Pope Francis as a universalist?

Edit: Here is a catholic explanation. Doesn’t sound universalist at all if you ask me…

Pope Francis, the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, has already proven to be a controversial person from time to time in his career of only a few months. And luckily it has been in a surprisingly Christlike way, not in the way most modern liberal people expect popes to conservative and oldfashionedly irrelevant: The pope who denied the papal palace, shuns wealth, calls the church to focus on the poor,  washed the foot of women and Muslims instead of Catholic priests and criticised capitalism now stated that atheists are redeemed too and can do good works.

2 articles have been going round on facebook since yesterday, first one from the Vatican Radio and then one from the American Huffington post, which tried to interpret the words of the pope from an American perspective, but to me they seemed to miss the point and tried to make him answer questions he wasn’t addressing…

But let’s have a look at what our papal friend is saying:

“The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation”:

“The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

“Instead,” the Pope continued, “the Lord has created us in His image and likeness, and has given us this commandment in the depths of our heart: do good and do not do evil”:

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

(bold parts from the Vatican radio website)

Some people, like Paul from disoriented, reoriented, actually do think Francis’ words point to Christian universalism (the idea that through the saving work of Christ all will be saved in the end), and point to the old tradition of universalism within christianity that goed back to Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, but I’m not so sure of that actually. I don’t have much problems with hopeful universalism or even praying for the salvation of Satan in the end (as Gregory of Nyssa did), but I believe in free will, and I am afraid that some will never be able to enjoy an eternity with God, it would be hell to them.  But it’s not my task to even speculate about those things, let alone proclaim that I know all the answers here.

It is clear that the pope is an inclusivist here, not in the the sense of salvation (which is not addressed) but when it comes to doing good, which is what is expected from all human beings. (I suppose Rahners idea of anonymous Christians or the older idea of virtuous pagans does fit in here somewhere.)

What we can be sure of though is that the pope here rejects 2 doctrines that are important to certain protestant traditions, especially those based on Calvinism: limited atonement (Jesus did only die for the chosen)  and total depravity (man is fallen in a comprehensive way, and can’t do good himself)

(My problem with total depravity lies in the people whom the NT calls good and just, like Zachary and Elisabeth who were Thora-abiding Jews, and Cornelius who was a God-fearing pagan. Apart from that I do believe very strongly in human depravity, and I see it all the time in the news, around me, and in myself!)

The pope acknowledges here simply that all people can do good, whether they’re atheists or catholics:

“Doing good” the Pope explained, is not a matter of faith: “It is a duty, it is an identity card that our Father has given to all of us, because He has made us in His image and likeness. And He does good, always.”

What’s interesting is that he roots the possibility of doing good works both in Creation (man being the image of God) and in being redeemed by the blood of Christ.  Note also that Pope Francis is speaking about good works and bringing peace here. he isn’t speaking about salvation per se, especially not in ‘going to heaven after you die’ kind.Francis in his view on Christianity seems to be focussed more on the ‘here and now’ aspect of the Kingdom of God, specifically for the ‘least of those’ than about the ‘pie in the sky’ dimension of salvation that some people prefer.

To be sure about how to interpret what the pope said I asked  a catholic, Rob Allaert who writes in Dutch on http://www.thuiskerk.be , and he responded with the next paragraph:

Redemption needs to be uderstood as gift and assignment. Become who you are in Christ. Or as Saint Paul would have it: “Offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.” So, there is an assignment attached to salvation which has in itself a universal scope.

(He also said my interpretation in this post ‘nailed it’.)

So, redemption is only the beginning point here, not the end point at all as ‘salvation’ is often seen in  evangelicalism. Salvation may be universal, but it gives us ‘an assignment’. I don’t think I can disagree with that actually. I even think we should say the same about predestination: if some are predestined by God, it is not just to be saved themselves, but to bring Christ, and salvation and redemption, to this broken world.

So what can we take from this, except from a strong affirmation of the popes inclusivism and love for all people of all religions, and the call to everyone for peace and doing good? I hope there’s also the last thought included somewhere: Loving God and neighbor as the great commandment says (which will include living out that love, maybe even in radical ways) is not the way to salvation, it is part of salvation itself. The Christian idea of both heaven and the Kingdom of heaven on earth looks forward to a world in which all relationships have been restored, and everyone and everything lives in harmony with God, other humans, and all of Creation.

If that’s what the pope means, I agree with him…

what do you think

Bram

PS: The most creepy thing about a universalist pope, especially if he is the second pope after John Paul II, is that in the dispensationalist end-times plots I encountered as a kid (that the pentecostals for some had borrowed from dispensationalism) the endtimes-pope would be some kind of ‘all-religions-are equal’ universalist who would be very popular but open the door for the worship of the beast 666 by the people of all religions.
(Not that real Christian universalism in which it is Christ and Christ alone who saves all would apply here, let alone a pope who calls the Church back to following the gospel in simplicity as Francis does. But somewhere in me the idea still lingers sometimes, and it feels a bit creepy…)

C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, and science and magic as twins

Yesterday I came onto this blog post, in which Ayn Rands marginal notes are quoted like  she has scribbled them into C.S. Lewis book ‘the abolition of man’, a book that I’ve read several times in my life. As someone who knows the ideas of this book, I was quite surprised not only by the vitriol of her comments, but also by how irrelevant some of them are to the text they’re criticising. Update: the complete marginal notes from Rand can be found here (thank you Arend Smilde for the link)

For those who don’t know the book (which can be read online here): Lewis is mostly known for his Christian books, but this is a more a philosophical book that’s actually not particularly Christian. The main point of the book is 2-fold: First there is an Orwellian critique to the modernist project of man conquering nature, in which Lewis states that the final step of this conquering will be ultimately self-defeating on the part of man. The second point is that there is a more or less absolute set of values inherent to this world, which he calls the tao,  with a word borrowed from Eastern philosophy, of which all meaningful human values in all cultures are derived. I do not agree with every detail, and I don’t get more than half of his references, but  I’ve always found the basic ideas of the book, and it’s critique to modernism, quite compelling. (But you need to read the whole book to understand his conclusions, including some weird parts that are hard to read.)

(I also have the idea that some of her remarks about middle ages and the renaissance would not have been made if her issue of the book would have included, like the Dutch version does,  De despcriptione temporum, his inaugural lecture from the chair of mediaeval and renaissance literature at Cambridge University (1954).)

One of the things Rand reacts quite strongly to is the idea that magic and modern science are related:

The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

Lewis as a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature (see also the ‘de descfriptione  temporum’ text I’ve linked to) knows what he is talking about, and anyone who knows something about the life of Isaac Newton for example, who was both a scientist and an alchemist who did weird studies in the occult (and a Christian who wrote bible commentaries)  should know what he’s talking about. Newton can indeed be considered as one of the last great Western magicians as well as one of the first great scientists…

Very important here is what Lewis means with the words science and magic. Both are not means of mere knowledge for him, but of power, power over reality, including power of the one who has it over other humans. Magic is a way to get power using the supernatural, science (and technology) is a way to get power using the natural world. Note also that ‘magic’ as used here is the opposite of astrology, which has the purpose of conforming to the influences of the stars and the supernatural!

Lewis himself does not deny the existence of science as a search for knowledge, and indeed explicitly notes that there are scientists who are seeking for pure knowledge, but that’s not the goal of most applied science both in the 16th century and the momdern time, which shares indeed the goal of magic: to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

I don’t think Lewis would say that this is always a problem, he’s not a luddite and used technology himself, and never rejects it. But what he wants to show us is a dark side that is inherent to modern (applied) science. A dark side that might remind us to the lie of the snake, that told the first couple that they would be like God.

And indeed, science has been used for ‘playing God, and abused in a lot of abominable ways to get power, not only over nature, but also over other humans. Most science nowadays is subdued not to those who want pure knowledge, but to those who want power and money.  This is how we came to have the atom bomb, genetically engineered crops that are very handy in making multinationals richer, etc, (While some other scientific fields not useful for securing power and money are underfunded!)

So what happened to magic? It lost because it didn’t seem to work the way science worked, and was pushed out of the modern worldview which became more and more hermetically naturalistic. But its goal is still the same goal of a lot of modern science.

The point of self-control to be able to conform ourself to reality is also something we should not forget. We are not the creators of the universe, and there are things higher than us we should conform to, like certain laws of nature. I do not mean this deterministically, we should not let every thing we meet rule over us, man is indeed able to fight back when reality is hostile and evil, but we moderns should not forget that we can never be free without self-control…

what do you people think?

peace

Bram

to the guy searching for ‘brambonius cools emerging’

(warning: just a rant full of christian theological  lingo)

Looking at my stats today I saw that my blog has been found 5 times today looking for ‘brambonius cools emerging’. Makes me wonder if anyone still uses the term ‘emerging church’, and why people would bother finding out if I (using my internet nick) have something to do with it.

To be honest, I don’t even know myself :p

I can’t deny that I’ve been following the ‘emerging church dialogue’ (even if I was quite late to the discussion.) and that I have learned a lot from it. I am a postmodern evangelical after all, so I found in it the words to explain how I look at the world; On the other hand, I think I’m too post-modern and too evangelical (once a charismatic, always a supernaturalist…) to ever fall for modernist forms of christianity, be it either fundamentalism or liberalism. Thank you very much, both are completely inconceivable for me… So if you mean some kind of ‘liberalism 2.0′ I’m not your man. I’ve found out that I’m allergic to all forms of liberalism, from liberal theology to liberal humanism and oldschool liberal politics and economics (like the stuff they call ‘conservative’ in America).

So if you mean the ‘tall skinny kiwi‘ type of emerging church, or the Shane Claiborne type of christianity, yes!: I’m in…

If you mean some kind of updated liberalism, as some seem to use the word ‘emergent’ (maybe mainly the critics, see cartoon) count me out. It won’t ever work for me. I’m a supernaturalist who is quite critical towards the enlightenment.  For me that’s just the negative-picture version of fundamentalism… I will readily affirm the apostles and Nicene creed, but I will also place them alongside the sermon on the mount as foundational to Christianity. And I believe in the gifts of the Spirit for today (and the fruits), Christian non-violence and peacemaking, equality of the sexes [and egalitarianism], the priesthood of all believers, the trusworthiness of scripture (I don’t care about the modern concept of ‘innerancy’ though),  creation care and stewardsghip over nature, and the incompatibility of capitalism and christianity… I believe God works in all of His Church, even though I have no use for a lot of things in various traditions that I believe to be abominable (like double predestination, rich TV-preachers asking money from the poor, relic worship, christian materialism etc…)

To satisfy the heresy-hunters even more some labels I could wear: I’m a Wesleyan anabaptist-inspired postmodern charismatic evangelical with both orthodox and organic church sympathies, inspired by Francis of Assisi, christian mysticism and apophatic theology, who thinks Christianity is a way of life restored in relationship to God than accepting all the right theologies.

Love God, love your neighbor as yourself. In the end after the day of Judgment that’ll be all that’s left, with all evil and everything incompatible with God erased….

And as you might have noticed, I’m as non-reformed as a protestant can be…

May the Spirit lead me and bring me to the right path… May God bring His Kingdom and reveal Christ to me more and more, so that I can follow Him!

peace

Bram

Evangelicals don’t listen to Jesus enough?

Sometimes when I read the gospels and then see myself and fellow Christians, I wonder about the difference between what I read and what is expected as ‘normative’ in contemporary Christianity.  As a non-American I do see a lot of weird Americanist synchronism hiding as ‘conservative Christianity’. Sometimes when I see the Christian subculture with all its distractions I really understand Ghandi who said ‘I like your Christ, but I don’t like your Christians, they are so unlike your Christ’

Today I read an article by what looks to me like a good oldfashioned American baptist preacher, that reminds me that evangelicals, that all christians who proclaim to be ‘followers of the bible’ can in no way be expected to sweep the words of Jesus under the mat. There is no alibi for that. Read 10 big things Jesus said which you and I keep conveniently forgetting by pastor Joe McKeever here.

I am quite sure we all need to be reminded of a lot of those, or even if you’d disagree with some of his conclusions, just take all his bible verses as a starting point, or start with the words of the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5-7) of the sermon on the plain in Luke 6 read every day and taken serious in all aspects of our lives are enough to shake and challenge a lot of our traditions and assumptions. And let’s not forget that both pieces of teaching  I’ve named are concluded by Jesus with :

Matthew 7:24 “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who built his house on rock.25 The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, but it did not collapse because it had been founded on rock. 26 Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.27 The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, and it collapsed; it was utterly destroyed!

So would living according to the words of Christ maybe be a good idea for those who claim to follow Him? Is it not the only thing we should expect that anyone who claims to be a ‘bible-following Christian’ tries to do. Love our neighbour, love our enemies, bless those who persecute you (even rejoice when they persecute you for Christ’s sake!), take care for the poor and sick, etc…

And yes, I know I’m still nowhere with that either, but I wish we would see that as a real problem, more than a lot of problems we evangelicals like to see that might be quite irrelevant…

Bram

The unhelpfulness of words like ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’.

People love to live in a simple understandable world, I guess that’s why a lot of people divide the world into simple categories,  and apparently very often in a very polarizing way even, with only two black and white categories, which gives us very warped worldview.

The English example dichotomy between “liberal” and “conservative” for example has little use for me, on the contrary. Firstly because they are often used as a false dilemma: there are many more options than these two (especially when used in the way some people use them),  it just crams everything in two black boxes, which is a bit as watching the big colorful reality on a small black’n white  TV: it’s dangerously reductionist … In itself there is a very diverse and complexe spectrum that falls into multiple dimensions … A worldview that tightly to one of these two sides will sit very definitely false ‘us-against-them “feeling without ever understanding the other while projecting a lot of naive prejudices out of the own ideology onto the other…

Moreover, those words given are no real opposites of each other, “liberal” refers to a school of thought that has its roots in modern thought, and ‘conservative’ is an appeal to a tradition that should be preserved. Ironically  in an American context (where I see those words used most btw.) the tradition to be defended is built on a kind of old-fashioned modernist liberalism, from the time of the founding fathers… The details of what is considered ‘conservative’ will vary enormously depending on the context and tradition: for a Flemish person like m ‘conservative ‘will be quite different from the ‘conservative’ of an American, or Japanese, or Inuit, or Piraha person…

‘Liberal’ is also not quite the same as ‘progressive’, which would be a more logical opposite of “conservative” that gets used as well. But that word is equally problematic, since  it is equally something that is positioned towards a given tradition, so depending on the specific context the meaning will also be completely different. Moreover, it is impossible for any person or group to ever be completely progressive or conservative. There are also things to be conserved and in which one is then  ‘conservative’,  and others that need to change in which one is progressive…

(Left right there are similar unhelpful terms anyway, but let’s not talk about  them here…)

But there is more, and it’s something that we as children of modernity will not notice because it is a way of thinking that surrounds us as the water surrounds a fish. The connotation for many people is that “progress” is something undeniably positive. This is a purely modern idea that people of other times and cultures do not have, and that I fully doubt and reject. One does not need the aforementioned Piraha to see this: for example, in the Middle Ages our culture held to the opposite idea, that the older thing would be better the newer thing. The word ‘primitive’ for example had in earlier times no pejorative meaning (rather the opposite, the primitive church was considered cleaner than the later church for example), in Beowulf we find the idea that an ancient sword would probably be better than a new for example.*

(Maybe there are people on the conservative side that see ‘back then’ as the ideal as the medievals would. Of course that is just as counterproductive and pointless as well)

But we should not give this kind of meaning to progress on the time axis. Advancing in time simply means change and evolution, and that is neutral in itself. Or better, that change can be positive or negative, or neutral. The use of the word ‘progress’ for ‘it becomes better’ might therefore be just a problematic illusion of the Spirit of our age. It reminds me of the modernistic naive optimism of the Enlightenment.**

So let’s stop this polarization, please between ‘conservative’ and either of the 2 other sides please. We make it very difficult for us to really leave behind the things that we have to leave behind on one hand and go forward to something better while going back to the right path were we went wrong on the other hand if we keep in mind two opposite irreconcilable sides.

Now, for a thought experiment to illustrate what I mean, looking at myself to see whether the words do apply to me will every time give both a yes and a no. I’m influenced by modernism Westerner, so I will definitely have some liberal ideas. distinctly theological liberalism is not anything that works for me, but I’ll probably have, like all modern believers and even the very conservative, influences of liberalism-positive or negative-that I can not see myself because of the fact that I live in modernism as a fish in the water… Conservative as in the way of adhering to a tradition I want to preserve  I am, but in a broad sense, with  the great Christian tradition, in mind  but not a specific tradition. Progressive I am too, in the sense that certain things have to change, but that is precisely where I find the terms completely pointless: protection of the environment-and all of creation for example is something I find important, and if there would be any logic in the world this would be a “conservative” idea, but no, it seems to be progressive … (And that while I’ve largely learned the importance of the protection of our planet from my Catholic  teachers in elementary and middle school …) So, none of these words works in describing me or in describing anything that is not me either…

peace

Bram

* C.S. Lewis’ essay and inauguration speach as a professor in medieval and renaissance litterature  ‘de Descriptione Temporum’ is very interesting here. It can be read here.

** This modern idea of ​​progress, which we associate with modern enlightened humanist thought, ironically  has  its theological roots in Judeo-Christian eschatological thought of a very strong teleological nature… It only got stripped of it’s religious roots somewhere along the way  (between Hegel and Marx?) . But that does not mean that this way of thinking can be seen as something else than than teleological (working towards a goal or Telos).

Some interesting things elsewhere VII

It’s still the first 2 weeks of the school-year over here, which are utter chaos for me as a teacher of protestant religion in Flemish secondary schools, so not much has been happening on this blog. I left this SITE-list half finished at the end of August, so maybe it’s time to finish it and publish it before it loses all relevancy in this constantly changing world.

The random picture today is quite cute. Having small children makes one like cute pictures of fuzzy apes…

Ray Hollenbach on how Jesus welcomes sinners at His table. Who do we welcome at our table?

Morgan Guyton actually has written a lot of posts that are worth reading since my last SITE-list. This one is about submission and leadership.

Thank you Lord for hearing me @ godspace.

2 interesting posts by Jonalyn on soulation. One about egalitarian marriages and one about friendships between men ans women. I still don’t have no idea who the mentioned Sally and Harry are, and I don’t think they’d interest me…

Roger Olson on the problems with John Pipers view of Gods sovereignity and sin.

Busyness as moral lazyness on internetmonk

An orthodox approach to sacrifice and atonement (I guess you all know I find those things very interesting)

Andrew Jones of Tall skinny Kiwi on homeschooling with the whole planet as a home… I wish I could go to all those places to learn those things…

shalom

Bram

Homosexuality on the Wartburg Watch with Justin Lee

The Wartburg watch blog has a very interesting series on Christians and homosexuality, with very challenging contributions from the inimitable Justin Lee of the Gay Christian Network, and Brad/futuristguy. It’s much more nuanced, interesting and intellectually honest than for example this chart that has been going around on facebook lately.

(I’m not a big fan of being judgmental and dismissive of those you find judgmental and dismissive. That’s only another version of exorcising the devil with Beelzebul..)

Here are the Wartburg Watch posts; Be sure to read all of them!

Lifelong Celibacy: Part One of The Great Debate on Gay Christianity

My Story About Gender, Sexuality, and Perspectives on “Successful” Transformation

Side A: Justin Lee Explains His View of The Bible and Gay Relationships

A Christian Teen Discovers He’s Gay and Traditional (?) Marriage

Final Thoughts on Gays and Christianity: We Can Do Better

I think the most important thing here is what Dee says in the preface to her last post about Justin:

He opened my eyes to many things that I have never considered. Justin made me realize that I am dealing with people, not a just a theological concept.

This should be our approach. Love people before theory.My eyes were opened to that by Andrew Marins book ‘love is an orientation’, but in all those discussions online it’s a good reminder. We’re dealing with people.

Carbon-based lifeforms who bear the image of God!

…on both sides…

Bram

 

fallible language V: speaking about creation

We’re still in a series that I’ve begun last winter, about fallibility of language (find part I, part II, part III and part IV here) in which we were looking at the way in which language fails us sometimes.

We’ve been talking about God and theology, but today we’re going to go to a more specific discussion, that is very important for certain people in my own broad tribe of evangelicalism: speaking about Creation.

I’ve always found the 2 most vocal major streams of thought within contemporary Christianity equally irritating; at one hand you have the very militant creationists, who claim to know scientifically exactly how God has made the world in a lot more details than the bible can provide. And if you don’t follow them you don’t believe in the bible and you’ll lose your faith. On the other side you have those who have an equally big faith in science and who know that science has the last word in everything, and if there’s anything in Christianity or the bible that goes against the findings of modern science we should get rid of it…

To be honest, I find both positions to be equally impotent and signs of a quite uncritical synchretism with the arrogant optimism of the enlightenment that we human beings can and will know everything. My thoughts on how Creation has happened may have shifted over the years, but one of the things I’ve always known is that the circumstances of how God made the world are not likely to be found out completely by our science, the visible does not stem from what we can see, and neither that any description of it will ever be complete and able to scientifically nail down what happened.

Vinoth Ramachandra, writing from an Evangelical but non-Western Point of View, puts it this way in his excellent but quite heavy book ‘subverting global myths’:

Creationism and evolutions are simply mirror images of each other. The former reduces the Christian doctrine of creation to the level of a scientific account of chronological origins, and the latter elevated the biological theory of revolution into a total worldview. Paradoxically,creationist and evolutionists have more in common than they each realize: Both work within a “universe-as-machine” picture of the world, so that Gods relationship with the world can only be conceived in the form of ingeneer-type interventions which have to be scientifically inexplicable.

But the whole “universe as a machine” framework is just a modern way we think we make sense of the world… And Creation is something that happened outside of the things that we know and have words for, and something that was not witnessed by us. So I’d expect science to be able to find out something, but not at all even the main thing. Only of you’re a purely materialist Christian you could believe such a thing… (We’ve actually had discussions about evolution and spiritual beings here on this blog a while ago) But neither would I believe that an God-inspired description would be ever complete, it would just be an assurance that indeed God is the Creator. (the question about the origin of angels and demons is still there btw, genesis doesn’t say a word about this!)

With all of this in mind, I found the Orthodox way of looking at the subject of Creation much more interesting. Let’s go back to ‘light from the Christian East’:

For one thing, the Orthodox emphasis on our human inability to conceive of and speak about God and creation together could help us escape the sometimes acrimonious “creation versus evolution” arguments that so often have bedeviled reflection on the creation among Western Christians over the last century or so. From the perspectives of Orthodoxy, the first chapters of Genesis do not explain creation. Creation was God’s act, and no amount of human intellectual ingenuity could ever account for it, nor any human words capture it. The terse affirmations made in Genesis 1-2 do not amount to explanations or even descriptions, from an Orthodox perspective; they confront us with the declaration that all that is came from God. In presenting the entire universe as God’s creative handiwork, Orthodoxy excludes all thought of an evolutionary process operating outside of God, to be sure. Equally, it precludes any arrogant claim to comprehend from the first chapters of Genesis how God brought everything into existence. What Scripture presents is the declaration that God made all that is, without any attempt to clarify how all came into being. The opening chapters of Genesis present what must be wondered at, not what can be fathomed. They offer stimulation for common praise by all those who believe in him, not material with which we should brow-beat fellow believers whose ideas about the way in which God may have accomplished that work differ from ours.
Further, even if God had explained it to us, could we have understood it? What language could God borrow to explain to mere creatures the act of creation so that we could comprehend it? If his ways and thoughts are beyond ours (Is 55:8-9), should we not offer humble praise for his creation and what hè has told us about it, rather than fighting among ourselves as to who best comprehends how God brought all things into existence? Is the beginning of Scripture intended to satisfy our intellectual curiosity about “how,” or is it to invite us to celebrate “what” and “who”? Western Christians could learn a bit more humility in speaking about creation and God from their brothers and sisters in Eastern Orthodoxy. (Payton)

Now that’s a bit like what I think about the subject, but much more eloquently worded…

what do you think?

Shalom

Bram

see also this post and the discussion under it, on evolutionary creationism and angels…

C.S. Lewis: I’m not a fundamentalist

This is a C.S. Lewis quote about how to read the bible that is probably equally irritating to fundamentalists and modernist/liberal christians, but it makes a lot of sense to me:

“I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation “after the manner of a popular poet” (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction. The real reason why I can accept as historical a story in which a miracle occurs is that I have never found any philosophical grounds for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen.”

C.S. Lewis, reflections on the psalms

I have no problem with accepting insights from bible criticism and modern theology (although there’s a lot of reductionistic rubbish too, that seems to be written from the point of wanting to believe everything but a ‘traditional’ reading), but I’ve never had any interest in the idea that miracles are a mark that a story is myth, and cannot have happened. I do have not only philosophical but even experiential reasons to believe in the possibility of miracles even…

There might be othere reasons to doubt that certain (OT) stories are more likely more or less mythical and not completely historical (or completely not, I wouldn’t care if Job was just a literary story to convey its philosophical message…) Not believing in the supernatural is one modern error, but thinking that a bible verse can only be inspired and to our benefit if it’s completely historical is another one from the opposite side….

What do you people think?

shalom

Bram

Some of my doubts

Sometimes I doubt everything.

Sometimes everything I’ve been taught and everything that is taken for granted by this whole world seems like nonsense… We all swallow the propaganda and follow the authorized version ‘they’ want us to believe…

And I’m not just talking about my faith here… I’d rather deny all grounds on which Western thought are built than deny Him completely… since in a way I can’t deny God just as I can’t deny myself, but I can deny every system of thought describing Him. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe I do not actually exist…

It’s not that I can deny the supernatural, even if I have a hunch that most of it is actually natural but just outside of what we call ‘laws of nature’. I can’t deny miracles and the supernatural but I could attribute them to explanations that we don’t even know about in our thinking, maybe all our our thoughts about it is like medievals knowing nothing about electricity trying to understand how a computer works.

It’s not that I can deny science I can’t deny evolution but I can’t believe that the material world is all there is, so it can’t be the whole story. I do know we can describe enough of the universe in a meaningful enough way to manipulate it. But does that mean that we actually understand anything at all?

I can’t deny that the laws of Love like Jesus articulates them are better and more substantial than anything I’ve seen in the world, and yet hardly any Christian I know even tries to live them. Sometimes I wonder if my own ‘religion’ does even understand a thing about itself….

And I honestly don’t even trust the idea behind all our western thinking that the universe is rational and knowable… Seems like very naive to say the least… I seems sometimes like the other extreme from the Eastern idea that everything we see is an illusion and nothing more, and equally unbalanced…
And worst of all, all of this, all life on earth seems completely screwed up, and still it’s evident that everything is worth more than we can contain. Every human life, every ecosystem, every species that goes down in our screwed-up systems is of incredible worth. And then I get a Pedro the Lion song stuck in my head:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful

if everything would be meaningless?

But everything is so meaningful

and most everything turns to shit

(rejoice)

There’s so much that needs to be saved, but not much stuff that can save in this world. Look at how even our enlightened traditions exchanged the crusades with the nuclear bomb. We are not getting better, we’re getting more (rendabel) in doing work like the factories and computers do, and we’re getting further in death and destruction. From the dodo and the crusades to Nagasaki and drones and cluster bombs we didn’t become better people.

When will we learn that violence will not save us but only breed more violence and destruction? When will we break the cycle of greed and other nonsense?

That’s why I hope in Jesus. That’s why I think nothing else would make sense. Because I love this endagered world and it’s uncontainable creator…

Kyrië Eleison

Christe Eleïson

Kyrië Eleison

Bram