience of sexual intercourse, and particularly of orgasm (even in masturbation), is an experience also associated with a greater or lesser degree of collapse of ego boundaries and attendant ecstasy. For a second we may totally forget who we are, lose track of self, be lost in time and space, be outside of our self, be transported. We may become one with the universe. But only for a second.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

In describing the prolonged “oneness with the universe” associated with real love as compared to the momentary oneness of orgasm, I used the words “mystical union.” Mysticism is essentially a belief that reality is oneness.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Love, of self and of God

The capacity to love oneself measures one’s capacity to love God and others. . . . In the past, love of self was erroneously associated with the sin of pride. The reality is that it takes great love of self to avoid sin (destructive behavior) and to attain eternal salvation (ultimate self‑fulfillment). . . . Love of self is appreciation and respect for one’s being, including one’s personal history, race, sexual identity, physical appearance and culture.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

Appreciation and love for one’s sexual identity becomes the foundation and basis for the capacity to love. Love of others is rooted in love of self. . . . Even the capacity to love God begins with self‑esteem, which is in reality a sincere gratitude for the gift of one’s being and existence.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

Love one another

‘Love one another’. This gentle precept, which two thousand years ago came like a soothing oil humbly poured on human suffering, offers itself to our modern spirit as the most powerful and in fact the only imaginable, principle of the earth’s future equilibrium. Shall we at last make up our minds to admit that it is neither weakness nor harmless fad ‑ but that it points out a formal condition for the achievement of life’s most organic and most technically advanced progress?

Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy p. 20.

Man The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – K

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Knowledge

In considering the history of ideas, I maintain that the notion of ‘mere knowledge’ is a high abstraction which we should dismiss from our minds. Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

When we know some fragments of reality we want to complete them in such a way that they “make sense” in a systematic way. Yet by the very nature of the limitations of man we always have only “fragmentary” knowledge, and never complete knowledge. What we tend to do then is to manufacture some additional pieces which we add to the fragments to make of them a whole, a system. Frequently the awareness of the qualitative difference between the “fragment” and “the additions” is missing because of the intensity of the wish for certainty.

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that the aim is unattainable. . . . There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

How find and how exact is the detail we can see with the best instruments in the world? . . . We seem to be running after a goal which lurches away from us to infinity every time we come within the sight of it. . . [This is] the crucial paradox of knowledge.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, condemned the “aristocracy of intellect.” That is a belief which can only destroy the civilization that we know. If we are anything we must be a democracy of the intellect. We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power, by which Babylon and Egypt and Rome failed.

Knowledge is not a loose‑leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self‑knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanation of science, waits ahead of us.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Knowledge and Will

The ultimate questions of our life transcend knowledge. One riddle after another surrounds us. But the final question of our being has but one concern, and it decides our fate. Again and again we are thrown back to it. What will become of our own will? How does it find itself in the will of God? The highest insight man can attain is the yearning for peace, for the union of his will with an infinite will, his human will with God’s will. Such a will does not cut itself off and live in isolation like a puddle that is bound to dry up when the heat of summer comes. No, it is like a mountain stream, relentlessly splashing its way to the river, there to be swept on to the limitless ocean.

Albert Schweitzer

Knowledge, of the right

It is strange that I am never quite clear about the motives that underlie my decisions. Is that a sign of vagueness, or intellectual dishonesty, or a sign that we are led on beyond what we can discern, or is it both?

Bonhoeffer on declining $5000 for new work from Leiper of the Federal Council of Churches, p. 557

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – J

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Jesus

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus quotes Augustine: “Jesus is the answer to every problem.” An apt slogan, but a dangerous one.

One can contrast the “Jesus followers” who tend to ignore the fundamental breaking‑points in Jesus’ life and his totally patient, submissive relation to his Father, and on the other hand “disciples of Christ,” who are in danger of turning him into a myth, in no way essentially connected with Jesus of Nazareth. Each would do well to acknowledge the Christian status of the other: a belief in Jesus as that definitive saving reality which gives purpose to life. Edward

Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Although one can appreciate the enthusiasm for Jesus as an inspiring human being, it entails no binding invitation, can bear no stamp of the universally human, unless it can be shown that “the creator,” the God of Jews, Muslims, Christians and so many others, is personally implicated in this Jesus event.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

There are no ghosts or gods in disguise wandering around in our human history: only people . . . Jesus is the revelation, in personal form, of God.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Through a lack of well‑grounded information, a lot of people fall into an ‘overbearing’ style of Christian belief, overbearing and even un‑Christian in its absolutist claims, so alien to Jesus and his gospel.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

The historian must ask: What manner of man must this have been who could trigger such extreme reactions: on the one hand, unconditional faith and on the other aggressive disbelief?

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

The titles used to honor Jesus, e.g. son of man, messiah, Christ, have meanings relative to the culture and experience of those using the title.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

What the historical Jesus left us was not in the first instance a sort of resume of his preaching, but an eschatalogical liberation movement for bringing together people in unity. Universal shalom.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

[T]he final and definitive meaning in our own life by reference to Jesus of Nazareth is not something given or appropriated once and for all. It is a decision that a person must take, subject to circumstances, over and over again, and then must continually re‑articulate. To put it another way, the constant factor is the changing life of the “assembly of God.”

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

All this means that the present with its contemporary empirical models has to be the place where we, as Christians, must make our Christological response. Proclamation and theology must always have a time index. Unless we recognize this, we are putting our faith in a purely ideological, abstract or magical kerygma: “Jesus is the Lord.”

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Jesus, and the oppressed

Mark 2:17b: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Ahn Byung‑mu says, “He loved people with partiality. Whatever the situation he always stood on the side of the oppressed, the aggrieved, and the weak.” The minjung are the sinners, the tax collectors, the sick, those who opposed the powers of Jerusalem, the despised people of Galilee, the prostitutes. It that is true, we must do theology not about the minjung, but of and by the minjung.

Suh Kwang‑Sun David, Minjung Theology

Jesus, ascension into heaven

If you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward ‑ not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within…..It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Jesus, hermeneutical understanding

The hermeneutical problem, or the problem of understanding a Christological belief in Jesus of Nazareth, is centered on a conflict: the critical tension between the phenomenon of Jesus, his person, message, ministry and death, and the religious and cultural expectations, aspirations, and ideologies present in the culture constituting his environments and the environment of those who expressed what they were confronted with in Jesus.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Jesus, historical interpretation

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings. Heb. 13:8‑9. This passage eventually took on a metaphysical and theological significance to mean Jesus in his eternal being was unchangeable. But the history of images of Jesus through the centuries has been kaleidoscopic in variety.

Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries

Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries, quotes Albert Schweitzer:

Each successive epoch found its own thoughts in Jesus, which was, indeed, the only way in which it could make him live[; for typically, one] created him in accordance with one’s own character. . . . There is no historical task which so reveals someone’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.

Jesus, Presence of

“I am with you all the days” ‑ there is more in this than meets the eye. It says: I am with you all the days to teach you humility. For what can we possibly do for him that will give us the right to feel we are really serving him? You remember the legend of St. Christopher. When he carried a small child across the river, his burden became heavier and heavier until it weighted him down. St. Christopher said he could bear no greater load and the child replied, “Thou has borne on thy shoulders all the world and him who created it.” In Jesus’ promise, “I am with you,” there is a heavy weight like that. For whoever feels his presence will be weighted down by him. Only those who feel his presence know how unholy and sinful their wills are. Yes, I would say only they truly know what sin is.

Schweitzer, Sermon, “Christ in Our Life,” 1904

Jesus, Speaking in a Human Way

Last Good Friday, while we were meditating in deep devotion upon his death, in France someone was removing his picture from the law courts, where until then he had looked down at the judges. Those who gave the order for this could never have heard anyone speak of Jesus in a human way. They heard him referred to in dead formulas and dogmas, so they thought he belonged only to the church, and they did not appreciate his simple human greatness. Often it appears that the world cannot penetrate to Jesus because he is so boxed in by dogmas.

Schweitzer, Sermon, “Christ in our Life,” 1904

Jesus, The Name of

Nothing restrains anger, curbs pride, heals the wound of malice, bridles self‑indulgence, quenches the passions, checks avarice and puts unclean thoughts to flight as does the Name of Jesus. For when I name His Name, I call to mind a Man meek and lowly of mind, generous, reasonable, pure, merciful ‑ a Man conspicuous in fact for everything in which integrity and holiness consist; and, at the same time, in the same Lord Jesus I see Almighty God. As Man, He heals me by His example; as God, He strengthens me by His aid. Bernard of Clairvaux

[There is no gnosticism in this statement, there is nothing magical about the name of Jesus, apart from the concreteness of his life. Because of that concreteness the life of Jesus can have meaning to me as a concrete human being. St. Bernard also goes on to address Jesus as God. Probably for St. Bernard, this Jesus as God was different from us “mortals”. However, for me, I choose to believe that even in that aspect, we share in the nature of Jesus. We all are created in the image of God, we each are God’s children. Insofar as we remove sin from our hearts, as Jesus removed sin from his heart, we allow ourselves to become God’s vessel. “Let your lights so shine . . . ” that mankind may see the hand of God at work. RW 12‑20‑91

Judgment

One lives only once. If when death comes they life is well spent, that is, spent so that it is related rightly to eternity ‑ then God be praised eternally. If not, then it is irremediable ‑ one lives only once.

Soren Kierkegaard

Justice

The more one begins to consider the problem of justice, the more impossible and visionary any full justice appears to be.” Well‑being cannot be achieved for all; for some the process will always being injustice ill‑being.

Marjorie Suchock, God‑Christ‑Church

She goes on to ask, “Is the notion of justice necessarily to be tailored to a smaller scale so that we might find contentment in lesser conditions?” She answers:

1. If the field of justice is restricted to any area or group or time, so that some are categorically outside the range of well‑being, then justice is contradicted at its core.

2. A second danger lies not with the contradiction to the nature of justice entailed by its limitations in scope or vision, but in complacency. If well‑being is the foundation of a society, then the society must be dynamic.

3. Finally, unless a vision of justice holds within it the real possibility of its fulfillment, it cannot inspire the hope which is so necessary to effect action. The loss of hope is the loss of effort; the loss of effort is the reinforcement of complacency, which is the loss of dynamism ‑ justice yields to injustice.

Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church

Whatever you do is evil for someone. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way: for this is surely the way God intended it….. Pain is part of there being a world at all.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Interdependence in relationality is a basic condition of justice: acting for the other’s good is at the same time acting for one’s own good, and the impoverishment of one is the impoverishment of all.

Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church

The many for the one and the one for the many: justice involves a rhythmic interdependence; justice involves a mutual enrichment and harmony. . . . The many finally enjoy the unity of the one, each contributing what value has been achieved and benefiting from the values of others in the transformation of judgment and harmony. Justice is not an illusory dream; justice is as real as God.

Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church

Justice is universal of all cultures. It is a tightrope that man walks, between his desire to fulfill his wishes, and his acknowledgement of social responsibility. No animal is faced with this dilemma: an animal is either social or solitary.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Natural Law aims at justice, and at moderate certainty in the man‑made rules. To be practically meaningful, however, judicial justice must be justice not merely in the abstract but in the concrete.

Quotes That I Have that Gathered – I

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Idealism

Idealism took as its premise God, the supreme ideal, above the universe, of which this physical world was mere imitation. Plato, the supreme Idealist, also recognized that ideas, themselves, contribute to our understanding, but also fall short by omissions whereby they fail to include the totality of evident fact. He therefore suggested the duty of tolerance. It is true, it seems, that our ideas which are grounded in experience, are mere apprehensions (or imitations) of that experience. But the source of that apprehension or imitation is not an ideal existing above the world, but rather the experience, itself, within this world. Language symbolizes experience, exemplifies it, and even intensifies it. Language never equals experience.

(Personal note 7‑23‑90.)

Idealism and suffering

But not withstanding these helps from God, I found myself a man encompassed with infirmities; the parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of the flesh from the bones; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should have often brought tomy mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken fromthem; especiallymy poor blid child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships which my oor blind one might undergo, would seem to break my heart in pieces. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thoy like to hae for thy portion in this world! thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee. But yet, recalling myself, thought I, I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you. Oh, I saw in this condition I was a man who was pulling down his house upon the heads of his wife and children; yet, thought I, I must do it, Imust do it; and now I though on those two milch kind that were to carry the ark of God into another country, and to leave their calves behind them. I Samuel 6:10 ‑ John Bunyan

NOTEON BUNYAN: Born to a tinker in 1628, his formal education was but two elementary school grades. He had a serious guilt‑complex, ever suffering under the burden of his weighty sins. His first wife was deeply religious and introduced him to pious literature. He became a deacon, and two years later began to preach, first against Quaker mysticism. His first wife died, and he remaried. One of his children was a blind daughter whom he loved tenderly. In November 1660 he was imprisoned, where he made shoe laces to support his family, gave religious instruction to his fellow prisoners, and wrote books, including Pilgrim’s Progress. In prison he said: “If you would let me out today, I should preach tomorrow!”

Ideology

Campbell tells of overhearing a social philosopher in Japan ask a Shinto priest, “We’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines. But I don’t get your ideology.” “I don’t think we have ideology,” the priest answered. “We don’t have theology. We dance.”

Joseph Campbell, Introduction to The Hero’s Adventure

Idols

Man transfers his own passions and qualities to the idol. The more he impoverishes himself, the greater and stronger becomes the idol. The idol is the alienated form of man’s experience of himself. . . . The contradiction between idolatry and the recognition of God is, in the last analysis, that between the love of death and the love of life.

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

The Talmud says: “Whoever denies idolatry is as if he fulfilled the whole Torah” (Hullin 5a).

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

Immortality

Immortality believed in for the sake of comfort is not genuine immortality. . . . It is imposed on people from the outside. They soon forget about it, preferring to stifle their fear of death by refusing to think about it. But the man who dares to live his life with death before his eyes, the man who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to him by right but has been bestowed on him as a gift, the man who has such freedom and peace of mind that he has overcome death in his thoughts ‑ such a man believes in eternal life because it is already his, it is a present experience, and he already benefits from its peace and joy.

Albert Schweitzer

No one has ever come back from the other world. I can’t console you, but one thing I can tell you, as long as my ideals are alive I will be alive.

Albert Schweitzer

Inquisition, the rack

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, quotes William Lithgow’s account of his experience on the rack, tearing sinews of joints: I was brought to the rack, then mounted on the top of it. My legs were drawn through the two sides of the three‑planked rack. a chord was tied about my ankles. as the levers bent forward, the main force of my knees against the two planks burst asunder the sinews of my hams, and the lids of my knees were crushed. My eyes began to startle, my mouth to foam and froth, and my teeth to chatter like the doubling of a drummer’s sticks. My lips were shivering, my groans were vehement, and blood sprang from my arms, broken sinews, hands and knees. being loosed from these pinnacles of pain, I was hand‑fast set on the floor, with this incessant imploration: ‘Confess! Confess!’

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Quotes That I Have that Gathered – H

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Happiness

A happy person is aware of personal limitations, failures, and mistakes, which he or she accepts as learning experiences and stepping stones to further progress. . . . The happy person is able to accept and handle his or her feelings, including pleasure, joy, anger, guilt, anxiety and pain, which the person does not suppress but shares with a loved one. The happy person is able to express anger and other negative feelings calmly and constructively, without destroying another person’s self‑esteem and without destroying his or her relationship with the other. . . . The happy person is able to accept and adapt to change. . . . The happy person is responsible for his or her own life, its direction, and the decisions he or she makes from day to day.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

Heaven and Hell

Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Holy, and the Human

The individual who is able to recognize and appreciate the holy in himself or herself transcends human limitations and comes in contact with God. Hope The rabbinical literature gave warning again and again against trying to “force the messiah.” The attitude required is neither on of rash impatience nor of passive waiting; it is one of dynamic hope. This hope is, indeed paradoxical.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

For the person of faith, defeat is no proof invalidating his faith, while victory will always be looked upon with suspicion, since it might turn out to be the mask for defeat. This concept of paradoxical hope has been expressed in a short statement in the Mishnah: “It is not up to you to finish the task, but you have also no right to withdraw from it.” (R. Tarfon in Piekei Avot II, 21).

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Process theology suggests that the power of hope against despair is not paradoxical at all, but rests with the nature of God as the power for justice. god is the source of the vision and of the reality; there is a locus for justice in the nature of God. The effect of God upon us is the transmission of vision, along with the conviction of its worth and attainability. God is the source of hope. This is the significance of the doctrine of divine omnipotence for us. Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church Hope is catalytic, and ultimately is the most important ingredient in the struggle for justice, insuring the perseverance that brings justice about. Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church If God is for us, who can be against us. And so we address the evils of our existence in the hope that they can be overcome.

Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church

Human life

In writing to Abbe Breuil in 1923, Teilhard noted his impressions that the “human world ‑ to speak only of that ‑ is an immense and disparate thing, just about as coherent, at the moment, as the surface of a choppy sea. . . . I still believe, for reasons colored by mysticism and metaphysics, that this incoherence is only preparatory to a unification.”

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and politics. We have reached the point of regarding each other only as members of a people either allied with us or against us and our approach: prejudice, sympathy, or antipathy are all conditioned by that. Now we must rediscover the fact that we ‑ all together ‑ are human beings, and that we must strive toconcede to each other what moral capacity we have.

Albert Schweitzer

Man can no longer live for himself alone. We must realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all life. Fromthis knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe.

Albert Schweitzer

Because I have confidence in the power of Truth and of the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind.

Albert Schweitzer

Human life, authentic

Being human means being in the face of meaning to fulfill and values to realize. It means living in the polar field of tension established between reality and ideals to materialize. Man lives by ideals and values. Human existence is not authentic unless it is lived in terms of self‑transcendence.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy quoting Viktor Frankl.

Humanism

Humanism defined: Coming from the Latin, humanus, humanism places the highest value upon the human person and gives primary importance to man, his potentialities and well‑being within the temporal sphere of his existence. Humanists affirm with Protagoras (440 B.C.) that “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not. ‑ With regard to the gods I know not whether they exist or not, or what they are like. Many things prevent our knowing; the subject is obscure and brief is the span of our mortal life.”

J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic

There are many expressions of humanism:

– scientific humanism: Julian Huxley and Max Ott

– ‑philosophical humanism: Paul Kurty and Carliss Lamont

– ‑existential humanism: Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre

– ‑self‑realization humanism: Erich Fromm and Abraham Maslow ‑Marxian humanism: Herbert Marcuse

– ‑experimental humanism: W.T. Stace

All of the above have at least two things in common:

1. concern for human good, individually and collectively

2. belief that man must resolve his problems alone: man and nature is all there is

J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic

Leading humanists have the following to say of “secular” or “natural.”

“There is no entelechy, no built‑in pattern of perfection. Man is his own rule and his own end.” (H.J. Blackham)

“A philosophy founded on the agreement that “man is the measure of all things” can have no room for belief in the intervention of non‑material postulates.” (Miriam Allen de Ford)

“I myself hold that we have increasing knowledge of our world, and that there is no need to postulate a realm beyond it.” (Ray Wood Sellars)

“Humanism believes that the nature of the universe makes up the totality of existence and is completely self‑operating according to natural law, with no need for a God or gods to keep it functioning.” (Carliss Lamont)

“Humanists accept the fact that God is dead; that we have no way of knowing that this is a meaningful question.” (Paul Kurtz)

J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic

Compare “Secularism”

Humanism, Radical Humanism

By radical humanism I refer to a global philosophy which emphasizes the oneness of the human race, the capacity of man to develop his own powers and to arrive at inner harmony and at the establishment of a peaceful world.

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

“Good” for the humanistic conscience is all that furthers life; “evil” is all that arrests and strangles it. The humanistic conscience is the voice of our self which summons us back to ourselves, to become what we potentially are.

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

What from a mundane standpoint was the tragedy of the Jews ‑ the loss of their country and their state ‑ from the humanist standpoint was their greatest blessing: being among the suffering and despised, they were able to develop and uphold a tradition of humanism.

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

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Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – G

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Gandhi

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his book on Gandhi, reports Winston Churchill to have described Gandhi as a “seditious lawyer . . . posing as a half‑naked fakir,” who had no right to be negotiating with the British government.

God

For Tillich, God is being‑itself, and that is the only nonsymbolic statement which can be made about God.

Guyton B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement.

For Bultmann, God is the wholly other, the one who radically transcends the world. God so much transcends the world, that God can never be grasped by human thought. That is because human thought is limited to objects within the world, within history, within the grasp of humanity.

Norman Perrin, The Promise of Bultmann

For Fromm, “God is one of many different poetic expressions of the highest value in humanism, not a reality in itself. I wish to make my position clear at the outset. If I could define position approximately, I would call it that of a nontheistic mysticism.”

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

There is reason to believe that behind spurious notions and false concepts of God there lies a reality that is God. This is what Paul Tillich meant when he referred to the “god beyond God” and why some sophisticated Christians used to proclaim joyfully, “God is dead. Long live God.”

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Germanica Theologia: “. . . the Perfect cannot be apprehended, known, or expressed by any creature as creature. Therefore we do not give a name to the Perfect, for it is none of these. The creature as creature cannot know or apprehend it, name or conceive it.” [This is in contrast to Eric Fromm’s notion of God as nameless because God is living, a dynamic becoming.]

God and Life

God and Life are one. . . . This persistently creative life of which every individual and every species is an experiment is what we mean by God. God, thus defined, has nothing of the ready‑made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely.

Durant on Bergson

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives ceased to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Dag Hammarskjold, Markings.

God and Man

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero’s Adventure, quotes the zen philosopher, Dr. D.T. Suzuki: “God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature ‑ very funny religion.”

Man is uncertain; his knowledge is fragmentary. In his uncertainty he looks for absolutes that promise certainty which he can follow, with which he can identify. Can he do without such absolutes? Is it not a question of choosing absolutes? Is it not a question of choosing between God that affirms life and idols that negates life?

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

God helps man to change his heart, but never by changing man’s nature, by doing what only man can do for himself.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Mankind cannot abandon God for the simple reason (for faith) that God will not abandon man and continues “to visit” him ‑ by routes which we cannot map in advance.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

If you consider the Politbureau or the American technocrats you will see that there are those who escape atheism by impiously imagining themselves on the throne of the Almighty.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

The paths into which God leads mankind are shrouded in darkness for us. There are only two ground rules. They go together, and each taken by itself is enigmatic. The first is that all sin requires atonement. The secon dis that all progress demands sacrifice, which has to be paid for by the lives of those chosen tobe offered up. We sense this more than we understand it.

Albert Schweitzer

God at the Center

I should like to speak of God, not on the boundaries, but at the center, not in weakness, but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt, but in a man’s life and goodness.

Bonhoeffer, Christology lectures 1933.

The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers have given out, but in the middle of the village.

Bonhoeffer, letter to Bethge.

It is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigor, and not only in suffering; in our activities and not only in our sin.

Bonhoeffer.

“I shall think myself blessed only when I see Him in every one of my daily acts; Verily He is the thread, Which supports Muktanand’s life.”

Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth, quoting an acquaintance, Muktanand.

God, cantus firma of life in the world

Edwin Robertson, The Shame and the Sacrifice

God, changing images through history of art

According to Andre Malraux, a French art critic, God’s figure as the subject of Western art changes as the periods go by. First, God was depicted in the Byzantine period as a mysterious glimmering symbol hovering over the universe as a transcendent and an almighty judge. Second, in Western art the figure of a God changes to take on an anthropomorphic form. Third, in Romanesque cathedrals, God is usually portrayed as the Christ who takes the human form. Fourth, in the Gothic art of the thirteenth century, although the Christ figure is increasingly depicted as that of an earthly human being, it still retains the theme of king and victor. Fifth, in the fourteenth century, the Christ figure changes into one in which distress and agony are accentuated. Sixth, in the fifteenth century, Jesus is portrayed as a man in actual historical situations of the time of the artists. Seventh, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the figure of Christ gradually disappears from the canvas and the general human figure appears. Eighth, in the next stage, the inner thoughts of the artist find expression in abstract forms rather than in a human form.

Suh Nam‑Dong, Minjung Theology

God, Doctrine of Negative Attributes

Moses Maimonides (1135 ‑1204) held that it was inadmissible to use positive attributes to God’s essence, although it is permissible to imply attributes of actions with regard to God. . . . Hence it is clear that He has no positive attribute whatever. The negative attributes, however, are those which are necessary to direct the mind to the truths which we must believe concerning God; for on the one hand, they do not imply any plurality, and on the other, they convey to man the highest possible knowledge of God.” . . . [Maimonides concluded with Psalm 4:4, “Silence is praise to Thee.”

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

God, evolution of the biblical concept

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods, (beginning note, p. 3) describes the evolution of the biblical concept of God:

1. God as absolute ruler, counterbalanced by man as God’s potential rival, which would have been achieved had man eaten both from the tree of knowledge and from the tree of life.

2. By the First Covenant God agrees not to be absolute ruler, but man and God become partners in a treaty. God lost his freedom to be arbitrary.

3. The Second Covenant between God and the nation of men, the Hebrews, calls Abraham from his own country and kindred with the promise of God making him a great nation by which “all the families of the earth will bless themselves.” This is an expression of universalism.

4. The next phase is reached in God’s revelation to Moses. All anthropomorphic elements have not disappeared. What is new is that God reveals himself as the God of history rather than the God of nature. Most important the distinction between God and an idol finds its full expression in the idea of a nameless God. The logical consequence of Jewish monotheism is the absurdity of theology. If God has no name there is nothing to talk about.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

As theism begins to crack and die, we c an see ever more clearly the process of “God creation” that we human beings have always pursued. The attributes we have claimed for God are nothing but human qualities expanded beyond human limits. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 49.

It was Freud’s contention that theistic religion was born as the means of dealing with the trauma of self-conscious existence. It was born as a tool designed to keep our hysteria in check. The theistic definition of God as a personal being with expanded supernatural, human, and parental qualities, which has shaped every religious idea of the Western world, came into existence not through divine revelation, Freud argued, but out of human need. Today this theism is collapsing. The theistic God has no work to do. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 54.

Karen Armstrong, in her insightful book A History of God, has demonstrated that Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all at one time accused of being atheists when their ideas began to challenge the popular religious wisdom of their day. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 58.

Spong notes that the ancient Hebrew word for God included urach (wind), nephesh (breath), and rock (1 Sam. 2:2; Ps. 18:2; Ps. 18:31; 1 Cor. 10:4). If something as impersonal as the wind, one’s breath, or a rock could be used by our forbears to conceive of God, then surely we might be more courageous and break our of our personalistic images and begin to contemplate new meanings and radically different figures of speech in our quest for God. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, pp. 60, 61.

God, forgiveness of man

We find in the Bible, and still more so in the Talmudic tradition, a marked emphasis on forgiveness, mercy, and on man’s capacity to “return.” While God threatens punishment to the third and fourth generation, love and compassion are promised to the thousands of generations, and thus God’s compassion far outweighs his sense of punishment. But even this punishment of children for the sins of their fathers is denied in another verse of the Bible, which says that “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor shall the children be put to death for the fathers” (Deut. 24:16). Isaiah succinctly states God’s compassion, “I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me”. (Is. 65:1).

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Master Eckhart on sin: “But if a an rises completely above sin and turns away from it absolutely, then God, who is faithful, acts as if the sinner had never fallen into sin. . . . God is a God of the present. He takes you and receives you just as he finds you, not as the person you were, but as what you are.”

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Quotes That I Have Gathered – F

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Faith

In writing of a conversation with a ship’s doctor and another passenger on his voyage to the East, Teilhard de Chardin noted, “We had finally to admit that we differed on points as fundamental as ‘Is it better to exist than not to exist?’ I think, in fact, that in all thought there is this point a fundamental option, a postulate which is not demonstrable but from which everything else is deduced. If one admits that being is better than its opposite, it is difficult to stop short of God. If one does not admit it, no further discussion is possible.”

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

See Hans Kung’s Does God Exist.

“Is life absurd or is it divine?” This is the fundamental issue.

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith.

Gandhi

Faith has the same place in the divine life which sense has in the natural, being indeed nothing else but a kind of sense or feeling persuasion of spiritual things . . .

Henry Scougal

Faith, Life of

A life of faith produces two things. First, it enables us to see God in everything. Secondly, it holds the mind in a state of readiness for whatever may be His will. . . . Thyis continual, unceasing dependence, this state of entire peace and acquiescence of the sould in whatever may happen,is the true, silent martyrdom of self. It is soslow, and gradual, and interna, that they who experience it are hardly conscious of it.

Francois Fenelon

Faith and Works

You do right when you offer faith to God; you do right when you offer works. But, if you separate the two, then you do wrong. . . . So you believe in Christ? Then do the works of Christ, so that your faith may life! Let love be to your faith as soul to body, and let your conduct prove that your faith is real. You who say that you abide in Christ ought to walk as He walked.

Bernard of Clairvaux

Faith, and inheritance

Sociology teaches that actuality, reality qua experience, is inherently colored and partly conditioned by the social (mental and cultural) paraphernalia that we bring from the past to the present. The knowledge imparted by faith, despite its irreducible character, forms no exception.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Awareness that every religion, including Christianity, is conditioned by cultural‑cum‑historical factors substantially relativizes the absolute character of values as currently apprehended, just as it also mitigates the pressures of the past.

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Because of the tension of the mystery of faith and its articulation, conditioned by the religious culture, there is the need not only for a historical approach to dogma and a hermeneutic evaluation of primitive Christianity and its subsequent development, but also for a sociological enquiry that will size up ideologies in a critical spirit.

Faith, and Truth

Teilhard: “The faith has need of all truth.”

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define ‘faith’ as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of ‘faith’. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Faith, Living life of

[Living the life of faith means living completely in this world, not trying to make something of oneself, but] living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.

. . . Watching with Christ in Gethsemane ‑ that is faith, that is repentance, that is how one becomes a man and a Christian. How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?

Faith, loss of faith

Max Begouens met Teilhard in war and through war experiences lost his faith. He confronted Teilhard with this loss of faith after the war, and Teilhard responded. “Very simply, with that kindness and affection which never seemed to leave him, he expounded to me his ideas on Creation, the meaning of Evolution, the supreme and active part played in the Evolution of the Cosmos by Christ. . . [T]he Father gave me explanations that threw light on everything. He gave me the answer I had so long been waiting for.”

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit. Corte notes this experience had also a profound effect on Teilhard: “And now he had been able to try out on a brilliant mind the penetrative power of the reflections which were already so much a part of his own life.”

Fall of Man, The

The idea in the biblical tradition of the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corruption.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

The Bible leaves no doubt that it does not consider man either good or evil, but endowed with both tendencies. With respect to the story of the garden, the Bible never calls Adam’s act a sin.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

The story of the garden and the fruit of knowledge of good and evil is not the “fall” of man, but of his awakening, and thus, of the beginning of his rise.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

With Adam’s “fall”, human history began. Once he has acquired that knowledge, he can no longer return to the womb, to Mother Earth. There is no way to turn back.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Man creates himself in the historical process which began with his first act of freedom ‑ the freedom to disobey ‑ to say “no”. This “corruption” lies in the very nature of human existence. Only by going through the process of alienation can man overcome it and achieve a new harmony.

Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Freedom and Discipline

It appears to me that great freedom and great exactness should be united. Exactness makes us faithful, and freedom makes us courageous. If you are very strict without being free, you will become servile and scrupulous. If you are free without being strict you will become negligent anc careless. Those who have little experience of the ways of God think they cannot unite these two virtues. They understand, by being exact, living in constraint, in sorrow, in a timid and scrupulous unquietness that destroys the repose of the soul; that finds sin in everything, and that is so narrow‑minded that it questions about the merest trifles, and dares hardly to breathe. They define being free, having an easy conscience, not regarding small things, and to be content with avoiding great faults, and not considering any but gross crimes as faults, and saving these, allowing whatever flatters self‑love, and any license to the passions that does not produce what they call great evil. [But St. Paul says,] “Be free, for the Savior has called you to liberty; but let not this liberty be an occasion or pretext for evil.” . . . [A]ccording to the excellent instructions of St. Augustine, Love God and then do all you can. . . . The first sight of our little failures should humble us, but then we must press on . . .

Francois Fenelon

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

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Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – E

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Encounter

There is an important thing, which I have told many people and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.

Eternal Life

When I hear the phrase “eternal life,” I don’t immediately think of the peace and joy of those who have passed from this life. I first think of the eternal life which has become manifest tome as a spiritual presence of those who are no more and of those who are still alive: men whose proximity I feel primarily as spiritual beings rather than earthly existences. When human beings with all their weaknesses and defects can mean somuch to us, how much greater is our feeling for him who embraces all that is pure, spiritual, and eternal. In this saying, “I am with you,” lies the fate of every human life.

Schweitzer, Sermon “Christ in Our Life,” 1904

Ethics

Good . . . is not an abstraction but a process, movement, constantly accepting the world and people and taking part in their life; and so ethics is helping people ‘to share in life’, it is the Christlike in the midst of the human.

Bonhoeffer p. 624 The Same and the Sacrifice

Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner. [Note and compare, however, Fromm’s definition of religion and his conclusion that healthy religion is necessary to mental health.]

The business of a philosopher is to understand the world and if people solve their social problems Religion will die out.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

Ethics are responsibilitywithout limit towards all that lives.

Albert Schweitzer

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

Albert Schweitzer

What we seem to forget is that, yes, the sun will continue to rise and set and themoon will continue to move across the skies, but mankind can create a situation inwhich the sun and moon can look down upon an earth that has been stripped of all life.

Albert Schweitzer

Eternity

The source of temporal life is eternity. Eternity pours itself into the world. But Eternity is beyond all categories of thought.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

There is some level of eternity in those whose lives each of us has shaped in relationships both professional and personal. . . . Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 211

The being of Jesus touched, opened, and revealed the Ground of Being. When my being is enhanced by love, called to a new reality by love, introduced through love to limitless freedom, then I believe that I have touched that which is timeless, eternal, and real. My confidence in eternal life, life beyond the limits of finitude and death, is found in that experience, and my doorway into that experience is still the one who, for me, seems to have embodied it, Jesus whom I call Christ. In the community of people who constitute themselves as disciples of this Jesus, I stil experience, above all else, the call of this ‘Christ to live, to love, and to be. That is what it means to me to live “in Christ,” a phrase Paul used constantly. So my doorway into and my hope for life that is transcendent and eternal is located at this point. I stand here convinced that there is something real beyond my ultimate limits. I have tasted it. So I embrace this vision and life in this hope. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p.218.

Evil

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure. Compare Schweitzer’s “reverence for life.” See also Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church on justice.

“Good” for the humanistic conscience is all that furthers life; “evil” is all that arrests and strangles it.

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

Evolution

Teilhard said of his development of the notion of evolution: “just at the right moment, like a seed sprung from I don’t know where.” This notion, says Corte, was stirred by Bergson’s Creative Evolution, 1906. It is much broader than that of Darwin and Lamarck, more like, as Corte describes it “the very law of the Universe created in Space‑Time.”

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Corte quotes Teilhard de Chardin: “Little by little I grew more and more conscious, less as an abstract notion than as a presence of a profound, ontological total drift of the Universe around me: so conscious of this that it filled my whole horizon.” For Teilhard Evolution was this drift, a vital reality and not mere hypothesis.

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Quotes That I Have Gathered – D

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Death

According to Kubler‑Ross, death is the final stage of growth. Her studies on death and dying have confirmed what religion has maintained through the ages: death is a transition to life.

Teilhard de Chardin was not only a man of science; he was a man of deep love and faith. He looked closely into the meaning of death. He commented that “if there were no death, the earth would certainly seem stifling.” For him death is “the only way out to a greater life.” Death does not return us to “the great current of things” but “surrenders us totally to God.”

Teilhard de Chardin’s profound understanding of the reality of eternity and communion in death is reflected in his prayer:

O Energy of my Lord, irresistible and living Force, since of us two, You are infinitely stronger, it is for you to consume me in the union that shall fuse us together. Give me, then something even more precious than the grace which all the faithful beg from you. It is not enough that I die in communion. Teach me communion in dying. Death is not only the final stage of growth, but also the culmination of the processes involved in the integration of the human and the holy. Death comes as a reward only when the individual has loved and appreciated the gift of life and has exerted effort to integrate the human and the holy within himself or herself.

Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

If we can live with the knowledge that death is our constant companion, traveling on our “left shoulder,” then death can become in the words of Don Juan, our “ally,” still fearsome but continually a source of wise counsel. With death’s counsel, the constant awareness of the limit of our time to live and love, we can always be guided to make the best use of our time and live life to the fullest. But if we are unwilling to fully face the fearsome presence of death on our left shoulder, we deprive ourselves of its counsel and cannot possibly live or love with clarity. When we shy away from death, the ever‑changing nature of things, we inevitably shy away from life.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

An African myth related in NPR “African Rites of Passage” August 4, 1990:

Life and Death were journeying together and stopped at a well to drink. They began to argue over which was the senior and should drink first. Life argued that it was senior: “Before there can be death, there must be life.” Likewise Death argued that it was senior: “Life proceeds from death and returns to death.” A wiseman appeared, and Life and Death submitted the question of their seniority and who should drink first to him. The Wiseman responded: “Without death there can be no life, and without life no death. You are each two faces of the same reality. Drink together.” And they drank together from the same gourd and continued their journey together.

A person on the program NPR “African Rites of Passage” August 4, 1990, noted that in contemporary society death is now treated casually. There is a focus on death because of a gap: “I don’t know where to go from here. . . .” Response: “You have to take the torch and carry on for the next generation.” He also noted: T‑shirt: “Go ahead and shoot me, I’m already dead.” “No matter how full the river, it still wants to grow.”

The art of living is the art of dying.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

To face death for what it is as the end of individual existence enables one, . . . to find one’s true identity as one with universal reality. To confront death as the end may also enable us to live without reserve, not just provisionally, in the present.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

We are ready for death, we accept death, not when our lives are empty and restless with unsatisfied desires, but when they are rich because we live in an open responsiveness.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Gene Wilder, 16 months after his wife, Gilda Radner, died of cancer, said, “Gilda taught me a lot of things. One of the biggest things she taught me was that death can close you up and shut you off and make you hide ‑ or it can open you up as you’ve never been opened before and make you reach out for life.”

People are no longer moved by fear of death or by the hope of life eternal. All they ask is that death not be mentioned. And thus it seems a conspiracy of silence has descended. We all pretend toward our neighbor that the possibility of his death could never happen.

Albert Schweitzer

When the path of life leads us to some vantage point where the scene around us fades away and we contemplate the distant view right to the end, let us not close our eyes. Let us pause for a moment, look at the distant view, and then carry on.

Albert Schweitzer

Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? ‑ Albert Schweitzer

See “Life, and death”, “Self‑denial”

Death, denial of

Denial of the “tragic fact that man’s life ends in death” is only self‑deception or a false ideology: such denial is regression. One who denies death does not really accept life.

Guyton B. Hammond on Eric Fromm’s thought, Man in Estrangement

Death, fear of

People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes a fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another ‑ but its predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness. It is no longer of this particular environment.

Joseph Campbell

Devil

The figure of the Devil is, after all, that of the lustful Pan, and his attendant demons are satyrs. Demography is in fact a scarcely concealed pornography. The monstrous Devil is the external caricature, the magnified image of the erotic, animal, self‑seeking, and other features of human life which men constantly refuse to acknowledge and accept.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Satin is thus a symbol of what we disown in ourselves. That explains the fascination of the Evil One. But we must, as Jung urges, “integrate the Evil One.” When human evil is externalized and refused acknowledgement, it becomes monstrous.

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Devotions

Fix some part of every dayfor private exercises. You may acquire the taste which you have not; what is tedious at first will afterwards be pleasant. Whether you like it or no, read and pray daily. It is for your life; there is no other way, else you will be a trifler all your days, and a pretty, superficial preacher. Do justice to your ownsoul; give it time and means to grow. Do not starve yourself any longer.

[S]et apart certain hours to think of God and your relation to Him. You must read, pray, distrust your inclinations and habits; remember that you carry the gift of God in an earthen vessel, and above all, let your sould be nourished with the love of God. However youmay have departed from Him, do not fear to return toHimwith a humble and childlike love. Speak toHim in your prayers of all your wretchedness, of all your wants, of all your sufferings; speak even of the disrelish you sometimes feel for His service. You cannot speak too freely nor with toomuch confidence. He loves the simple and the lowly; it is with them that He converses. If you are of this number, open your whole heart and say all to Him. After you have thus spoken to God, be silent and listen to Him.

John Wesley to preacher, John Trembath

See,also Leisure

Discipline

Discipline is the means of human spiritual evolution.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Love and discipline go hand in hand, so that unloving, uncaring parents are people lacking in discipline. Passive dependent people lack self‑discipline. They are unwilling or unable to delay gratification of their hunger for attention. As a matter of fact, it is no accident that the most common disturbance that passive dependent people manifest beyond their relationships to others is dependency on drugs and alcohol. They are addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up, and when people are not available to be sucked and gobbled, they often turn to the bottle or the needle or the pill as a people‑substitute.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Dogma

What the world needs is not dogma, but an attitude of scientific inquiry, combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.

Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

See, also, “Man, Hope for” and “Skepticism”

Duality

We think in opposites because we cannot think otherwise. That’s the nature of our experience of reality. Man‑woman, life‑death, good‑evil, I‑you, this‑that, true‑untrue. But my theology suggests that behind that duality there is a singularity over which this plays like a shadow game.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Everything in the field of time is dual: past and future, dead and alive, being and nonbeing. But the ultimate pair of the imagination are male and female, the male being aggressive, and the female being receptive, the male being the warrior, the female the dreamer. We have the realm of love and the realm of war. Freud’s eros and Thanatos. . . When you are a man, you are in the field of time and decisions. Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure To transcend means to go past duality.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure

Teilhard quoted by Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

As Teilhard sees it the universe has, from its beginning “marks of the rupture between matter and spirit; and all unification is the fruit of a struggle against dispersion.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard’s view of the universe discloses a human reality Rideau describes as follows: “If man is placed in the universe, the universe is placed in man, and the history of the universe is ultimately the history of man. If the world contains and goes beyond man, it is also true to say that man contains and goes beyond the world.” There is absolute rejection of any dualism by Teilhard.

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Whenever continuity is possible, the burden of proof rests upon those who assert opposition and dualism. Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home. This is shown also in civilizations endurance. As the developing growth of an individual from embryo to maturity is the result of interaction of organism with surroundings, so culture is the product not of efforts of men put forth in a void or just upon themselves, but of prolonged and cumulative interaction with environment. Nothing that a man has ever reached by the highest flight of thought or penetrated by any probing insight is inherently such that it may not become the heart and core of sense.

John Dewey, Art as Experience

Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development: “I have found . . . that by analyzing physics and perception the problem of the relation of mind and matter can be completely solved. It is true that nobody has accepted what seems to be the solution, but I believe and hope that this is only because my theory has not been understood.”

See also “Matter, and Spirit” “Spirit, and Matter” and “Evolution” and “Philosophy, universal phenomenology”

Theologia Germanica:

Let us remember how it is written and said that the soul of Christ had two eyes, a right and a left eye. In the beginning, when the soul of Christ was created, she fixed her right eye upon eternity and the Godhead, and remained in the full intuition and enjoyment of the Divine Essence and Eternal Perfection; and continued thus unmoved and undisturbed by all the accidents and travail, suffering, torment, and pain that ever befell the outward man. But with the left eye she beheld the creature and perceived all things therein, and took note of the diffeence between the creatures, which were better or worse, nobler or meaner; and thereafter was the outward man of Christ ordered. . . .

Now the created soul of man also has two eyes. The one is the power of seeing into eternity, the other of seeing into time and the creatures, of perceiving how they differ from each other as aforesaid, of giving life and needful things to the body, and ordering and governing it for the best. But these two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their work at once; but if the soul sees with the right eye into eternity, then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working and be as though it were dead. . . . Therefore whoever will have the one must let the other go; for “no man can serve two masters.”

[3‑27‑92: Is this duality necessarily exclusive of each other? Whitehead suggests it is not. Is it not really a matter of balance, a dynamic balance? That Germanica Theologia fails to see the dynamic interrelation of these apparently opposite poles is evident in its identification of God with Perfection. It is akin to Greek Idealism: “. . . the Perfect cannot be apprehended, known, or expressed by any creature as creature. Therefore we do not give a name to the Perfect, for it is none of these. The creature as creature cannot know or apprehend it, name or conceive it.” This is in contrast to Eric Fromm’s notion of God as nameless.

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Quotes That I Have Gathered – C

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Certainty

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push‑button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns the nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts ‑ obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts. [Of the example of Auschwitz:] This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods [absolute knowledge]. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Syetard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push‑button order and the human act. We have to touch people. Any truth‑claim is the result of human interpretation of experience subject to the possibility of error that is an inescapable aspect of our finitude. J. Wesley Robb, The Reverent Skeptic

Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development, notes that his original philosophical interest was two‑fold: 1) could philosophy provide a defense for religious belief, however vague; and 2) desire to believe that something could be known, in pure mathematics if nothing else. In regard to religion, he came first to disbelieve free will, then immortality, and finally God. “As regards the foundations of mathematics, I got nowhere.” It is an odd fact that subjective certainty is inversely proportional to objective certainty. . . . It is a practice of theologians to laugh at science because it changes. . . . Men who speak in this way have not grasped the great idea of successive approximations. Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

For my part, I should regard an unchanging system of philosophical doctrines as proof of intellectual stagnation. Bertrand Russell’s Best, edited by Robert E. Egner

David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order quotes Bernard Lonergan: “Be attentive, be intelligent, be rational, be responsible, develop and, if necessary, change.”

Change

Where there is no anticipation, change has to wait upon chance, and peters out amid neglect. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Bergson was rebelling against the fixities and rigidities which both logicians and materialists had ascribed to reality. . . . If change was real, novelty was real; if novelty was real, freedom was real. The immediate was flux and the changing was ultimate. He held that change means growth, growth means creation, creation means freedom. And if freedom was ultimately real, what a liberation that spelled for the soul of man, no longer bound by the fixities of space, of logic and of habit! The real facts of evolution were to be found, not in a mechanical elimination of the unfit, but in the creative surge of life, in an elan vital. Foreword to Creative Evolution

Choice

Choice, or what might seem to be chance, is the means through which life is realized. The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises. . . . The best advice is to take it all as if it have been of your own intention ‑ with that, you evoke the participation of your own will. Man, in the biblical and post‑biblical view, is given the choice between his “good and evil drives.” Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; choose life, that you and your descendants may live.” Eric Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods

Christ

. . . The first author of any part of the New Testament was Paul . . . We . . . become aware that Paul seems far more prone to proclaim Christ than he is to explain Christ, though he does begin the explanatory process. (2 Cor 5:19; Rom. 8:39; Rom. 6:23; 1 Cor. 1:23, 24). . . . If one asserts that “God was in this Christ,” as Paul does, then the question inevitably arises as to how the holy and distant God happened to be present in that finite and particular life. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, pp. 73, 74.

I would choose to loathe rather than to worship a deity who required the sacrifice of his son. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 95. . . . A savior who restores us to our prefallen status is therefore pre-Darwinian superstition an post-Darwinian nonsense. P. 99.

Christ, knocking

If one does not hear the sighs of the han of the minjung, one cannot hear the voice of Christ knocking on our doors. Suh Nam‑Dong, Minjung Theology

Christian Living

Man is summoned to share in God’s suffering in the world. . . . [It is not being religious that makes a Christian, but participating in the sufferings of God in the secular world . . . ; participating in the powerlessness of God in the secular world. ‑ Bonhoeffer. ‘

To be in Christ means to share in the world. Good, therefore, is not an abstraction but a process, movement, constantly accepting the world and people and taking part in their life; and so ethics is helping people ‘to share in life’, it is the Christlike in the midst of the human. . . . Christ leads, not beyond, but right into the reality of everyday life. Christian life is no end in itself, but puts one in a position to live as a man before God, not to become a superman, but to exist ‘for other men.’ Bonhoeffer p. 624 The Shame and the Sacrifice

Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered. Bonhoeffer, p. 625 The Shame and the Sacrifice

Christianity, history The history of Christianity has . . . been written by white, western, bourgeois hands. Gustavo Gutierrez

Christianity, and modern world

Teilhard de Chardin was critical of Christianity’s relation to the modern world:

1. lack of receptiveness to modern humanism; inability to assimilate contemporary values

2. persistence of manicheanism, Jansenism and dualism in doctrinal teaching and piety

3. defective concept of charity

4. incomplete, if not obsolete, concept of God

5. predominance in conception of the incarnation of juridical and moralistic concepts over concrete and physical concepts

6. incorrect interpretation of original sin, mystery of the cross, of resignation to suffering, and of renunciation and detachment

7. unrealistic attitude towards the world and lack of any real contact with it

8. view of salvation solely from perspective of the individual

9. static concept of the universe

Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard is convinced Christianity is the only salvation of the world in history, provided it rediscover its mystery, modify the terms it uses, and renew youthful contact with and in its action on the world. Rideau says of that, “A human world is absurd, unreal and inacceptable, if it does not, in its essence, involve a victory over death; time makes no sense if it does not emerge into eternity.” Emily Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin

Christianity in the last century and at present is often untrue to itself. It has lost the essential element of willingness to love, and of reaching communion with God through that willingness. Schweitzer quoted in Best of Playboy Interviews, Dec. 1963

When Playboy asked if Christianity’s unfaithfulness meant the ideals are now worthless, Schweitzer responded, “An ideal which has true merit cannot be worthless or out‑of‑date. Time has no impact on the true ideal. But it can become obscured, and that is often what has happened. Mankind today is technically brilliant but often spiritually empty because the habit of fundamental thought has been abandoned. . . . Men must discover for themselves, in their own minds, the truth of existence. . . . They must struggle against that spirit of the age which tries to submerge independent thought under a blanket. This struggle is supremely important.

Best of Playboy Interviews, Dec. 1963

Commitment to Principle

John Wesley to Ebenezer Blackwell, May 16, 1753:

I have often observed with a sensible pleasure your strong desires to be not almost only but altogether a Christian. And what should hinder it? What is it that prevents those good desires from being brought to good effect? Is it the carrying of a right principle too far? I mean, a desire to please all men for their good? Or is it a kind of shame? the being ashamed not of sin but of holiness . . . ? The giving way on one point naturally leads us to give way in another and another till we give up all. O sir, let us beware of this! But this can only be by pressing on. Otherwise we must go back.

[Is it possible to be too committed to principle? What do we do when commitment to principle impinges upon practical considerations of security, income, a home, comfort? I have come to the conclusion that one cannot be too committed to right principle. An inclusive principle that apprehends God and God’s activity in the world is dynamic and balanced already: it cannot be carried too far. It is the fear of commitment to such principle, as Wesley says here, that is destructive. RW 3‑28‑92 based upon notes from Summer, 1991]

Concepts

A concept can never adequately express the experience it refers to. It points to it, but it is not it. The concept and the symbol have the great advantage that they permit people to communicate their experiences; they have the tremendous disadvantage that they lend themselves easily to an alienated use.

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, makes an analogy of the relativity of knowledge to a portrait by Topolski: “These pictures do not so much fix the face as explore it; . . . each line that is added strengthens the picture, but never makes it final.

See also the introduction to Suchocki, God, Christ, Church

Concepts, alienation of concepts

There is a simultaneously permanence and change in any living being, likewise in any concept reflecting the experience of a living man. However, that concepts have their own lives, and that they grow can be understood only if the concepts are not separated from the experience to which they give expression. Once this happens ‑ and this process of alienation of concepts is the rule rather than the exception ‑ the ideas expressing an experience has been transformed into an ideology that usurps the place of the underlying reality within the living human being.

Confession

Confession is not a peasant sinner groveling before the king, begging for forgiveness in order to escape punishment. . . . Confession is my being confronting the Ground of all Being, and forgiveness is my moving beyond limits into something more real, more whole, more life giving than I can now contemplate. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 197.

Consciousness

Theoretically, then, evrything living might be conscious. In principle, consciousness is coextensive with life.

Bergson (Compare Teilhard’s matter aware of itself)

As life grows richer in its scope, its heritage and its memories, the field of choice widens, and at last the variety of possible responses generates consciousness, which is the rehearsal of response.

‑Durant on Bergson

Consciousness seems proportionate to the living being’s power of choice.

– Bergson

Contemplation

Means there be in the which a contemplative prentice should be occupied, the which be these ‑ Lesson, Meditation, and Orison: or else to thine understanding theybe called ‑ Reading, Thinking, and Praying.

– Annonymous, from The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th century

Contradiction

Like all human beings, I am a person who is full of contradictions.

– Albert Schweitzer

Gandhi is reported to be unconcerned with being consistent with prior statements he made, but concerned only with responding to the present with the principles he believed in: “Do I contradict myself,” he would ask, “Consistency is a hobgoblin.” [this latter is a paraphrase of a saying I heard, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?”] 4‑6‑92

Creed

Creeds are at once the outcome of speculation and efforts to curb speculation. . . . Wherever there is a creed, there is a heretic round the corner or in his grave.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Our task is neither to literalize nor to worship the words of yesterday’s theological consensus. It is, rather, to return to the experience that created these creedal words in the first place and then to seek to incorporate that experience in the words that we today can use, without compromising its truth or our integrity as citizens of this century. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 20.

Creed, personal creed

Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, sets out his “beliefs”:

I believe that there are two ways of arriving at the choice of the good. The first is that of duty and obedience to moral commands. . . . The other way is to develop a taste for and a sense of well‑being in doing what is good and right. . . .

I believe that to recognize the truth is not primarily a matter of intelligence, but a matter of character. . . .

I believe in freedom, in man’s right to be himself, to assert himself. . . .

I believe that one of the most disastrous mistakes in individual and social life consists in being caught in stereotyped alternatives of thinking. . . .

quoted by Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

Cross, The

To endure the cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. . . . It is not suffering per se, but suffering‑and‑rejection, and not rejection for any cause or convictionof our own, but rejection for the sake of Christ. If our Christianity has ceased tobe serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotinal uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life. We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering. . . . The cross means sharing the suffering of Christ to the last and to the fullest. . . . The cross is there, right from the beginning, he has only got to pick it up; there is no need for him to go out and look for a cross for himself, no need for him deliberately to run after suffering.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Quotes That I have Gathered – B

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Baptism

Baptism requires a “theology of recapitulation,” the taking upon oneself of the vocation, the ministry, the project of Jesus Christ, himself. It is this which makes one a part of the community he called into being. This is a rather different understanding of baptism that the one that sees it exclusively as a cleansing from original sin. It is also different from those views of baptism which see it as a sign that this person is now a part of a community but that do not elicit any particular responsibility on the part of the person for participating in the ongoing ministry of Christ in the world. Harvey Cox, An Emerging Theology in World Perspective.

Bible

The Bible preserves for us fragments of the process [of change] as it affected one gifted race at a nodal point. The record has been written up by editors with the mentality of later times. Thus the task of modern scholars is analogous to an endeavor to recover the histories of Denmark and Scotland from a study of Hamlet and Macbeth. . . . And with a leap of six hundred years one version of the story ends with the creed of the Council of Nicaea. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

The Old Testament is a book of many colors and contains a remarkable evolution from primitive authoritarianism and clannishness to the idea of a radical freedom of man and the brotherhood of all men. It is a revolutionary book; its theme is the liberation of man from the incestuous ties to blood and soil, from the submission to idols, from slavery, from powerful masters, to freedom for the individual, for the nation, and for all of mankind. Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods

[O]ne cannot see the revelation of God in Jesus in an infallibly inspired Bible which is a direct word of God, alleged to be normative for us ‑ and that on a basis of what is (wrongly) described as its literal meaning (which exegetical analysis then often reveals to be very different from what was at first supposed.) Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Revelation is the saving activity of God as both experienced and expressed in words. Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

The question then arises: where then is the Bible’s authority to be located? . . . Neither Jesus nor the earliest ‘church community” constitutes the fount and origin of Christianity, but both together as offer and response. The interpretive norm provided by Scripture can only be rendered more specific via the method of systematic co‑ordination: in that way the biblical text, in so far as it actually mirrors the life of diverse Christian congregations, is the interpretative norm. Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Biblicism is unbiblical. Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus

Consecutive reading of biblical books forces everyone who wants to hear to put himself, or to allow himself to be found, where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of men. We become a part of what once took place for our salvation. Forgetting and losing ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the Jordan into the promised land. With Israel we fall into doubt and unbelief and through punishment and repentance experience again God’s help and faithfulness. All this is not mere reverie but holy, godly reality. We are town out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. . . . And only in so far as we are there, is God with us today also. A complete reversal occurs. It is not in our life that God’s help and resence must stillbe proved, but rather God’s presence and help have been demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus Christ. . . . Our salvation is “external to ourselves.” ‑ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Body and Spirit

To isolate an ideal moment of feminine physical beauty is precisely to abstract. What is then presented as a result of that mental reduction of bodily reality is not a person in the flesh, not even a stranger, not really a human body, but an abstract form, used as device in the solitary fantasies and selfish purposes of an isolated, unrelated self. Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

If a husband and wife truly relate to each other, they will know and love each other’s body as bearing the marks of the pain, the struggle, the accidents of life; as showing the gradual signs of aging; evoking care as well as pleasure, though the two are not exclusive in the outgoing joy of love. Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

. . . the spouse, the bride Is never naked. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind. Charles Davis, Body as Spirit

Charles Davis, Body as Spirit distinguishes between the sensuous and sensuality. Sensuality, he says, is a rejection of the body, because in sensual indulgence
the body is driven by the mind against its own spontaneous rhythms. On the other hand, sensuousness is when we participate in the spontaneous rhythms and responses of the body and are open to the joys and delights, the pain, suffering, and stress of bodily experience.

Body, bodily life

Philosophically speaking, the subject of critical transcendence is the life that is lived by a person in response to physical needs. Because of the social conditions of the world, the minjung is forced to life with, by, and for the body. Bodily life produces bodily responses to reality in the form of feeling. This feeling is the total human response to the whole of reality. It is honest, authentic, and truthful. Suh Kwang‑Sun David, Minjung Theology

If the human body, or life itself, is a gift from God, the person has responsibility to take special care of that gift. To neglect the human body or to hate it would be a violation of the divine law. In fact a simple definition of sin is behavior that tends to destroy oneself and others. Philomena Agudo, Affirming the Human and the Holy

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Deepak Chopra: A New Creation Story: Beyond Religion and Science

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Posted: 10/14/10 08:17 AM ET

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/a-new-creation-story-beyo_b_759933.html

Stephen Hawking made worldwide news with his sound bite about how the universe was created. Specifically, he said that a Creator is not needed to explain how the universe began. Behind the sound bite was a deeper insight, which is that one law of nature — gravity — transcends space and time. Therefore, as long as gravity exists, multiple universes can unfold out of nothing. Among scientists this proposition has raised eyebrows and no doubt will be discussed for a long time. But let’s look at the larger picture. The discussion about creation has grown stale. On one side, science sticks by its basic principles: The laws of nature govern the universe, randomness prevails over any possible pattern or design, and all phenomena, including the human mind, can be reduced to physical properties. On the other side, religion sticks to its basic principles: God or the gods created the universe, the hand of the creator can be seen everywhere in nature, and human beings are connected to the divine, giving us a privileged position in the cosmos.

To resolve this opposition, dozens of books have attempted to reconcile science and faith. Yet without a doubt science has the upper hand. The modern world is willing to throw out any number of beliefs about God if the facts don’t fit. Science isn’t willing to throw out a single piece of data, however, to satisfy an article of faith. The net result is that science has become bolder. The old position was that physics is separate from metaphysics. But Hawking’s statement that a Creator is unnecessary is nothing less than a metaphysical statement. In fact, it points the way to abolishing metaphysics altogether. Why bother with God when science is on the verge of delivering a Theory of Everything?

The problem is that just at the moment when science is poised to strike the last blow, it has gotten stuck. Metaphysics hasn’t been defeated; rather, physics has been forced to peer into the domain of God with no way forward. Hawking himself has been forced to concede that there is no Theory of Everything. There is only a patchwork of smaller theories, each competent to explain a specific aspect of nature, but with no unifying principle. This statement isn’t going down well among cosmologists. They want a unified model based on mathematical certainty, not a shrug of the shoulders. They already know that time and space emerged from the quantum void, but this nothingness has to be explained. Otherwise, it could contain absolutely anything. Hawking states quite firmly that it cannot be explained. He clings to gravity as a substitute for God, since without gravity, creation falls apart.

Some scientists refuse to be shocked; others refuse to give up. Cosmologists earn their paycheck by winning grants based on the latest mathematical model for how the universe came to be. But to an outside observer, Hawking’s basic insight that the human mind will never be able to pierce the quantum vacuum feels like a direct challenge to science’s story of creation. It doesn’t support religion’s creation myths, not by a long shot. But Hawking has deeply considered the big picture of cosmology and declared the game over, if the game is a perfect model that will unify all the laws of nature. An outside observer would also conclude that it might be too early to give up. Perhaps we can move forward if creation depends on basic principles that neither science nor religion has accepted so far.

Which is exactly what is happening in the forefront of speculative thinking. Religionists are trying to rethink God in light of quantum mechanics; scientists are looking to spiritual traditions for glimpses into the realm that transcends the five senses. A new creation story is trying to be born, and although nobody knows the outcome yet, here are the new founding principles that currently vie for acceptance:

Just as matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, neither can information. Beyond the display of physical processes, information fields may be the key to how the universe became organized from apparent chaos.
The universe may contain more than information. It could be imbued with proto-consciousness. That is, the raw ingredients of mind may be inherent in nature at the quantum level.
God could be a constant presence in evolution. Instead of creating the universe and then standing back from his (or her) creation, the deity may exist in every atom and molecule as the tendency to evolve.
Human values may be imprinted in creation. Plato first declared that our sense of love, truth and beauty derived from the perfect love, truth and beauty that exist beyond the physical world. Today, these so-called Platonic values may be provable in a new way, as universal consciousness that orders and patterns the forms of nature.
Mathematics may be the key to nature’s organizing power. If mathematical laws are the true building blocks of creation, then we don’t need a creator. We have symmetry, order, complexity and harmony embedded in abstract form through a higher order of mathematics that transcends time and space.
The observer is also a participant in creation. The universe we look upon is a perfect home for human beings because our minds are entangled with the laws and processes that create mind. To explain how the universe came about, you first must explain what the mind is. The two cannot be separated. There is no reality “out there” independent of the observer.
Design dominates over randomness in nature. Although we see apparent chaos at the quantum level as particles collide and interact, an invisible force urges these processes into more complex forms, eventually resulting in the most complex form of all, DNA. Candidates for such a shaping force are evolution, intelligence, creativity and even a God who likes to experiment.

One way or another, a new creation story will emerge from one or more of these basic principles. To win the day, it must conform to the data being collected about the universe. It must also not contradict quantum physics, which to date is the most successful scientific theory ever propounded. Yet it is evident that quantum physics has probably reached its theoretical limit, even though not every physicist — or most physicists — realize it.

The limit to any system occurs when its accepted foundation comes into question. In this case, advanced thinkers are asking questions that were unheard of in the past: What is mathematics? What is gravity? What is a natural law? Instead of being metaphysical questions, these have turned practical. Until they are answered, the nothingness that Hawking has peered into remains dark, inert and empty. Yet we know it cannot be empty. Our brains are the product of DNA. DNA is the product of information arranged in a chemical code. Chemicals are the result of quantum interactions at the subatomic level. Quantum interactions wink in and out of the quantum vacuum. Moving backwards, that’s as far as the modern creation story goes. Whatever step it takes next will have to be a step into the void. Will we discover the mind of God there? Without using religious terminology, we must discover something that allows us to go back up the ladder from a void to the human brain. Otherwise, creation will have accidentally hit upon mind. Physics, including Stephen Hawking, continues to bet on the latter proposition, but more and more it faces impossible odds.

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Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Teilhard Phenomenon Quotes

I have not proofed this. I gathered these quotes by reading notes that I had taken into my speech to text program.

Editors introduction to The Phenomenon of Man: “In The Phenomenon of Man he (de Chardin) has affected a threefold synthesis of the material and physical world with the world of mind and spirit; of the past with the future; and of . . . the many with the one.”

The Phenomenon of Man, location 92.

“He quotes with approval Nietzsche’s view that man is unfinished and must be surpassed or completed; and proceeds to deduce the steps needed for his completion.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 134.

“In 1925 he coined the term ‘noosphere’ to denote the sphere of mind.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 137.

“The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation; an isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as an isolated human individual. I would prefer to say that mind is generated by or in complex organizations of living matter.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 199. \

“Teilhard was a strong visualizer. He saw with his mind eye that the banal fact of the Earth’s roundness, the sphericity of man’s environment, was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environment, man’s thoughts and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 211.

“He envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a final state, which he called ‘point Omega.’”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 228.

“The concept of a hyperpersonal mode of organization sprang from Teilhard’s conviction of the supreme importance of personality.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 247.

“This belief in the preeminent importance of the personality in the scheme of things was for him a matter of faith, but of faith supported by rational inquiry and scientific knowledge.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 253.

“Persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality . . . .”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 260.

“In modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 273.

“We should consider inter-thinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny is to realize new possibilities for evolving life on this planet.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 274.

“As a dedicated Christian priest, he felt it imperative to try to reconcile Christian theology with this evolutionary philosophy, to relate the facts of religious experience with natural science.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 310.

“Some of the ideas which he had expressed in his lectures about original sin and its relation to evolution, were regarded as unorthodox by his religious superiors, and he was forbidden to continue teaching.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 319.

“But he never succeeded in obtaining permission to publish any of his controversial or major works. This caused much distress, for he was conscious of a prophetic mission: but he faithfully observed his vow of obedience.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 335.

“He was prevailed on to leave his manuscripts to a friend. They therefore could be published after his death, since permission to publish is only required for the work of a living writer.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 369.

“With the aid of the sun’s energy, biological evolution marches uphill, producing increased variety and higher degrees of organization.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 389.

“On this new psychological level, the evolutionary process leads to new types and higher degrees of organization.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 400.

“We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the Earth’s immense future, and can realize more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 413.

“Nothing is constructed except at the price of an equivalent destruction.”

The Phenomenon of Man, location 832.

“[T]he most convincing proof to me that life was produced once and once only on earth is furnished by the profound structural unity of the tree of life.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 1738.

“Survival of the fittest by natural selection’ is not a meaningless expression, provided it is not taken to imply either a final ideal or a final explanation.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 1979.

“What we find within the struggle to live is something deeper than a series of tools; it is a conflict of chances.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 1982.

“This dramatic and perpetual opposition between the one born of the many and the many constantly being born of the one runs right through evolution.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2021.

“All scientists are today an agreement for the very good reason that they couldn’t practice science if they thought otherwise.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2569.

“That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now, as I have said, common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2586.

“But we have every reason to think that in animals a certain inwardness exists approximately proportional to the development of their brains.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2632.

“The natural history of living creatures amounts on the exterior to the gradual establishment of a vast nervous system.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2677.

“To jolt the individual out of his natural laziness and the rut of habit, and also from time to time to break up the collective frameworks in which he is imprisoned, it is indispensable that he should be shaken and prodded from outside. What would we do without our enemies?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2721.

“The superior psychic levels demands physically big brains.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2833.

“Unlike the insect, the mammal is no longer completely the slave of the phylum that belongs to. Around it an ‘aura’ of freedom begins to float, a glimmer of personality.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2857.

“Admittedly the animal knows. But it cannot know that it knows: that is quite certain.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3001.

“From the moment we regard evolution as primarily cyclical transformation, we see there is not one instinct in nature, but a multitude of forms and instincts each corresponding to a particular solution of the problem of life.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3001.

“Life does not work by following a single thread, nor yet by fits and starts. It pushes forward its whole network at one and the same time.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3101.

“What at first sight is disconcerting, on the other hand, is the need to accept that this step could only be achieved at one single stroke.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3105.

“Let us therefore keep hold of one idea – that the access to thought represents a threshold which had to be crossed at a single stride;…”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3126.

“To call Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus pre-hominids might suggest that they were not yet quite man. And that, according to my argument, which means that they had not yet crossed the threshold of reflection. The contrary seems to me much more probable; that, while admittedly far from having reached the level on which we stand, they were already, both of them, in the full sense of the word, intelligent beings.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3539.

“Throughout living phyla, at all events among higher animals where we can follow the process more easily, social development is a progress that comes relatively late. It is an achievement of maturity. In man, for reasons closely connected with his power of reflection, this transformation is accelerated.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3698.

“Traditions became organized and a collective memory was developed.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3751.

“The better we get the past into perspective, the more clearly we see that the periods called ‘historic’ (right down to and including the beginning of ‘modern’ times’) are nothing else than direct prolongation’s of the Neolithic age.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3758.

“One might well become impatient or lose heart at the sight of so many minds (and not mediocre ones either) remaining today still closed to the idea of evolution.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3978.

“Is evolutionary a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow in which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3985.

“However materialistic they might be, it did not occur to the first evolutionists that their scientific intelligence had anything to do in itself with evolution.”

Phenomenon of Man, location or thousand 4008.

“If we abide evil by our fundamental principle of not imposing evil by evil we cannot purchase patent sedition, treason, or violence. We shall submit to every ordinance and every requirement of government, except such as are contrary to the commands of the gospel, and in no case resist the operation of law, except by meekly submitting to the penalty of disobedience.”

Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God Is within You: Christianity Not As a Mystic Religion but As a New Theory of Life, Kendall location 122.

“Without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 255.

“There is no such thing as the energy of despair, in spite of what is sometimes said. What those words really mean is a peroxisome of hope against hope. All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 260.

“Between these two alternatives of absolute optimism or absolute pessimism, there is no middle way because by its very nature progress is all or nothing.… On neither side is there any tangible evidence to produce. Only, in support of hope, there are rational invitations to an act of faith.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4279.

“[Humanity] has succeeded, not only in becoming cosmopolitan, but in stretching a single organized membrane over the earth without breaking it.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4401.

“The principal axis of revolution: ever more complexity and thus ever more consciousness.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4460.

“The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman – these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4466.

“No evolutionary future awaits man except in association with all other men. The dreamers of yesterday glimpsed that.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4495.

“A new domain of psychical expansion – that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise their heads to look at it.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4628.

“After all, half 1 million years, perhaps even 1 million, were required for life to pass from the pre-hominids to modern man. Should we now start wringing our hands because, less than two centuries after glimpsing a higher state, modern man is still at loggerheads with himself?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4657.

“To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance towards the ‘other.’”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4812.

“The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism’. Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalized is itself.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4815.

“Considered in its full biological reality, love – that is to say, the affinity of being with being – is not peculiar to man.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4831.

“A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4879.

“We have noticed that, since man’s advent, there has been a certain slowing down of the passive and somatic transformations of the organism in favor of the conscious and active Metamorphoses of the individual absorbed in society.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5067.

“I can distinguish three principal ones in which we see again the predictions to which we were already led by our analysis of the ideas of science and humanity. They are: the organization of research, the concentration of research upon the subject of man, and the conjunction of science and religion. These are three natural terms of one and the same progression.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 1591.

“Something has been started which, I am convinced, will now never stop.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5098.

“Have we ever given serious thought to the predicament we are in?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5100.

We behave as though we expected discoveries to fall ready-made from the sky, like rain or sunshine, all men concentrating on the serious business of killing each other and eating.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5107.

“Less is provided annually for all the research all over the world than for one capital ship. Surely our great grandson’s will not be wrong if they think of us as barbarians?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5111.

“But the moment will come – it is bound to – when man will be forced by disparity of the equipment attached to admit that science is not an accessory occupation for him but an essential activity, a natural derivative of the over – spill of energy constantly liberated by mechanization.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5116.

“A commercial market can reach saturation point. One day, though substitutes may be found, we shall have exhausted our mines and oil wells. But to all appearances nothing on earth will ever saturate our desire for knowledge or exhaust our power for invention.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5135.

“Man, the knowing object, will perceive that last that man, ‘the object of knowledge’, is the key to the whole science of nature.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5145.

“But man, we should add, is a solution of everything that we can know.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5147.

“Psychologically, our souls are incredibly subtle and complex: how can one fit them into a world of laws and formulas?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5151.

“In the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and developed.”

Phenomenon of Man, location the 176.

“We need and are irresistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all physics, all biology and all psychology, science of human energetics. It is in the course of that creation, already obscure only be gone, that science, by being late to concentrate on man, will find itself increasingly face-to-face with religion.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5187.

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reasons supplanting belief.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5192.

“But, as the tension is prolonged, that conflict visibly seems to need to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium – not in the elimination, nor do well at the, but in synthesis.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5196.

“Religion and science are the two conjugated faces were phases of one and the same act of knowledge, the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfill them.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5221.

“We may begin by asking seriously whether life will not perhaps one day succeed in ingeniously forcing the bars of its earthly prison, either by a finding the means to invade other inhabited planets or (a still more giddy perspective) by getting into psychical touch with other focal points of consciousness across the abysses of space.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5263.

“For these two reasons among others I adopt the supposition that our noosphere is destined to close in upon itself in isolation, and that it is in a psychical rather than a spatial direction that it will find an outlet, without need to leave for overflow the earth. Hence quite naturally, the notion of change of state occurs.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5263.

“Human history develops between two points of reflection, the one inferior and individual, the other superior and collective.”

“God – Omega.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5283.

“Hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in the ever warmer radiance of Omega. Some sort of unanimity will reign over the entire mass of the noosphere. The final convergence will take place in peace.”

As to progress into the future, de Chardin writes, “there are no summits without abysses.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5299.

“The only universe capable of containing the human person is an ‘irreversibly’ personalizing” universe.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5339.

“By its very structure of the noosphere could not close itself either individually or socially in any way a save under the influence of the center we have called Omega.”.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5351.

“At the present time no other energy of a personal nature could be detected on Earth save that represented by the sum of human persons.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5358.

“If, on the other hand, Omega is, as we have admitted, already in existence and operative at the very core of the thinking mass, then it would seem inevitable that its existence should be manifested to us here and now through some traces.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5359.

“… Uncompromising affirmation of a personal God: God as Providence, directing the universe with loving, watching care; and to God the revealer, communicating himself to man on the level of and through the ways of intelligence.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5383.

“Is the kingdom of God a big family? Yes, MA sensitives. But in another sense it is a prodigious biological operation – that of the redeeming incarnation.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5400.

“Then, as St. Paul tells us, God shall be in all. This is indeed a superior form of pantheism without traces of poison of adulteration or annihilation. . . .”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5408.

“Following Greek thought – following all thoughts in fact – are not ‘to be’ and’ to be one’identical?

“Christian love is incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5434.

“To be able to say literally to God that one loves him, not only with all one’s body, all one’s heart and all one’s soul, but with every fiber of the unifying universe – that is a prayer that can only be made in space time.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5467.

“… We are logically forced to assume the existence in rudimentary form… Of some sort of psyche in every corpuscle, even in those… Whose complexity is of such a low or modest order as to render it (the psyche) in perceptible.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5537.

Christianity and Evolution

De Chardin uses the phrase, “religion of the earth” and “the God of the ahead.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 76.

“To keep things quite here, we should be careful to distinguish between secularity, secularization, and secularism. By secularity is commonly meant recognition of the value inherent in the earth and in man’s earthly activity – that human activity of which the most important part is, in this age, constituted by science, technology, and the organization of society. By secularization we mean the historical and sociological process which led to this recognition, and which is characterized by a progressive enfranchisement, in man’s scientific and political activity, from any inference on the part of theology and metaphysics. I secularism, finally, we mean every attitude or teaching which stresses ex-clue civilly the values of earth the life at the expense of any religious or metaphysical consideration.”

“All secularism, it goes without saying, is unacceptable to the Christian, but what should be the Christian’s attitude to the undeniable fact of secularization? How are we to define the relationship between the message of the Gospel and the ‘religion of the earth.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 82.

“So long as the church neglects, by means of a refashioned Christology (all the elements of which are available to us) to solve the apparent conflict that henceforth exists between the traditional God of revelation and the new God of evolution, so long, too, will there be an increasing distress not only on the fringe of the believing world but at its very core; and, pari passu, Christianity’s power to attract and convert will grow last.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 89.

“The crisis we are suffering today does indeed consist in the conflict between a religion of transcendence and a secularized world, between the ‘God of the above and the God of the ahead’, between a ‘religion of heaven’ and a ‘religion of the earth.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 97.

“In Teilhard man’s earthly work is linked to the idea of a world in evolution.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 100.

Teilhard, therefore, was perfectly justified in exulting the greatness and the dignity of that work and speaking of a ‘holy love of earth’, long before Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of a ‘holy secularity, or worldliness.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 103.

“Teilhard felt that the solution… Was to be found at the very center of the Christian faith, in an updated Christology.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 108.

“Teilhard considers the value of the world and asks how it can be related to the incarnate Word.” 113.

“The organ made for seeing God is not (if you get to the bottom of the dogma) the isolated human soul; it is the human united to all the other souls, under the humanity of Christ.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 155.

“And yet it is quite obvious that thought must have a certain organic support, which is itself a function of certain physico – chemical conditions.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 228.

“We cannot pin down the point at which the hand of God is apparent. It acts upon the whole body of causes without making itself evident at any point.”

“Properly speaking, God does not make: he makes things make themselves. That is why there is no breach or cleavage at the point at which he enters.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 306.

“Considered objectively, material facts have in them something of the divine. In relation, however, to our knowledge, this divine element of them is no more than a potency.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 333.

“And it is almost impossible to conceive that, among the millions of looking ways which whirl in space, there is not one which is known, or is going to know, conscious life – and that evil, the same evil is that which is such a blemish on earth, is not contaminating all of them, like some insidious ether.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 441.

[As to the traditional concept of original sin] “he is caught in a dilemma: either he must completely redraw the historical representation of original sin (= a first man’s disobedience); or he must restrict the theological fall and redemption to a small portion of the universe that has reached such boundless dimensions. The Bible St. Paul Christ and virgin and so on, but hold good only for earth.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 444.

“Let me say frankly what I think: it is impossible to universalize the first Adam without destroying his individuality.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 459.

“[The doctrine of original sin] simply symbolizes the inevitable chance of evil… Which accompanies the existence of all participated being.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 471.

“Strictly speaking, there is no first Adam. The name this guys is a universal and unbreakable law of reversion or perversion – the price that has to be paid for progress.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 479.

“A mankind which proclaims that it is alone, or in a special position, in the universe reminds us of the philosopher claims to reduce the whole of the real to his own consciousness, so exclusively as they deny true existence to other men.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 514.

“It is infinitely probable that the conscious layer of the cosmos is not confined to a single point (our mankind) but continues beyond the Earth into other stars and other times.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 518.

“The idea of an earth chosen arbitrarily from countless others as the focus of redemption is one that I cannot accept; and on the other hand the hypothesis of a special revelation, in some millions of centuries to come, teach the inhabitants of the system of Andromeda that the Word was incarnate on earth, is just ridiculous.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 522.

“Unless we introduce a relativity and time we should have to admit, surely, that Christ has still to be incarnate in some as yet uninformed star?… What, then, becomes of ‘Christ died for our sins.’ And what becomes, too, of the unique role of the Virgin Mary?

Christianity and Evolution, location 526.

“Christ is all or nothing.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 532.

“The more we bring the past to life again by means of science, the less we can accommodate either Adam or the earthly paradise.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 547.

“I am inclined to favor a third explanation. This is that original sin expresses, translates, personifies, in an instantaneous and localized act, the perennial and universal law of imperfection which operates in the mankind in virtue of his being ‘ln fiery.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 622.

“DB attitude of the earthly paradise is the salvation constantly offered to all, but rejected by many, and so arranged that nobody can succeed in obtaining it except by unification of his being in our Lord. (And what determines the supernatural character of this unification is that it is affected gratuitously around the world and not around an infra-divine center.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 628.

“On earth we are essentially separate, incomplete – a point made, you may remember, in Plato’s Phaedrus. We are seeking desperately for our completion.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 695.

“Fundamentally, we have but one passion: to become one with the world which envelops us.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 697.

“We cannot but quite seriously question whether there may not be a sort of cosmic consciousness in our soul, more diffuse than our personal consciousness.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 704.

“Poets have never been truly public’s (nor will they ever be) except insofar as they have responded to some flash of the absolute, of the universal making itself apparent to them in one or other of the manifestations.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 714.

“We may say, I believe, that there is no profound poetry, no true lyricism, no sublimity and words, in our touring music, that does not rest upon the evocation of the Whole, pre-sentiment of, nostalgia for, the Whole.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 716.

“And yet there have always been poets: there must, then, always have been naturally pantheist souls.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 718.

“Pantheism in the wide sense in which I am now discussing it, as referring, that is, to a concern for the W hole, is seen to be religious, fundamentally religious.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 724.

“The Whole cannot reveal itself to us without our recognizing in it God, or the shadow of God.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 728.

“All the progress we have made, since the Renaissance, in penetrating nature derives, indeed, from what may be expressed in just these few words: the discovery of the universes infinite extension and infinite cohesion in space and time.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 754.

“At the present moment (pending, that is, further discoveries) we stand between two extreme terms of material elements, the electron and the nebula. And within this wide vector him of corpuscular magnitudes, to whose lines there would appear to be no limit either in length or number, there prevails an unimaginable solidarity; operating through the mysterious zones of the ether and of gravity, this knits everything that exists into an extraordinary continuum of energy.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 757.

“We can see the worship of the world in every quarter, wherever we look.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 784.

[Speaking of human progress], “some sort of super mankind. Were one able to make one’s way to the bottom of men’s souls, one would find that worship sustaining the most unbelieving of scientists in his researches. On almost every occasion it is that which provides a refuge for the best minds that abandon the various Christian forms of belief.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 790.

“Nobody, I think, can fail to see that the vital question for Christianity today is to decide what attitude believers will adopt towards this recognition of the value of the Whole, this ‘preoccupation with the Whole.’Will they open their hearts to it, or will they reject it as an evil spirit?”

Christianity and Evolution, location 790.

“Science and philosophy’s revelation of the whole is an undeniable fact.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 803.

“In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even in the view of the mirror biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.”

The Phenomenon of Man, location 5757.

“The present religious crisis derives from the integrin is in between the God of supernatural revelation on one side and the great mysterious figure of the universe on the other summer in consequence there will be no permanent peace for our faith unless we succeed in understanding that God and the cosmos are not real enemies – that there is no opposition between them …”

Christianity and Evolution, location 809.

“We have Scripture (St. Paul, in particular) to tell us what, in a general way, will be the final appearance of the world restored in Jesus Christ.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 822.

[Teilhard seems to be committed to scientific principles, but in doing so, he adapts his religious faith to conform, or affirm that. That seems to be affirmed by what follows:]

let us, then, see whether, in examining the features of this new Earth, we may not find a way of arriving at a new interpretation that will fit in with both the expectations of the pantheist and the hopes of the Christian.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 822.

“However individual our salvation may be from many points of view, it is in consequence accomplished only by collective fulfillment.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 826.

“There can be no hiding the fact: in the present teaching of theology and ascetics, the most prominent tendency is to give the word ‘mystical’ (in mystical body, mystical union) a minimum of organic or physical meaning.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 840.

“Without realizing it, they make the very common mistake of regarding the spiritual as an attenuation of the material, whereas it is in fact the material carried beyond itself: it is super material.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 850.

“What form must our Christology take if it is to remain itself in the New World?”

Christianity and Evolution, location 955.

“Our Christology is still expressed in exactly the same terms as those which, three centuries ago, could satisfy men whose outlook on the cosmos is now physically impossible for us to accept.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 967.

“Nothing can any longer find place in our constructions which does not first satisfy the conditions of the universe and process of transformation. A Christ whose features do not adapt themselves to the requirements of a world that is evolutive in structure will tend more and more to be eliminated out of hand.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 980.

“Reduction, incarnation, the gospel message: how are these three aspects of Christology to be modified if they are to measure up to the properties of an evolutive world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 992.

“The fact is that it is the determination to preserve the literal interpretation of the story of the Fall which accounts for the stubbornness with which the concrete reality of the first human couple was defended.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 997.

“From the point of view of the Christian scientist, acceptance of Adam and Eve necessarily means that history is cut off short in a completely unreal way at the level of the appearance of man; what is more, when we reached the more immediately living domain of belief, original sin, in its present representation, is a constant bar to the natural development of our religion.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1001. Next line ”

“. . . it drags us back inexorably into the overpowering darkness of reparation and expiation.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1005.

“Original sin, conceived in the form still attributed to it today, is an intellectual and emotional stuck trade jacket.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1006.

“To my mind, the answer is that if the dogma of original sin is constricting and debilitating it is simply because, as now expressed, it represents a survival of obsolete static views into our now evolutionary way of thinking. Fundamentally, in fact, the idea of Fall was no more than an attempt to explain evil in a fixed universe. As such, it is completely out of keeping with the rest of our representations of the world; and that is why we find it oppressive.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1008.

“Original sin is a static solution to the problem of evil.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1013.

“They suggest the punishments which every human group decides to inflict on those who upset the established order.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1019.

“We must remember, the world was only a week old and Adam send. Nothing in paradise, accordingly, had yet had time to perish.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1026.

“So far as dogma is concerned, we are still living in the atmosphere of a universe in which what matters most is reparation and expiation. The vital problem, both for Christ and ourselves, is to get rid of the stain.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1029.

“It is, in short, he cause Christ is still today projected upon a static world, as he used to be, that he is presented to us in official ecclesiastical documents chiefly through the wrist shadow of his cross.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1032.

“In this new setting, while evil loses nothing of its poignancy or horror, it ceases to be an incomprehensible element in the structure of the world becomes a natural feature.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1037.

“Fewer act and not being are diametrically opposed in the same way as our perfected unity and fewer multiple.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1048.

“I say this with all sincerity: I have always found it impossible to be sincerely moved to pity by a crucifix so long as this suffering was presented to me as the expiation of a transgression which God could have averted – either because he had no need of man, or because he could’ve made him and some other way.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1075.

“The complete and definitive meaning of redemption is no longer only to expiate: it is to surmount and conquer. The full mystery of baptism is no longer to clans but (as the Greek fathers fully realized) to plunge into the fire of the pure fine battle “’for being, – no longer the shadow, but the sweat and toil, of the Cross.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1084.

“We must clearly understand what is meant by and evolution of world. It is one in which the consistency of the elements and their stability of balance lie and the direction not of matter but of spirit.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1104.

“All the spirit of the earth combining to produce an increase of thinking unity; that is the avenue opening up ahead of us.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1149.

“The church (and this is perhaps the clearest evidence of her immortal truth) is alone now in effectively preserving the idea and the experience of a personal God head.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1155.

“’There has been too much talk of lambs. Give the Lions a chance.’Too much gentleness and not enough force. Those symbols are a fair summary of my feelings and my theme, as I turned to the Western of readjusting the gospel teaching to the modern world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1162.

“The truth about today’s gospel is that it has ceased, or practically ceased, to have any attraction because it has become unintelligible.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1168.

“Here again, if we are to remain faithful to the gospel, we have to adjust its spiritual code to the new shape of the universe. Henceforth the universe assumes an additional dimension for our experience. It has ceased to be the formal garden from which we are temporarily banished by a friend of the creator.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1172.

“With a new view of space, a third road is opening up: to make our way to heaven through Earth.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1193.

“’History shows that no religion has been able to maintain itself in the world for more than 2000 years. Once that time has run out, they all die.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1207.

“… Our formulas have become narrow and inflexible.… There must be a moult if we are to continue to live.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1211.

“I believe Christianity to be immortal.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1215.

“After what will soon be 2000 years, Christ must be born again, he must be reincarnated into a world that is become too different from that in which he lived. Christ cannot reappeared tangibly among us; but he can reveal to our minds a new and triumphant aspect of his former countenance.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1221.

“By upbringing and intellectual training, I belong to the ‘children of heaven’; but by temperament, and by my professional studies, I am a ‘child of the earth.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1239.

“Today I believe probably more profoundly than ever in God, and certainly more than ever in the world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1244.

“’It is through that which is most incommunicable he personal in us that we may contact you with the universal.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1254.

“On the strict psychological plane to which I intend to confine myself here, I mean by ‘faith’ any adherence of our intelligence to a general view of the universe.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1256.

“To believe is to affect an intellectual synthesis.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1260.

“Similarly, I maintain, in the domain of beliefs, every faith is born from a faith.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1265.

“If, as the result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession by faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe insensibly in the world. The world (its value, yes infallibility and its goodness) – that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1279.

“’Everything holds together.’Expressed in this elementary form, faith in the world does not differ noticeably from the acceptance of the scientific truth.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1291.

“For me, in other words, there are no longer any ‘things’ in the world; there are only ‘elements.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1302.

“There are basically two types of mind, and only to: those who do not go beyond (and see no need to go beyond) reception of the multiple – however interlinked in itself the multiple may appear to be – and those whom perception of the same principle was necessarily completed in some unity.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1307.

“There are only, in fact, pluralists and modernists: those who do not see, and those who do.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1309.

“The unity of the world is by nature dynamic or evolutive two.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1345.

“We now see beings as like threadless fibers, woven into a universal process. Everything falls back into a past abyss, and everything rushes forward into a future abyss.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1349.

“Spiritual evolution. I note that the juxtaposition of these two words still seems contradictory, or at any rate anti-scientific, to a great number (and perhaps the majority) of natural scientists and physicists.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1356.

“It is a curious thing: man, the centering creator of all science, is the only object which are science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogenous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones: but no ordered places yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1364.

“On earth we perceive a constant increase in psyche throughout time.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1381.

“A basis of spirit preserves all the laws noted by physics, all at the same time relating directly to thought.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1383.

Quote the spirit in question has a special, well-defined nature. It in no way represents some entity which is independent of matter or antagonistic to it, or floating in, the physical world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1392.

“. . . spirit which is born within, and as a junction of matter.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1395.

“’It is better, no matter what the cost, to be more conscious than less conscious.’ This principle, I believe, is the absolute condition of the world’s existence.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1398.

“The only reality in the world is the passion for growth.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1403.

“I realized that the discovery and around me of the nation spirit and nothing at all if that spirit was not immortal. Immortality which, in the very wide sense in which I use the word, means your reversibility.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1409.

“There is, indeed, no discernible limit to the depths to which knowledge and love can be carried. But if spirit can grow greater without any check, surely that is an indication that it will in fact do so in a different universe whose fundamental law would appear to be ‘if a thing is possible it will be realized.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1413.

“One thing is certain – that in the short interval covered by the last two centuries, the collective powers of spirit have increased to an impressive degree. All around us there is a general convergence, and everything is on the point of forming one solid bloc within mankind.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1417.

“The poll of two combined opposite currents, each equally year reversible: entropy and life.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1429.

“Each one of us to some degree forms but one with the totality of the universe. It is the same with action.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1429.

“What conditions must the world satisfy if it is to be possible for a conscious freedom to operate in it?”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1431.

“For my part that thing is clear: in the case of a true act (by which I mean one to which one gives something of one’s own life), I cannot undertake it unless I have the underlying intention (as Thucydides noted many centuries ago) of constructing a work of abiding value,… [Not that I am vain]… But some sort of essential instinct makes me guess at the joy, as the only worth while joy, of Clearwater 80 yes one individual Adam in the final establishment of: and ultimately nothing else can mean anything to me.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1437.

[This reminds me of something dad wrote to me 7-8 years ago. He said that think that the point of Christianity is dying and going to heaven. He says no, it is living a life of eternal significance. At their 40th wedding anniversary, I had asked him about that statement. In response, he said he didn’t think were made to be throwaways, and he referred to the 25th chapter of Matthew, where Jesus tells the story that does who treated others with love treated him with love and would enter their reward, whereas those who did not, would enter into their punishment.]

“Man, the more he is man, can give himself only to what he loves; and ultimately he loves only what is indestructible.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1453.

“The time is close at hand when mankind will see that, precisely in virtue of its position in a cosmic evolution which it has become capable of discovering and criticizing, it now stands biologically between the alternatives of suicide in worship.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1460.

“[This new vision] must provide ahead of us and unlimited horizon. Without this, the world would be incapable of sustaining the progress it stimulates.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1466.

“When everything else, after concentrating were being dissipated, has passed away, spirit will remain.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1472.

“The personal with which we are constantly in contact is an element (a monad); on the other hand it is primarily by diffuse activities that the universe is made known to our experience.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1484.

“The spirit of the world, in the natient form in which it appeared to me, is not a fluid, an ether, or an energy.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1488.

“Personalized being, which makes us to be human, is the highest date in which we are enabled to apprehend the stuff of the world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1492.

“It cannot, therefore, but the ‘superconscious,’ which means ‘super personal.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1494.

“Dust, for my own part, I cannot conceive and evolution towards spirit which does not culminate in a supreme personality.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1498.

“Then, however, we meet the complementary question of what will remain of each one of us in this ultimate consciousness of itself which the universe will attain.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1500.

“Once the fruit of my life has been gathered up into an immortality, a self-centered consciousness
of that factory enjoyment of it matters little to me.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1502.

“It is enough for me in that respect that what is best in me should past, there to remain forever, into one whose greater and finer than I.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1504.

“I know that I belong to the world and that I shall return to it, not simply in the ashes of my body, but in all the developed powers of my mind and heart. I can love the world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1536.

“Religion, born of the Earth’s need for the disclosing of the God, is related to and coextensive with, not the individual man but the whole of mankind.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1554.

“My own effort to reach faith can succeed only when contained within a total human experience and prolonged by it. I must therefore plunge resolutely into the great River of religions and of which the rivulet of my own private inquiries has just flowed.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1558.

“To which of these apparently opposed current semi-to surrender myself, if the stream is to carry me to the ocean?”

Christianity and Evolution, location and thousand 561.

“Personally, I have no difficulty in accepting miracles, providing (and this, in fact, is precisely what the church teaches” the miracle does not run counter to the continually warned numerous and exact rules you’re finding in the natural evolution of the world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1569.

“[Teilhard identifies three possible types of belief]: the group of Eastern religions, the humanist neo-pantheism’s, and Christianity.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1587.

“The great appeal of the Eastern religions (let’s us, to put a name to them, say Buddhism) is that they are supremely Universalist and cosmic.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1589.

“Knowledge and power – that is the only road that leads to freedom. Matter is heavily loaded, throughout, with sublime potentialities.… [he makes a distinction, however] for the East, the One is seen as a suppression of the multiple; for me, the One is born from the concentration of the multiple.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1599.

“The God whom I seek must reveal himself to me as a savior of man’s work. I thought that I could discern him in the East. But it is clear that he awaited me at the other end of the horizon in those areas more recently opened to human mysticism by the ‘road of the West.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1606.

“The humanist pantheism’s represent in our world and extremely useful form of religion.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1609.

“We have without any doubt been watching for the last century the birth and establishment of a new faith: the religion of evolution.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1614.

“In humanism’s, on the other hand, I find the genesis of the greatest measure of consciousness.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1619.

“The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun. And I turned to the humanist pantheism’s of today I feel that the lowering sky is pressing down on me and stifling me.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1630.

“All that I can do, then, is to look to the third and last branch of the river – the Christian current.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1632.

“Christianity is eminently the religion of the imperishable and the personal. It’s God thinks, loves, speaks, punishes, rewards, in the same way as a person does. The universe of Christianity, Nate San immortal souls, eternally responsible for their own destiny. DOS, over the heads of its faithful, the same heaven opens up with a wide welcome, as for the pantheists remained impassive enclosed.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1638.

“As a result of seeing only ‘personal’ relationships in the world, the average Christian has ended by reducing the create for and creature to the scale of ‘juridical man.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1642.

“Christianity gives the impression of not believing in human progress. It has never developed the sense of the earth, or it has allowed the sense to lie dormant in it.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1647.

“Faith in Christ fulfills my highest hopes, the very hopes which neither the pantheism’s of the East nor those of the West could satisfy. But it does so, I thought, only, with the other hand, to take away from me the one springboard from which I could rise up to the expectation of a divine immortality – it robs me of faith in the world. And so I had a new question to answer: does my individual religion makes such novel and exceptional demands that no older formula can satisfy them? I feared that this might well be so. It was then that the universal Christ was revealed to me.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1649.

“The universal Christ, as I understand the name, is a synthesis of Christ and the universe. He is not a new Godhead – but then inevitable deployment of the mystery in which Christianity is summed up, the mystery of the incarnation.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1655.

“The Christian’s (or rather, to be more precise, the Catholic’s) dearest belief is that Christ envelops him in his grace and makes him participate in his divine life. When we go on to ask by what physical possibility this mysterious process is affected, we are told ‘by the divine power.’ Very well – but this is no more an answer then is the Negroes who explains an aircraft by saying ‘white man’s magic.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1661.

“If we Christians wish to retain in Christ the very qualities on which his power and our worship are based, we have no better way – no other way, even – of doing so than fully to accept the most modern concepts of evolution.”

Christianity and Evolution, location.

“It is, then, in this physical poll of universal evolution that we must, in my view, locate and recognize the plenitude of Christ.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1671.

“Now I realize that, on the model of the incarnate God whom Christianity reveals to me, I can be saved only by becoming one with the universe. Thereby, to, my deepest ‘pantheist’ aspirations are set aside, guided, and reassured.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1685.

“The world around me becomes divine.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1686.

“[Tilhard speaks of speaks of the universal Christ:] Christ renewed, it is true, by contact with the modern world, at the same time Christ become even greater in order still to remain the same Christ. I have been reproached as being an innovator.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1693.

“I realized that Christianity takes on its full value only when extended (as I find it rewarding to do) to cosmic dimensions. Inexhaustibly fructified by one another, my individual faith in the world and my Christian faith in Christ have never ceased to develop and grow more profound.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1697.

“In the great river of mankind, the three currents (Eastern, human and Christian) are still at cross purposes. Nevertheless there are sure indications which make it clear that they’re coming to run together.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1706.

“I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1721.

“Evil is inevitable in the course of the creation which develops within time. Here again the solution which brings us freedom is given us by evolution. No: God, I am quite certain, does not hide himself so that we shall have to look for him – any more than he allows us to suffer in order to increase our merit .… Like a mother, he watches over his latest born. But my eyes cannot yet see him.”

Christianity and Evolution at 1736.

“Our doubts, like our misfortunes are the price we have to pay for the fulfillment of the universe, and the very condition of that fulfillment.”

Christianity and evolution at 1754.

“Adopting this dynamic point of view (in which creation is presented essentially in terms of evolution) it is important to observe that the same fundamental process can be called creation, incarnation, or redemption, according to what aspect of it is considered.”

Christianity and evolution at 1767.

[De Chardin says that if we consider God as not the center of consciousness but I had a center of centers, and if we regard man no longer is the center is as an access point in the direction which the world is advancing, then we avoid the weaknesses of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism and yet came all the requirements of Christian dogma.]

Christianity and evolution at 1813.

[De Chardin speaks of the necessity to day of readjusting the fundamental lines of our Christology to a new universe.]

Christianity and evolution at 1821.

“I would say that man’s origin by way of evolution is now an indubitable fact for science.”

Christianity and evolution at 1835.

“Man (and in this he resembles every other living being) was born not only as an individual, but also as a species.”

Christianity and evolution at 1847.

“How can one expect him, without breaking through the framework of tradition, to expand his faith, his hope and his charity…”

Christianity and evolution at 1873.

“Can one, without distorting the Christian attitude pass from the notion of ‘humanization by redemption’ to that of ‘humanization by evolution’?”

Christianity and evolution at 1894.

[De Chardin speaks of a new theology as the “core of the modern religious problem.”

Christianity and evolution at 1914.

“For a century now, the persistently growing importance of humanity in modern thought has been a matter of concern and anxiety to defenders of religion. A new star has risen, a rival, they believe, to God; they have constantly sought to deny its reality or diminish its brilliance.”

Christianity and evolution at 1952.

[De Chardin asserts that human progress and the kingdom of God are not mutually contradictory,” but is “biologically to on the point of emerging from the rightly ordered conjunction of these two forces.”]

Christianity and evolution at 1958.

“To conform to the facts of experience and at the same time to meet the demands of faith, the original Fall cannot be located at one given moment of time or one given place.”

Christianity and evolution at 2018.

“The stuff of which graces is made it is strictly biological. This we shall be seeing later, as a bearing on the theory of the Eucharist, and, more generally, on that of all the sacraments.”

Christianity and evolution at 1975.

“It is abundantly clear that the origin of evil does not raise the same difficulties (nor call for the same explanations) in a universe which is evolutive in structure, as it does in a static universe, fully formed from the outset.”

Christianity and evolution at 2000.

“The only religion mankind once and can henceforth acknowledge is one that is capable of justifying, assimilating and animating cosmic progress, as shown in the ascent of mankind.”

Christianity and evolution at 2049.

“It’s three fundamental personalist mysteries are in reality simply the three aspects of one and the same process (Christogenisis) considered either in its motive principle (creation), or in its unifying mechanism (incarnation), or in its ascensional work (redemption); and so we find ourselves in the main stream of evolution.”

Christianity and Evolution at 2055.

“Evolution is a man Christianity need one another to support and complete each other.”

Christianity and evolution at 2060.

“Evolution, we might say, preserves Christ (by making him possible), and at the same time Christ preserves evolution (by making it concrete and desirable).”

Christianity and evolution at 2073.

“By its very structure Christianity is the religion made to measure for an earth that has awoken to a sense of its organic unity and its developments.”

Christianity and evolution at 2085.

Is de Chardin saying that because Christianity envisions the incarnation of God into humankind, unlike any other recognized religion, therefore Christianity is most adaptable as a religion to the conditions of the development of the world through evolution?

“In reality, if the concept of the Trinity is properly understood, it can only strengthen our idea of divine oneness, by giving it the structure (or rather the structural, built, character) which is the mark of all real living unity, in our experience.”

Christianity and evolution at 2122.

“One thing at least appears certain, that… God never reveals himself to us from outside, by intrusion, but from within, by stimulation, elevation and enrichment of the human psyche… [Both individually and collectively].”

Christianity and evolution at 2170.

“Every evolution (so far as our experience goes) involves selection and rejection.… It reminds us that there can be loss – and in that case the reprobate elements would be eliminated forever, that is, they would be exiled to the opposite pole from God.”

Christianity and evolution at 2183.

“To assert the existence of hell is simply a negative way of saying that, I physical and organic necessity, man can attain his happiness and fulfillment only by being true to the movement which carries them along, and so reaching the term of his evolution.”

Christianity and evolution at 2189.

“Hell, it cannot be said too often, is known to us and has meaning only insofar as it [represents the] opposite place from heaven, as being the opposite pole from God.

Christianity and evolution at 2193.

“Hell is an ‘indirect’ reality [of which it is not profitable or possible to look at directly]. … We are like semantic here who is all the time aware of the colossal drop behind him, while the essence of his tactics and the successes climb & keeping his back turned to it.

Christianity and evolution at 2224.

“A different view now prevails:… Matter and spirit are now seen as to terms mutually and graded in the unity of one and the same movement parenthesis spirit emerging experientially in the world only upon progressively more fully synthesized matter).”

Christianity and evolution at 2276.

“Christianity is preeminently a faith in the progressive unification of the world in God; it is essentially Universalist, organic and ‘monist.’”

Christianity and evolution at 2278.

[Speaking of World War II, ongoing at the time of this writing], “we commonly speak of it as an economic war, antiwar of saturation. But, if my view is correct, it is much or any war of conversion, because it is a war of ideals.”

Activation of energy at 275.

“The more planetary ties tend to force us together, the more do we feel the need to disengage ourselves from one another.”

Activation of energy at 457.

De Chardin speaks of a “total consciousness which is common to the whole earth, and specific to the earth: a spirit of the earth.”

Activation of energy at 483.

“It becomes clearly apparent that it is physically impossible for the universe simultaneously to contain in itself both a reflective activity and a total death.”

Activation of energy at 485.

“Life – and so reflection – and so foresight – and so the demand for super life. These four terms are linked yet other in a biological chain.”

Activation of energy at 512.

“On an earth that is in process of a resistible depression, we see that the great problem for man is coming to be to find out how to control you and himself inevitable but supremely dangerous work of the forces of unification.”

Activation of energy at 567.

“What we have to do is to love one another – he cause love is equally by definition the name we give to’inter- centric’ actions. By its nature, love is the only synthesizing energy is differentiating action can super personalize us.”

Activation of energy at 584.

“When all is said and done, the future of the world depends entirely upon the emergency and us of a moral consciousness of the Adam, culminating in the appearance of the universal love.”

Activation of energy at 867.

“Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.”

Activation of energy at 1026.

“One thing is scientifically incontestable: in the whole history of life there has never been such an accumulation of organized energy concentrated in so small a volume as during the present war.”

Activation of energy at 1048.

“Life appears to us more and more objectively as a specific property of matter that has been taken to an extremely high degree of ordered complexity…”

Activation of energy at 1100.

[De Chardin speaks of] “the awakening of a true ‘spirit of the earth,’ which transcends the spirit of the nation which was always used to know.”

Activation of energy at 1123.

“… If we look at the world as a whole from a sufficiently elevated standpoint, it represents, without any possible doubt, the characteristics of a mass of consciousness in motion.”

Activation of energy at 1157.

“If we really consider the matter, we shall realize that it is entirely through lack of universalism that the Democratic, the communist, and the axis mistakes are still so violently in conflict…”

Activation of energy at 1182.

“Each along your online, let your thoughts and action be ‘universal,’ which is to say ‘total.’ And tomorrow, maybe, you’ll find to your surprise that all opposition has this. And you can ‘love’ one another.”

Activation of energy at 1216.

“… There is no love except in the present.”

Activation of energy at 1369.

“So defined in its nature and properties, Omega in very truth stands radiant in the heaven of the future as that which provides the momentum for centrogensis and serves to make it completely total.”

Activation of energy at 1378.

“It is centricity that makes beings personal and Omega supremely centered.”

Activation of energy at 1362.

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

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Edvard Schillebeeckx: All Humanity is the Elect People of God

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

The following interview is taken from http://www.geocities.ws/marc_batko/allhumanity.html

All Humanity is the Elect People of God
An Interview with Edward Schillebeeckx

[This interview from May 1997 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.DiePresse.at. Edward Schillebeeckx is a dominican theologian from Holland who has written seminal books and essays on systematic theology.]

Die Presse: Your theology avoids confrontation with secular culture and shares in the human search. Edward Schillebeeckx: To me what is central is a theology that develops a living sensitivity for the integrity of the human in allits anthropological dimensions, in the social and cultural areas, in theory and praxis and in the utopian and religious horizons. What holds together the culture of the modern world is the striving for whole integrated humanity and life worth living. Why has God become a problem for western people! Firstly, there are outward factors. Sociologists of religion speak today of social credibility structures of faith in God in a secularized world. In such a society, personal convictions no longer have a social confirmation. The inwardness of the person is no longer strengthened or encouraged by the concrete society but rather is alarmed and unsettled. Since modern times, every western citizen speaks of the inner side of the person and the more superficial side of human existence, namely its conditioning by social and economic situations. The individual ego appears in dominant western philosophies of subjectivity and most forms of modern sociology as something outside society while society on the other hand lives in an inner space, sometimes hostile and outside individuals: as two independent greatnesses which have contact with each other. The critical question is whether one is burdened with a distorted view of the person. The picture of the autonomous “complete individual” glorifying himself is found most clearly with Immanuel Kant. Kant didn’t regard the person as capable of advancing from his interior to a person independent of reality. This modern subjectivity is presented as constant human nature. For Christians, this was often a dogma of faith. In reality, this picture reflects a new time created by western people. It is a human interpretation which is facing more and more resistance.
Life is pluralized Whatever the problems of faith in God in the pre-modern age, people live, marry and die differently today. What was experienced as socially inevitable was interpreted as necessary. In contrast, modern life is pluralized. This multiform nature appears in a great variety of institutions. The modern person encounters a world with many elective possibilities and is thrown back more than ever on his own inwardness. How long can one maintain a protected milieu in a pluralist society without falling into a ghetto? For every person sharing and really participating in a modern society, the other possibility is a fragment of his own personality structure: an undisturbed security of remaining in truth while others err. This doesn’t exist any more. That modern persons including believers spontaneously reject the theory that “salvation is found only in the church” points to a spontaneous opinion and a particular personality structure. Modern people think pluralistically and know that no one owns the truth. Indifferentism – everyone has his own truth – threatens.

Die Presse: Modern persons live in a world of uncertainty which only occasionally is interrupted by a new philosophical construction or by new religious movements. They emphasize the contemporary “world context” of faith in God very vehemently. Can you explain that?
Schillebeeckx: Yes. As recognized at conferences of Third World theologians, believing and exploited people in the Third World face the secularized and exploiting West. Both problems are connected and cannot be separated. The existence of the “non-person” of the poor and the oppressed in a subcontinent like Latin America or in countries which for centuries have been under the rule of Christians is a scandal for all faith in God. This scandal makes faith in God incredible for many people. Therefore we in the West can no longer speak of God without relating our ideas of God with the massive suffering of people anonymously among us and elsewhere. Western believers have often joined this pressing problem with an appeal to the coming and different better world and with the so-called mantel of love which doesn’t dare take sides but through a false concept of reconciliation sides in reality with the oppressive system which is at best disqualified by words, not by deeds.

Die Presse: Edward Schillebeeckx, you recently explained in a lecture at the Catholic Academy in Bavaria: “We must seek clarity with the history of encounters between religions or religious persons, with a history that is full of disgraceful violence for the sake of an `ideal’ cause, a proclaimed truth. Is violence in the name of religion inhuman and evil from a Christian perspective?
Schillebeeckx: I think so. I know that this answer involves a critical questioning of our traditional interpretation of Christianity’s so-called claim to absoluteness with terms like election and covenant in Judaism and Christianity. However I also know that the idea of election by God includes mediation and universality without any partiality threatening humanity. This means that the election and creation intention of God who seeks the salvation of all people are subordinated. All historical forms of religious election must stand in a serving function to the universal election of all humankind. If not, threat, danger and violence toward people of a different faith are inherent to the self-understanding of being elected of individuals, peoples and communities of faith. Christian-religious imperialism should be radically condemned for humane reasons. The argument that accepting a certain religion is the first civil duty because the God of the confession is an immediate guarantee for the well-being of human society leads to religious violence. In the 4th century, after the fall of the Roman empire, when Christianity was a state religion, the Roman term “religio” was applied to the Christian relation to the absolute. For centuries, the God of Christians in the West was the preserver of the socially established state order with all the consequences resulting for those regarded as heretics or schismatics. The adoption of the ancient Roman term “religio” later made the crusades possible. Thus my thesis is that the claim of an immediate connection between an established reason for the state and the religious relation to the absolute mystery should be rejected for human-ethical reasons. Christian churches should ignore the claim of being the one true religion as ideology and bid farewell to the Roman term “religio” with which they operated for centuries up to Vatican II.

Israel’s Election Die Presse: Is the election of Jesus on the line of Israel’s election?
Schillebeeckx: Israel’s election and Jesus’ election serve the universal salvation which God intends for humankind. Compared with other religions, every religion is unique. `There is no second one like this!” is true for the confessing member of every religion. As a result, it is meaningful to speak of absolute singularity or uniqueness. Then one falls back into the old categories of religious imperialism in claims of absoluteness.

Die Presse: Does the gift of the Holy Spirit subordinate all election to the universal alliance of creation?
Schillebeeckx: Thanks to the sending of the Spirit, there is salvation for all people apart from personal, Jewish or Christian election. During my whole theological life, I have fought inwardly against the Christian term “salvific significance of Jesus’ death”. I reject the interpretation that Jesus’ death represents universal salvation. Jesus’ message and conduct must be included in his life. Within the context of a violent evil world, Jesus’ death was in fact the supreme consequence of his life, message and praxis, his charity and service in his sending by God. The assertion of faith that Jesus is the universal Redeemer implies that Christian actually produce the “fruits of God’s reign” in our history through their praxis. Otherwise the so-called objective redemption is a speculative slogan or cliche. We must go Jesus’ way of life ourselves if our proclamation is to be credible for others. Jesus’ way of life is marked by two characteristics which must be found in his disciples to make his message and praxis concretely universal. the first is that Jesus resolutely refused the way of life proposed to him in three temptations as a form of triumphalist messianism and chose the way of vulnerable solidarity with threatened people. As a second characteristic, Jesus’ way of life includes the cross and is a way of the cross. “The cross” is not cherished in itself. On account of his solidarity with violently threatened persons, Jesus was expelled by the world powers and accepted by God as a permanent presence on account of his solidarity with rejected persons. Such a way of life has God’s blessing.

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Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

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Schillebeeckx’s Christology Reviewed by John C. Haughey

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Some time ago I found this site on the web. I am unable to find its source now but it is an excellent tribute to Schillebeeckx:

Schillebeeckx’s Christology
By John C. Haughey

EDWARD SCHILLEBEECKX’s immense Christological project can be summed up simply. He wishes to establish the thesis that Maranatha Christology is the mother of all Christologies. He brings impressive erudition to his task. It is worth noting this in terms of sheer quantity: 674 pages of text and 61 pages of footnotes in his first tome Jesus, An Experiment in Christology (Seabury, 1979, $24.50); 852 pages of text and 59 pages of footnotes in his second tome, Christ, the Experience of Jesus as Lord (Seabury, 1980, $29.50); Interim Report on the Books Jesus and Christ (Seabury, 1981, $9.95), 143 pages of text and 8 pages of footnotes. For those who have not as yet delved into Schillebeeckx, it would be much easier to comprehend the scope and purpose of his task if one began with his third book, the Interim Report. (He is projecting still another tome on the subject of the Holy Spirit in the origins of Christology.) The Interim Report makes it clearer than the first two tomes that Schillebeeckx is not working from a complete Christology, as he calls it, but is working via an historical and genetic method toward a Christology. Hence, even in his second book he indicates that he is still in the foothills of Christology as we ordinarily conceive of it.

The best access into his intensely fertile mind is the issue of experience as the medium of God’s revelation. More particularly, Schillebeeckx focuses on Jesus’ own experience and the experience of Jesus’ first followers, both as individuals and after his death the primitive communities’ experience of his presence. Schillebeeckx trusts a revelation that can be located in human experience and, on the other hand, distrusts a revelation that loses touch with experience. Hence, he frequently uses the categories, “tradition of experience” and “living tradition.” So crucial is the category of experience for him that the reader, at least this reader, is led to wonder what Schillebeeckx’s own experience of Christ is. When he approaches the question of modern experience, he slips into the innocuous term “our” experience which

John C. Haughey, S.J., is a fellow of the WoodstockTheologicalCenter in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Conspiracy of God (1973) and Should Anyone Say Forever?: On Making, Keeping, and Breaking Commitments (1975). He is also the editor of The Faith That Does Justice (1977), Theological Reflections on the Charismatic Revival (1978), and Personal Values in Public Policy (1979). Fr. Haughey has served as Chairman of the International Conference on World Religions and as an editor of the Jesuit weekly, America.

202 – Schillebeeckx’s Christology

gives more sociological and impersonal information than one wants after the emphasis on experience. (Unfortunately, somewhere along the line it has become as unheard of for systematic Christological theologians to “witness” to Christ as it has for witnesses to show any interest in systematic Christology.)

From the experience of being redeemed by what Jesus said to his disciples and did in their midst, a Christologizing process began. According to this Dutch professor of the history of theology of the University of Nijmegen, the first Christians pursued the question of who this person was, because through him they had begun to experience the saving power of God. “In my Jesus books I want to show that soteriology – the kingdom of God as salvation for man: the heart of Jesus’ preaching-precedes Christology in the order of the genesis of Christological knowledge.”¹ As a consequence, the disciples wonder: Who is he and what is his relationship to God?

Not only does the early church seek to develop a Christology from soteriology, it develops a Christology into a soteriology. I think that one of the reasons why both readers and critics have a problem with the relationship between soteriology and Christology in Schillebeeckx is because he is delaying the necessary explanation of their linkage, which he sees as pneumatological, until he treats it in his third volume.² One of the serious implications of not having a clearer relationship between these two is that we have tended to obscure the fact that Jesus and Jesus’ message were not concerned about his own identity but rather with God’s passionate interest in the well-being of humankind. But by their heavy concentration on Jesus’ own identity, Christians have allowed the kingdom which he preached to fall through the cracks, so to speak. Something was lost when the message of the messenger became a message about the messenger.

The saving experience of God through Christ took place within an expectation of what God was about to do in and for Israel. The peculiar tone of Jewish hope that affected the milieu of Jesus had its beginnings with the Maccabean era (167 B.C.) through the disaster of Bar Kochba (135 A.D.). The literary form of Jewish expectation in this period of time is apocalyptic. Apocalyptic hope began to focus on an eschatological prophet who would preach repentence prior to the imminent catastrophe which would bring an end to this aeon. Those whose hearts heard the word of the prophet would repent and would be able to enter into the new aeon.

Enter John the Baptist. He proclaims a message which is both apocalyptic and non-apocalyptic. It is apocalyptic insofar as it is concerned about the imminent arrival of the definitive future with a

¹Interim Report on the Books Jesus and Christ (New York: Seabury, 1981), p. 71.
²Schillebeeckx admits that he is still in the process of an opus “the contours of which I cannot see completely even now.” Interim, p. 90.

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particular emphasis on the judgment that this arrival will bring. It is not apocalyptic insofar as John the Baptist emphasizes the immediate ethical imperatives, starting with repentence, that are incumbent upon the individuals who hear God speaking to them in his preaching. John the Baptist skewers the nationalistic hubris of contemporary Israel which had its hopes on the imminent destruction of Israel’s foes, Israel’s worldwide vindication and domination, and finally a guaranteed salvation for those who were of the line and stock of Abraham.

Enter Jesus. He is examined first in terms of his experience of God. According to Schillebeeckx, his “Abba experience” generated both his self-understanding and his understanding of the kingdom of God which he preached. In contrast to John, Jesus’ imminent kingdom was gracious beyond measure. Its benignity and the Father’s compassion stirred and won the multitudes to whom Jesus preached his understanding of the kingdom. His experience of God was taken to be authentic and authoritative by many. The one whom Israel had awaited was seen to have come in the person of Jesus. Salvation was experienced in his words and deeds. He was the prophet of eschatological salvation. Jesus, as eschatological prophet, is the first of the designations which are attached to him. It is also the understanding Jesus began to develop of his own mission. Eschatological prophet is “the matrix of all other titles and creedal strands.”³ Schillebeeckx finds evidence of this in all four Gospels.

Schillebeeckx complains that most exegetes have overlooked the importance of the eschatological prophet, thinking that subsequent higher Christological titles such as Son and Lord could not emanate from such a lowly designation. By contrast, Schillebeeckx convincingly establishes the fact that such a description of Jesus is open to all subsequent Christologizing. Schillebeeckx roots the importance and interpretation of Jesus as the eschatological prophet in a number of different figures and texts. For example, he finds Deuteronomy 18:15 significant. “Behold I send my messenger before you … give heed to him and hearken to his voice, do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him. But if you hearken attentively to his voice and do all that I say then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. My messenger shall go before you.” Behind this text and at the headwaters of religious Judaism stands the figure of Moses. Schillebeeckx finds the comparison of Jesus with Moses throughout all four Gospels. Like Moses, Jesus is an intimate of the God he preaches. Like Moses he “speaks to God face to face, even mouth to mouth.”⁴ Since Jesus’ God is credible, what one does by way of response to this eschatological greater-than- Moses prophet is critical. If one responds positively, one will know the saving power of God. If one does not, the experience of salvation remains

³ Jesus, p. 479; also: pp. 480, 487-99; Interim, p.73.
⁴ Exodus 33:10; Numbers 12:8; cf. Christ pp. 309-21.

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foreign. Hence Jesus as eschatological prophet is central to all subsequent Christologizing, no matter how “high” it becomes.

III

Jesus, the eschatological prophet, was the bond that held together all four creedal tendencies, or models, as Schillebeeckx refers to them. All of these antedate the New Testament, but they are found in the New Testament. These are: 1) maranatha Christologies which confess Jesus as the one who is to come and the lord of the future; 2) a wonder-worker Christology which sees Jesus as good and doing good and as being reviled for his works of compassion; 3) wisdom Christologies which see Jesus as sent by God’s wisdom or as identified with wisdom itself proclaiming the mysteries of God’s salvation; 4) finally, all forms of Easter Christology in which the death and resurrection of Jesus occupy a central place. Schillebeeckx traces each of these credal tendencies to some aspect in the historical life of Jesus which helped to create the Christology. For example, Jesus proclaiming the coming kingdom developed into a maranatha Christology. Jesus, who went around Palestine doing good, develops into a wonder worker Christology. Jesus, who discloses the mysteries of God to man, develops into a wisdom Christology.

According to Schillebeeckx, something has to be underneath all of these Christologies, which unites them and which even now can explain both the person and the subsequent interpretations of the phenomenon of Jesus. “For me this is Jesus, the eschatological prophet.”⁵

Schillebeeckx sees an immediate link between Jesus identifying himself as eschatological prophet and the parousia kerygma which began immediately after his death. The parousia kerygma emphasized the coming of the kingdom. What was to come and what his lips preached were still to come. The earliest form of this kerygma is found in the “Q tradition.” The passage from a parousia kerygma to a resurrection Christology is a movement from concentration on the kingdom to a concentration on the person of Jesus. The deeper, earlier layer of the tradition is the mother of all Christianity.

It would be valuable to take some of these stages of development apart. Schillebeeckx contends that the disciples underwent a much deeper conversion after the death of Jesus. This contention is at the heart of Schillebeeckx’s reconstruction. They experienced themselves being forgiven for deserting Jesus, they recommitted themselves to him and to his cause after his death, and they did both of these things because they sensed his presence. That he was present to them by reason of a resurrection was not their first interpretation; rather, they experienced only that he was present to them. Schillebeeckx argues: “For the

⁵ Interim, p. 70.

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Q community, the crucified one is the saviour and judge of the world Soon to return, but even now actively present in the preaching of the Christian prophets; in other words, for them Jesus has evidently been taken up to God. How? This is nowhere dwelt upon. Their Easter experience is the enthusiastic one of the Lord actively present in their community and soon to come: a maranatha experience.”⁶

Schillebeeckx makes the interesting observation that apocalyptic traditions could not have suggested Jesus’ resurrection to the minds of his disciples. Apocalyptic did conceive of resurrection, but it was a general resurrection in the final days. Rather than apocalyptic (which is the usual explanation), the idea that Jesus rose from the dead was suggested to these first Christians by reflection upon his ministry, his teaching, and his identification with the kingdom of God. These communities awaited and proclaimed the same kingdom that Jesus had preached. But now they added the dimension that with the coming of the kingdom, Jesus too would come this time as judge and Son of Man. They thereby personalized the imminent rule of God: Jesus will dispense mercy and judgment in that day. One of the ways in which they did this was to link the Son of Man to the historical Jesus who is now in a heavenly condition. For example, Jesus exclaims: “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels of God” (Lk. 12:8; this is from the Q material).

There seem to be three distinct but not necessarily successive moments in the earliest materials that in turn find their way into the New Testament. The first two of these moments are developments within the Q material itself, and the third is Mark’s further emendations beyond the Q materials. In the earliest Q materials, the heavenly Jesus seems to be operative in the present community. This is seen as individuals responding to his words preached by that community, words about Jesus, and Jesus’ own words. Later developments within the Q materials, which apparently are added in the Hellenistic/ Jewish phase of the Q community, manifest a much greater interest in every facet of the earthly life of Jesus. A salvific function is obviously being attached to the words and deeds of the earthly Jesus. In neither of these two phases of the Q community is there an explicit resurrection proclamation, but when it comes from other material, it is easily absorbed into the Q material because the heavenly Jesus is seen as present and operative in the Q community.

The third moment in this early Christology, however, the Marcan moment, does not assume an operative presence in the community of the heavenly Christ who is now with God. Marcan Christology depends on the memory of Jesus and on his coming again. Its key dogmatic difference from the two moments found in the Q material is its transfer of Jesus’ exaltation to the future parousia rather than to a presently exalted Christ. Schillebeeckx claims, for example, that the messianic

⁶Jesus, p. 396.

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secret in Mark is more interested in denying a validity to what he calls “power Christologies” that were developing in the Christian communities than the more obvious reason for messianic secret as it is traditionally understood. Any form of Christology that has power operative now is inappropriate since Jesus is absent, not present, for Mark. He has concealed himself in heaven, and power will irrupt when he comes again in glory. The community is now in an orphaned state. According to Schillebeeckx, the notion that Jesus would come again in power was historically prior to the idea that Jesus rose from the dead corporeally.

In developing the resurrection moment in his genetic evolution of Christology, Schillebeeckx is true to the importance which he attaches to experience and is anxious to keep together the disciples’ experience of Jesus’ presence in their midst and what happened to Jesus himself-his rising from the dead. In other words, he is not interested in focusing the mystery of the resurrection simply on Jesus himself, but wants to keep it ensconced in the experience of the saving presence of Christ in the midst of his followers. The appearances of the risen Christ, which Schillebeeckx contends come later in the development, put into words the conversion experience that the disciples had undergone in and through the presence of the risen Jesus.

With respect to these appearances, however, “it is not a question of concomitant visual phenomena; at most they are an emotional sign of what really overwhelmed the disciples: the experience of Jesus’ new saving presence in the midst of his own people on earth. The coming together again of the disciples who were scattered after Jesus’ death is the fruit of the new presence of the now glorified Jesus.”7 Hence, the cognitive, experiential, and emotional dimensions of the disciples’ experience come together to explain the appearances of Jesus. Schillebeeckx says that his intention in treating the appearances this way “was to relieve this visual element of the deep dogmatic significance which some people attach to it, namely of being the foundation of the whole of the Christian faith.8

A weak point in his whole development is the hypothesis of a conversion on the part of the disciples after the death of Jesus. In his new book, Schillebeeckx admits this is a deduction, rather than something he can textually prove.

Pressed by exegetes for his handling of the process, Schillebeeckx takes to more obscure ground, by explaining that he is not talking about one homogeneous development within the Christian community but is talking about many different developments coming from different corners of Palestine. He would say that for some early Christian traditions, belief in the resurrection of Jesus is a starting point of the whole development of their Christology, whereas in other traditions, the

⁷Interim, p. 81.
⁸Interim, p. 82.

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conviction of one who is to come is the starting point of the development. He furthermore claims that even in the first creedal tendency (in the maranatha Christology) the resurrection is implied “but it was not explicitly presupposed.”⁹ While the innocent reader of the first volumes probably thought that that is a chronological account, Schillebeeckx’s further explanations indicate that one is reading a coalescence of many different traditions, making it difficult if not impossible to establish chronological sequences.

If we take Schillebeeckx’s original intention, which was “to bridge the gap between academic theology and the concrete needs of the ordinary Christian” (Foreword), we would have to give Schillebeeckx low marks. In saying this, however, I could not give the books low marks. The problem is in the fecundity of his mind and the immensity of the data which he brings to bear on the reader. Within any one excursus, one can get lost, so overwhelming is the amount of data that Schillebeeckx has researched. We are in his debt for having researched so much, of course, but “the concrete needs of the ordinary Christian” have a hard time being met with the amount of data here. Each tree is so interesting, one might never get a fix on the forest.

I didn’t fully understand what Schillebeeckx thought his role was or what he thought the role of Christology was until near the end of the first volume. It would be worth noting here that he does not think that theology’s task is the creation of new Christological models but the gathering together of “elements which may lead to a new, authentic disclosure experience or source experience.”¹⁰ Such an experience evokes models, he claims. The model that Schillebeeckx’s Jesus evokes is one of kingdom/orthopraxis in view of coming kingdom/companionship with Jesus and his brothers and sisters in the Christian community while awaiting this gracious kingdom.

In order to appreciate this model, one has to concur with Schillebeeckx’s observations about the limitations of the Johannine model which were behind the decisions of the definitive councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. These constituted only one option of many. That option individualized Christology considerably by its concern about the person and nature of Jesus and its inability to integrate its concern about the person of Jesus with the eschatological, historical, soteriological, and political implications of the message Jesus presented. Schillebeeckx makes that message intrinsic to the identity of Jesus. As a consequence, he delivers to the reader a degree of freedom and a political responsibility for both living and proclaiming this gracious imminent kingdom that other Christologies have been less successful in doing. Until and unless the message of the kingdom is intrinsic to one’s Christology, the possibilities are great that we find ourselves admiring “a divine Ikon” and thereby making a new ideology out of Christology itself.¹¹

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

⁹Interim, p. 85; Jesus, p. 396.
¹⁰ Jesus, p. 571; cf. also Christ, pp. 30-62.
¹¹Jesus, p. 671.

Quotes from Two Books of Teilhard de Chardin

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Quotes from two books of Teilhard de Chardin

“He quotes with approval Nietzsche’s view that man is unfinished and must be surpassed or completed; and proceeds to deduce the steps needed for his completion.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 134.

“In 1925 he coined the term ‘noosphere’ to denote the sphere of mind.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 137.

“He seeks to link the evolution of mind with the concept of energy. If I understand him right, he envisages two forms of energy, or perhaps two modes in which it is manifested energy in the physicists sense, measurable or calculable by physical methods, and ‘ psychic energy’ which increases with the complexity of organized units.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 189.

“The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation area indeed an isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as an isolated human individual. I would prefer to say that mind is generated by or in complex organizations of living matter.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 199. \

“Teilhard was a strong visualizer. He saw with his minds eye at the banal fact of the Earth’s roundness, the sphericity of man’s environment, was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environment, man’s thoughts and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards.”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 211.

“He envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a final state, which he called ‘point Omega.’”

Introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, location 228.

“The concept of a hyperpersonal mode of organization sprang from Teilhard’s conviction of the supreme importance of personality. [Patch human being] has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration – integration of the self with the outer world of man and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 247.

“This belief in the preeminent importance of the personality in the scheme of things was for him a matter of faith, but of faith supported by rational inquiry and scientific knowledge.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 253.

“Persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality and conscious partners patient.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 260.

“It remains for our descendents to organize this global noosystem more adequately, so as to enable mankind to understand the process of evolution on earth more fully and to directed more adequately.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 270.

The editor notes that de Chardin delighted DMV phrase, “in modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 273.

“We should consider inter-thinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny is to realize new possibilities for evolving life on this planet.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 274.

“A reading of Bergson’s ‘ Evolution Creatrice’ had helped to inspire in him a profound interest in the general facts and theories of evolution.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 295.

“As a dedicated Christian priest, he felt it imperative to try to reconcile Christian theology with this evolutionary philosophy, to relate the facts of religious experience of natural science.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 310.

“[In his] geological research in the desert remoteness of Mongolia and North Western China, [he was inspired] a remarkable and truly political essay which was at one and the same time mystical and realistic, religious and philosophical.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 319.

[In Mongolia he on earth the scroll of Peking man]

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 324.

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 319.

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 335.

“He wanted to deal with the entire human phenomenon, as a transcendence of biological I psychosocial evolution.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 345.

“He was prevailed on to leave his manuscripts to a friend. They therefore could be published after his death, since permission to publish is only required for the work of a living writer.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 369.

“It isn’t antientropic process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its degradation of energy and its tendency to and uniformity. With the aid of the sun’s energy, biological evolution marches uphill, producing increased variety and higher degrees of organization.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 389.

“On this new psychological level, the evolutionary process leads to new types and higher degrees of the organization.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 400.

“He has helped to define the conditions of advance space… Bracket which] are these: global unity of mankind’s noetic organization or system of awareness, but a high degree of rioting within that unity; love, with goodwill and full cooperation; personal integration and internal harmony; and increasing knowledge.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 406.

“We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the Earth’s immense future, and can realize more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love.”

Introduction to the Phenomenon of Man, location 413.

“Nothing is constructed except at the price of an equivalent destruction.”

The Phenomenon of Man, location 832.

“[T]he most convincing proof to me that life was produced once and once only on earth is furnished by the profound structural unity of the tree of life.” It is

Phenomenon of Man, location 1738.

“’ Survival of the fittest by natural selection’ is not a meaningless expression, provided it is not taken to imply either a final ideal or a final explanation.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 1979.

“What we find within the struggle to live is something deeper than a series of tools; it is a conflict of chances.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 1982.

“This dramatic and perpetual opposition between the one born of the many and the many constantly being born of the one runs right through evolution.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2021.

“All scientists are today an agreement for the very good reason that they couldn’t practice science if they thought otherwise.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2569.

“That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now, as I have said, common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2586.

“But we have every reason to think that in animals to a certain inwardness exists approximately proportional to the development of their brains.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2632.

“The natural history of living creatures amounts on the exterior to the gradual establishment of a fast nervous system.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2677.

Phenomenon of Man, location 2721.

“How can life respected determinism song the without and yet act and freedom within? Perhaps we shall understand that better someday.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2729.

“The superior psychic levels demands physically big brains.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2833.

“Unlike the insect, the mammal is no longer completely the slave of the phylum that belongs to. Around it an ‘aura’ of freedom begins to float, a glimmer of personality.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 2857.

“Admittedly the animal knows. But it cannot know that it knows: that is quite certain. If it could it would long ago have not plied its inventions and developed a system of internal constructions that could not have escaped our observation.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3001.

“It is true that in the end, from the organic point of view, the whole metamorphosis leading command depends on the question of a better brain. But how was this cerebral for perfectioning to be carried out – how could it have worked – if there had not been a whole series of other conditions realized that just the same time?

Phenomenon of Man, location 3093.

“Life does not work by following a single thread, nor yet by fits and starts. It pushes forward its whole network at one and the same time.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3101.

“What at first sight disconcert suss, on the other hand, is the need to accept that this step could only be achieved at one single stroke.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3105.

“Let us therefore keep hold of one idea – that the access to thought represents a threshold which had to be crossed at a single stride;…”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3126.

“The more deeply science plumbs the past of our humanity, the more clearly does it see that humanity, as a species, forms to the rhythm and the rules that marked each new offshoot on the tree of life before the advent of mankind.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3381.

Phenomenon of Man, location 3539.

Phenomenon of Man, location 3698.

“With man (at all events with post-Neolithic man) simple elimination tends to become exceptional, or at all events secondary. However brutal the conquest, the suppression is always accompanied by some degree of assimilation.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3797.

“Formerly, on the tree of life we had a mere 10 goal of stems; now over the whole domain of Homo sapiens we have synthesis.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3803.

“Traditions became organized and a collective memory was developed.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3751.

“The better we get the past into perspective, the more clearly we see that the periods called ‘historic’ (right down to and including the beginning of ‘modern’ times) are nothing else than direct prolongation’s of the Neolithic age.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3758.

“One might well become impatient or lose heart at the sight of so many minds (and not mediocre ones either) remaining today still closed to the idea of evolution.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 3978.

Phenomenon of Man, location 3985.

“However materialistic they might be, it did not occur to the first evolutionists that their scientific intelligence had anything to do in itself with evolution.”

Phenomenon of Man, location or thousand 4008.

“Unique in this respect among all the energies of the universe, consciousness is a dimension which it is inconceivable and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling or to suppose that it can double back upon itself.… Every increase of internal vision is essentially the germ of a further vision which includes all the others carry still farther on.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4237.

Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God Is within You: Christianity Not As a Mystic Religion but As a New Theory of Life, Kendall location 122.

“Without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 255.

Phenomenon of Man, location 260.

Phenomenon of Man, location 4279.

“Undeniably, quite apart from any hypothesis, the external play of cosmic forces, when combined with the nature – so prone to coalesce – of our thinking souls, operates towards a concentration of the energies of consciousness;…”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4385.

“[Humanity] has succeeded, not only in becoming cosmopolitan, but in stretching a single organized membrane over the earth without breaking it. To what should we attribute this strange condition if not to a reversal, or more exactly a radical perfectioning, of the ways of life by the operation (at last, and only now possible) of a powerful instrument of evolution – the coalescence upon itself of an entire file?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4401.

“The principal axis of revolution: evermore complexity and thus evermore consciousness.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4460.

“The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egotistic leave the extremity of everyone for himself is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4461.

“The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman – these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of altogether, in a direction which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4466.

“No evolutionary future awaits man except in association with all other men. The dreamers of yesterday glimpsed that.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4495.

“A new domain of psychic coal expansion – that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise their heads to look at it.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4628.

“After all half 1 million years, perhaps even 1 million, were required for life the past from the pre-hominids to modern man. Should we now start ringing our hands because, less than two centuries after glimpsing a higher state, modern man is still at loggerheads with himself?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4657.

“Is it not possible that in our theories and interacts he had neglected to give due place to the person and the forces of personalization?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4703.

“To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance towards the ‘other.’”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4812.

“The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism’. Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalized is itself.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4815.

“Considered in its full biological reality, love – that is to say, the affinity of being with being – is not peculiar to man.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4831.

“Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4845.

” Mankind, the spirit of the year, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of the unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian and yet they are biologically necessary. And for them to be incarnated in the world all we may well need is to imagine our power of loving developed until it embraces the total of Man and of the earth.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4860.

“A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 4879.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5067.

Phenomenon of Man, location 1591.

“Something has been started which, I am convinced, will now never stop.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5098.

“Have we ever given serious thought to the predicament we are in?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5100.

We behave as though we expected discoveries to fall ready-made from the sky, like rain or sunshine, all men concentration the serious business of killing each other and eating.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5107.

“Less is provided annually for all the research all over the world than for one capital ship. Surely our great grandsons will not be wrong if they think of us as barbarians?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5111.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5116.

“A commercial market can reach saturation point. One day, though substitutes may be found, we shall have exhausted our minds and oil wells. But to all appearances nothing on earth will ever saturate our desire for knowledge or exhaust our power for invention.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5135.

“Man, the knowing object, will perceive that last that man, ‘the object of knowledge’, is the key to the whole science of nature.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5145.

“But man, we should add, is a solution of everything that we can know.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5147.

“Psychologically, our souls are incredibly subtle and complex: how can one fit them into a world of laws and formulas?”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5151.

“In the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and developed.”

Phenomenon of Man, location the 176.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5187.

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reasons supplanting belief.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5192.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5196.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5221.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5263.

“Human history develops between two points of reflection, the one inferior and individual, the other superior and collective.”

“God – Omega.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5283.

As to progress into the future, de Chardin writes, “there are no summits without abysses.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5299.

“The only universe capable of containing the human person is an ‘irreversibly’ personalizing” universe.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5339.

“By its very structure of the noosphere could not close itself either individually or socially in any way a save under the influence of the center we have called Omega.”.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5351.

“At the present time no other energy of a personal nature could be detected on Earth save that represented by the sum of human persons.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5358.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5359.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5383.

“Is the kingdom of God a big family? Yes, MA sensitives. But in another sense it is a prodigious biological operation – that of the redeeming incarnation.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5400.

“Then, as St. Paul tells us, God shall be in all. This is indeed a superior form of pantheism without traces of poison of adulteration or annihilation. . . .”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5408.

“Following Greek thought – following all thoughts in fact – are not ‘to be’ and’ to be one’identical?

“Christian love is incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it.”

Phenomenon of Man, location 5434.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5467.

Phenomenon of Man, location 5537.

Christianity and Evolution

De Chardin uses the phrase, “religion of the earth” and “the God of the ahead.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 76.

Christianity and Evolution, location 82.

Christianity and Evolution, location 89.

Christianity and Evolution, location 97.

“In Teilhard man’s earthly work is linked to the idea of a world in evolution.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 100.

Christianity and Evolution, location 103.

“Teilhard felt that the solution… Was to be found at the very center of the Christian faith, in an updated Christology.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 108.

“Teilhard considers the value of the world and asks how it can be related to the incarnate Word.” 113.

“The organ made for seeing God is not (if you get to the bottom of the dogma) the isolated human soul; it is the human united to all the other souls, under the humanity of Christ.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 155.

“And yet it is quite obvious that thought must have a certain organic support, which is itself a function of certain physico – chemical conditions.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 228.

“We cannot pin down the point at which the hand of God is apparent. It acts upon the whole body of causes without making itself evident at any point.”

“Properly speaking, God does not make: he makes things make themselves. That is why there is no breach or cleavage at the point at which he enters.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 306.

“Considered objectively, material facts have in them something of the divine. In relation, however, to our knowledge, this divine element of them is no more than a potency.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 333.

Christianity and Evolution, location 441.

Christianity and Evolution, location 444.

“Let me say frankly what I think: it is impossible to universalize the first Adam without destroying his individuality.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 459.

“[The doctrine of original sin] simply symbolizes the inevitable chance of evil… Which accompanies the existence of all participated being.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 471.

“Strictly speaking, there is no first Adam. The name this guys is a universal and unbreakable law of reversion or perversion – the price that has to be paid for progress.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 479.

Christianity and Evolution, location 514.

“It is infinitely probable that the conscious layer of the cosmos is not confined to a single point (our mankind) but continues beyond the Earth into other stars and other times.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 518.

Christianity and Evolution, location 522.

Christianity and Evolution, location 526.

“Christ is all or nothing.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 532.

“The more we bring the past to life again by means of science, the less we can accommodate either Adam or the earthly paradise.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 547.

Christianity and Evolution, location 622.

Christianity and Evolution, location 628.

“On earth we are essentially separate, incomplete – a point made, you may remember, in Plato’s Phaedrus. We are seeking desperately for our completion.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 695.

“Fundamentally, we have but one passion: to become one with the world which envelops us.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 697.

“We cannot but quite seriously question whether there may not be a sort of cosmic consciousness in our soul, more diffuse than our personal consciousness.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 704.

Christianity and Evolution, location 714.

Christianity and Evolution, location 716.

“And yet there have always been poets: there must, then, always have been naturally pantheist souls.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 718.

“Pantheism in the wide sense in which I am now discussing it, as referring, that is, to a concern for the Whole, is seen to be religious, fundamentally religious.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 724.

“The Whole cannot reveal itself to us without our recognizing in it God, or the shadow of God.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 728.

Christianity and Evolution, location 754.

Christianity and Evolution, location 757.

“We can see the worship of the world in every quarter, wherever we look.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 784.

Christianity and Evolution, location 790.

“Science and philosophy’s revelation of the whole is an undeniable fact.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 803.

“In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even in the view of the mirror biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.”

The Phenomenon of Man, location 5757.

Christianity and Evolution, location 809.

“We have Scripture (St. Paul, in particular) to tell us what, in a general way, will be the final appearance of the world restored in Jesus Christ.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 822.

[Teilhard seems to be committed to scientific principles, but in doing so, he adapts his religious faith to conform, or affirm that. That seems to be affirmed by what follows:]

Christianity and Evolution, location 822.

“However individual our salvation may be from many points of view, it is in consequence accomplished only by collective fulfillment.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 826.

Christianity and Evolution, location 840.

Christianity and Evolution, location 850.

“What form must our Christology take if it is to remain itself in the New World?”

Christianity and Evolution, location 955.

“Our Christology is still expressed in exactly the same terms as those which, three centuries ago, could satisfy men whose outlook on the cosmos is now physically impossible for us to accept.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 967.

Christianity and Evolution, location 980.

“Reduction, incarnation, the gospel message: how are these three aspects of Christology to be modified if they are to measure up to the properties of an evolutive world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 992.

Christianity and Evolution, location 997.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1001. Next line ”

“. . . it drags us back inexorably into the overpowering darkness of reparation and expiation.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1005.

“Original sin, conceived in the form still attributed to it today, is an intellectual and emotional stuck trade jacket.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1006.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1008.

“Original sin is a static solution to the problem of evil.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1013.

“They suggest the punishments which every human group decides to inflict on those who upset the established order.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1019.

“We must remember, the world was only a week old and Adam send. Nothing in paradise, accordingly, had yet had time to perish.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1026.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1029.

“It is, in short, because Christ is still today projected upon a static world, as he used to be, that he is presented to us in official ecclesiastical documents chiefly through the shadow of his cross.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1032.

“In this new setting, while evil loses nothing of its poignancy or horror, it ceases to be an incomprehensible element in the structure of the world becomes a natural feature.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1037.

“Fewer act and not being are diametrically opposed in the same way as our perfected unity and fewer multiple.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1048.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1075.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1084.

“We must clearly understand what is meant by an evolution of world. It is one in which the consistency of the elements and their stability of balance lie and the direction not of matter but of spirit.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1104.

“All the spirit of the earth combining to produce an increase of thinking unity; that is the avenue opening up ahead of us.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1149.

“The church (and this is perhaps the clearest evidence of her immortal truth) is alone now in effectively preserving the idea and the experience of a personal God head.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1155.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1162.

“The truth about today’s gospel is that it has ceased, or practically ceased, to have any attraction because it has become unintelligible.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1168.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1172.

“With a new view of space, a third road is opening up: to make our way to heaven through Earth.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1193.

“’History shows that no religion has been able to maintain itself in the world for more than 2000 years. Once that time has run out, they all die.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1207.

“… Our formulas have become narrow and inflexible.… There must be a moult if we are to continue to live.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1211.

“I believe Christianity to be immortal.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1215.

“After what will soon be 2000 years, Christ must be born again, he must be reincarnated into a world that is become too different from that in which he lived. Christ cannot reappear tangibly among us; but he can reveal to our minds a new and triumphant aspect of his former countenance.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1221.

“By upbringing and intellectual training, I belong to the ‘children of heaven’; but by temperament, and by my professional studies, I am a ‘child of the earth.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1239.

“Today I believe probably more profoundly than ever in God, and certainly more than ever in the world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1244.

“’It is through that which is most incommunicable he personal in us that we may contact you with the universal.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1254.

“On the strict psychological plane to which I intend to confine myself here, I mean by ‘faith’ any adherence of our intelligence to a general view of the universe.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1256.

“To believe is to affect and intellectual synthesis.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1260.

“Similarly, I maintain, in the domain of beliefs, every faith is born from a faith.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1265.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1279.

“’Everything holds together.’Expressed in this elementary form, faith in the world does not differ noticeably from the acceptance of the scientific truth.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1291.

“For me, in other words, there are no longer any ‘things’ in the world; there are only ‘elements.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1302.

“There are basically two types of mind, and only two: those who do not go beyond (and see no need to go beyond) reception of the multiple – however interlinked in itself the multiple may appear to be – and those whom perception of the same principle was necessarily completed in some unity.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1307.

“There are only, in fact, pluralists and modernists: those who do not see, and those who do.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1309.

“The unity of the world is by nature dynamic or evolutive two.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1345.

“We now see beings as like threadless fibers, woven into a universal process. Everything falls back into a past abyss, and everything rushes forward into a future abyss.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1349.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1356.

“It is a curious thing: man, the centering creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogenous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones: but no ordered places yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1364.

“On earth we perceive a constant increase in psyche throughout time.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1381.

“A basis of spirit preserves all the laws noted by physics, while at the same time relating directly to thought.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1383.

Quote the spirit in question has a special, well-defined nature. It in no way represents some entity which is independent of matter or antagonistic to it, or floating in, the physical world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1392.

“. . . spirit which is born within, and as a junction of matter.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1395.

“’It is better, no matter what the cost, to be more conscious than less conscious.’ This principle, I believe, is the absolute condition of the world’s existence.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1398.

“The only reality in the world is the passion for growth.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1403.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1409.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1413.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1417.

“The poll of two combined opposite currents, each equally year reversible: entropy and life.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1429.

“Each one of us to
some degree forms but one with the totality of the universe. It is the same with action.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1429.

“What conditions must the world satisfy if it is to be possible for a conscious freedom to operate in it?”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1431.

“For my own part, the thing is clear: in the case of a true act (by which I mean one to which one gives something of one’s own life), I cannot undertake it unless I have the underlying intention (as Thucydides noted many centuries ago) of constructing a ‘work of abiding value,’… not that I am so vain, but some sort of essential instinct makes me guess at the joy, as the only worthwhile joy, of cooperating as one individual atom in the final establishment of a world: and ultimately nothing else can mean anything to me.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1437.

“Man, the more he is man, can give himself only to what he loves; and ultimately he loves only what is indestructible.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1453.

Christianity and Evolution, location 1460.

“[This new vision] must provide ahead of us and unlimited horizon. Without this, the world would be incapable of sustaining the progress it stimulates.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1466.

“When everything else, after concentrating were being dissipated, has passed away, spirit will remain.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1472.

“The personal with which we are constantly in contact is an element (a monad); on the other hand it is primarily by diffuse activities that the universe is made known to our experience.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1484.

“The spirit of the world, in the natient form in which it appeared to me, is not a fluid, an ether, or an energy.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1488.

“Personalized being, which makes us to be human, is the highest date in which we are enabled to apprehend the stuff of the world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1492.

“It cannot, therefore, but the ‘superconscious,’ which means ‘super personal.’”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1494.

“Dust, for my own part, I cannot conceive and evolution towards spirit which does not culminate in a supreme personality.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1498.

“Then, however, we meet the complementary question of what will remain of each one of us in this ultimate consciousness of itself which the universe will attain.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1500.

“Once the fruit of my life has been gathered up into an immortality, a self-centered consciousness of that factory enjoyment of it matters little to me.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1502.

“It is enough for me in that respect that what is best in me should past, there to remain forever, into one whose greater and finer than I.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1504.

“I know that I belong to the world and that I shall return to it, not simply in the ashes of my body, but in all the developed powers of my mind and heart. I can love the world.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1536.

“Religion, born of the Earth’s need for the disclosing of the God, is related to and coextensive with, not the individual man but the whole of mankind.”

Christianity and Evolution, location 1554.

“Can one, without distorting the Christian attitude, passed from the notion of humanization by redemption to humanization by evolution?”

Christianity and evolution at 1892.

“Here, if I am not mistaken, is the core of the modern religious problem, and the starting point, it may well be, of a new theology.”

Christianity and evolution at 1894.

“Under the pressure of today’s events and the evidence we now have, the tangible world that its future developments are certainly taking on an increasing interest for the followers of the gospel. This is producing a humanist revival in religion… [Which] prefers to emphasize its luminous aspect. … Christ is tending more and more to appeal to us as leader and King of the world: this is in addition to, and as strong as, his appeal as it’s atoner.”

Christianity and evolution at 1914.

“For a century now, they persistently growing importance of humanity and modern thought has been a matter of concern and anxiety to defenders of religion. And you star has risen, a rival, they believed, to God; and they have constantly sought to deny its reality or diminish its brilliance.”

Christianity and evolution at 1948.

De Chardin argues that human progress and the kingdom of God are not contradictory, but are “two magnetic forces; further, he argues that the Christian Renaissance time is biologically due from the conjunction of those two forces.

Christianity and evolution at 1952.

“These two spiritual currents may feed, swell, and fertilize one another, and so, by synthesis, make Christianity break through into a new sphere: the very sphere in which the Redeemer, combining in himself the energies of both heaven and earth, will take his place supernaturally (as seen by our faith) at the actual focus point upon which the rays of evolution naturally (as seen by our science) converge.”

Christianity and evolution at 1958.

“To conform to the facts of experience and at the same time to meet the demands of faith, the original Fall cannot be located at one given moment of time or one given place.”

Christianity and evolution at 1970.

“The stuff of which grace is made to strictly biological.… [It] has a bearing on the theory of the Eucharist, and, more generally, on that of all the sacraments.”

Jeana T and evolution at 2018.

“It is abundantly clear that the origin of evil does not raise the same difficulties open parenthesis your call for the same explanations) in a universe which is evolutive in structure, as it does in a static universe, fully formed from the outset.”

Christianity and evolution at 1975.

“From this it follows that a threefold faith is necessary, and sufficient, as a foundation for the Christian position: 1. Faith in the (personalizing) personality of God, the focus of the world. 2. Faith in the divinity of the historic Christ (not only profit and perfect man, but also object of love and worship). 3. Facing the reality of the church file and, in which and around which Christ continues to develop, in the world, his total personality. [Everything else is subsidiary.

“The only religion mankind wants and can henceforth acknowledge is one that is capable of justifying, assimilating and animating cosmic progress, as shown in the ascent of mankind.”]

Christianity and evolution at 2038.

“… The universe, as now revealed to us by fax, is moving towards higher states of consciousness and spirituality…”

Christianity and evolution at 2049

“evolutionism and Christianity need one another to support and complete each other.”

Christianity and evolution at 2055.

“Evolution, we might say, preserves Christ (by making him possible), and at the same time Christ preserves evolution (by making it concrete and desirable).

Christianity and evolution at 2060.

“One thing at least appears certain, that… God never reveals himself to us from outside, I intrusion, but from within, by stimulation, elevation and enrichment of the human psychic current…”

Christianity and evolution at 2122.

“To assert the existence of hell is simply a negative way of saying that, by physical and organic necessity, man can attain his happiness and fulfillment only by being true to the movement which carries them along, and so reaching this term of his evolution.”

Christianity and evolution at 2183.

“To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.” [Is this intended to appease the Catholic Church’s censure of him?]

Christianity and evolution at 2247.

“… matter and spirit are now seen as two terms mutually integrated in the unity of one and the same movement…”

Christianity and evolution at 2261.

“Christianity is preeminently a faith in the progressive unification of the world and God; it is essentially universalist, organic and monist.”

Christianity and evolution at 2276.

“The more the century succeed one another… The more men are forced against one another on our round planet… Is pressure upon itself is continually being increased, not nearly so much by its numerical growth as by the multiplication of interconnections of all kinds and the amazing speeding out of their development.”

Activation of energy at 485.

“By its nature, love is the only synthesizing energy whose differentiating actions can super-personalize us.”

Activation of energy at 567.

“Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.”

Activation of energy at 867.

“One thing is scientifically incontestable: in the whole history of life there is never been such an accumulation of organized energy concentrated in so small a volume as during the present war (World War II).”

Activation of energy at 1029.

[Became of the lack of universalism in the Democratic, the communist, and axis mystiques) “these various movements cannot fail in the end to discover that though they may set out on opposite sides they’re all tackling the same mountain, and they must inevitably meet at the same peak: and that is the personalizing Association of the greatest possible number of men, through the heart, in one lesson mind.”

Activation of energy at 1157.

“It is centricity that makes beings personal and Omega supremely centered.”

Activation of energy at 1360.

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

A witness to Bonhoeffer’s execution: in the almost 50 years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 309

“Cheap grace is ‘grace without price; grace without cost!’”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 337.

“Luther said that grace alone can save; but those words were always spoken in correlation with the obligation of discipleship, of obedience to Jesus.”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 387.

“Grace was intended to open the way to Christ, but cheap grace only closed it.”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 400.

[Cheap grace is] preaching forgiveness without requiring repentance.”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 413.

“You can never give personal obedience to abstract ideas.”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 457.

“Cheap grace has served as an inoculation, or more accurately, a vaccination. We have gotten just enough of Jesus to prevent us from catching the real thing.”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 429.

“Only he who believes is obedient,… Only he who is obedient believes.”

Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, location 497.

“[Jesus] knows that only in the concrete obedience do we become free to believe.”

I Want to Live These Days with You at 258.

“That faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.”

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr , Profit, Spy at 549.

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Health Challenges

Posted on June 23, 2013 by bibleartists

Health challenges are not new to me. “By the grace of God,” with the blessing of medical care and pharmaceutical “miracles,” and with the love and encouragement of many people, I have been able to find some way to “get up” and keep living a meaningful life.

During this blog, I have been blessed with what, for me, is good health. I’ have now reached, however, a stage in my multiple sclerosis, post polio syndrome and general aging that I must find ways to accomplish physical and mental functioning that I used to take for granted. Heat can be debilitating for me, and when my core temperature rises with uncontrolled bodily heat or an infection, I can become quite helpless physically and mentally. Post polio “brain fatigue” imposes some limitations, which I tend to ignore, to do something that I feel “needs to be done.. These limitations and influence at times can be detected in my writing and posts by myself and others. Complicating such issues is the fact that I rely on speech recognition to do the main part of my writing, and that software often “hears” words that I did not intend. My “MS slur doesn’t help. When I do type, as now, it is “hunt-and-peck” with my right hand. “When I am finished writing” a post, I often do not have the patience or the mental edge to adequately proof what I have written and posted. I apologize to anyone who has noted erratic , non-sensical writing. I hope I have now better proofed my earlier posts.

I have generally enjoyed good health while writing this blog; at least, whatever the progress of my post polio syndrome and multiple sclerosis has not affected my mind to the degree that I have felt incompetent to write on the subjects that I have. I would like to further explore the art masterpieces and the music that I have already posted, giving more of my own interpretations. I would like to explore the art of writing, literature, as it relates to Biblical subjects and spiritual matters. I trust that it has great potential for good. My Legal Philosophy professor, John Snowden, closed a semester with the seemingly mystical saying: “If you ever have a problem, find a good book, and there you will find your answer.” I hope this blog can be good reading for someone; it has been therapeutic for me.

So I will post notes that I have compiled from my readings over the years concerning theology, and then share with you some writings that I have developed over my lifetime. I will start with the notes that I had gathered from my readings over the years, which have had great significance for me..

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Eric Fromm’s The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture

Posted on June 20, 2013 by bibleartists

I previously commented on Eric Fromm’s stated position in Psycoanalysis and Religion that healthy religion is necessary to mental health. His definition of religion is crucial to that statement: healthy religion helps us orient effectively to the world around us and to find healthy objects of devotion. I was early influenced by his essay, The Dogma Of Christ, which I will discuss here.

It may seem odd to include his essay in this section of my blog which is devoted to theology of the modern era. By training he was a psychoanalyst, he openly espoused a humanist orientation and philosophy, and at times he was considered by some to be an atheist. However, I have long felt that good mental health counselors must have a healthy religious orientation and understanding to be effective. So it is with Eric Fromm. Moreove, by his fruits I know him and trust him.

In his Foreword to this essay, which he first published in 1930 and republished in 1963 at the request of Professor James Luther Adams of the Harvard Divinity School, Fromm acknowledges,

. . . I one – sidedly stressed in this work the social function of religion as a substitute for real satisfaction and as a means for social control. While I have not changed my views in this regard, today I would also emphasize the view (which I held then as now) that the history of religion reflects the history of man’s spiritual evolution. . . .

As far as I know, this is the first work in which the attempt was made to transcend the psychologistic approach to historical and social phenomenon so customary in psychoanalytic literature.

Fromm states the principle that we cannot understand people by understanding their ideas and ideologies; but we can understand a people’s ideas and ideology by understanding the people, themselves.

The main emphasis of this study is the analysis of the socioeconomic situation of the social groups which accepted and transmitted Christian teaching . . .

He introduces the essay as follows,

It is one of the essential accomplishments of psychoanalysis that it has done away with a false distinction between social psychology and individual psychology.

Psychoanalysis is focused on experiences of the individual and their influence on the emotional development of that person. It is concerned with groups of “normal” people within that society.

The present investigation is concerned with a narrowly limited problem of social psychology, namely, the question concerning the motives conditioning the evolution of concepts about the relation of God the Father to Jesus from the beginning of Christianity to the formulation of the Nicene Creed in the fourth century.

[As a child uncritically accepts all statements by his father, so, in society, the individual] is disposed to believe uncritically what is presented to him by the rulers as just and true.” The figure of god supplements and supports that social trust; “god is always the ally of the rulers.

. . .

. . . This infantile psychic situation represents the pattern of their religious situation. . . . [Freud] attributes to religion the affect of a narcotic capable of bringing some consolation to man in his impotence and helplessness before the forces of nature. [It should be noted that at the writing of this essay in 1930, Fromm was a strict Freudian.]

He then states his intention concerning this essay:

The aim will be to understand the dogma on the basis of a study of people, not people on the basis of a study of dogma.

Fromm notes that at the time of Jesus, Palestine had been a part of the Roman Empire, and it had to adjust to Rome’s economic and social demands. Rome’s policies left a large part of the Jewish population unemployed and dependent. The rural population suffered under an onerous tax burden; many fell into great debt, resulting in their submission to the conditions of slavery; the small farmers gave way to a small but powerful group consisting of priests and moneyed aristocracy.

The Pharisees lived subject to stringent rules of diet and conduct guided by their minutely detailed rules. They believed in the vitality of the immortal soul which would be rewarded according to the manner in which they lived. Although united in their similar scholarly approach to the Law, as a group, they were economically and theologically diverse. Some were from the lowest social strata, while others were members of the upper class citizenry. However, as scholars and keepers of the Law, they were hated by the common person. That hatred intensified as the separation between the proletariat and the moneyed aristocracy increased. Such enmity was at times demonstrated by revolts and the proliferation of various religious – messianic movements. Galilee was known as a hotbed of revolutionary struggles against Roman authority. In 4 B.C. a proletariat revolt was severely and ruthlessly crushed by Roman soldiers. Rome celebrated its victorious suppression of the revolution by crucifying 2000 revolutionaries.

In 6 AD Rome asserted direct control of Palestine. At about that time the lower classes united in a party known as the Zealots; however, the middle class, led by the Pharisees, sought reconciliation with Rome. The greater the separation between the lower classes and the middle class, the greater the intensity of the rift between the two, and the activity of the Zealots, inspired by a swelter of messianic hopes. Crucifixion was a gruesome Roman means to remind the people who was in charge and to warn them of the cost of rebellion and its resulting pain and humiliation upon failure.

In 66 A.D. popular insurrection arose. Initially it was supported by the middle class, but not vigorously. ts support dissipated and it returned to its old ways of compromise with the Roman authorities. Ultimately Rome ruthlessly suppressed the rebellion.

Such was the political and social scene into the middle of which arose the movement of John the Baptist. His most ardent followers were those of the lowest, despised masses. Immediately thereafter the cause was taken up by Jesus, who bore many signs and was ultimately associated with messianic hopes. Eschatological expectations abounded.

The bleaker the hope for real improvement became, the more this hope had to find expression in fantasies. The Zealots’ desperate final struggle against the Romans and John the Baptist’s movement were the two extremes, and were rooted in the same soil: the despair of the lowest classes. . . . We see here an ambivalent attitude: these people loved in fantasy a good father who would help and deliver them, and they hated the evil father who oppressed, tormented, and despised them.

Jesus preached the nearness of the Kingdom of God. Fromm notes:

The conditions of the entrance into the kingdom are, in the first place, a complete change of mind, in which a man renounces the pleasures of this world, denies himself, and is ready to surrender all that he has in order to save his soul; then a believing trust in god’s grace which he grants to the humble and the poor, and therefore hearty confidence in Jesus as the Messiah chosen and called by god to realize his kingdom on the earth. The announcement is therefore directed to the poor, the suffering, those hungering and thirsting for righteousness . . . to those who wish to be healed and redeemed, and finds them prepared for a entrance into. . . the kingdom of god, while it brings down upon the self satisfied, the rich and those proud of their righteousness, the judgment of obduracy and the damnation of Hell.

Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of heaven, which is at hand, gave immense hope to the hopeless. The core of that message is expressed in Luke 6:20 ff.:

Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of god.

Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.

Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

Fromm notes the intense hatred among the common people for tax collectors and Pharisees. That remained a major theme throughout the 2000 years of Christian history. Christianity arose from this lowest, poorest, uneducated stratum of Jewish Society and had little concern for social institutions. They were known for their love for each other and their mutual support. Because they believed in an imminent eschatological culmination during their lifetimes, they saw no need for earthly goods but shared everything that they had. As Fromm describes it, they were “oppressed enthusiasts held together by hope and hatred.”

The oldest church doctrine of Christ is expressed in Acts 2: 36: ” God has made him both Lord and Christ.” It consists of the “adoptionist” theory, i.e. that god adopted him. According to this thought, Jesus was not Messiah from the beginning, nor was he from the beginning the son of god. That follows the line of thinking expressed in Psalm 2:7: “You are my son, today I have begotten you.” It also expressed the Semitic idea that the king is a son of god from the day that he assumes the throne, whether by descent or otherwise. As Fromm puts it,

It is therefore in keeping with the oriental spirit to say that Jesus, as he was exalted to the right hand of God, became the son of god.

In the early community of enthusiasts, Jesus was thus a man exalted after his death into a god who would soon return in order to execute judgment, to make happy those who suffer, and to punish the rulers.

In true Freudian fashion, Fromm sees the significance of that elevation of man to god as an expression “of an unconscious wish for the removal of the divine father.” Later, Christianity abandoned adoption and the implied hostility toward God which it implied, for a notion that Jesus was god from the very beginning; however, the oppressed Christian community could only identify with someone who suffered as they suffered, and so it was also necessary that he be fully man.

Since the early converts had such a hatred for their rulers, and, as Fromm describes it, unconscious hatred against God the Father, they were drawn to the figure of Jesus, crucified.

Through his death, Jesus expiated the guilt of all, and the first Christians greatly needed such an atonement.

Early Christian beliefs concerning Jesus became transformed as Christianity came in contact with the pagan world, and as its membership expanded from the lowest classes to include the well educated and wealthy. That was generally established by the end of the second century. It was further transformed when it became the religion of the ruling class under Constantine. With the alliance of Christianity with political power also came social stability.

[T]he original religion was transformed into another one, but the new Catholic religion had good reason for concealing this transformation.

. . .

. . . The core of the missionary preaching of the early communion was, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” . . . Paul’s faith was still imbued with eschatological hopes, but with him the expected time of the kingdom’s coming already began to be postponed further into the future.

By the direction of Constantine, the church “no longer looked to the future or application of the lessons of history, but, rather, it looked backward. The world no longer needed to change; salvation had become an individual matter guaranteed by faith in Jesus. The hope for real, historical deliverance was replaced by faith in complete spiritual deliverance. Historical interest was supplanted by cosmological interest.

Hand in hand with it, ethical demands faded away. . .. Very closely connected with the renunciation of the original rigorous ethical practice was the growing reconciliation of Christians with the state.

. . . With the continued development of the Church, the concept of the nature of Jesus leaned more and more to the dramatic viewpoint: a man was not elevated to a god, but a god descended to become man. This was the basis of the new concept of Christ, until it culminated in the doctrine of Athenasius, which was adopted by the Nicene Council: Jesus, the son of god, begotten of the father before all time, of one nature with the father. The Arian view that Jesus and god the father were indeed of similar but not identical nature was rejected in favor of the logically contradictory thesis that two natures, god and his son, are only one nature; this is the assertion of a duality that is simultaneously a unity.

. . . Far from being a religion of rebels and revolutionaries, this religion of the ruling class was now determined to keep the masses in obedience and to lead them. . . . The formula of passive submission replaced the active hostility to the father. It was not necessary to displace the father, since the son had indeed been equal to god from the beginning, precisely because god himself had “emitted” him.

Fromm reviews the development of Christian dogma and of the various “heresies.” He concludes The Dogma of Christ with the following:

Catholicism signified the disguised return to the religion of the Great Mother who had been defeated by Yahweh. Only Protestantism turned back to the father – god. It stands at the beginning of a social epic that permits an active attitude on the part of the masses in contrast to the passively infantile attitude of the Middle Ages.

I highly recommend this book of Fromm’s essays which was originally published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.. and republished by Fawcett Premiere Book. They are beyond the scope of this particular post, but really are very much relevant to the human condition, and its spirit. Other essays by Fromm are as follows:

The Present Human Condition

Sex and Character

Psychoanalysis – Science or Party line?

The Revolutionary Character

Medicine and the Ethical Problem of Modern Man

On the Limitations and Dangers of Psychology

The Prophetic Concept of Peace

See Erich Fromm The Fear of Freedomat http://www.ge.tt/#!/4FZsSyG/v/0, The Same Society, Psychoanalysis and Religion

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Albert Schweitzer’s The Mystery of the Kingdom of God

Posted on June 19, 2013 by bibleartists

We first discussed Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus as a means to summarize Christian theological developments in the early part of our modern era. Predating The Quest was his own attempt to cut through dogma to the core of Christianity in The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, which was published in 1900.

This is a remarkable book. In it Schweitzer discusses in great detail a number of different aspects of Jesus’ selfconsciousness as the Messiah and the development of that consciousness and of his notion of the Kingdom that is at hand. My summary which follows cannot do it justice. I highly recommend it.

Schweitzer divides Jesus’ ministry into two phases: the first in Galilee and the second in Jerusalem. In the first he makes no mention of the Passion; the second is the Passion.

From the time that he was baptized by John the Baptist, his mission was to spread the good news: the Kingdom of God is at hand. That time has been called the “Galilean spring time.” The last week of his life was in Jerusalem.

Schweitzer explores the development of Jesus’ self consciousness as the Messiah. To some that may sound heretical. For Schweitzer, the fact that Jesus brings together the notions of the Kingdom of God as both an ethical and as an eschatological fact suggests that Jesus must have developed those notions throughout his ministry, from beginning to end. It suggests a transition from one to the other. Such a development is necessary because although Jesus taught addressing each, the two are incompatible. Schweitzer explores how that reasonably could happen:

Jesus may have entertained at first a purely ethical view, looking for the realization of the Kingdom of God through the spread and perfection of the moral – religious society which he was undertaking to establish. When, however, the opposition of the world put the organic completion of the Kingdom in doubt, the eschatological conception forced itself upon Him.

That would require that Jesus came to reject the former conception for the latter. That change must have been part of the process of his ministry. It is reflected in his charge to his twelve disciples to carry throughout Israel the message: “the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Matthew 10:7. “Verily I say unto you, you shall not have gone through the cities of Israel until the Son of Man be come. Matthew 10:23. They were to call the people to repentance.

The question at issue is not about the course of conduct which they are to maintain after his death. For such instruction not a single historical word can be adduced. The woes precede the dawning of the Kingdom. Therefore the victorious proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom must accommodate itself to the woes.

The account in Mark 10 concerning what dogmatically is interpreted as the argument of the disciples concerning their position in the Kingdom to come is too narrowly interpreted. Schweitzer notes a “now and then” parallelism in Jesus’ speech which is the key to the meaning of those passages:

1 Whosoever would become great among you, shall be your servant.(Mark 10:43)).

2 Whoso ever of you would be first, shall be bondservant of all (others).- (v. 44).

3 Therefore the Son of Man expected the post of highest rule because he was not come to be served but to serve, in giving his life a ransom for many. (v. 45).

The modern interpretation of the above passages has been severed from its context of the time. It is false because it takes no account of Jesus’ “now and then” parallelism. In the two older Synoptic gospels that time of reign was to be during an interim period in expectation of the Kingdom of God.

. . . [S]uffering is for Jesus the moral means of acquiring and confirming the messianic authority to which he is designated.

Earthly rule is ungodly because it depends upon force to maintain its power. However, Jesus refers to the Kingdom of God in its eschatological aspect, as would be understood by Jews of his time looking back with hope to the prophets. That connection between the Passion and eschatology is inherent in Mark 8:34 – 9:1.

Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God would come during the life of that generation.

Jesus never spoke of His coming again but only of the coming or the advent of the Son of Man. . . . Christianity has made of that statement, “I shall die, but I shall be glorified through my coming again.”

Jesus’ statement, as recorded in Mark, would have been understood by his disciples as the dawning of the eschatological Kingdom, not in the modern – ethical notion that Christianity has given it.

Jesus did not openly preach of his messiahship. When he took Peter, James, and John to the high mountain where they witnessed his transfiguration, he instructed them to tell no one, but to keep his secret. Mark 9:23 13; Matthew 17:1 – 12; Luke 9:28-36. At that time, as Matthew reports, Jesus disclosed to them that Elijah had already come but the people had not recognized him as such. He then revealed that the Son of Man would also suffer at their hands. It was then that the three disciples concluded that he was talking about John the Baptist as Elijah.

What we call the Transfiguration is in reality nothing else but the revelation of the secret of messiahship to the Three. A few weeks later comes then its disclosure to the Twelve.

This revelation to the Three is handed down to us in the form of a miracle – tale. It has undergone the same transformation as have all the incidents of that voyage along the north coast. The scene on the mountain, like the feeding of the multitude and the encounter of Jesus with his Disciples at dusk, bears evident marks of the intense eschatological excitement of the moment. For this reason the historical facts are no longer clear in detail.. . .

There is in fact an inward connection between the baptism and the transfiguration. In both cases a condition of ecstasy accompanies the revelation of the secret of Jesus’ person.

As one might expect, the Three betrayed Jesus’ trust and shared “the secret” with all of the Disciples, after which Jesus discussed the secret with them, also. Christianity has made of Jesus’ teaching concerning the Kingdom an apotheosis, i.e., a culminating act in which Jesus would return in all his Glory. However, the Jews of Jesus’ time would have understood it eschatologically: the appearance of the Son of Man would inaugurate the eschatological Kingdom.

The fact that the Passion idea was a secret stands opposed to the modern – historical solution. . . . not the ethical but the hyper – ethical, the eschatological, notion of the Kingdom dominates the Passion as Jesus conceived it.

Throughout His ministry, Jesus assumes that the Kingdom of God is already present “as a dispensation of forgiveness” for the people of Israel. Jesus came to believe that his people needed atonement; that was very real to Him. The advent of the Kingdom depended upon it. That Jesus would provide that atonement was the essence of his secret of the Passion.

Jesus’ idea of the Passion is in the end completely absorbed in that of the Deutero – Isaiah. Like the servant of God, he too is destined to reign in glory. But first he appears, meek and unrecognized, in the role of a preacher who works righteousness. He must pass also through suffering and humiliation ere God permit the glorious consummation to dawn. What he endures is an atonement for the iniquity of others. This is a secret between himself and God. The others cannot and need not understand it, for when the glory dawns they will recognize that he has suffered for them. Wherefore Jesus did not need to explain his Passion to the people and to the disciples, and ought not to do so. It must remain a secret, – so it is written in the scripture.

In his charge to the disciples, Jesus addressed only the eschatological Kingdom. That was the focus of his ministry at that time. Because of the eschatological nature of Jesus’ preaching, it must have been related to his call to repentance in preparation for the Kingdom, much as the earlier prophets of the Old Testament called the people of Israel to wash and make themselves clean; put away evil; give relief to the oppressed, shelter the fatherless, plead for the widow. Isaiah 1: 16, 17. Such repentance is not a mere formality, but as Dietrich Bonhoefer was later to described, it is “costly grace.” Such discipleship makes a difference in the world by relieving its suffering.

As such, the Sermon on the Mount is a call to repentance. Only those in right relationships to the world and with their neighbors can enter the Kingdom of God. Likewise the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:3 – 12. Each includes verbs of both the present and the future tenses.

Nothing but the maintenance of the new morality in all relations of life guarantees entrance into the kingdom. Hence Jesus can say to the Pharisee who agrees to the summary of this new morality as it is expressed in the commandment of love: thou art not far from the Kingdom of God. Mark 12: 34.

Schweitzer explains that Jesus’ use of “not far,” is not an assessment of his near perfection, but an expression of chronology. Right relationships prepare the way for the Kingdom of God.

Modern – Christian theology is permeated by Hellenistic – rationalistic ideas and has undergone a development of two millenniums. . . . [A]ll notions about ethics of the Kingdom, or about the development of it, have been forced upon Jesus by our modern consciousness – simply because we could not readily familiarize ourselves with the thought that the ethics of Jesus is conditional.

As I interpret it, Schweitzer’s view of Jesus’ conditionality is akin to that of James: a Christian’s works will reflect his or her faith; faith without works is dead.

For Jesus the Kingdom of God lay beyond good or evil. “To this height of hyper – ethical idealism the modern consciousness is no longer capable of soaring. . . We have a prejudice against this conception of conditional ethics. . .. [T]o render the ethics of Jesus unconditional and self sufficing is not only unhistorical, but it means also the degradation of his ethical idealism. Jesus made clear the social character of his ethics.

We moderns tend to see the parable of the sower of seeds (Mark 4:11) through scientific, horticultural eyes,

. . . but the exposition is rather devised to place the two conditions so immediately side by side that one is compelled to raise the question, how can the final stage proceed from the initial stage? . . . So small, considering all that was lost, was the sowing; and yet the harvest so great! – Therein lies the secret.

Likewise, with the parables of the mustard seed and of the woman adding a little leavening to a mass of dough.

These parables are not at all devised to be interpreted and understood; rather they are calculated to make the hearers observant of the fact that in the affairs of the Kingdom of God the secret is preparing like that which they experience in nature.

Jesus gave the Great Commission to the twelve Disciples expecting that the Kingdom of God would be established before they had spread the good news and called for repentance to all cities of Israel. While they were on that mission, the crowds gathered about Jesus and Jesus received some disciples of John the Baptist.

John is Elijah, i.e., the personality whose advent marks the immediate dawning of the Kingdom. . . . He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

Matthew 11:12-14.

Schweitzer observes,

. . . [the phrase, “he that hath ears to hear let him hear”] occurs only in connection with the parables of the secret of the Kingdom and as the conclusion of apocalyptic sayings. . . .

. . .

Hence 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, of excogitating and depicting every incident of the great catastrophe, and of preparing for the same; while for Jesus it was a question of bringing to a pass the expected event through moral renovation. Eschatological ethics is transformed into ethical eschatology.

Jesus commission to his disciples is not universalistic. Rather, it is directed to “the lost sheep of Israel.” Jesus’ concern was not with the law, but with a new morality: “Salvation comes out of Israel.”

Jesus’ ethics is modern, not because the eschatology can be reduced somehow to a mere accompaniment, but precisely because the ethics is absolutely dependent upon this eschatology! Every moral – religious performance is therefore labour for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Schweitzer considers that the Disciples’ mission must have been successful, because multitudes came to hear Jesus by the sea. They would not let him go. Schweitzer considers that was the occasion for a “cultus – meal!” He notes, “We have absolutely the same solemn ceremony at the Last Supper.” The only difference is that of the table company: in the first it was a multitude, in the second it was the Disciples:

The celebration, however, was the same. . . .

The gathering at the feast is of an eschatological character. The people that gathered about him by the seaside were waiting with him the dawn of the Kingdom in replacing now the customary full meal with a sacred ceremonial meal, at which He distributed food with thanksgiving to God, He acted at the prompting of His messianic consciousness. As one who knew himself to be the Messiah and would be manifested to them as such at the imminent dawn of the kingdom, he distributes, to those whom He expects soon to join Him at the messianic banquet, sacred food . . . The time for earthly meals is passed: hence He celebrates with them a foretaste of the messianic banquet.

The story of this event has been distorted into a miracle: the cultus-meal which Jesus improvised by the seashore has been represented as a hearty and filling supper. That the scanty provision which was at hand, the food designed for himself and his disciples, was solemnly distributed to the people is historic. That this meal took the place of the evening repast likewise corresponds with the fact. But that through a supernatural process the multitude was filled by it, – that belongs to the miraculous character which the later age ascribed to the celebration because its significance could not be apprehended.

When the Disciples partook of the meal which is now known to Christians as the Last Supper, the Disciples understood the messianic significance of the meal because Jesus revealed it to them.

Schweitzer addresses the parables of Jesus in the latter period of his ministry. Those are God’s vineyard (Matthew 21:33-46); the royal marriage (Matthew 22:1 – 14); the servant watching (Matthew 24:42-47); the virgins (Matthew 25:1 – 13); and the talents (Matthew 25:14 – 30). Schweitzer notes the contrast of these latter parables with the earlier parables concerning the secret of the Kingdom. The Passion now becomes the focus of his ministry. He becomes aware of the redeeming death that he must accept:

Therewith Jesus comes to the aid of the men of violence who are compelling the approach of the Kingdom. The power which He thereby exerts is the highest conceivable – He gives up His life.

The baptism by John the Baptist signified “the inception of Jesus’ messianic consciousness.” At Ceasarea Philipi he revealed that secret to all of his disciples, that secret having been already exposed by the three Disciples to which Jesus entrusted it.

One thing is certain: up to the time of the mission of the Twelve no one had the faintest idea of recognizing in him the Messiah.

Schweitzer notes some editing of that actual history in several passages of Matthew: 9:27 – 31; 12: 23; 14:33; and 15: 22. The last cited verse of Matthew has it that the Canaanite woman addresses Jesus as the son of David, whereas Mark simply has her fall at his feet and cry for help. The disciples knew Jesus’ secret, but the people did not. In Jerusalem Jesus addressed a legal question and ordinary matters, but he did not reveal his selfconscious messiahship.

Of the arrest of Jesus, Schweitzer notes that there was no need for the Pharisees to pay Judas to tell them where Jesus was. Jesus was not in hiding, nor were his Disciples. They could have determined that without bribing Judas.

When Jesus was arrested the Disciples fled. Jesus was led away to his trial before the Pharisees and the high priest. They had bribed witnesses to give testimony against Jesus, but it was insufficient to convict Him. So the High Priest asked Jesus directly whether he was the Messiah. Jesus was not required to give testimony against himself. Without His admission the High Priest would have had nothing to condemn him. And so, Schweitzer asks, where Jesus kept his Messiahship secret, how did the High Priest know of Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah?

Since the Pharisees needed no disclosure of Jesus’ whereabouts, that being within their power to determine, it became evident to Schweitzer that Jesus’ secret which he did not openly proclaim, but entrusted to the disciples, was the subject of Judas’ betrayal. Jesus’ death was very much a willing sacrifice.

Schweitzer asks,

If Jesus taught the Disciples to understand the ethical significance of his death, why did the primitive Christian explanation of the Passion confine itself to the notion of conformity with scripture and the “forgiveness of sins”?

To this question the modern – historical solution furnishes no answer. The eschatologico-historical solution, on the other hand, is able to take account perspectively of the necessary distortion which Jesus’ idea of the Passion underwent in the primitive church. It indicates which elements alone of the Passion secret could still subsist after his death. Because it grasps the connection between the early Christian interpretation and the thought of Jesus the eschatologico – historical solution is the right one.

The abolition of the causal connection between the death of Jesus and the realization of the Kingdom was fatal to early Christian eschatology. With the secret of the Passion, the secret of the Kingdom likewise perished. . . . Thus the eschatology of the early church was “dechristianized” by Jesus’ death. . . .

This dechristianizing was manifest specially in the matter of the final Affliction. According to the Passion idea of the first period, the believers must suffer along with the Messiah; according to that of the second, he was resolved to endure the affliction for them. . . . Early Christian eschatology was therefore still “Christian” only through the person of Jesus, no longer through his spirit, as was the case in the secret of the Kingdom of God and in the secret of the Passion.

In his post script, Schweitzer notes that various people will pass judgment upon his realistic account of the life of Jesus, according to their own points of view and interpretations of faith.

Only, with the aim of the book may they not find fault: to depict the figure of Jesus in its overwhelming heroic greatness and to impress it upon the modern age and upon the modern theology.

Shortly thereafter, he published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the subject of the prior post in which he examines the efforts of other theologians to find the historical Jesus. At the conclusion of that book, Schweitzer summarizes the significance of that enterprise despite the fact that a complete picture of the historical Jesus is inaccessible. From my perspective, these two books together are essential for the modern Christian. As Tolstoy concluded, the sayings of Jesus are to be taken seriously in that they describe an ethic of life which is life changing. In my father’s language, it describe the way to a “life of eternal significance.”

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Results of the Quest of the Historical Jesus

Posted on June 11, 2013 by bibleartists

Schweitzer concludes his review of the German theological quest for the historical Jesus with the chapter, “Results.” He begins that chapter with the summary of his results:

Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed in modern theology in an historical garb. . . .

. . .

The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. . . .

. . .

The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical foundation. . . .

The mistake was to suppose that Jesus could come to mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves. That is not possible. First because such a Jesus never existed. Secondly because, although historical knowledge can no doubt introduce greater clearness into an existing spiritual life, it cannot call spiritual life into existence.

Nonetheless, Schweitzer finds that the German quest for the life of Jesus had been invaluable: “one of the most significant events in the whole mental and spiritual life of humanity.” However, he notes,

We modern theologians are too proud of our historical method, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical theology can bring to the world. . . . History will force it to find a way to transcend history, and to fight for the lordship and rule of Jesus over this world with weapons tempered in a different forge.

. . .

. . . The names in which men expressed their recognition of Him as such, Messiah, the Son of Man, Son of God, have become for us historical parables. We can find no designation which expresses what He is for us.

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside. He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word[s]: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Posted on June 11, 2013 by bibleartists

The Quest of the Historical Jesus

A Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede

Albert Schweitzer is best known in theology for The Quest of the Historical Jesus. He observes that the “greatest achievement of German theology is the critical investigation of the life of Jesus.”

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, scientific principles of language analysis, historical analysis, psychological analysis, and textual analysis were developed for purposes of examining and analyzing ancient historical records to determine their authenticity and meaning. The same tools were employed for the same purposes of “literary criticism” of the Bible. As to examination of the literature in the gospels, it was noted that different gospels had some of the same characterizations and narrations of the life of Jesus, but they also conflicted on various point, sometimes of great consequence. Before an objective view of the Jesus of the gospels could be obtained, scholars had first to confront dogma that had grown up about Jesus concerning his two natures as man and as Son of God. Schweitzer noted,

This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus. . . . That the historical Jesus is something different from that Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self evident.

It was believed that through the tools of literary criticism the historical Jesus could be revealed.

It was known that the Jews were expecting a Messiah according to their scriptures, i.e., the Christian Old Testament. It was also known that eschatology, i.e. the religious belief concerning death, judgment, and what is to come in or after the final days, was then a vital part of Jewish Life.

However, early Biblical criticism lacked recognized standards; those took some considerable time to develop. Reimarus and Bruno Baur wrote a life of Jesus, which Schweitzer characterized as “mere products of imagination.” How, in a scientific world, could scholars account for miracles? Were they supernatural events? Could there be a rational explanation? Or, was the report “mythological.“

Here, I must reveal my own understanding and bias as I consider Schweitzer’s use of the word, “mythological.” I consider the word to be distinctive from “fabrication,” “invention,” “legend” or “rationalization.” My view of myth is consistent with that of Joseph Campbell as revealed in his PPS interviews with Bill Moyers which resulted in Moyers’ his book, Joseph Campbell: The Power Of Myth, Moyers’ opens the series with the question, “Why myth? Why should we care about myths? What do they have to do with my life?”

Campbell answers,

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. . . . We have in our great tradition – Plato, Confucius, the Buddha – and others who speak of the eternal values that have to do with the centering of our lives.

. . .

Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body.. . .”

.. . Everything mythologyical has grown up in a certain society in a bounded field.

. . . A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe . . .

. . . [T]here is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you are a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group. . . .

Now, the Biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. . . Major religions are not attempts to control nature but to help you put yourself in accord with that.

. . .

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet. . . .

Marcus Borg, a member of the Jesus Seminar, addresses the mythological, metaphorical nature of many New Testament sayings concerning Jesus’ life and his teachings. He talks of an Indian story teller who began his story with, “Now, I don’t know if it actually happened this way, but I know it’s true.”

As used here, I do not believe that Schweitzer uses it in the same sense as the word is used by Joseph Campbell; rather he uses it to indicate that the account cannot be historically confirmed; it is likely fictitious. However, Schweitzer addresses the methods of resolving the issues presented by a Biblical text: “On the one side we are offered a historical solution, on the other a literary.” In the first, one asks, “Does the difficulty of explaining the historical personality of Jesus lie in the history itself, or only in the way in which it is represented in the sources?” In the latter, the theologian asks the question of whether it is consistent with the surrounding circumstances that are described in the text, or in other texts’ references on the same or similar subjects. Later in his Quest, in his review of Strauss’ quest, it will become clear that he understand, myth as Campbell used and understood it. There he articulates Strauss’ distinction of Christian myth from pagan myth, and of myth from legend.

Schweitzer notes that Reimarus was the first theologian to attempt an historical view of Jesus’ life. His was a monumental work consisting of 4000 pages, much of it attacking the inherited faith of the church. He not only embraces Reimarus’ tools of critical analysis, but he finds great humor in his writing, as well. It is “one of the ablest, wittiest, and most acute which has ever been written.”

Reimarus finds no indication that Jesus intended to either do away with the Jewish law or to create his own religion. It was righteousness in the Jewish sense that would mark the coming of the Kingdom of God. However, Reimarus notes, Jesus forbade his disciples to share the news of the coming of the Kingdom with the gentiles. Matthew 10:5.

Of the final act of the passion, as recorded in Mark, Reimarus notes,

“My God! my God! Why hast thou forsaken me? “

This avowal cannot, without violence, be interpreted otherwise than as meaning that God had not aided him in his aim and purpose as He had hoped.

Of Matthew 16:28, Reimarus notes that Jesus does not claim to be the Messiah, but promises that all messianic hopes will be realized before the end of that generation. Jesus never said a word about his dying and rising again.

He concludes:

In order to get rid of the difficulty of the death of Jesus, they gave it the significance of a spiritual redemption, which had not previously entered their field of vision or that of Jesus Himself.

But this spiritual interpretation of His death would not have helped them if they had not also invented the resurrection.

The Parousia, or Second Coming, was delayed, however. It did not occur during that generation to which Jesus spoke as he had predicted, nor has it in the 2000 years since.

. . . Nevertheless it served the turn of the gospel so well that the simple early Christians, after the first believers had been bemused with it, and the period which was fixed had lapsed, the Christians of later generations, including Fathers of the Church, could continue ever after to feed themselves with empty hopes. .. .

. . .

. . . The theologians of the present day skim lightly over the eschatological material in the gospels because it does not chime with their views. . . . Inasmuch as the non – fulfillment of this eschatology is not an admitted, our Christianity rests upon a flaw. . . .

Schweitzer grants that Reimarus begins with undoubtedly genuine historical information in that he recognized two separate streams of messianic expectation in late Judaism. He harmonized the gospels by focusing on the Synoptics but excluded the gospel of John. He “rightly notes” that Christianity did not arise out of the teaching of Jesus and that baptism and the Lord’s Supper were not instituted by Jesus, but by the early Church. He understood that to get to the historical Jesus he must combine the critical methods of historical analysis and literary criticism.

Schweitzer writes,

Still more remarkable is his eye for exegetical detail. He has an unfailing instinct for pregnant passages like Matthew 10:23, and 16:28 which are crucial for the interpretation of large masses of the history.

Schweitzer further praises him,

There are some who are historians by the grace of God . . . However, [i]n truth they are at best merely doing the preliminary spade work of history, collecting for a future historian the dry bones of fact . . .”

Reimarus was “before his time:” Schweitzer finds great value in his work which was not recognized by Reimarus’ contempories:

His work is one of the supremely great works which pass and leave no trace, because they are before their time; to which later generations pay a just attribute of admiration, but owe no gratitude.

Schweitzer then surveys the “Lives of Jesus” produced by other early rationalists, following Reimarus. He characterizes that early rationalism as “wholly dissociated from a simple – minded Supernaturalism. . . . Here, to change the metaphor, rationalism surrounds religion without touching it . . .” He describes it as “half – developed rationalism.”

The early rationalists “thought of themselves as merely writing an historical supplement to the life of the God – Man Jesus.” Their method was to accept the doctrine concerning the divinity of Jesus, explore its Biblical roots, and only then to explore the human side of Jesus. Early rationalists tried to explain the miracles in natural ways; but, when they were unable to do so, they had no difficulty resorting to supernatural intervention.

Schweitzer describes Johan Jakob Hess (1741 – 1828) as “not a deep thinker, but was well read and not without ability. As a man, he did splendid work.”

He paraphrased the four gospels in an attempt to make them coherent and agreeable together. Where possible, he naturalized the miracles, but,

Above all, we must retain the supernatural birth and the bodily resurrection, because on the former depends the sinlessness of Jesus, on the latter the certainty of the general resurrection of the dead.

Hess characterized the temptation of Jesus as Satan’s test to determine if He was so extraordinary as to be a threat to Satan. He finds the resurrection of Lazarus to be authentic, as though his acceptance of the death and resurrection of Jesus allowed for the supernatural resurrection of Lazarus as well.

Schweitzer finds his interpretation of the parables “barely recognizable” and “in the mummy-wrappings of his paraphrase.” He complains,

Of the peculiar beauty of the speech of Jesus not a trace remains.

The simplest occurrences give occasion for sentimental portraiture. The saying ‘Except ye become as little children’ is introduced in the following fashion: ‘Jesus called a boy who was standing near. The boy came. Jesus took His hand and told him to stand beside Him, nearer than any of his disciples, so that he had the foremost place among them. Then Jesus threw His arm round the boy and pressed him tenderly to his breast. The disciples looked on in astonishment, wondering what this meant. Then he explained to them, . . . [etc.]

On the other hand, Schweitzer considers that the Life of Jesus by Reinhard (1753-1812) is on a “distinctly higher level.”

With all his philosophizing and rationalizing, however, certain pillars of the supernaturalistic view of history remains for him immovable.

Rationalists generally considered that many events of “raising from the dead” were merely cases of premature burial, which was believed to be frequent in the east.

Karle Agust Hase’s Life of Jesus was the first attempt to reconstruct the life of Jesus on a purely historical basis. The results are strained, however. He seeks to make the circumstances of the baptism intelligible by supposing the appearance of a meteor; he explains a number of other miracles in a fictitious manner of which participants were unaware at the time.

Of raising the dead, he is skeptical: a stringent proof that death had actually taken place cannot, according to Hase, be given, since there is no evidence that corruption had set in . . .

Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus resorts to dogmatics rather than history. He accepts without question that Jesus considered himself to be divine. “The uniqueness of (Jesus’) divine selfconsciousness is not to be tampered with.”

He arranges the gospel miracles according to their probability of occurrence as reported. Of the Ascension he acknowledges that “something inexplicable did occur.” Of the synoptic story of the temptation, it made no sense to him: ‘To change stones into bread, if there were need for it, would not have been a sin.’” He dismisses out of hand the miracles of the birth and childhood of Jesus, likewise the reported miracles following the crucifixion he attributes simply to “poetic imagination.”

Whereas modern theologians and scholars consider that the Synoptic gospels were earlier and historically more accurate than the gospel of John, Schleiermacher considers the latter to be the only authoritative gospel. He considers the Synoptic gospels to be variant interpretations of it.

Of David Friedrich Strauss, Schweitzer writes, “He was not the greatest, and not the deepest, of theologians, but he was the most absolutely sincere.”

Schweitzer writes of the graduation of Strauss and his friends from theological school, that they questioned how they would square their theological views “with popular beliefs which they were expected to preach.” I suspect that is a common challenge for any sincere student of theology who has prepared for the ministry.

Schweitzer notes that Strauss

struck the death blow of out-and-out rationalism; the half – and – half rationalism did not perish with it, but allied itself with the neo-Supernaturalism which Strauss’s treatment of the life of Jesus had called into being.

Strauss wrote of his dilemma,

What interests me in theology causes offense, and what does not cause offense is indifferent to me. For this reason I have refrained from delivering lectures on theology.

He acknowledged that philosophy played a large part in his theology, and that he was inspired by the philosophy of Hegel. That offended the philosophical faculty at the university where he taught, and it curtailed his philosophy lectures. “Strauss was forced back to theology.”

He published his Life of Jesus, which met with great criticism. He looked to his friends, and only two or three dared to support him. He returned to Stuttgart. As he found public and academic opinion to improve, he continued to publish editions. As Schweitzer describes it, “The historic personality of Jesus again began to take on intelligible outlines for him.” Schweitzer classifies his Christian Theology as one of the most important contributions to theology. In it, he reframes Christianity in the language and thought of Spinoza. For him, religion is not concerned with the ordinary, everyday realities but,

with present spiritual realities which appear as ‘moments’ in the eternal being and becoming of Absolute Spirit. . . . Immortality is not something which stretches out into the future, but simply and solely the present quality of the spirit, its inner universality, its power of rising above everything finite to the Ideal. . . .

Consistent with Schleiermacher and Hegel, he addresses the Christian notion of eternity:

In the midst of finitude to be one with the infinite. . . . [that] is all that one can say of ‘life after death,’ or of ‘heaven.’”

Schweitzer notes bitterness in Strauss’s writing and the influence of Darwin in which he asks, “How are we to understand the world?” And, “How are we to regulate our lives?

Theologians of his day failed to see his worth and he died an unhappy man.

Of Strauss’ Life of Jesus, Schweitzer writes that it

is one of the most perfect things in the whole range of learned literature. . . . His analysis descends to the minutest details, but he does not lose his way among them.

Strauss is the first theologian to understand myth and to apply it consistently to the New Testament, writes Schweitzer:

Myth formed, to use Strauss’s illustration, ‘the lofty gateways at the entrance to and at the exit from the gospel history;’

. . .

Then, too, the offense of the word myth disappears for anyone who has gained an insight into the essential character of religious myth. It is nothing else than the clothing in historic form of religious ideas, shaped by the unconsciously inventive power of legend, and embodied in a historic personality.

Myth, as used by Strauss, is to be distinguished from pagan mythology. Strauss considered that by the time many of the gospels were written the stories of Jesus’ life had become infused with the theology of its predominantly gentile adherents so that they tended to abandon the historical Jesus for legend.

Of the impact of Hegel’s philosophy upon Strauss’s theology, Schweitzer seems to approve:

Hegel’s philosophy had set him free, giving him a clear conception of the relationship of idea and reality, leading him to a higher plane of Christological speculation, and opening his eyes to the mystic interpenetration of finitude and infinity, God and man.”

Strauss notes that the story of Jesus’ baptism in the gospel of John is,

woven on the pattern of Old Testament prototypes, with modifications due to messianic or messianically interpreted passages. . . . It is certainly historical that the Baptist received a revelation of the messianic dignity of Jesus, otherwise he could not later have come to doubt this.

He suggests that Jesus may have been a follower of the Baptist. But he questions whether John baptized Jesus, since his baptism was a sign of repentence and “Jesus cannot have felt Himself to be sinlessness when he submitted to it.” He also finds the stories of the temptation, of the calling of his disciples, and of Peter’s draught of fish, fail the tests of authenticity.

The story of the demons’ recognition of Jesus as the Messiah “immediately arouses suspicion.” Legend becomes confused with what actually happened. “The immediate healing of leprosy had its prototype in the story of Naaman and the Syrian;” the cures by touching and upon a spoken word at a distance, “have myth written on their foreheads.”

Concerning the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection, Strauss concludes,

We are forced on one horn of a dilemma or the other: if the resurrection was real, the death was not real, and vice versa. That the ascension is a myth is self – evident.

Although Schweitzer admires Strauss’s skill in demonstrating the historical impossibility of some interpretations; nonetheless, the supernaturalistic account often “comes off much better than the rationalistic, the artificiality of which is everywhere remorselessly exposed.”

Schweitzer opines that Strauss at times may push the rationalistic too far, but it should be excused: ” Whoever discovered a true principle without pressing its application too far?”

Where Strauss sees conflict between the Synoptic gospels and the gospel of John, Schweitzer notes that he comes down on the side of the Synoptics and against John. In the accounts of the triumphal entry of Jesus it into Jerusalem will, Strauss finds the conflicts irreconcilable. He sees the account of Mark as “a mere satellite to Matthew with no independent light.” He questions when Jesus recognized himself as Messiah, and the process leading to it.

Strauss considers that when Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, he uses it in the sense that

Daniel had ascribed to the Son of Man . . . He looked forward to the abolition of Jewish law, and to the distinction between Jew and Gentile, but not now – in the future Kingdom.

Strauss was rejected by his own generation for destroying the supernatural view of miracles; however, in Schweitzer’s time, he was admired for presenting Jesus in a positive, historical way.

Schweitzer concludes:

Jesus’ claim to Messiahship is purely eschatological; in our time, he [Strauss] is seen, not in a negative sense as the destroyer of faith, but in a positive sense as prophet of advancing knowledge of Jesus.

Schweitzer reviews the impact of Strauss:

The fear of Strauss had, indeed, a tendency to inspire Protestant theologians with catholicising ideas.

Strauss examines the question of how much the people knew of Jesus’ claim of messiahship, of his betrayal, trial, and crucifixion. When the demoniacs and the blind man identified Jesus as the Messiah, the crowds showed no recognition of the claim. When Peter identified Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus had instructed him to tell no one. The rest of the disciples knew of his claim to the messiah ship only because Peter disobey Jesus and told them.

Schweitzer concludes the chapter on Strauss:

Jesus died because two of his disciples had broken his command of silence: Peter made known the secret of His Messiahship to the twelve at Ceasarea Phillipi a; Judas Iscariat by communicating it to the high priest. But the difficulty was that Judas was the sole witness [against Jesus on that count].

. . .

. . . The betrayal and the trial can only be rightly understood when it is realized that the public knew nothing whatever of the secret of the messiahship.

It is the same in regard to the scene in the presence of Pilate. The people on that morning knew nothing of the trial of Jesus but came to Pilate with the sole object of asking the release of a prisoner, as was the custom at the feast (Mark 15:6-8).

Schweitzer discusses various other theological questions and then makes some conclusions concerning what is left of Christian faith after the quest for the historical Jesus. That will be the subject of my next post.

Links to my site:

Introduction https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/introduction/

Graphic Arts https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/i-graphic-arts/

Architecture https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ii-church-architecture-and-its-incorporation-of-art/

Music https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iii-music/

Theology https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/iv-theology/

Home Page https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/

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Monthly Archives: June 2013

Quotes That I Have Gathered – W

Quotes That I Have Gathered – T, U, V

Quotes That I Have Gathered – S

Quotes That I Have Gathered – R

Quotes That I Have Gathered – P

Quotes That I Have Gathered – O

Quotes That I Have Gathered – N

Quotes That I Have Gathered – M

Quotes That I Have Gathered – L

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Quotes That I Have Gathered – D

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Deepak Chopra: A New Creation Story: Beyond Religion and Science

Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man

Edvard Schillebeeckx: All Humanity is the Elect People of God

Schillebeeckx’s Christology Reviewed by John C. Haughey

Quotes from Two Books of Teilhard de Chardin

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes

Health Challenges

Eric Fromm’s The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture

Albert Schweitzer’s The Mystery of the Kingdom of God

Results of the Quest of the Historical Jesus

Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus