I believe that is true.
On a PBS radio program this morning called Hidden Brain there was a discussion about the way people’s global beliefs influence the way they experience the world and their life: is it a safe place, are people basically decent and is the future more likely to be an occasion for hope or dread?
I think Christian faith can provide a hopeful posture toward life and others.
Oh wow! This one looks special:
“Insofar as this is a book of apologetics, its aim is not to show that Christianity is true—though I am convinced it is—but to help bring some to the point where they want it to be true, and to present it with a disconcerting unfamiliarity to those for whom it has become a familiar object of wearying contempt.”
Christopher Watkins, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture
So far as I recall, this discussion hasn’t contained any digs at anyone so I’m at a loss to understand your remark about them.
I’m afraid your second comment is also opaque to me. The apologetics I developed in Can We KNOW God Is Real? does advise those who would seek God to make an experiment to put themselves in a position to experience God. And all Christians have had their spiritual perception restored from blindness by the Holy Spirit, that’s why they’re Christians.
Were these comments intended for someone else?
My husband saw this on Twitter somewhere. It seemed appropriate in this thread.
But since he considers absurdity an essential ingredient in his message’s transmission, maybe a PM editor would sigh and okay it as is?
But Kierkegaard already replied in anticipation in the preface to Fear and Trembling:
The present author is by no means a philosopher, he has not understood the System —whether it exists, whether it is completed—this itself is already enough for his weak head: the thought of what an enormous head everyone in our times must have because everyone has such an enormous thought. Even if one were able to restate the entire content of faith in conceptual form, it does not follow that one has grasped faith, grasped how one entered into it or how it entered into oneself. The present writer is by no means a philosopher, he is, poetice et eleganter [to express it poetically and in elegant fashion], a supplementary clerk who neither writes the System nor makes any promises concerning the System, who neither obligates himself to write about the System nor obligates himself to the System. He writes because for him it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and palpable, the fewer there are who purchase and read what he writes. He easily foresees his fate in an age when people have written off passion in order to serve scientific scholarship, a time when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that people can leaf through the pages during an afternoon nap, and he must take care to conduct himself in the manner of that polite gardener’s apprentice in Adresseavisen [classified ads] , who, hat in hand and with references from his most recent place of employment, recommends himself to a highly respected public. He foresees his fate: to be utterly ignored; he has intimations of something frightful: the numerous floggings to which he will be subjected by zealous critics; he trembles at what is even more frightful: that one or another busy scholarly bureaucrat, who gorges on paragraphs (who, in order to rescue scientific scholarship is always willing to do to someone else’s writings what Trop magnanimously did with The Destruction of the Human Race, in order “to preserve good taste”), who will cut him up into paragraphs, and who thus, with the same inflexibility as the man who, in service to the science of punctuation, divided up his speech in accordance with the word-count, so that there were fifty words before a period and thirty-five before a semicolon. — I prostrate myself in the most profound subservience before every systematic customs inspector: “This is the not the System, it has not the least thing to do with the System.
Well that is a regular poser. Can you translate? But no hurry, I’ve got to go work on taxes for the next two hours as per an earlier agreement. But it is an intriguing message.
Strong correlation to above, noted in my hard copy. I wish I had posted them together:
The first is reminiscent of Corrie Ten Boom of course, and the last bit is good, especially if you know you have a good Father. Nothing wrong with the middle two pieces, either.
I believe so.
Loosely.
In italics.
Thank you Kendel. Still feels like a foreign language. Looks like it’ll be a while before I can get my attention together enough to wade in. Pretty fried from data entry tonight.
This is much better. THANK YOU. I’ve gotten rid of everything except what you’ve paraphrased and then bolded the parts that strike me as most significant. I’m mostly ignoring his distracting attempts at humor.
So I think he is questioning the wisdom of seeking to establish faith by systematizing theology and placing it on a logically argued foundation where he contrasts the “passion” which has been written off with scientific scholarship which is in vogue.
I agree with him. Faith should be about what you trust not what you find convincing. You find out what you trust by noting what you actually count on. If the only thing you can count on is your own knowledge and rational powers that is what your faith is in.
Mark, thank YOU! Your comments about this passage are really helpful to me. The quote about “the content of faith in conceptual form” is commonly quoted, and you nailed it. I hadn’t recognized the value of passion vs. scientific scholarship, but you are clearly right on that as well. @Jay313 has mentioned that SK (and LW) see an association between faith and passion, see faith as a passion. Not having read much about and nothing by Hegel, I must rely on 2ndary commentaries on his thought. Gardiner’s OUP VSI on Kierkegaard gives the briefest sketch of Hegel’s System, which appears in large part to contain a rationalized spiritual dimension that assumes the need for some “higher being.” Which is not faith.
As you can tell in my paraphrase, I was more focused on his condemnation of editors as well as thoughtless readers. Typical lit student, looking for literary devices and a fascinating turn of phrase that hides a key detail. As usual you have pulled out the pithiest of the pithy!
Much of this book reads this way. Kierkegaard is a strange teacher, but teacher none the less. He relies on repetition a lot, as well as “structured lists” or “Structured comparisons.” The charts I’ve created in my notes come from his structured lists, which are actually deconstruced tables, written out as sentences or stories. IF you start listing components of a story or list in a column, then look at the next list or story, and do the same, the patterns become more visible, and (for me) easier to compare/ contrast.
Repetition is also an indication that something is important. No kidding. And there are things he is relentless in repeating. Throughout the entire book so far. However he uses repetition in different ways. Some whole concepts are repeated. Sometimes it’s only a significant or unique word/term (ex bourgeois philistine) that works like a hyperlink: “Remember when you read this term before? Remember what I was talking about?” Most often, though, he returns to a concept like Infinite Resignation and adds a bit more to it or reminds the reader of what he had already built up. This last technique strikes me much like collaging in art, or the way Mako Fujimura talks about the way he layers pulverized minerals in his paintings.
Yep! This is the thesis of the Preface. He will add to these ideas throughout the book. Your second point will be developed as Infinte Resignation — something that is “rationalizable,” spiritualized, and within to doers power. It is a component of the Ethical, which is becoming very imnportant in the section I just started, Problema 1.
Again SK is a careful, albeit frustrating, teacher. Entering Problema 1, I can tell that he has been laying groundwork for me, the reader. Admittedly, I have read a good deal of background on the piece, but what I am understanding right now in the chapter, I think comes from the work SK has done, not so much what I have read about it. He has also been teaching the reader how he fuctions as a teacher/writer. “Hold on. Keep that question in mind, or write it in the margin.” My first few marginal questions were answered a few sentences later.
This is an interesting version of the Socratic Method. Plant the seed of confusion, which elicits the question one intends to answer. It also makes repeated reading important. If SK repeats himself, I think he does expect the reader to repeat some/all of the reading as well. Which I do. And which is fruitful. In going back over sections, after he has laid more groundwork or reframed an idea in a number of ways, I see how he addressed something I had had a question about (and forgot) or was destracted away from. I often shake my head, and wonder, “Now why didn’t I see that before. It’s perfectly clear.”
McGilchrist warns that not everything can be made clear. Not all implicit knowledge can be translated explicitly without loss or distortion. Faith would be that sort of knowledge. It can’t be written down precisely once and for all in a way that guarantees transmission to all. He describes the manner in which this sort of knowing can be passed along as the passing on of a flame from one torch to another, the passion in one sparking the same in another. He doesn’t (or at least has yet to) mention the last passion of Christ -I believe that refers to the crucifixion- but that could be seen as the original source of the flame/passion of the Christian faith. If that’s right, the apologetic movement which seeks to harness the modern analytic philosophic methods to secure certainty only substitutes something else for the implicit knowledge faith had carried.
From last night’s reading in TMWT,
Thus we have the infamous ‘trolley’ thought experiments: would you be doing the morally superior thing if you pushed a fat man off a bridge in such a way that in landing he switched the points, and changed the course of a runaway truck, so that it would kill only one adult and two children instead of five adults?
No doubt it would be said to be in the service of our friend, objectivity. Yet one of the reasons we are captivated by great plays such as Richard III – to return to the Jedediah Buxton example – and novels, narratives and myths, is that they allow us to stand back: to step away from the immediacy of experience, through what I call ‘necessary distance’, and see the complexities under which all human life labours. Such distance does not alienate, but, on the contrary, enables us to see ourselves with heightened awareness, and to empathise with those who stand for us – and for more than us. Great dramatic performances play out, in archetypal form,the intricacies of all human relationships and human motives, the conflicting demands of many-faceted love, of friendships, family and kin, of valued work, vocation, and the urge to create, the striving to preserve dignity and pride, and the lure of beauty towards things that are perhaps exciting, dangerous, deeply fulfilling and unendurable at once – not to mention loyalties to religious conviction, to a society’s cohesion, to the need to avoid pain, and the call to confront evil, to belong to a society and to be a unique individual, to heal, to save and to give meaning to life. In short, they inculcate the practice of judgment. That something like this can be reduced to calculation is an extraordinary idea, to say the least.
It is hard for me to imagine anyone acting morally at all whose chief consideration was to act in the most morally superior manner possible. Morality as performance is something else, fake.
Or maybe a society of people who attempted such calculations would not be a very good one to live in. Because how much trust can you have in friends/family/acquaintences if you know they are constantly calculating whether or not a greater number of people might benefit if you were dead? And that would still be a worrisomely warranted fear even if we knew that such determinations could ever be calculated in an impartial and accurate manner (which we know they cannot be).
I remember an old MASH episode where a young mother smothered her crying baby on a bus crowded with hiding people worried they might be found by searching soldiers. Hawkeye was later guilt ridden about having told her to keep the baby quiet.
Maybe the world is a more desireable place to live in when we’re all surrounded by people willing to burn the world down in order to protect their loved one(s). To protect the immediate is a very concrete thing indeed. They are your world of importance. To pretend that you are going to protect an entire wider world is a very abstract thing, and not likely something you will accomplish by sacrificing your principles at the so-called ‘smaller’ level. Greater causes do exist, to be sure. But I have to wonder if the scriptures about being faithful with the little things (before you could be expected to handle the great ones with any justice) don’t come to bear somehow.
I agree. The only one we should consider sacrificing for the good of the many is ourselves. If a grenade is thrown into our midst it isn’t permissible to push someone else onto it. You either be the hero yourself or shrink away in understandable fear and hope for the best. But if anyone else is to make that sacrifice no one should rob them of the opportunity to make one last deliberate choice.
The part of this quote that spoke loudest to me was this:
the intricacies of all human relationships and human motives, the conflicting demands of many-faceted love, of friendships, family and kin, of valued work, vocation, and the urge to create, the striving to preserve dignity and pride, and the lure of beauty towards things that are perhaps exciting, dangerous, deeply fulfilling and unendurable at once – not to mention loyalties to religious conviction, to a society’s cohesion, to the need to avoid pain, and the call to confront evil, to belong to a society and to be a unique individual, to heal, to save and to give meaning to life . In short, they inculcate the practice of judgment.
This is why discussions about morality which revolve around oughts always struck me as futile. What we should do in any actual situation is never reducible to a decision tree. There are many important considerations and often enough some conflict. There is nothing wrong with affirming relationships, commitments or projects but what we need to develop is the capacity for judgement. Simple maxims are never enough.
From The Universal Christ, by Richard Rohr.
Overall had some interesting bits like I posted below, but I had a hard time getting “into” this book. Maybe because it felt a bit more academic than I was expecting/have been listening/reading lately.
“We cannot jump over this world or its woundedness and still try to love God. We must love God through, in, with, and even because of this world.”
“Those who agree to carry and love what God loves, both the good and the bad, and to pay the price for its reconciliation within themselves—these are the followers of Jesus Christ. They are the leaven, the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed that God uses to transform the world. The cross, then, is a very dramatic image of what it takes to be usable for God. It does not mean you are going to heaven and others are not; rather, it means you have already entered heaven and thus can see things in a transcendent, whole, and healing way now.”
I’ve heard the world called the Vale of soul making, the idea that a newborn is in a pure state from which things only get worse is wrong. Babies have not gotten their souls twisted by living out of harmony with them but neither have they had the opportunity affirm anything to deepen their souls. God is perfectly complete to begin with, where He withdraws to make room for a true Other to emerge it isn’t the ungerminated seed He delights in finding. The seed needs to interface with HIs world and let it shape his soul in order for God to be satisfied in the harvest.
This makes me very happy to read and gives me hope.
To pick up on a criticism of Rohr’s book, it is a kind of dualism to set what the cross is not against what he sees it as.
It is interesting to consider the cross as a picture of the present kingdom, and as a picture of the kingdom to come. There can be a sense that both realties are true, that whosoever desires to come, may come. The cross has broken down the veil that separates us from God, and assures us that we shall not have to suffer the wrath of God to come.
“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. . . . The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
G.K. Chesterton, as quoted by Christopher Watkins in Critical Biblical Theory
The introductory section on cultural engagement and diagonalization is a comfortable fit with my view for economic justice being equally fairness and desert.
I especially like how Watkins writes:
“diagonalization presents a biblical picture in which the best aspirations of both options are fulfilled, but not in a way that the proponents of those options would see coming.”
“Before we go any further, we need to dispel two possible misunderstandings about diagonalization. First, let us not make the mistake of thinking of it as a cardigan-and-slippers-wearing, middle-of-the-road compromise between two bold options.”
Chesterton again:
“We want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. . . . I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.”
The other misunderstanding he wants to dispel,
“is thinking that diagonalization is some cheap imitation of postmodernism, mixing the black and white colors of truth to make an indistinct, muddy grey.”
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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