@Mervin_Bitikofer, I’ll bring this part of our discussion over here so as not to diverge too far from the OP on the Book of Revelation.
Lately, I’ve been working my way back through James K. A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism with a rather fine toothed comb. It wavers between excellent and having missed the mark. The bit below is worth quoting for Smith’s depth of perception of Derrida’s work and the relevance of Smith’s application of it to the Gospel.
Derrida’s claim that there is nothing outside the text was often misunderstood, and not just by Christian theologians. Later, when presented with the opportunity, Derrida tried to clarify his claim: “The phrase that for some has become a sort of slogan of deconstruction, in general so badly understood (‘there is nothing outside the text’), means nothing other than: there is nothing outside context.” In a way, Derrida is repeating the axiom of real estate as a central condition of interpretation: location, location, location! The context of both the phenomenon (whether a book, a cup, or an event) and the interpreter function as conditions or frameworks that determine just how a thing is seen or understood. Just as he claims that there is nothing outside the text, elsewhere Derrida claims that “there are only contexts.” Context, then, determines the meaning of a text, the construal of a thing, or the “reading” of an event. For instance, part of the context of the centurion’s “reading” of the crucifixion was his compatriot’s earlier experience with the gentle healer from Nazareth—a context that the two natives of Jerusalem lacked. (I would also argue that grace formed part of the centurion’s context.) When Derrida talks about how contexts are “determined” or “filled in,” we find a very important (though largely ignored) emphasis in his work: the role of community in interpretation. As he explains in his afterword to Limited Inc, contexts are flexible and dynamic: contexts change as time and place changes, generating different meanings and interpretations. Derrida describes this as the possibility of recontextualization: a phrase can mean one thing in one context and something different in another […]. Contexts change, and therefore meanings are given to change[.]
Smith, James K. A… Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (The Church and Postmodern Culture): Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (pp. 51-52). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Taking these words of Smith’s father than I think he does, as the context in which the Church exists changes and the generations of members change, as they have been doing for 2000 years, recontextualization of the Gospel and the Bible will continue – as we can see that it has done already. We are being dishonest with ourselves now, if we think we maintain today the precise theology of the earliest church, or that the church in 2000 years - if it survives - will look back to the theologies today, systematic or otherwise, and think, “You know, they really had it all together there.”
The Following bible text i think is more explicit than that Kendel…
Acts 17:
11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
12 Therefore many of them believed; also of honourable women which were Greeks, and of men, not a few.
@adamjedgar , please, do not do Biologos or text, while you drive! It isn’t safe for you or other people on or near the road…
Nothing on any of these threads is so pressing that it needs to be addressed while you are driving.
Please, practice safe driving.
" Heinrich Heine, who wrote in his 1820–1821 play Almansor the famous admonition, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen": “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
“Beginning on May 10, 1933, Nazi-dominated student groups carried out public burnings of books they claimed were “un-German.” The book burnings took place in 34 university towns and cities. Works of prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers ended up in the bonfires. The book burnings stood as a powerful symbol of Nazi intolerance and censorship.”
John the Baptist
Matt 3:7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Peter
Acts 5:3 But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land?
Acts 5:4 While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.”
Acts 5:5 When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it.
Paul
Acts 13:9 But Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him
Acts 13:10 and said, "You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?
1Tim 1:19 holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith,
1Tim 1:20 among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.
When I (as 21th century one) would hear a preacher like this I probably would leave that Church instantly?!
It’s been awhile, but I still think about you all pretty often. I just finished Ian Stewart’s book Signifcant Figures and loved the closing chapter
You can only stop born mathematicians doing mathematics by locking them up, and even then they’ll scratch equations on the walls.
They’re obsessed with it. They can do no other. They give up more profitable professions, they go against their families’ advice, they plough on regardless even when many of their own colleagues consider them mad, they’re willing to die unrecognised and unrewarded. They lecture for years for no salary, just to get a foot in the door. The significant figures are significant because they’re driven.
What makes them that way?
It’s a mystery.
My older brother once related that one of the professors lading the advanced mathematical studies program at UC Berkeley commented occasionally that to be a math doctoral student a person had to be crazy since pushing the boundaries of math requires venturing into bizarre realms where standard maths don’t work.
The wild thing is that those doctoral dissertations get filed in library stacks where people doing cutting-edge physics and such come looking for math that will fit the problems they’re working on!
And sometimes a mathematician can solve a particularly horrible problem simply because no one had told them it was difficult.
Or a philosophy undergrad of average intelligence hearing about Hilbert’s Hotel for the first time and immediately thinking infinity is a non-numerical value.
By the way, I recently had a fantastic and lengty discussion about infnite collections with a mathematician and philosopher. They made a suprising statement and we were able to compare it to the possibility of defining an infinite distant on a line or ray. An infinite segment. I disagreed this was possible.
Obviously we agreed a segment contains an infinite number of points (uncountable real numbers), and it is infinitely divisible (countable rational numbers), but, and this seemed philosophically interesting, a segment cannot be defined as having an infinite number of equally discrete units. At that point the person checked out.
Here is that McGilchrist video I was telling you about, @Kendel.
Came across an interesting video yesterday by my favorite author, Iain McGilchrist whose book The Matter With Things convinced me God was a perfectly good name for the something more that brings meaning and purpose to life. This one isn’t about that in particular but is perhaps my new favorite introductory video for introducing others to his ideas.
The interviewer, Jack Light, does a great job and is very well spoken himself, the young man is “a third-year Honours student at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, studying International Relations and Russian.” It says “He is part of the Roosevelt Group, a student-led publication and think tank based at the University. The Roosevelt Group’s aim is to attempt to emulate Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s ability to unite people with various backgrounds and passions through their commitment to community and productivity.” Noble goals for sure.
Jack’s introduction of I.M. lasts about a minute and the introduction to hemispheric difference and I.M.'s hypothesis for why the brains of every living thing with a neuronal mass are profoundly divided goes until about the 7 minute mark. But the things he goes on to say up to the 12 minute mark are surprisingly clear and rich, condensing material that took him 30 years to research and write.
Big truth is written in reality itself before it was ever written in books. If you say yes to Reality, “What is,” you will recognize the same truth when it shows itself in any Bible. If you do not respond to the good, the true, and the beautiful in Reality, I doubt if you will ever see it in the best Bible translation in the world. If it is the truth, it is true all the time and everywhere, and sincere lovers of truth will take it wherever it comes from. If it is true, it is common domain, and “there for the mind to see in the things God has made” (Romans 1:20). Or, as aquinas was fond of saying, “If it true, it is always from the one Holy Spirit.”
Enjoying the latest entries. Here is one I just came across in Maria Popova’s weekly newsletter in an entry titled “What Happens When We Die” (What Happens When We Die – The Marginalian):
Even Walt Whitman, who could hold such multitudes of contradiction, could not grasp the void. “I will make poems of my body and of mortality,” he vowed as a young man as he reverenced our shared materiality in his timeless declamation that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It was easy, from the shimmering platform of his prime, to look forward to becoming “the uncut hair of graves” upon returning his own atoms to the grassy ground one day.
But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.”
And then he did dissolve, leaving us his immortal verses, verses penned when his particles sang with the electric cohesion of youth and of health, verses that traced with their fleshy finger the faint contour of an elemental truth: “What invigorates life invigorates death.”
It’s a rough one, not knowing from this side of the experience of death even what the process of getting there is like. We can make some pretty good guesses. However, if Popov and Whitman are right about ultimate death, then there is nothing. Obliteration. Erasure. The permanent, irreversable ceasing to exist.
The situation for Whitman, as for all of the rest of humanity before us, is that the invigoration he experienced in life no longer affects him. For Whitman neither his life nor his death exist. His own existence no longer exists. After his death his atoms can only be invigorated for someone else, which is of no value to Whitman.
I appreciate the bare, yet empathetic way Terry Eagleton talks about death in “Radical Sacrifice”. Much of the book emphasises the preciousness of one’s own death, as a function of its scarcity. He opens chapter three this way:
AMONG THE MANY duties included under the heading of knowing how to live, writes Michel de Montaigne, is the business of knowing how to die. It belongs to that knowledge to recognise that death is not to be feared in the way that one might fear injury or bankruptcy. These are experiences we have to live with; but though we also have to live with the fact of our mortality, we do not by definition live with death itself. What we fear is not so much being dead, which as Lucretius argues in De Rerum Natura is nothing in itself and so nothing to be afraid of, as the absolute loss of experience it entails. It is not death that is alarming, in short, but the prospect of no longer being alive. This is not, to be sure, the only aspect of mortality we find unsettling. As Samuel Scheffler points out, the thought that one will at some point simply lapse from existence is strange enough to induce a kind of panic or vertigo. One of the signal advantages of being dead, however, is that it puts paid to this vertigo altogether. Death is the one problem that we can be certain will be resolved, being in homeopathic manner the infallible cure for the anxieties it engenders. It will simply be wiped from our minds as our minds are wiped away.
