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I’m late to the what are you thing. Grew up Methodist in a big congregation. Married a seminary student and am now ELCA Lutheran. I like Christian existentialism and Tillich a bit too much, bordering on being obsessive about it.
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Jan 24, 2021 01:10
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The Cost of Discipleship is solid. Barth’s Humanity of God is a good follow up. I made a list of books my son’s godfather should give my sons if I died and they wanted to know what I believed: The Cost of Discipleship The Humanity of God Moral Man and Immoral Society The Irony of American History Dynamics of Faith
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Jan 26, 2021 01:39
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White Coke posted:What's the deal with your text/avatar combo? I can't figure out who the saint is. I got the avatar with a red text for pissing somebody off. I used to post in the D&D religion threads regularly and someone gave it to me. I don’t know who it is. It grew on me over time so I just kept it when I changed the text.
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Jan 26, 2021 03:09
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White Coke posted:An argument I've see pop up is: religious experiences can be caused by drugs like LSD, or by medical conditions like schizophrenia, so therefore any and all religious phenomena are explicable by these means and therefore "untrue". Personally I’ve never had a spiritual experience. I am a Christian for the reason Justin the Martyr gave: "This is the only philosophy which I have found certain and adequate." When I was younger I was freakishly active. I was in multiple sports, Scouting, quiz bowl competitions, multiple martial arts and I did thousands of hours of community service. This was basically needed to keep me sane when I was younger. Anyway at some point I looked at the service I was doing in my community and wondered why am I doing this? I demanded that God tell me and give me a reason. I never got answer. Years later I’d even realize that the crisis itself was a consequence of having a weird brain. I’m not a Christian because of a spiritual experience. I am a Christian because I find the event of Jesus as the Christ, the only certain and adequate explanation and answer for my question of: “What does it mean to be?”
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Jan 27, 2021 06:30
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What does miracle mean? It doesn’t have to mean there was some supernatural event. In a literal sense it’s that which astonishes or that which causes wonder. The inexplicable doesn’t have to make us feel happy or grateful even. When I was at the academy, after we got recognized as plebs they have the parents weekend and they got to come visit us in Great Neck, they watch a few ceremonies, then they spend the weekend in NYC. Basically everyone in my class’ parents were flying back from NYC to their homes on 9/10 or 9/11 in 2001. It’s hosed up but I still am in wonder about it and I am astonished by it. I don’t think that state is one where one has to be happy or that everything that happened was good.
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Jan 30, 2021 08:16
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Thirteen Orphans posted:The first project is about making a martial art/martial pedagogy that marries the teachings of my late teacher and father Grandmaster Thirteen Orphan’s Dad 8th dahn Hapkido with the knowledge I’ve gained through my studies in the Chinese so-called “internal” martial arts, particularly Taijiquan and Baguazhang. Back in high school I did my black belt test for Hapkido under Grandmaster J. Park. Way back when I first started Taekwondo he wrote something on my Dobok in Korean that he told me was my name that was also apparently a joke that no one would ever tell me. Don’t meet a lot of people involved in Hapkido.
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Feb 1, 2021 07:18
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Morning Bell posted:. When is it loving your neighbour, when is it coming with a sword, what are striking differences between the secular humanist mindset. I wouldn’t cast in in opposition to a secular humanist mindset. Paul Tillich has an idea called the “Method of Correlation”. But to talk about that I need to talk about Barth first. If one takes a philosophy of religion course they often end with Friedrich Schleiermacher and the emergence of liberal theology and Christian modernism. Well Barth’s predecessors and professors were in a continuation of that line of thought. But WWI happens and these theologians, well they made arguments not particularly in line with the example of Jesus, arguments that were supportive of the horrors of that war. It’s in that context that Barth’s commentary of Paul’s Epistle is written. The most famous metaphor for what Barth does with that work, “like a bombshell on the theologians' playground”. Basically Barth blows apart the intertwining of philosophy and theology that got rolling in the German Enlightenment with Kant, Hegel, etc. Sometimes this gets called Barth’s “No”. It’s where dialectic neo-orthodox theology gets rolling and it breaks that intertwining of philosophy and theology. Tillich is a response to what Barth sets in motion. His not particularly gracious characterization of Barth’s evangelism is that the Gospel in it is “thrown like a stone (at the head)”. Dude ends a lecture series on the history of Christian thought given at Harvard basically with: and this (the whole preceding history of Christian thought that I’ve been teaching) is why Barth is wrong. Anyway Tillich in responding to Barth is basically saying, we live in this time and place and we have this set of question about our existence arising, in his time it was self critical radical humanism, existentialism. When we talk about God we should think about these questions from our time, from philosophy. Then we use our answer, the event of Jesus as Christ to answer the questions. That’s correlation in a nutshell. It’s not the synthesis of philosophy/ theology that liberal theology had that led to Barth’s no. But it’s not having them entirely separated and unrelated to each other. That’s the way I would think to try to answer and wrestle with those types of questions.
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Feb 2, 2021 03:42
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When we talk about God as Christians we are also taking about humans, because of Jesus. From the Humanity of God: “We do not need to engage in a free-ranging investigation to seek out and construct who and what God truly is, and who and what man truly is, but only to read the truth about both where it resides, namely, in the fullness of their togetherness” So when we talk about omnipotence or predestination we are doing that, engaging in that construction and ignoring that God was human and we don’t have to construct him. But “Man cannot be man without thought. He must think even if he is the most primitive devotional Christian, with no theological education or understanding. Even in religion we give names to special objects. We distinguish acts of the Divine. We relate symbols to each other. We explain their meaning. There is language in every religion, and the existence of language means that there are universals, and of universals that there are concepts, and of concepts that one must think, even on the most primitive level.” Because that’s what we do because we use language. Between those two views there to me lies how to understand the error. omnipotence, predestination, etc, these are only our symbolic constructions to talk about God, our thinking about God. God was human and that’s what was real. But we’ve got to talk about that to communicate, so we have to make constructions, but we know that they are only our constructions with our limitations and that we are also talking about ourselves.
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Feb 5, 2021 03:30
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The omnis point they are not what they point to.
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Feb 6, 2021 06:41
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They still think in the same way as the evangelical places they left. Different specific beliefs after leaving but the same way s of thinking about the world.
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Feb 6, 2021 09:12
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Things are. “for in Him we live, and move, and are;” A creator is a being. Personally I’m strongly in favor of understanding the Father as Being-itself. That there is an “is” rather than some start of a casual chain.
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Feb 7, 2021 01:24
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ThePopeOfFun posted:You should dish your beef to God now and unceasingly, and that's Wise. I’d be willing to argue that this is even a serious act of faith.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:13
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Elissimpark posted:I think there's a tendency in the Western world to assign the Christian God a more human point of view, which is a bit silly. Assign isn’t a strong enough word. It’s various degrees of God was human in Christianity. The Logos was flesh. There is a spectrum of Christology but basically all the denominations have a Christology.
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Feb 9, 2021 07:29
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zonohedron posted:Like this, this is the kind of conversation I mean. HEY GUNS and I have been insisting for at least four iterations of this thread that ritual isn't the seasoning you sprinkle on top of your religious life (where some people like more and some people like less and some people just leave it off) but is instead absolutely central to it, and along comes somebody who is definitely not Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, saying, "Ritual often comes before belief, I find, and is an excellent vehicle for fostering that belief," which is a pretty good translation of "lex orandi, lex credendi," in my opinion. I find myself going back to these lines from the history of Christian thought quite a lot:. “Now I repeat: reality precedes thought. But I repeat also: thought shapes reality. These two are interdependent. You cannot abstract the one from the other.“ What I would say to "lex orandi, lex credendi," is that even before liturgy were people living lives following Jesus. I guess I mean don’t leave off, lex vivendi. We live as Christians first (reality precedes thought) but ritual and liturgy shape how we live as Christians.
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Feb 26, 2021 03:36
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:A good analogy I heard was: Faith as Ultimate Concern. I am in the sea, whether on a lifeboat, rowboat or sail boat. That I am in the sea, means I think about being in the sea, even in the worst weather where I might lose hope, until I am not in the sea. All ships pale before the sea itself. Separately open boat lost at sea is about the worst thing that one can experience. Edit: I’d also add that the larger and more seaworthy the ship the more easily one can become unafraid of the sea, which is a dangerous mistake. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Mar 5, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 17:27
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Nah that’s a harmful framing of faith, actively harmful to faith. Edit: You edited your post in a way that it’s not so bad now. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Mar 7, 2021 |
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Mar 7, 2021 16:53
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Civilized Fishbot posted:I believe Christianity is the same way as well, based on its descent from Judaism, but I'm less sure. An open question: What is the revelation of God, by God in Christianity? Or rephrased: How does God show us that he is in Christianity?
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Mar 7, 2021 17:02
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Civilized Fishbot posted:What I'm saying is: The Bible is very clear that G-d loves proving that G-d is real, it's basically His favorite thing to do, so it's silly to say "G-d would never create the Earth in such a way to prove that G-d is real" or "G-d encourages the proliferation of evidence that G-d is not real." Well first there is a foundational difference between you and I here. I don’t think God the Father is a being. I think God the father is Being-itself. Next how do I know what it is to be and what Being-itself is? From Jesus. And then from the Spirit in all (and I do believe all in the broadest all here) my brother’s and sister’s. The new testament to me is people writing about the experience of their communities or their personal understanding of the event of Jesus. Having conversations like these talking about what it is to be for each of us. Doubting what I think it means to be. These are ways I learn about God and they aren’t contradictory to faith. Reason isn’t contradictory to faith. The logos isn’t a threat to the Logos.
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Mar 7, 2021 17:22
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Freudian posted:I absolutely don't mean to offend anyone with the following, but it feels like Christianity has never properly come to terms with the fact that Jesus' own people rejected the Message - and then survived, being their own people. Well the Romans. I mean think a lot of that was the Jewish wars and then Christianity becoming Greek and Roman, which certainly is a can of worms.
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Mar 7, 2021 19:56
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/arts/bible-deuteronomy-discovery.html?referringSource=articleShare Worth a read. Edit: Potentially the oldest Duet. source was labeled a forgery in the 1880’s but probably isn’t. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 01:27
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Ehh the parts that are missing compared to Deuteronomy coincide with what should be missing based on the current versions of documentary hypothesis. This is to say the text reflects a modern understanding of the writing of Deuteronomy and not one from the 1880s. My wife finds it compelling. But she and I are very much on the literary side of the argument.
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Mar 12, 2021 05:11
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Gaius Marius posted:I really wanna go to the park in Nara where all the deer are tame and you can just walk up to them, such peaceful creatures. Very good if you don't have a field or garden cultivated We’ve got an elk herd close to that where I live. They tolerate runners and bikers. Dogs and particularly aggressive photographers get the why don’t you gently caress off display.
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Mar 16, 2021 07:31
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Gaius Marius posted:I wouldn't gently caress with Elks though they'll gently caress you up if you accidentally set them off, lot of tourists in Yellowstone forget that wild animals are still wild Tias posted:On occasion we'll have a major loving accident with elk in Scandinavia, most often when a bull gets completely hosed up on fermented fruit and charges a car intersection. The herd has been in and part of town for a long time. The Roosevelt Elk went out around 1900. But they introduced a herd from Montana in 1913. They maintain the Elk fence on the highway well and they have a clear path to go from the fields in town back and forth to the Cascades. About 450 Elk. In town when they cross roads they tend to do it at night. One elk will cross and then a second will come up to the road. The pair watch the road on either side. Then the whole herd moves across. It’s a hell of thing to watch. Some new construction has them coming through the community park I live on so now we get to watch them from our living room. Only real issue they cause is getting the kids to not throw the turds at each other.
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Mar 17, 2021 02:05
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Captain von Trapp posted:I haven't seen this case made much, but you could (and I probably would) argue that in Christianity angels and demons fit many reasonable definitions of lowercase-g gods. “History of Christian Thought” posted:
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Mar 23, 2021 03:04
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Christians imo are overly-obssesed with purity. Not necessarily, I mean to get a bit scatological is the divine in poo poo? Look at it this way in its context who was Jesus to the Romans ? This was a nobody. Worse this was a criminal nobody, the worst of the worst and an enemy of the state. This is a scandalous assertion, that this nobody was God. It’s also an inversion, an assertion that the very highest is in the very lowest. The Word was Flesh is a scandalous assertion. This idea is really embedded in our culture too that saviors reach down into the muck and poo poo to invert the location of the divine to pull us up. Just of the top of my head one can see it in the last Nolan Batman movie. I mean the example of Jesus and the assertion the Jesus is the Christ is in conflict with the elements of Christianity that are more obsessed with purity.
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Apr 13, 2021 00:19
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If one is into feminist theology, She Who Is, is pretty good. https://www.amazon.com/She-Who-Feminist-Theological-Discourse/dp/0824519256
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Apr 13, 2021 23:19
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I could have suggested way more radical authors. Johnson’s methods are very much in the mainline Protestant .
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Apr 14, 2021 00:38
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:There are well established reasons why God is referred to as He for all but the last few decades of Christian history. Lol. Like do you even Hagia Sophia? No but seriously you are very much wrong and harmfully wrong.
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Apr 14, 2021 01:07
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:Jesus Himself referred to God as His Father... I’d consider the guy who Christianity is founded on to know best on the topic. People leave the religion because of the way you think.
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Apr 14, 2021 01:20
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There were many early communities that talked about Jesus in terms of both Logos and Sophia. God’s reason and wisdom made flesh. This tradition continued for like over a thousand plus years ( eg. The Hagia Sophia).
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Apr 14, 2021 01:28
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White Coke posted:I think I brought this up earlier in the thread, but weren’t there Gnostics who thought women couldn’t be saved? How do you get from that to talking about God’s feminine side? A broad bunch of beliefs were Gnostic it wasn’t one thing. The big thing with them is initiation into a community that told one the secret knowledge
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Apr 14, 2021 01:36
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Just to throw it out there, she’s a Roman Catholic religious sister writing from a Catholic perspective. Yes but her thinking and methodology is very much taken from the work of Paul Tillich which is Lutheran and Protestant.
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Apr 14, 2021 01:41
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Also on topic is The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Gospels-Elaine-Pagels/dp/0679724532
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Apr 14, 2021 02:07
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Valiantman posted:I wish to comment, that this is not a very good or persuasive reason to do something (or not do it). People leave religion because of many reasons, good and bad. And religion is not inherently good or bad either. But misogyny is bad. And asserting that our symbols to talk about God are only and have only been masculine is misogyny. Our words and symbols are constructed tools. When we assert that they are God’s words, we put the end and means of humans from a particular context in the place of God’s ends and means. We privilege a male and Greek way of thinking from a particular context. I’m not saying to not think in that way, I mean I do for a large chunk of how I think. We should recognize that it wasn’t the only way to think and that it’s symbols aren’t the only symbols we can use to talk about God. I’m comfortable saying that not doing that is bad and harmful and should be called such.
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Apr 14, 2021 16:38
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zonohedron posted:What if they are God's words? Like, what if God took a particular constructed tool and used it, specifically? How does God reveal God to us? My first answer to that question is by the event of Jesus as the Christ. My second answer is by God’s reason, wisdom, and love in all of the rest of us. Our scripture doesn’t say the Word was a book. It asserts that the Word was flesh! What do I think God uses specifically to reveal God, the Word made flesh (Jesus) and the Word in humans, in all of us, given by God by the Spirit. Truth is a whole not a part and all things serve God.
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Apr 14, 2021 18:10
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zonohedron posted:On the other hand, I’m objecting to the assertion that we should only use the masculine pronoun to refer to God combined with an assertion that we should not use feminine pronouns. I am not saying to not use masculine pronouns.
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Apr 14, 2021 19:22
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Valiantman posted:I'm not disagreeing with you, though I don't think you are debating with anyone present here, since I've seen no one state that God, not just Jesus, is actually literally male. I was specially responding to this: Zazz Razzamatazz posted:There are well established reasons why God is referred to as He for all but the last few decades of Christian history.
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Apr 15, 2021 00:25
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We use familial words to talk about our relationship with God. Something I’ve always remembered is the assertion that when we talk about God with symbols we are also saying something about the symbol. If we use the symbol King to talk about Jesus we are also asserting something about Kings. So when we use familial terms to talk about God we end up implying things about our relationships within our actual families.
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Apr 15, 2021 00:34
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:I was saying that the position of the Catholic Church is that God has revealed Himself to humanity, and that He has chosen (for whatever reason) to use male pronouns to do that. In that view trying to force gender neutral pronouns on God is kind of ignoring how He has presented Himself throughout the ages. Yeah I’m not a fan of forcing. I’m saying we should be okay with people using other language than we use. They aren’t us, their lives aren’t ours, and their symbols will be different. I think you should look at what you’re doing. I think you should look at the conflating of how a community talks about God, with God speaking to us.
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Apr 15, 2021 07:19
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docbeard posted:One of the ways Menno Simons described what he called "true evangelical faith" (speaking of loaded religious terms!) was that it "becomes all things to all people". I'm not a hundred percent sure what that was intended to mean but this discussion has made me think of it a lot. Truth is being; new truth is new being. I mean that’s an idea like back to the apostolic church fathers.
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Apr 16, 2021 07:08
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