Are all Faiths the Same? How do we shed exclucivity and yet stay faithful to Christ?

 


I have been assuming that experience of God is at a subliminal level. Since we all experience it that way we can experience it and not even know. Thus to talk about the inklings of ideas of God that we get and about any actual known experiences we have, we must filter that through cultural constructs. The reason is obvious, becuase culture is langue and it's through the constructs of culture that we interpret the world. God is beyond our understanding. Even those experience directly and so power they know it, are still confronted with a phenomenon of which they cannot speak directly. To make sense of it and to communicate it to others we must filter it through constructs. That means that our understanding of God is largely metaphor.

Given this framework I've come to a slow conclusion over the last couple of decades that the same reality stands behind all faiths. That doesn't mean that I see Krishna or Bhudda as Jesus, but it does mean that I see God as the motivating instigator of religion as a whole and of belief in God in particular. I see God as working in all cultures. I see God as having interaction with all faiths, but not filling the blanks as other gods. I see a basis for this in the Bible.

Paul said "To those who through persistance seek glory, honor and immortality he will give eternal life.But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the good and follow evil there will be wrath and anger...first for the Jew and then for the gentile; but glory honor and peace for everyone who does good. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart form the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.

Indeed when Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirement of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences bearing witness and their hearts now accusing, now even defending them..." (Romans 2:7-15).[1] New American Standard and other translations say "their hearts accusing, now excusing them..." Most Christians are afraid of this conclusion and they down play this verse. Often Evangelicals will come back and say "he makes it clear in the next passage that no one can really follow the law on their hearts." Well, if they can't, than they can't. But if they can, and do, than God will excuse them. God knows the heart, we do not. The verse clearly opens the door to the possibility of salvation (although by Jesus) thorugh a de facto arrangement in which one is seeking the good without knowing the object one is seeking (Jesus). In other words, it is possible that people in other cultures who follow the moral law written on the heart know Jesus de facto even if they don't know him overtly. Paul backs up this conclusion in Acts 17:22-30 [2] Paul goes to Athens as is asked by the Athenian philosophers to explain his ideas to them.

These were pagan followers of another religion. Paul stood up and said to them, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious for as I walked around and observed your objects of worship I even found an alter with this inscription 'TO AN UNKOWN GOD' Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."He basically says that they are worshiping God, they just don't know who he is. That's why he says "I will make it known to you." He doesn't say "you have the wrong idea completely." Most Evangelicals dismiss this as a neat rhetorical trick. But if we assume that Paul would not lie or distort his beliefs for the sake of cheap tricks, we must consider that he did not say "you are all a bunch of pagans and you are going to hell!" He essentially told them, "God is working in your culture, you do know God, but you don't know who God is. You seek him, without knowing the one you seek. He goes on,(v27)"God did this [created humanity and scattered them into different cultures] so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him though he is not far form each one of us." This implies that God not only wants to work in other cultures, but that it is actually his paln to do things in this way. Perhaps through a diversity of insights we might come to know God better. Perhaps it means that through spreading the Gospel people would come to contemplate better the meaning of God's love.

In any case, it does mean that God is working in other cultures, and that God is in the hearts of all people drawing them to himself. Of their worship of idols, Paul said "in past times God overlooked such ignorance but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (v30). Now what can this mean? God never overlooks idolatry or paganism, in the OT he's always commanding the Israelite to wipe them out and expressly forbidding idolatry. It means that on an individual basis when God judges the hearts of people, he looks at their desire to seek him, to seek the good. That their status as individuals in a pagan culture does not negate the good they have done, and their ignorance of idolotry does not discount their desire to seek the good or the truth. IT means that they are following Jesus if they live in the moral life, even though they follow him as something unknown to them. IT also means that all of us should come into the truth, we should seek to know God fully, and when we do that we find that it is Jesus all along.

One thing this might change is our understanding of the chruch. It was the theologian Cyprian (200-258) who said there is no salvation outside the chruch. This doctrine is called extra ecclesiam. He was born in Carthage around 200. He was made Bishop of Carthage in 248, died in 258. [3] In his most important work, "De unitate ecclesiae."  he states: "He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother; . . . he who gathereth elsewhere than in the Church scatters the Church of Christ" (vi.); "nor is there any other home to believers but the one Church" (ix.).[4] Cyprian should not come across as a bad guy even though he makes this exclusivity statement. For one thing he favored reinstating (after suitable intervals of probation and penance) those who fell away under persecution recognizing the extreme hardship they were under. He also faced sickness in order to stay in the city and care for plague victims. He was falsely accused and put to death by the very chruch which he so ardently defended.[5]

This is in the third century. Christianity had been going for a long time before this formal declaration that there is no salvation outside the chruch. Of course this doesn't mean they had not been saying it here and there all along. Yet they were pretty far removed from the understanding of Paul who way back there in the late 50s of the first century was telling the Greeks they already knew God but needed to know more about him. Not only had a lot happened, Christianity became a religion prosecuted religion of martyrdom, but also thoroughly gentile so that the perspective of Judaism was forgotten. Jews reject idols but they did not see pagans as damned merely for being who they were. Modern Jews still largely hold to that preservative.

One problem with extra ecclesiam is I'm a protestant! That began as a Catholic doctrine, when the split came with the east the Roman Catholics continued the idea, it's a Roman catholic notions. Though many protestants passionately accept the Father's as gospel the teachings of the Apostolic fathers became the teachings of the Catholics and are acted upon as though they exclude protestants. At least before Vatican II. While I am passionately defending extra ecclesiam a bunch of Catholics are looking at me and saying "but you are outside the chruch yourself!" So I have to re think this busienss of the nature of the chruch. First of all I have have to see the chruch as the tool, not the point of the mission. It is Christ's mission not the church's mission. As Motlmann says "The Mission has a chruch."[6] I also no longer see the church as the agent of salvation. Membership in the chruch is not what saves us. It maybe valid, it may be necessary but it's not the saving agent. Christ's atoning sacrifice is what creates the ground upon which forgiveness is possible. The chruch just preaches the message.

We find in the OT there were priests and prophets of God who were not connected with Israel, thus they were outside what was the chruch of that time. Balaam of Balaam's Donkey,(numbers 22:21-29) was called a prophet and was told to prophesy against the Israelites. 

^{Numbers 22:}

 And Balak the son of Zippor was king of the Moabites at that time. ⁵ Then he sent messengers to Balaam the son of Beor at Pethor, which is near the River^[a] in the land of the sons of his people,^[b] to call him, saying: “Look, a people has come from Egypt. See, they cover the face of the earth, and are settling next to me! ⁶ Therefore please come at once, curse this people for me, for they are too mighty for me. Perhaps I shall be able to defeat them and drive them out of the land, for I know that he whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed.”

When he sees the angel and gets it right that he's suppossed to say waht God tells him he says: ³⁸ “Well, I have come to you now,” Balaam replied. “But I can’t say whatever I please. I must speak only what God puts in my mouth.” He doesn't say say "what God is this? what angle is this." He is already known as a spiritual person who could curse Israel, he already knows God and knows about God's angels. So there is evidence of spiritually and following of God outside the "chruch" of that day. We have a similar phenomenon with Melchizedek. He is called a priest of God most high, before Israel exists. In 14 Genesis He is introduced as King of Salem, and in Hebrews he is he is said to be a type of Christ and placed into Israel as bearer of an order of Priesthood through which Jesus' own high priesthood is reconned. (Heberws 7).

I normally value the fathers and use them as precedents but I have to take Paul's preservative over that of the Church fathers, especially such a late father as third century. I can't accept a rigid exclusive view that would condemn other traditions and culture just for being who they are.  It would be totally unjust if God condemned people just becuase they take their own culture seriously. We have to take our own culture seriously, what else do we have? Why should be accept a foreign culture merely becasue they say "we are the right way?" How can we expect them to be any different. 

Yet there are considerations that have come to concern me.


The three major considerations:

(1) Passages about idolatry

Exodus 20:3-6 ESV / 290 helpful votes

“You shall have no other gods before me. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

1 John 5:21 ESV / 145 helpful votes

Little children, keep yourselves from idols.

Jonah 2:8 ESV / 135 helpful votes

Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.

Colossians 3:5 ESV / 130 helpful votes

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Psalm 16:4 ESV / 83 helpful votes

The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply; their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips.

numerous others.


(2) Warning not to preach any other Gospel

Galations 1:

⁸ But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! ⁹ As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!

(3) false prophets lead one away to other gods.

Deuteronomy 18:20 ESV / 48 helpful votes

But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’

It might bear reiterating: I am not saying that other gods are actually god.I may have expressed myself badly at times on message boards, but that's no excuse. We must continue to be clear. I say "all gods point to God." Point to does not mean they are God. Krishna is not Jesus. I am not saying Brahmin is the creator God of the universes. I am saying that all people have an innate sense of the true creator God and they are seeking God and they have a concept of God, however flawed or inaccurate all our concepts are. The direction in which they point is toward the true God but that does not mean that the specific personage of which they conceive is actually the true thing. I don't worship otehr gods nor do I encourage other to do so. I do appreciate and admire other faiths, and I study other faiths. I only study them with an understanding that aspects of their view might point in the right direction but for me Jesus is it. I'm not studying other faiths becuase I'm shopping for a new faith. Nor do I read them to put them down or to compare them unfavorably to my own. It just has to do with being a scholar.

I find value in the perspectives without worshiping other gods or abandoning my own faith. There is some comparison bewteen the talk of sowing and reaping in the OT, view of Karma in Hinduism and talk to balance and the Tao in Taoism. I'm not accessing that to obtain salvation through good Karma or through the Tao.

The question about the Gospel, what constitutes "another Gospel" I find is the most crucial question. That statement goes with the theology in the book of Galatians. It's a theology contains a social aspect and it counters racism, sexism, and preaches equality and social action.[7] He gives a short summary of the Gospel just before the statement about another Gospel so there's no doubt what he's calling the  Gospel: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴ who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, ⁵ to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. This corresponds to Peter's understanding in Acts: "for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). I don't say there is any other name. If I one who follows the true nature of the good, the creator God and seeks the right, is defacto follow Jesus even though he may not know it's Jesus he's following, that is not the same as saying that he's saved by another name. It's saying he saved in spite of antoehr name.

The Gospel I responded to and was born again by was more a presence than a theology. I  was responding to a real presence that I actually felt and a prayer that was answered immediately, a miracle before my very eyes.[8] I understood little theology but what I did understand was that Jesus would change my life from inside, by reigniting some aspect of my spiritual being, through his love, or the sake of his love and not in exchange for anything I could do or as a reward for anything I achieved. I knew it had something to do with Jesus death on the cross and his resurrection. I could not have explained it then as I can now.

I genuinely respect other faiths because they are indicative of who people are. Faiths are different because they are filtered through culture, and culture is what makes us who we are, either directly or indirectly. Even in rebellion against our culture we are being shaped by it. All faiths point to the one reality behind them all but this s not a licensee to worship "other gods." Once we know Jesus we know God. That doesn't mean that people of other faiths are seeking turth, that they aren't imbued with truth, that they don't follow Jesus without realizing that's who he is.


Sources


[1](Romans 2:7-15).

[2] Acts 17:22-30

[3]"Cyprian," Wikipedia,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian
accessed 5/13/14.

[4] Ibid.

[5] James E. Keifer, "Cyprian of Carthage, Bishop and Martyr." Bibliographical sketches of Memorable Christians of the Past. Online source: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/242.html
accessed 5/13/14.

[6] I hope the reader will forgive me but I don't know where that quotation is found. I think it might be in Jurgen Motlmann's The Crucified God. I remember it from class notes in seminary (Perkins: SMU). 

[7] Metacrock, "Women and Christity: Netiehr male nor female." Doxa: Christian Thought i the 21st century. On line resource. http://www.doxa.ws/social/Women/equal2.html
accessed 5/13/14

[8] see page 2 of my testimony: http://www.doxa.ws/Theology/Testamony.html

Answering comment on God and non Christian Prayer

 


We have a comment from a friend, an atheist (former Christian--I keep telling him he still is one)
Mike aka MonolithTMA said...

People that argue that God doesn't hear the honest and honorable prayers of unbelievers, remind me of the folks who think Jesus was actually named Jesus, and that he spoke in King James English.

I recall the part in Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, in The Last Battle, mentioned here in this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tash_(Narnia)

"Emeth, who expects Tash to smite unbelievers with heavenly fire, goes searching for Tash in Aslan's Country, but instead meets Aslan. It is revealed that Aslan and Tash are opposites, with each existing as the antithesis to the other. Aslan tells Emeth that 'all the service thou hast done to Tash, I accept as service done to me' and further explains that 'no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him'. He explains that Emeth's pious devotion, because it was rooted in a love of justice and truth, was really to Aslan rather than to Tash, although Emeth had not been aware of this; Emeth finds great happiness in this revelation."

6:58 AM

 I like that passage. That's pretty much what I'm saying on the thing about Acts 17. In connection with that I will continue the discussion on Monday by taking up the question "then what good does it do to be a Christian?"

One thing I like the most about this passage is that it identifies God with ideals like truth and justice. To me I identify God with Love. I know the passage in 1 John "God is love" is a metaphorical statement but metaphors have their reality. The reality is that God is the source of love. If we understand and appreciate fully that love is more than just an emotional feeling, but embrace it as a philosophy then we see that understanding is derived from a basic description of God's character. God's character is love and that is the true and original source of love. Thus in that sense God is love.

God is truth in the same way. Truth is what is, God is the basis of all that is. This is a way of thinking that is less and less understanding in the postmodern world.I  laugh as the CARM atheists just boggle their minds trying to ridicule such ideas and saying things like "how could God be truth, it's truth that i have do nut on my desk, is God the fact that I have a  donut?" That's what comes of literalistic thinking.

I think Paul was saying that those who seek the truth source of goodness are following Jesus defacto even if they don't know it's Jesus. That does not mean all non Christians are automatically saved, any more than it means that all people who sit in churches on Sunday morning are saved. Being in a chruch doesn't make you saved any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car. So I distinguish between being in the Christian social club and acutely "knowing Jesus." It is possible to do one without the other, but salvation is not automatically guaranteed for the chruch goer, and non salvation is not automatically befallen upon the "non Christian" adherent. But salvation is promised by God for all those who seek him and who gives their lives to Christ. Giving your life Christ makes you born again and that is salvation. I'll discuss this more on Monday.

What makes one a liberal theologically? Revisting the Credo

Greg Carey

Professor of New Testament, Lancaster Theological Seminary:

In public conversations such as The Huffington Post, it's common to see people deriding "liberal" biblical scholars, as if the world is just full of people whose dearest wish is to undermine the Bible and turn Jesus into nothing but a symbol for a bizarre mushroom cult.
(And by the way, that Jesus-mushroom thing? It was actually proposed.)
Biblical scholarship is an academic discipline, taught and studied at universities, colleges and divinity schools all around the world. So it should be no surprise that biblical scholars run in all shapes, sizes, colors and denominations. What would surprise many people, though, is that a very large number of us love Jesus and the church, and we spend hours upon hours communicating the love and wonder we experience with the Bible. Indeed, some of our secular colleagues justifiably complain there are too many of us in the field. More surprising might be this one fact: many of us have our roots in fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity. The best way for conservative churches to produce "liberal" biblical scholars is to keep encouraging young people to read the Bible.

Huff post Religion

Jan 3, 2013

 ......."Liberal" is a label. I don't like Lables. That's a hold over form the sixties. I grew up in the sixties and even though sixties generation was very labeled we professed to like labeling. I also developed a penchant or existentialism early on (high school) and thus absorbed the dislike of labels famous among the existentialists. When I began to study postmodernism in early 90s  it didn't take much to convince me of their dictum that diversity is a good thing and is not a weakness. Yet academics and religion are very label oriented things. People love to pigeon hole everyone and everything. I began calling myself a liberal about 1986-87 when I first went to Perkins school of theology. It was not just because I was a liberal politically but also because I had had it with the conservative form of Christianity that I had been associated with since my born again experience in 1979. Yet I'm not a liberal becuase I belong to a sect called liberal. I belong to a sect called liberal because through study and prayer I've come to a conclusion that things are a certian way and taht way seems to be more often marked as a tendency by that term.
.......There are three major issues that make me a liberal theologically. The major issue is one's view of the Bible. when Evangelicalism defined itself in opposition to modern liberalism it did so with the fundamentalist understanding about five doctrines:  (1) the inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the Virgin Birth of Christ, (3) his substitutionary atonement, (4) his bodily resurrection, and (5) the authenticity of the miracles.


.......So if that's fundamentalism then opposite would be "liberal." Except liberalism was already hundreds of years old when fundamentalism began to be defined around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Liberal theology began in the Northern Renaissance and was an outgrowth of Renaissance humanism (which was also Christian and pedagogical movement (see Avergy Dulles Book Models of Revelation).* So liberal theology began with Erasmus in the Northern Renaissance and it began as a take on Biblical scholarship. For this reason I use the term liberal of myself even thou my major liberal making issue is Bibilcal and the way I deal with scripture not a rejection of a God who is conscoius and knows I exist or a rejection of Christ as deity or incarnate logos. My view of Scripture is largely in agreement with that of Karl Barth or Paul Tillich, who saw it as containing the word of God rather than being wholly the word of God. I also speak of it as a human record of divine human encounter. The bible is a collection of independent works and they don't all come form the same perspective but they all have authors who sensed the presence of God and who had some dealing with the divine in some way, then  dealt with their experiences through their own human perspective.Some of it is direct revelation "thus says the Lord" and some is indirect, symbolic. For more details on my view of scripture and revelation see my pages on the topic on my new site The Religious a priori, The Nature of Biblical Revelation. In my view this issue qualifies me as a liberal if one needs "qualifications."
......Secondly would be my view of God. The atheists on CARM were so insistent that I must support their view and adopt a dead matter force view of God like magnetism. I don't see Tillich doing that either. I've essays on this blog about that. "Paul Tillich's Ontology: Deep Structures" a good overview of what Tillich means by "being itself" and how he links that to God. The article doesn't say much about his view of God as personal. Paul Tillich and the Personal God: Was Tillich's 'Ground of Being' an impersonal force?" Deals directly with the issue. Hint, quote from Tillich in the paper: He says “God is not a person but he is not less than personal" )Sysmtematic vol I ,245.) If you read through those two article you will know as much most people care to know about Tillich's view of God. This view, which I do hold is easily confused with Pantheism. It is not pantheism and there are major differences. That aspect of it does mark a difference in it and the conventional view of God most Christians in America hold that in itself would tend to make one a liberal, if in fact labels matter. The real pantheism likeness and its difference are brought out in two articles. One I've just linked the reader to the other is also on this blog, "The Super=essential Godhead." This is about the view of Psuedo Dionysus the  Areopagite, who Tillich admired. In fact this was really Tillich's self imposed mission to bring into modern parlance the views of Dionysus.
......In a nut shell the conventional view sees God as a big man on a throne in some part of outer space, or the more sophisticated view sees God as a big mind somewhere beyond time. In both caes he's an entity, and he's spoken of as "a God." "A being." God can't be a being because that denotes one of many. He's not part of a race. The only real way to understand how there can be this ting that is not one of many not part of a larger body of others like himself is to understand that mind as a whole as the basis of reality. Similar to the Hindu concept of Brahmin. In this view God would be more analogs to  a category rather than a person. That doesn't mean that God is not conscious, in fact he's the source of all consciousness, thus Tillich calls him the personal itself. Basis of what the personal is. We can still thin of God as a great heavenly father and love God and feel loved by God but we just need to remember that there no accurate analogy to describe the nature of God and the analogy to father is must an analogy. It's a metaphor. That doesn't mean God's love is not real, it means it's mystical--we can't understand it. We don't need to understand it to feel and live by it and know it's real.
......The Third issue is Universalism or Salvation and Other Faiths. I am not a universalist becuase I believe Jesus is salvation. There is no salvation apart form Jesus. So if that makes me a fundie then I"m a freaking fundie. At the same time I believe that all those who follow Jesus don't know that they do. Some of those who follow Buddha and some who follow Krishna and so, God is the one reality behind all faiths. That makes me a liberal. I don't bow down and worship at other shrines. I don't see an idiol of Baal and call it Jesus. I don't worship other gods. I dont' hate them and revile them and call them demons either. I understand what Paul say sin Romans 2:6 that anyone seeking the good will find eternal life, as being  true statement and not a trick. I see the encounter with Greeks of Mars hill as inclusion of ll faiths in the reality of God (Acts 17). I think we can learn from other faiths. We can see them as colleagues. I think that makes me a liberal if it's important to be called one. I wrote an essey on this. called, oddly enough, "Salvation and other faiths." Its' on the old site Doxa.

I am a Trinitarian and I affirm the Nicene Creed but I don't guarantee that I don't understand parts of it in unconventional ways. I don't imagine my views are so important that anyone wants to read this much of my stuff, but in case one is interested here they are.

How Do We Know the nature or even existence of Salvation?

 

A reader asks:

How can anyone really know if or how salvation is possible (or even necessary) if, to quote a certain blogger, "God is beyond human understanding because God is transcendent." It seems to me like the concept of a need for salvation in the first place is man-made. Isn't it a huge leap to get from "It's rational to believe in God due to the universality of mystical experiences" to "All humans are sinners in need of salvation?"

  ....In answering this questoin we can catch a glimpse of a phenomenologically oriented theological method in action. The short answer is the concept of  "salvation" must have evolved out of the sense of the numinous. Of course its "man made" in the sense that it's a theological response to a felt and perceived need. Theology is the participation and study of a faith tradition. Classically it's defined as "faith seeking understanding," the modern definition makes it seem more like a social scinece, with participant-observer overtones. Rather than "man made" in the sense that it's constructed out of "whole cloth" so to speak, it's more like "human understanding" striving to comprehend something all people have always felt at a certain level. What follows is my theory of how theology evolves from the sense of the numinous which dawned upon our pre-human ancestors in the way that instinct dawns upon animals, and culminates in higher rational abstract though in time, as it becomes theology.

from Numinous to religious development



stone age "Venus" figure: 
Probably fertility fetish

....Skeptics see religion as a question about empirical proofs of the existence of one additional thing in reality, besides all the things we regularly see in the universe; God, as opposed to a universe with everything in it that is in the God universe, but minus God. In other words for them God is just another object tin the universe to prove through empirical means. To them belief in God is just adding another fact to the universe. Belief in God is much more than that. Belief in God is not adding a fact to the universe; it’s an understanding of our relation to the universe. Belief in God is about understanding our relation to the universe, and that relation is as contingent beings, creatures whose being is derived form the ground of being. When we make this realization there is no more doubt. To realize the nature of being is to realize not only the reality of God but also the reality of oneself as creature of God. Of course this can’t have the same kind of verification that scientific work has, if it did it wouldn’t be a take on the basic nature of reality. This does not mean there are no methods that help secure the certainty that is found in the heart of one who has made such a realization. It is hoped that understanding this will lead others to seek that realization.

            We can see and understand this method looking at the nature of religious evolution in the evolution of humanity. Of course history of religions and comparative religion are extremely complex, time and space do not permit me to do them justice here. In a thumbnail sketch we can see the roots of Tillich’s concept of God as being itself coming out of this evolutionary development. Anthropologists understand religion as developing as man evolved. No one invented religion, no one decided one day to make up some entity called a God. Religion existed before gods existed. The instinctive realization toward integration into being was part of our ancient ancestors, part of our pre-human heritage. It grew up with us and began to down on us in ways that could be consciously pondered and portrayed as we began to grasp symbolic representation and to think about death and to wonder about the things around us. Atheists still use the old ninetieth century structural functionalist explanation for the origins of religion; the need to explain the thunder, the need to explain rain, the need to manipulate a higher power to make the crops grow. This explanation isn’t really accepted now days because now we realize there’s something more to it all; the sense of he numinous. To those outside looking in religion seems to be about ceremonies and the need to manipulate powers to those involved in It the reality is quite different. As I’ve already said atheists don’t listen to religious people as to why they believe, they are more concerned with assigning the explanations that flatter their own view point. The realization of the sense of the numinous the idea that there is a special quality to being that can be found all around us, the sense of the holy is the preferred explanation for thinkers such as Huston Smith:

"It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."

Smith considers transcendence to be the one dimension common to all peoples of religious faith: "what they have in common lies not in the tradition that introduces them to transcendence, [not in their faith by which they personally respond, but] in that to which they respond, the transcendent itself..."[1]

            The issue of religious adaptation to culture is most interesting because it illustrates the plastic nature of religion, and highlights the fact that belief is not just adding a fact to the universe but is actually an orientation to one’s own place in being. First we see humanity beginning to understand about pictures and representation, and in that same era, or before it perhaps but certainly in that era we began burying out dead with plants and herbs that would help them either because we expected them to have some sort of afterlife in which these things could be used, or we began to feel that they symbolically suggested our wishes for them. In this general era, the “pre historic” the “stone age” humans began to sense the presence of spiritual forces and began burying their dead [2] with herbs and drawing their hands on cave walls, because these things offered some sense of connection with spiritual forces. Some of the flowers put in the graves did not grow in the area; all are used in folk medicine with healing prosperities, indicating they had significance for a belief system.[3] Humans had a belief in sprits long before they believed in gods. What they were actually doing in all of this was coming to understand not only that the world and how they already knew to live in it, but the idea of its enchantment. The skeptic can only see that they were wrong, stupid ancient man so wrong about the existence of this extra object no one can see; what really seems to have been going on was a discovery about himself, we are living in a world filled with spiritual forces, he began to feel this. After several thousand years of pondering such things finally began to conceptualize these forces are personal and can be named and thus came up with the concept of gods. This concept was rooted in the first inklings of an understanding about our own lives and what it means to live in the world, to be part of being.

            Religious belief is an adaptation to culture because it is filtered through the lens of the cultural construct in order to be understood and shared in communication. The skeptic imagines the origin of religion to have been such as his/her observation of modern religion goes, a set of people try to understand why water falls out of the sky every so often and so they make up a story about a big man up there who pours water out of his huge boot, or whatever. The evolutionary practices of religious people as conform to their cultures have aided and abided this idea as it has been foisted upon the public. When we look at the nature of religion in the ancient world, even earlier we don’t an outside observer we see a practitioner who may resort to drawing upon a reservoir of knowledge that he already posses to explain the world, but he/she already posses that knowledge because it’s part of his/her way of life. Religion was not segmented factions battling to see whose set of doctrines came to dominate, in the ancient world religion was not about theology it was even “religion” that word was not used, it was ‘obedience.’ As human began sharpening their concepts they used the king as a model to represent deity because the king was the most powerful person around. Yet human understanding about life was already grasping the concept of the spirit and one’s place in being well before this understanding was ever called “religious belief.” The idea of God who is worshipped and has followers who chose one God over another a latter development, just as priest craft was a latter development.[4]

            Rudolph Otto coined the term “sense of the numinous, in his work The Idea of The Holy in order to capture the mysterious essence of the quality of feeling that stands behind all religion. He used words like “dread” and mysterium Tremendum to get across these are not ordinary feelings; words failed him in being able to describe what exactly he was talking, but this is the essence of mystical or “peak” experience. These terms are used to indicate a feeling or a sense that is beyond the ordinary sense in which we use them. It is non-rational, not irrational. It’s not “crazy” but can’t be analyzed or pinned down and distilled in reason. [5] The sense of the numinous is related to mystical experience and stands at the origin of religion in human thinking; this is essentially why religion exists. It is not hard to understand that this is the feeling related to the mysteries of life, death and the great beyond that led our ancient nameless primordial ancestors to draw their hands on cave walls and bury their dead with flowers to think about the other world and the forced that enchanted the universe with a sense they could not comprehend. At the center of this feeling is the sense of which we read above, of which Smith and Ideonopolis speak, “transcendence itself.” This is a realization about their place in the world, their being and their relation to the rest of being. They did not try to dissect it or psychoanalyze it away, they lived it out. The way to recapture it and live it again is to open up to the sense of wonder in being and allows the sense of being to suggest the categories into which we focus our understanding. There are methodologies that will allow us to do this.

The Universal Nature of Religion


What all people have done, all cultures have developed in my guises is the same basic set of questions and the same basic set of answers, but they come out in different forms. All religions seek to comprehend, identify and name the "human problematic." That is to say, the problem at the heart of being human. Some frame it in terms of sin, some cultures frame it in terms of "imbalance with nature" some frame it in terms of "disobeying natural law" some frame it in other terms, rebirth, impurity, whatever. They are all saying "there's a problem in the nature of being human, it's creates an estrangement form our source, it disrupts what is supposed to be harmonious and meaningful in our existence. This is the problem or set of problems at the hart of being human. In the very preparative understanding it's bad luck, breaking taboo, in the sophisticated understanding, as in the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, its self transcendence. Niebuhr pretty much sums up what all of them are saying, he does it through his understanding of St. Augustine. Because we are able to think and to remember the past and predict the future, we can understand what will happen if we don't pay the rent. That's self transcendence. We can go beyond our momentary self and understand based upon the past the problems of the future. That creates anxiety, we fear, so we steal (for example) to pay the rent.
....Thus, we become willing to do injustice to others in order to alleviate our anxiety. This creates a new anxiety, we don't like doing unjust things to others so we feel guilt. Guilt produces estrangement from our sense of source. We seek relief and we find it in terms of Ultimate transformation experience. We can't just bliss out and forget what we did because of the guilt. So we need to have guilt assuaged. Nothing assuages guilt like being forgiven. We seek mediation, we seek a way to mediate between the need for forgiveness and the transformational power that brings a sense of being forgiven. That mediation is where organized religion comes in. This is not  pretending anything, it's administering a sense of forgiveness. When that sense is real and the relief is really delivered the transformational power is unleashed and we have off scale happiness. This is the essence of what religion is about. All religions have it.
....I've mixed two things up here. I stand by the senerio but it's nto all Niebuhr.[6] The bit about sin and self transcendence is, the big about identifying human problematic and transformation resolving the problematic (that's the ultimate point of the mediation) is from Dr. Neil MacFarland of Perkins school of theology. [7] The development of modern theological method and the doctrinal details of any religious tradition are just the playing out through time and the diversification and evolutionary development of human understanding in relation to a religious tradition. The purpose of tradition is serve as a guide, so we know where people have been in the past and what the pitfalls to avoid are, and we and we can develop and sharpen our understand. In another way they are like vocabularies, because they enable one to enter the ancinet conversation and to understand what has been contributed to the conversation over time. People use them as means of exclusion but that is a cultural development and one that has not always been around. The Ancient Hebrews did not consign their enemies to hell (they didn't have a conception of hell) on the basis that "they are not us." That's actually a somewhat modern development and probably came out of the Greco-Roman disdain for the barbarian.
,,,,Now one might ask if this contradicts my understanding of Christianity? No not at all. See my article on Salvation and other faiths. As long as we believe that understanding can grow our modern understanding can be deeper than our ancestor's understanding. Of course I've said that God is beyond our understanding, that's true. We can know God, we just can't put into words what we know. We know through mystical union. We can make metaphors. As long as we remember not to literalize the metaphors we will be OK. After all the idea is to experience not to understand words on paper. It's not about control, it's about letting go of control.





sources

---

[1]Thomas Idinopulos,.”What is Religion” Cross Currents, Volume 48, no. 3(Fall 1998). Also see online URL: http://www.crosscurrents.org/whatisreligion.htm visited 10/28/10

[2] Paul Pettitt,  “When Burial Begins,” British Archaeology, Issue 66 August 2002. See Web versoin URL: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba66/feat1.shtml, visited 10/14/08. Pettitt is research fellow at Keble college, Oxford.

[3] Richard Leaky  and Roger Lewin. Origins. New York: E.P. Dutton. 1977

[4] Willfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1991, Originally published 1962. on line google books page 51, URL: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PNl1QexhUlIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=scholarly+articles+on+the+origin+of+religion&ots=e2_ic5NGQo&sig=OhwNzjS_J2eiYX6oJbFbFuOtB-o#v=onepage&q&f=false visited 9/28/10

[5] Rudolf Otto, and John W. Harvey.The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational factor in the Idea of the Divine, 1929. Kessinger Pulbisher’s rare prints, (John W. Harvey Trans)  2004 5-8 Online page number URL:

http://books.google.com/books?id=70DNx6VNS74C&dq=where+did+Rudolph+Otto+write+about+the+sense+of+the+numinous%3F&source=gbs_navlinks_s visited 10/4/10, Originally published Oxford University Press 1926.
  [6]. Reinhold Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man Vol. I.Westminster: John Knox Press 1991(the original publication was in the 40s).
[7] Class notes at Perkins

New Year, New committemnt of Faith, Re-Visiting the Credo

We have a lot of New readers so this is to let them know where I'm coming from.




.......Over the holidays I found myself in two major battles with CARM atheists, in both cases they were using "liberal theology" as a motivation trying to coax me or shame me onto their side: "you are supposed to be a liberal," or "you are playing fundie." The issues were that Tillich views God as an impersonal force and therefore I should too. Or that liberal theologians think Jesus was wrong about when he would return (see my "Olivet Discourse" posts on Atheist Watch, no 1 and especially no 2). In both cases they are trying to say that I say I'm a liberal so I must believe in impersonal God and Jesus is not divine, since that's what Liberal theolgoians believe. They are flat out wrong about Tillich and before it was all over their main instigator when form  the position that I don't know anything about Tillich to a frank admission that i've read more Tillich than he as (no Trick becuase he hardly read any--even  though he still illogically he knows more about it than the guy whose read all the books). They are dead wrong about Tillich, yes he does argue against "a personal God" but that doesn't mean he believes in an impersonal God. His position is that God is "the personal itself." Of cousre on the their position is that "your just crazy, tha'ts just a wild position no liberal scholar accepts" that Jesus wasn't a false prophet.
.......Their understanding of what liberal theology is just frankly stupid; of course their view is  a liberal theologian is a Bible scholar who disbelieves the Bible and uses "liberal" as a point solidarity with their atheism. They also strangely don't value diversity of views, they think everyone must hold the same view. There's one truth and that's scinece, of cousre they undrstand scenic to mean "per-atheism"
To them Science is the enforcement arm of the atheist movement. In reality of cousre liberal theology is diverse. It can't be pinned down to just one thing and is certainly is not in solidarity with atheism. Neither is science for that matter. Liberal theology is diverse. There is no one "liberal" opinion nor is it the case that liberal theological types automatically disbelieve the bible or Jesus.

Huff post Religion

Jan 3, 2013

Greg Carey

Professor of New Testament, Lancaster Theological Seminary

In public conversations such as The Huffington Post, it's common to see people deriding "liberal" biblical scholars, as if the world is just full of people whose dearest wish is to undermine the Bible and turn Jesus into nothing but a symbol for a bizarre mushroom cult.
(And by the way, that Jesus-mushroom thing? It was actually proposed.)
Biblical scholarship is an academic discipline, taught and studied at universities, colleges and divinity schools all around the world. So it should be no surprise that biblical scholars run in all shapes, sizes, colors and denominations. What would surprise many people, though, is that a very large number of us love Jesus and the church, and we spend hours upon hours communicating the love and wonder we experience with the Bible. Indeed, some of our secular colleagues justifiably complain there are too many of us in the field. More surprising might be this one fact: many of us have our roots in fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity. The best way for conservative churches to produce "liberal" biblical scholars is to keep encouraging young people to read the Bible.

 .......With the New Year I thought it not only good to renew commitment of faith but to clarify on the blog what my positions are. The place to start would be to explain about labels.  I don't like them. That's a hold over form the sixties. I grew up in the sixties and even though sixties generation was very labeled we professed to like labeling. I also developed a penchant or existentialism early on (high school) and thus absorbed the dislike of labels famous among the existentialists. When I began to study postmodernism in early 90s  it didn't take much to convince me of their dictum that diversity is a good thing and is not a weakness. Yet academics and religion are very label oriented things. People love to pigeon hole everyone and everything. I began calling myself a liberal about 1986-87 when I first went to Perkins school of theology. It was not just because I was a liberal politically but also because I had had it with the conservative form of Christianity that I had been associated with since my born again experience in 1979. Yet I'm not a liberal becuase I belong to a sect called liberal. I belong to a sect called liberal because through study and prayer I've come to a conclusion that things are a certian way and taht way seems to be more often marked as a tendency by that term.
.......There are three major issues that make me a liberal theologically. The major issue is one's view of the Bible. when Evangelicalism defined itself in opposition to modern liberalism it did so with the fundamentalist understanding about five doctrines:  (1) the inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the Virgin Birth of Christ, (3) his substitutionary atonement, (4) his bodily resurrection, and (5) the authenticity of the miracles.


.......So if that's fundamentalism then opposite would be "liberal." Except liberalism was already hundreds of years old when fundamentalism began to be defined around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Liberal theology began in the Northern Renaissance and was an outgrowth of Renaissance humanism (which was also Christian and pedagogical movement (see Avergy Dulles Book Models of Revelation).* So liberal theology began with Erasmus in the Northern Renaissance and it began as a take on Biblical scholarship. For this reason I use the term liberal of myself even thou my major liberal making issue is Bibilcal and the way I deal with scripture not a rejection of a God who is conscoius and knows I exist or a rejection of Christ as deity or incarnate logos. My view of Scripture is largely in agreement with that of Karl Barth or Paul Tillich, who saw it as containing the word of God rather than being wholly the word of God. I also speak of it as a human record of divine human encounter. The bible is a collection of independent works and they don't all come form the same perspective but they all have authors who sensed the presence of God and who had some dealing with the divine in some way, then  dealt with their experiences through their own human perspective.Some of it is direct revelation "thus says the Lord" and some is indirect, symbolic. For more details on my view of scripture and revelation see my pages on the topic on my new site The Religious a priori, The Nature of Biblical Revelation. In my view this issue qualifies me as a liberal if one needs "qualifications."
......Secondly would be my view of God. The atheists on CARM were so insistent that I must support their view and adopt a dead matter force view of God like magnetism. I don't see Tillich doing that either. I've essays on this blog about that. "Paul Tillich's Ontology: Deep Structures" a good overview of what Tillich means by "being itself" and how he links that to God. The article doesn't say much about his view of God as personal. Paul Tillich and the Personal God: Was Tillich's 'Ground of Being' an impersonal force?" Deals directly with the issue. Hint, quote from Tillich in the paper: He says “God is not a person but he is not less than personal" )Sysmtematic vol I ,245.) If you read through those two article you will know as much most people care to know about Tillich's view of God. This view, which I do hold is easily confused with Pantheism. It is not pantheism and there are major differences. That aspect of it does mark a difference in it and the conventional view of God most Christians in America hold that in itself would tend to make one a liberal, if in fact labels matter. The real pantheism likeness and its difference are brought out in two articles. One I've just linked the reader to the other is also on this blog, "The Super=essential Godhead." This is about the view of Psuedo Dionysus the  Areopagite, who Tillich admired. In fact this was really Tillich's self imposed mission to bring into modern parlance the views of Dionysus.
......In a nut shell the conventional view sees God as a big man on a throne in some part of outer space, or the more sophisticated view sees God as a big mind somewhere beyond time. In both caes he's an entity, and he's spoken of as "a God." "A being." God can't be a being because that denotes one of many. He's not part of a race. The only real way to understand how there can be this ting that is not one of many not part of a larger body of others like himself is to understand that mind as a whole as the basis of reality. Similar to the Hindu concept of Brahmin. In this view God would be more analogs to  a category rather than a person. That doesn't mean that God is not conscious, in fact he's the source of all consciousness, thus Tillich calls him the personal itself. Basis of what the personal is. We can still thin of God as a great heavenly father and love God and feel loved by God but we just need to remember that there no accurate analogy to describe the nature of God and the analogy to father is must an analogy. It's a metaphor. That doesn't mean God's love is not real, it means it's mystical--we can't understand it. We don't need to understand it to feel and live by it and know it's real.
......The Third issue is Universalism or Salvation and Other Faiths. I am not a universalist becuase I believe Jesus is salvation. There is no salvation apart form Jesus. So if that makes me a fundie then I"m a freaking fundie. At the same time I believe that all those who follow Jesus don't know that they do. Some of those who follow Buddha and some who follow Krishna and so, God is the one reality behind all faiths. That makes me a liberal. I don't bow down and worship at other shrines. I don't see an idiol of Baal and call it Jesus. I don't worship other gods. I dont' hate them and revile them and call them demons either. I understand what Paul say sin Romans 2:6 that anyone seeking the good will find eternal life, as being  true statement and not a trick. I see the encounter with Greeks of Mars hill as inclusion of ll faiths in the reality of God (Acts 17). I think we can learn from other faiths. We can see them as colleagues. I think that makes me a liberal if it's important to be called one. I wrote an essey on this. called, oddly enough, "Salvation and other faiths." Its' on the old site Doxa.

I am a Trinitarian and I affirm the Nicene Creed but I don't guarantee that I don't understand parts of it in unconventional ways. I don't imagine my views are so important that anyone wants to read this much of my stuff, but in case one is interested here they are.








*Avery Dulles Models of Revelation. Orbis Books, 1992. I do not have a page number for the quote but it's under the section on the model for inerrancy. See the book on Amazon.

I trust that Jesus Knew what he was talking about

Weekend Fisher responds to yesterday's post by saying:

Weekend Fisher said... You know, if someone asks us, "How can we know the reality of salvation?", somewhere along the way we have to get to "I trust that Jesus knew what he was talking about". Otherwise it's all a question of whose sci-fi/fantasy religion fic is better than the next guy's. The winner and a dollar will get you a coke.

The difference in my approach and her's is that she's talking about to get saved and I was talking about how do we know that getting saved is a real thing for us to do in the first place? I have no problem with what she says as far as that goes, how do you actually get saved? I agree with it and I think he has a good point.On her blog she responds to my request that she flesh it out:

Back on your blog -- about how you said you thought it should be obvious. I just think the people reading you might not think it's obvious. Just consider how often you can beat a point to death and they still won't get it. You can spell things out with plain words and an outline and you'll still get a large percent saying, "Huh?" If that's how much they understand the stuff you spell out day after day, post after post, what are the odds they'll get a point that you don't mention? Y'know.

Reading between the lines of that guy's question, I almost wondered if he was asking (translate mode): "Ok, you believe in God, but 'salvation' -- what about Jesus?" Which comes back to: What about hope? What about the reality of God in this world?"

Nothing I say beyond this point should be construed as a commentary on Fisher's theology. I'm not talking about her understanding now. I'm talking about Christian ideas in general.

In talking about salvation in the abstract we are talking about metaphors for things beyond our understanding. In discussing salvation for people who have no chance of ever hearing about Jesus we are talking about what God does to reach those people. I don't agree that he just sends them to hell with a "O that's too bad." I don't buy evangelical answers that "God is such a Holy God that he can't stand sin, even form people are who are seeking truth and don't really do anything wrong, but if they are not i the proper club they are not saved." I don't think Paul taught that either. There are two passages where Paul makes it clear (to me anyway) that this is not the case. I have a page where I discuss this at length. Here's an excerpt from that page:

Other Religions

Paul said "To those who through persistance seek glory, honor and immortality he will give eternal life.But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the good and follow evil there will be wrath and anger...first for the Jew and then for the gentile; but glory honor and peace for everyone who does good. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart form the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.

Indeed when Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirement of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences bearing witness and their hearts now accusing, now even defending them..." (Romans 2:7-15). New American Standard and other translations say "their hearts accusing, now excusing them..." Most Christians are afraid of this conclusion and they down play this verse. Often Evangelicals will come back and say "he makes it clear in the next passage that no one can really follow the law on their hearts." Well, if they can't, than they can't. But if they can, and do, than God will excuse them. God knows the heart, we do not. The verse clearly opens the door to the possibility of salvation (although by Jesus) thorugh a de facto arrangement in which one is seeking the good without knowing the object one is seeking (Jesus). In other words, it is possible that people in other cultures who follow the moral law written on the heart know Jesus de facto even if they don't know him overtly. Paul backs up this conclusion in Acts 17:22 Paul goes to Athens as is asked by the Athenian philosophers to explain his ideas to them.

These were pagan followers of another religion. Paul stood up and said to them, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious for as I walked around and observed your objects of worship I even found an alter with this inscription 'TO AN UNKOWN GOD' Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."He basically says that they are worshiping God, they just don't know who he is. That's why he says "I will make it known to you." He doesn't say "you have the wrong idea completely." Most Evangelicals dismiss this as a neat rhetorical trick. But if we assume that Paul would not lie or distort his beliefs for the sake of cheap tricks, we must consider that he did not say "you are all a bunch of pagans and you are going to hell!" He essentially told them, "God is working in your culture, you do know God, but you don't know who God is. You seek him, without knowing the one you seek. He goes on,(v27)"God did this [created humanity and scattered them into different cultures] so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him though he is not far form each one of us." This implies that God not only wants to work in other cultures, but that it is actually his paln to do things in this way. Perhaps through a diversity of insights we might come to know God better. Perhaps it means that through spreading the Gospel people would come to contemplate better the meaning of God's love.

In any case, it does mean that God is working in other cultures, and that God is in the hearts of all people drawing them to himself. Of their worship of idols, Paul said "in past times God overlooked such ignorance but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (v30). Now what can this mean? God never overlooks idolatry or paganism, in the OT he's always commanding the Israelite to wipe them out and expressly forbidding idolatry. It means that on an individual basis when God judges the hearts of people, he looks at their desire to seek him, to seek the good. That their status as individuals in a pagan culture does not negate the good they have done, and their ignorance of idolotry does not discount their desire to seek the good or the truth. IT means that they are following Jesus if they live in the moral life, even though they follow him as something unknown to them. IT also means that all of us should come into the truth, we should seek to know God fully, and when we do that we find that it is Jesus all along.

3) Justice of Punishment.

Jesus himself never speaks directly of hell, but always in parables. The other statements of Hell are mainly in euphemistic passages or in apocalyptic passages such as the book of Revelation. But I suggest that for some crimes hell is deserved. The slaughter of innocent people, the disruption of thousands of lives, the Hitlers of the world, and those who rationalize the deeds through "following orders" deserve to suffer the consequences of their actions. Evil has consequences, and those who commit evil should suffer the consequences, and they will.I have no direct knowledge of what hell is. It is based upon the Greek mythological concept of Tartarus which got into Hebrew thinking through Hellenization. There is no "hell" in the Tennach or the Pentateuch ("OT"). In the Hebrew scriptures there is only mention of Sheol, or the "the grave" to which everyone goes. But in the books of Revelation it does speak of those who work inequity being "outside the Kingdom of God." I don't' believe that hell is literal fire and brimstone, I do believe it is some state of anxiety or separation from God.

C. Knowing God.

Heb. 8:10-12 "...I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man say to his neighbor 'know the Lord' for they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more." This passage promises a "personal relationship with God."The word for "to Know" is the Greek Term Ginosko, which means personal experiential knowledge. To give one's life to Jesus means to develop a personal relationship with Jesus. Jesus said (John) "My sheep know my voice..." Personal relationship means that it is more than a set of rules, more than an ideology or a belief system, but a matter of the heart, the emotions, religious affections. IT may not be through dramatic miraculous effects (although I do believe that that is open to all Christians) but it is deeper than mere rule keeping, and does make for a satisfaction nothing else can match.God acts upon the heart. Salvation is a matter of "knowing God" not of mere intellectual assent. What does it mean to know God? It means that being a Christian is a matter of experiencing God's love in the heart and of loving God and others. It is also a matter of being "led" by God through impressions upon the heart, and not merely a set of rules or a list of beliefs that one must check off. IT is the development of "religious affections."The excitement of knowing God is unequaled by anything else in this life.

That was written many years ago. I know believe it's annihilation. Cease to exist and go proof.

There is a part of Weekend Fisher's statement with which I do not agree:

Otherwise it's all a question of whose sci-fi/fantasy religion fic is better than the next guy's.

I don't agree with it because that implies that there has to be a "one right religion." I don't believe that Christianity is "the right religion." "Christianity " is a man made institution based upon the based upon the spiritual concept of Church. The chruch is the "crowd" of God. The Greek term (Ekleasia, Eckloucia) meant like the crowd at the supermarket, or maybe more focused but something like "Jesus' possy." The guys he hangs out with. It's the collection of people who know God. "Christianity" is an entity not mentioned in Scripture. That pertains to all sorts of man made institutions.

It's one thing to point out the metaphorical nature of words and the transcendent nature of divine reality. Religious traditions are accumulations of cultural constructs we use to filter our perceptions of the divine becuase those perceptions are beyond our understanding. It's the cultural aspects that make religions different. The one true reality of God ("the divine") stands behind them all. Yet Jesus is not a metaphor.He was a concrete man in history. Christians are those who accept that this particular man was the embodiment of the second person of the Godhead. It's what we think about this one particular guy that makes us a Christian or breaks our pretense of Christianity. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. God can be working in other cultures, and people who never heard of Jesus can be following Jesus and not know it's him becuase they follow the moral law on the heart, they follow the good. There may be a since in which that works both ways, so the symbol they are using is (Buddha, the Tao) can thought of as "the real thing" in the sense that it's their understanding of the real thing ("the divine") that is leading them toward God's truth.

There is a point where we must disagree. That point doesn't have to mean eternal damnation fo those who don't understand it like we do. There is a point where membership in the club has to be brought into focus and we say "this is what we think it is, if you disagree we still like you but you are not in our club." Then in heaven we all go through our separate doors and come out i one giant court yard together and go "O hey it's you, you are guy's are here too, great!" We don't have to say "our deal is best so we get to kick ass."

That doesn't mean that I pray to Vishnu or that I would bow down to a wooden idol. To me that would be a sell out becuase I believe the best case senerio is that those might be metaphors that filter experience beyond understanding; they are not my metaphors. To exclude my own metaphor just to make a point would not be true my own idea of things. One time a friend of mine and I went to a Hare Krishna restaurant. They had really good chick pea dishes. This guy was not a Chrisian, he was a drop out for Moody Bible college. He wanted to test my liberality so he said "this food has been sacrificed to idols, do you know that? are you going to eat it?" I said "is that your understanding of the point Paul was making in 1 cor? Is that what they taught about Grace at Moody, just them vs. us?" I'll have to go over that again before I try to expound upon it, it did shut the guy up, after we had a little discussion about the passage.

So my verdict is, Yes if anyone is saved it is Jesus that saves them. Jesus and only Jesus. They may not know it's Jesus, they may have a different metaphor for it, but they are still seeking the good, seeking the moral law on the heart, which is the good. Rather than make Jesus a stumbling block Paul tired to show Jesus as the open door. Jesus called himself (rather his death, his sacrifice) a stumbling block for the pharisees his implication was that they allowed it to be stumbling block but not working out the truth of the matter. We can make membership in our club and excuse to condemn people or we can their desire for the truth a vehicle trough which they might actually come to know as Jesus and as savior. It's a lot easier to be saved by Grace than to qualify for the Romans 2:6-14 clause. Cut to the chase and do it outright, but that doesn't' give us the right to condmen all the other traditions because they are not us.

How can we know the Reality of Salvation?

stone age "Venus" figure:
Probably fertility fetish

Our friendly alien from another Galaxy Brap Gronk is having a wonderful visit in our neck of the cosmos. He's been visiting Paris and Alpha Centuri. He writes: "having a wonderful zapaspatlick, wish you were Kaplaov."

He also writes:

How can anyone really know if or how salvation is possible (or even necessary) if, to quote a certain blogger, "God is beyond human understanding because God is transcendent." It seems to me like the concept of a need for salvation in the first place is man-made. Isn't it a huge leap to get from "It's rational to believe in God due to the universality of mystical experiences" to "All humans are sinners in need of salvation?"

The concept of "salvation" must have evolved out of the sense of the numinous. Of course its "man made" in the sense that it's a theological response to a felt and perceived need. Theology is the participation and study of a faith tradition. Classically it's defined as "faith seeking understanding," the modern definition makes it seem more like a social scinece, with participant-observer overtones. Rather than "man made" in the sense that it's constructed out of "whole cloth" so to speak, it's more like "human understanding" striving to comprehend something all people have always felt at a certain level. What follows is my theory of how theology evolves from the sense of the numinous which dawned upon our pre-human ancestors in the way that instinct dawns upon animals, and culminates in higher rational abstract though in time, as it becomes theology.

from Numinous to religious development

Skeptics see religion as a question about empirical proofs of the existence of one additional thing in reality, besides all the things we regularly see in the universe; God, as opposed to a universe with everything in it that is in the God universe, but minus God. In other words for them God is just another object tin the universe to prove through empirical means. To them belief in God is just adding another fact to the universe. Belief in God is much more than that. Belief in God is not adding a fact to the universe; it’s an understanding of our relation to the universe. Belief in God is about understanding our relation to the universe, and that relation is as contingent beings, creatures whose being is derived form the ground of being. When we make this realization there is no more doubt. To realize the nature of being is to realize not only the reality of God but also the reality of oneself as creature of God. Of course this can’t have the same kind of verification that scientific work has, if it did it wouldn’t be a take on the basic nature of reality. This does not mean there are no methods that help secure the certainty that is found in the heart of one who has made such a realization. It is hoped that understanding this will lead others to seek that realization.

We can see and understand this method looking at the nature of religious evolution in the evolution of humanity. Of course history of religions and comparative religion are extremely complex, time and space do not permit me to do them justice here. In a thumbnail sketch we can see the roots of Tillich’s concept of God as being itself coming out of this evolutionary development. Anthropologists understand religion as developing as man evolved. No one invented religion, no one decided one day to make up some entity called a God. Religion existed before gods existed. The instinctive realization toward integration into being was part of our ancient ancestors, part of our pre-human heritage. It grew up with us and began to down on us in ways that could be consciously pondered and portrayed as we began to grasp symbolic representation and to think about death and to wonder about the things around us. Atheists still use the old ninetieth century structural functionalist explanation for the origins of religion; the need to explain the thunder, the need to explain rain, the need to manipulate a higher power to make the crops grow. This explanation isn’t really accepted now days because now we realize there’s something more to it all; the sense of he numinous. To those outside looking in religion seems to be about ceremonies and the need to manipulate powers to those involved in It the reality is quite different. As I’ve already said atheists don’t listen to religious people as to why they believe, they are more concerned with assigning the explanations that flatter their own view point. The realization of the sense of the numinous the idea that there is a special quality to being that can be found all around us, the sense of the holy is the preferred explanation for thinkers such as Huston Smith:

"It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."

Smith considers transcendence to be the one dimension common to all peoples of religious faith: "what they have in common lies not in the tradition that introduces them to transcendence, [not in their faith by which they personally respond, but] in that to which they respond, the transcendent itself..."[i]

The issue of religious adaptation to culture is most interesting because it illustrates the plastic nature of religion, and highlights the fact that belief is not just adding a fact to the universe but is actually an orientation to one’s own place in being. First we see humanity beginning to understand about pictures and representation, and in that same era, or before it perhaps but certainly in that era we began burying out dead with plants and herbs that would help them either because we expected them to have some sort of afterlife in which these things could be used, or we began to feel that they symbolically suggested our wishes for them. In this general era, the “pre historic” the “stone age” humans began to sense the presence of spiritual forces and began burying their dead [ii] with herbs and drawing their hands on cave walls, because these things offered some sense of connection with spiritual forces. Some of the flowers put in the graves did not grow in the area; all are used in folk medicine with healing prosperities, indicating they had significance for a belief system.[iii] Humans had a belief in sprits long before they believed in gods. What they were actually doing in all of this was coming to understand not only that the world and how they already knew to live in it, but the idea of its enchantment. The skeptic can only see that they were wrong, stupid ancient man so wrong about the existence of this extra object no one can see; what really seems to have been going on was a discovery about himself, we are living in a world filled with spiritual forces, he began to feel this. After several thousand years of pondering such things finally began to conceptualize these forces are personal and can be named and thus came up with the concept of gods. This concept was rooted in the first inklings of an understanding about our own lives and what it means to live in the world, to be part of being.

Religious belief is an adaptation to culture because it is filtered through the lens of the cultural construct in order to be understood and shared in communication. The skeptic imagines the origin of religion to have been such as his/her observation of modern religion goes, a set of people try to understand why water falls out of the sky every so often and so they make up a story about a big man up there who pours water out of his huge boot, or whatever. The evolutionary practices of religious people as conform to their cultures have aided and abided this idea as it has been foisted upon the public. When we look at the nature of religion in the ancient world, even earlier we don’t an outside observer we see a practitioner who may resort to drawing upon a reservoir of knowledge that he already posses to explain the world, but he/she already posses that knowledge because it’s part of his/her way of life. Religion was not segmented factions battling to see whose set of doctrines came to dominate, in the ancient world religion was not about theology it was even “religion” that word was not used, it was ‘obedience.’ As human began sharpening their concepts they used the king as a model to represent deity because the king was the most powerful person around. Yet human understanding about life was already grasping the concept of the spirit and one’s place in being well before this understanding was ever called “religious belief.” The idea of God who is worshipped and has followers who chose one God over another a latter development, just as priest craft was a latter development.[iv]

Rudolph Otto coined the term “sense of the numinous, in his work The Idea of The Holy in order to capture the mysterious essence of the quality of feeling that stands behind all religion. He used words like “dread” and mysterium Tremendum to get across these are not ordinary feelings; words failed him in being able to describe what exactly he was talking, but this is the essence of mystical or “peak” experience. These terms are used to indicate a feeling or a sense that is beyond the ordinary sense in which we use them. It is non-rational, not irrational. It’s not “crazy” but can’t be analyzed or pinned down and distilled in reason. [v] The sense of the numinous is related to mystical experience and stands at the origin of religion in human thinking; this is essentially why religion exists. It is not hard to understand that this is the feeling related to the mysteries of life, death and the great beyond that led our ancient nameless primordial ancestors to draw their hands on cave walls and bury their dead with flowers to think about the other world and the forced that enchanted the universe with a sense they could not comprehend. At the center of this feeling is the sense of which we read above, of which Smith and Ideonopolis speak, “transcendence itself.” This is a realization about their place in the world, their being and their relation to the rest of being. They did not try to dissect it or psychoanalyze it away, they lived it out. The way to recapture it and live it again is to open up to the sense of wonder in being and allows the sense of being to suggest the categories into which we focus our understanding. There are methodologies that will allow us to do this.

The Universal Nature of Religion


What all people have done, all cultures have developed in my guises is the same basic set of questions and the same basic set of answers, but they come out in different forms. All religions seek to comprehend, identify and name the "human problematic." That is to say, the problem at the heart of being human. Some frame it in terms of sin, some cultures frame it in terms of "imbalance with nature" some frame it in terms of "disobeying natural law" some frame it in other terms, rebirth, impurity, whatever. They are all saying "there's a problem in the nature of being human, it's creates an estrangement form our source, it disrupts what is supposed to be harmonious and meaningful in our existence. This is the problem or set of problems at the hart of being human. In the very preparative understanding it's bad luck, breaking taboo, in the sophisticated understanding, as in the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, its self transcendence. Niebuhr pretty much sums up what all of them are saying, he does it through his understanding of St. Augustine. Because we are able to think and to remember the past and predict the future, we can understand what will happen if we don't pay the rent. That's self transcendence. We can go beyond our momentary self and understand based upon the past the problems of the future. That creates anxiety, we fear, so we steal (for example) to pay the rent.

Thus, we become willing to do injustice to others in order to alleviate our anxiety. This creates a new anxiety, we don't like doing unjust things to others so we feel guilt. Guilt produces estrangement from our sense of source. We seek relief and we find it in terms of Ultimate transformation experience. We can't just bliss out and forget what we did because of the guilt. So we need to have guilt assuaged. Nothing assuages guilt like being forgiven. We seek mediation, we seek a way to mediate between the need for forgiveness and the transformational power that brings a sense of being forgiven. That mediation is where organized religion comes in. This is not pretending anything, it's administering a sense of forgiveness. When that sense is real and the relief is really delivered the transformational power is unleashed and we have off scale happiness. This is the essence of what religion is about. All religions have it.

I've mixed two things up here. I stand by the senerio but it's nto all Niebuhr.(VI) The bit about sin and self transcendence is, the big about identifying human problematic and transformation resolving the problematic (that's the ultimate point of the mediation) is from Dr. Neil MacFarland of Perkins school of theology. (VII)

The development of modern theological method and the doctrinal details of any religious tradition are just the playing out through time and the diversification and evolutionary development of human understanding in relation to a religious tradition. The purpose of tradition is serve as a guide, so we know where people have been in the past and what the pitfalls to avoid are, and we and we can develop and sharpen our understand. In another way they are like vocabularies, because they enable one to enter the ancinet conversation and to understand what has been contributed to the conversation over time. People use them as means of exclusion but that is a cultural development and one that has not always been around. The Ancient Hebrews did not consign their enemies to hell (they didn't have a conception of hell) on the basis that "they are not us." That's actually a somewhat modern development and probably came out of the Greco-Roman disdain for the barbarian.

Now you might ask if this contradicts my understanding of Christianity? No not at all. See my article on Salvation and other faiths. As long as we believe that understanding can grow our modern understanding can be deeper than our ancestor's understanding. Of course I've said that God is beyond our understanding, that's true. We can know God, we just can't put into words what we know. We know through mystical union. We can make metaphors. As long as we remember not to literalize the metaphors we will be OK. After all the idea is to experience not to understand words on paper. It's not about control, it's about letting go of control.





sources

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[i]Thomas Idinopulos,.”What is Religion” Cross Currents, Volume 48, no. 3(Fall 1998). Also see online URL: http://www.crosscurrents.org/whatisreligion.htm visited 10/28/10

[ii] Paul Pettitt, “When Burial Begins,” British Archaeology, Issue 66 August 2002. See Web versoin URL: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba66/feat1.shtml, visited 10/14/08. Pettitt is research fellow at Keble college, Oxford.

[iii] Richard Leaky and Roger Lewin. Origins. New York: E.P. Dutton. 1977

[iv] Willfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1991, Originally published 1962. on line google books page 51, URL: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PNl1QexhUlIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=scholarly+articles+on+the+origin+of+religion&ots=e2_ic5NGQo&sig=OhwNzjS_J2eiYX6oJbFbFuOtB-o#v=onepage&q&f=false visited 9/28/10

[v] Rudolf Otto, and John W. Harvey.The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational factor in the Idea of the Divine, 1929. Kessinger Pulbisher’s rare prints, (John W. Harvey Trans) 2004 5-8 Online page number URL:

http://books.google.com/books?id=70DNx6VNS74C&dq=where+did+Rudolph+Otto+write+about+the+sense+of+the+numinous%3F&source=gbs_navlinks_s visited 10/4/10, Originally published Oxford University Press 1926.
VI. Reinhold Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man Vol. I.Westminster: John Knox Press 1991(the original publication was in the 40s).
VII. Class notes at Perkins