Imagine where I am sitting. The room is clothed in a not-quite-victorious darkness, two lights breaking its intent at opposite corners of both of my eyes. Sound is on exile; beauty now has the throne it once possessed. Each breath is a meditation. The atmosphere insulates, commiserates. I am stretched out on his lovely couch. Absolutely nothing is wrong with the world. The aesthetic has disappeared, evaporated into the cloud of my freedom. The cloud is flavored with it, colored with it; everything is beautiful precisely because I will only what I can will. My existence is beautiful; that is, it has its telos in itself. And somehow, in the margin of typing these words, within the five minutes of contemplative slow-steps involved in actualizing my intention through the assertion of my will -- I am happy. I was unhappy. I was waiting for happiness, constricted by the inertia of the aesthetic.
Inertia applies to the aesthetic. It must, or else transcending it requires no exertion; transcending it means asserting freedom; freedom means the crucifixion of our adaptation. One would otherwise stumbles into happiness, just as easily as happiness stumbles upon the aesthete. The sting of the aesthetic is, of course, beauty; that is the dream of living without movement. What good is beauty? It is a nudge to exist. But as an overdose it is like a water chamber: man is drenched in it, engulfed at all sides, suffocated, each moment a superlative in pain, and he can do nothing at all but take it and wait for an end. Why? Beauty invites desire, and desire stretches.
Here: this happiness is beginning to drain -- and as I am writing, asserting my self, it is draining no more. I was beginning to doubt; added to this doubt: worry. I was thinking, ten seconds ago: my writing is false, pedestrian, artificial, naked of metaphor creativity, terse, Hemingwayesque, flaccid, boring, revolting. These doubts were freezing waters that contaminated my being, lethargized it, froze it. The more one doubts his own center, the more he is lost in his own periphery; to be aesthetic is to have one's periphery as one's center. The periphery is the world, and the self is meant to act upon it; the aesthete has the world as his self, which is to say: his self doesn't exist.
I was out tonight, haunting the streets with a trivial end in mind. I am in the center lane, the right-of-way is mine; green arrow, left. In turning another car cuts me off. Female, collegiate. Just as I trail behind her, just as she turning before me, her face turns to mine; her eyes evidently facing mine, but in moving so quickly I cannot discern her mood. I look to find a parking space, and make my way out. She has circled around, and again I catch her but -- ah, the look is concentrated clarity: a subtle contempt, unasked for, undeserved, her eyebrows contract with an infinitesimal fleeting movement; I walk on, emitting a mechanical spark-sigh, and suddenly I am alienated from the world of humanity.
Human beings are little transcendences. Apperitifs. They signify possibilties. To play this game, to wager one's happiness on the other, is to be for others. These days virtually all is being-for-others. Corollary: all is appearance. To attempt to exist for the sake of something else is not to exist, but to act, and no man can contravene his own script without his conscience stinging him; no man can escape his self, though he can work at forgetting, and forgetting is the cleverest invention of cheap happiness. All cheap happiness is myopic; it has the childish conjuration that each moment exists without relation to others. What is the greatest machine for forgetting? Alcohol.
If all is appearance, nothing is appreciated for being what it is. It isn't absurd to conceive of a woman who dates a man to prove a point. Her "lover" is a means to an end: the attention of others, the gradual climb up the ladder of admitted existence, whose rungs flutter ahead like a ten mile train that bends out of sight. In a world where nothing is appreciated intrinsically, everything is means -- for something else, which means that nothing in the world is an end, save the fleeting and arbitrary attention from others: a ghost whose essence is possibility. Today one only wishes the historical claims of the poets were true: that love hurts, love is pain, for at least here love exists, at least here instrumentality isn't all, for instrumentality is all when nothing is valued intrinsically. The eternal qualities are leaking from man; all that will remain is the eternal vice: existential hand-waving whose meaning is hollow, a massive sign, penetrating the universe of society, that signifies nothing.
What is the cure?
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
On the Common Christian
The common Christian is an individual who is always right, regardless of his layman subjectivity.
Whose callous wrath is more aptly self-termed "righteous anger".
Who creates God in his image via his inexorable interpretation and declares this the objectivity of scripture, while neurotically holding a warning over those who do not, regardless of the glaring existence of a world of denominations.
Is a sinner who demands repentance, but rejects the claims of sinlessness as the logical progression of sincere repentance; i.e., takes pleasure in the concept of a God who takes pleasure in the concept of sending convicts to heaven.
Demands the despotic errancy of the intellect over the application of the heart in seeking and expressing the good.
Is apt to project what he is impulsively repulsed by as irrevocably bad, regardless of what cold reason declares as otherwise possible; see homosexuality, women's rights, etc.
Cannot fathom quantam physics, but CAN fathom Norman Geisler's unfathomed "justifiable" crtique and rejection of it as "proof" of the blasphemy of honest science and metaphysics.
Loves his fellow man...only in reaction to the dreadful "all-seeing eye" (God).
Empties primarily the terms "God" and "Jesus" of all semantic value through incessant repetition, thoughtless repetition, leaving them in the ditch of sentimentality, irrationality, absurdity.
Has no concept of the ideas of awareness, detachment, or meditation, and considers any form of edification outside of their own whitewashed Christendom precisely not edification, but something accursed by God.
Is incapable of commiseration, relatedness, or happiness towards those who are not of "the one, true faith"; relates to others only as a condescending, dehumanizing means of converting them.
Is on a perpetual quest to lower others to their own unhappiness, concealed under the facade of happiness, so absurdly titled "salvation".
Considers the works of Siddharta, Gandhi, Maimanodes, and other non-Christian luminaries expressions of evil, or at the very least falseness, while John Calvin, Martin Luther, and other aaronsic characters are quite the memorable saints.
Reduces God to a concept -- a concept to be feared nevertheless, like the boogyman --, to be revealed as something grand "when we all get to heaven", while spiritual life is a fearful atophied existence here and now.
Neither lives for today, nor tomorrow, but demands that the world does not, cannot, and will find its only living precisely where there is no life: namely, with the the very ones who cannot live.
Christ is a hero, not a savior; is feared, not loved; is fought over, but never lovingly embraced.
God creates only to condemn, and punishes because He is "just", because men are "sinful" and unworthy of love, and such "justice" demands dogmatic adherance to various divine decrees, for no other reason than to escape divine contempt, not for the goodness of His creatures.
Hates the mystic because he is too mystical; hates the rationalist because he "intellectualizes" religion; hates the hated, and hates their attempts at liberation from such hatred.
Despise critiques of their own selfishness, but are so very capable of critiquing the world around them.
Are summed up with these words from Walker Percy: "They, too, are a curious, inquisitive, murderous civilization.... They are sentimental, easily moved to tears, and kill each other with equal ease. Uncognitive of their predicament and pre-help. Paranoid mind-set. Two superpowers, ideological combat but not yet a nuclear exchange. They like wars too, pretend not to, but get in trouble during an overly prolonged peace. Right now they are bored to death and spoiling for a fight."
In short, are not Christians, but proclaim Christianity; are not religious, but claim to be religious, while despising good religion; are not good, but parasitic on all things good; they are, as Nietzsche said, responsible for the conception of the world as evil and bad and little more -- a world as a consequence without a tinge of wonder, beauty, or benevolence.
Even shorter: they are the weak of the earth, in denial of their weakeness, hating the world for its limited freedom from weakness.
But there are some who actually follow Christ.
Whose callous wrath is more aptly self-termed "righteous anger".
Who creates God in his image via his inexorable interpretation and declares this the objectivity of scripture, while neurotically holding a warning over those who do not, regardless of the glaring existence of a world of denominations.
Is a sinner who demands repentance, but rejects the claims of sinlessness as the logical progression of sincere repentance; i.e., takes pleasure in the concept of a God who takes pleasure in the concept of sending convicts to heaven.
Demands the despotic errancy of the intellect over the application of the heart in seeking and expressing the good.
Is apt to project what he is impulsively repulsed by as irrevocably bad, regardless of what cold reason declares as otherwise possible; see homosexuality, women's rights, etc.
Cannot fathom quantam physics, but CAN fathom Norman Geisler's unfathomed "justifiable" crtique and rejection of it as "proof" of the blasphemy of honest science and metaphysics.
Loves his fellow man...only in reaction to the dreadful "all-seeing eye" (God).
Empties primarily the terms "God" and "Jesus" of all semantic value through incessant repetition, thoughtless repetition, leaving them in the ditch of sentimentality, irrationality, absurdity.
Has no concept of the ideas of awareness, detachment, or meditation, and considers any form of edification outside of their own whitewashed Christendom precisely not edification, but something accursed by God.
Is incapable of commiseration, relatedness, or happiness towards those who are not of "the one, true faith"; relates to others only as a condescending, dehumanizing means of converting them.
Is on a perpetual quest to lower others to their own unhappiness, concealed under the facade of happiness, so absurdly titled "salvation".
Considers the works of Siddharta, Gandhi, Maimanodes, and other non-Christian luminaries expressions of evil, or at the very least falseness, while John Calvin, Martin Luther, and other aaronsic characters are quite the memorable saints.
Reduces God to a concept -- a concept to be feared nevertheless, like the boogyman --, to be revealed as something grand "when we all get to heaven", while spiritual life is a fearful atophied existence here and now.
Neither lives for today, nor tomorrow, but demands that the world does not, cannot, and will find its only living precisely where there is no life: namely, with the the very ones who cannot live.
Christ is a hero, not a savior; is feared, not loved; is fought over, but never lovingly embraced.
God creates only to condemn, and punishes because He is "just", because men are "sinful" and unworthy of love, and such "justice" demands dogmatic adherance to various divine decrees, for no other reason than to escape divine contempt, not for the goodness of His creatures.
Hates the mystic because he is too mystical; hates the rationalist because he "intellectualizes" religion; hates the hated, and hates their attempts at liberation from such hatred.
Despise critiques of their own selfishness, but are so very capable of critiquing the world around them.
Are summed up with these words from Walker Percy: "They, too, are a curious, inquisitive, murderous civilization.... They are sentimental, easily moved to tears, and kill each other with equal ease. Uncognitive of their predicament and pre-help. Paranoid mind-set. Two superpowers, ideological combat but not yet a nuclear exchange. They like wars too, pretend not to, but get in trouble during an overly prolonged peace. Right now they are bored to death and spoiling for a fight."
In short, are not Christians, but proclaim Christianity; are not religious, but claim to be religious, while despising good religion; are not good, but parasitic on all things good; they are, as Nietzsche said, responsible for the conception of the world as evil and bad and little more -- a world as a consequence without a tinge of wonder, beauty, or benevolence.
Even shorter: they are the weak of the earth, in denial of their weakeness, hating the world for its limited freedom from weakness.
But there are some who actually follow Christ.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Inclusivism
No, I'm not a pluralist. The idea is salvation: does one need to hear Christ proclaimed in order for it to exist? Surely this wasn't the case in the Old Testament. Melchezedec was an OT pagan deemed righteous (therefore holding "correct" faith -- Romans 1:17) before meeting Abraham. Job comes to mind. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Daniel -- they all add to the mix as well. All of these are individuals either before Abraham or pagans after Abraham who were considered righteous by God -- justified by faith without the revelation of Judaism or Christ.
There's a danger to conventional theology. If salvation is consummated explicitly through external means -- i.e., hearing about Christ, accepting Him, etc. -- and individuals from other religions clearly show the fruits of the spirit (gentleness, kindness, etc.) but haven't heard of Christ through external means or accepted Him through such are not saved, and the revelation of these fruits in no way necessarily indicates that salvation has taken place, we run into an epistemic difficulty: how does one know that he has really heard Christ proclaimed? Maybe the objective gospel contains an infinitesimally different Jesus than the gospels we've heard, and infinitesimal or infinite one is still in error because conception doesn't line up with the "real", objective gospel. That is to say, if salvation means hearing about Jesus and accepting a particular "version" of Him (namely, the "biblical" one), and "fruits" signify nothing, even if an individual from another religion clearly shows stronger virtues than so-called "saved" Christians, we have a problem of certainty.
Add to this the preternatural absurdity of what I call the theory of the Divine Transaction: that salvation, because it is centered externally, is a business transaction between the saved and the savior. The moment someone "confesses" that Christ existed, rose from the dead, and such and so on, God writes this down in His big divine business book, and salvation is precisely acknowledgement of this deed. Human beings are essentially rather expensive cars, promised some nice racing-ground in a future life, while being destined to a spiritual garage in this one; and every deal is a scandal by virtue of the ludicrous requirements: being born in the right time, at the right place (where the gospel is preached), and believing the right things. Positive change in character is secondary to "right belief". This theory, as prevalent as American Idol, makes way for what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace: the cognitive-assertive, at times sentimental, superficial faith without sanctification, without a necessary transformation of the character of the one saved.
In addition to the problem of salvation as an external deal, we have the problem of the misconception of salvation as quantiative. Salvation, etymologically meaning “wholeness” or “healing”, is biblically elucidated by Christ as precisely a qualitative relationship rather than a quantitative one:
"This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." -- John 17:3 (NASB)
That is to say, salvation is essentially relational, and relatedness implies the ontological present. Moreover, any conception of salvation as the prolongation of the righteous soul to eternity is absurd because it is (according to the quantiative model) redundant: the wicked are also said to live forever. If this is the case, there is no semantic value to the phrase "salvation", seeing how the condemned undergo the exact same thing. Salvation must undergo the paradigm shift and be replaced with an immanent, present-centered, qualitative ideal.
Getting back, we need to define salvation as an internal process, at least intrinsically. Fruits need to count as they were meant to count: symptoms of inner goodness, not juxtapositions or coincidences. Here we come to the mystic idea of the "inner light", or even, at a stretch, approximations to Hinduism and concepts of Atman -- salvation is the "really real" part of the soul that transcends phenomenal reality. A good doctrine that fits with this -- as well as the general Old Testament idea of salvation prior to Christ -- is Logos Christology. According to this, Christ is the Logos, or living word of God, mentioned fleetingly at the beginning of the gospel of John. This Logos is the essence of salvation, and being internally founded (John 1:4), it is universally accessible without explicit external means to finding it. All men have it; it's fused with the soul.
What is the essence of this Logos, this Word? Exactly what it says it is: an eternal Word. Consciousness, after all, is constituted in the fusing of signifier with signified -- with the "thing" and the title of the "thing". When a person attempts to express something, he may speak a word. This word in itself does nothing (think of how semantically useless foreign languages are to you if you can't speak them: because you have no idea what the words "mean", they remain words, and nothing more); it is what it signifies that is important. So it goes from a trinitarian perspective: God the Father "speaks" a particular Word to every man, and this Word (this Logos) is literally the Son of God Himself (that is: Christ stripped of the historical qualifications of Christ: the Son of God) stamped in the consciousness of each individual. Kierkegaard called it "the Eternal" -- the trans-temporal ideological fusion constituting man's higher self -- this higher self that allows the real self to actualize through freely choosing it, ideally on a continual basis. The person who chooses to continually fulfill this Logos-commandment, particular for each person, is within salvation: his being is pure, undivided; contrariwise, the person who refuses to fulfill this Logos-commandment is outside of salvation. More:
Faith means the voluntary existential consummation of this Logos-commandment. Voluntary because nobody can do it for you; existential because it involves your existence, your self. This particular Logos-commdandment, this ideal, defines man's spiritual hope. Whereas in an earthly sense hope means placing a wager on something external, spiritual hope means the Logos-commandment for each individual self. Sin is understood as whatever lies outside of faith (Romans 14:23), or the refusal to do what one knows to be right (James 4:17); it is antithetical to faith, and just as the righteous live by faith (Hab 2:4; Romans 1:17), the sinful man lives against it -- that is, in sin. Sin, thus, means a working against the Logos-commandment found within you, and by so doing this and contravening your true spiritual hope, sin is thus despair. To sin is to kiss off your authentic hope. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I see no other place for our salvation than the Logos itself.
Of course, the point of Christianity, theologically understood through the lens of this perspective, means directing every man to the pre-existing Logos within through the external preaching of Christ without. The "good news" that defines the Gospel is that there is a "wholeness" or "healing" (literally the etymological meaning of salvation) present at hand -- through the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is at hand -- that is, within reach. It needs nothing external for it to exist, for "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). Nevertheless there still is a gospel that exists through external means: through the preaching of what universal human existence contains within it (i.e., the Kingdom of God, and as a corollary, salvation), human being can take advantage of what is within them. Salvation is more like a kernel found within each man -- a kernel of particularity by virtue of being his own particular Logos-commandment, different in relation to the man next to him; a kernel that must be actualized through freedom; a kernel that, first of all, needs to be realized for what it is. After all, if the kingdom is based within and man is ignorant of it, he must discover it; it is a hidden treasure, right before our noses, "a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field" (Matthew 13:44).
Nonetheless, the point is: if "salvation" is a universal kernel, and fruits reveal the inner goodness of a person -- his relative climb up the varying (or not?) gradations of salvation --, is it not possible that a person can be saved without hearing of Christ?
Seeing how salvation through external means entails the problem of certainty regarding which "version" of Christ you hear being the "correct" one so as to make the divine transaction complete, we left with ascertaining on the basis of "fruits": "A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit" [Matthew 7:18]. And surely people from other religions -- even people not considered "religious" -- have clearly revealed their fruits to be positive. Well, then, are they saved?
It gets a little philosophical. Salvation, being wholeness or healing, can be seen as a completion and an end: one is technically saved when he is absolutely whole or healed, or on the way to getting there. Yes, salvation can take the form of becoming, of being-toward-wholeness or being-toward-healing. The important point is discerning what the telos (end) is that makes the process of becoming possible. And in the case of Christian inclusivism, it's Christ, in the form of the Logos.
Why this ends in inclusivism and not pluralism is that salvation ends in Christ; which is to say, it isn't that other religions are absolutely wrong, but that, at least metaphysically, they're not completely right. Pluralism can't work because it means a resignation of differing religious metaphysics by virtue of the law of non-contradiction: you can't have certain threads of Christian metaphysics with Hindu metaphysics (one believed in reincarnation, one didn't; so both must be thrown out to accomodate the homogenizing tendencies of pluralism); which essentially means the end of the specific religions themselves, seeing how the credibility of the savior figures of each particular religion are tied in with their metaphyics. Buddha, for instance, preached anatta, or "no self", whereas Christ preached the self to its very brim -- particularly the self's dedication to, and reformation through, relation to God. If a particular metaphysic is considered wrong in order to work with pluralism, that's implying the person who made such an emission has a break (minimal or major) to his credibility. Nonetheless, it seems the farther West you get the more specific your God-concepts are -- the less He becomes impersonal, the more He becomes personal, interventional, and so on. Eastern religions, from the perspective of Christian exclusivism, penetrate the periphery and are on their way to the center of objective theistic truth; special revelation, being a particular product of interventionalist religions (i.e., Christianity, Judaism), transcends the general revelation of other religions -- the revelation that comes through inherent wisdom, reasoning, and so on in terms of religious discovery. Of course, Islam, for instance, seems a twin of Christianity by virtue of its almost identity religious makeup (save such things as trinitarianism, for instance); obviously this creates a problem for Christian inclusivism.
But the reason a person would find completion in Christianity, rather than, say, Buddhism or Islam, is that Christianity has the most explicit, precise theological claims; and it is also (in the case of juxtaposing Christianity with Islam), the most practical. It fits the best and its metaphysics reach the deepest: not an impersonal deity, but a personal one; not pantheism, but (a subtle but important difference) panentheism; not salvific weight on the necessarily doubtful interpretive process of holy texts (as is the case with Islam), but interaction with a real, spiritually palpable living Word etched in the soul of humanity, the specific identity of which is revealed to be the Son of God, who walked this earth at a particular point in history.
Chinese Christians have Taoistic translations of the New Testament that fascinatingly hit on this idea: "In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God." -- Such runs the beginning of John according to such translations.
Presumably Christ the (God-)man is the historical qualification of the Logos -- it is technically not Christ involved in the process of salvation, but the Logos, the Son of God. When Christ refers to Himself in the gospels He is speaking of the spiritual essence, the true deity-aspect of the Godhead: his Logos-identity. And as such, considered in this light, especially considering how salvation in the Old Testament was possible through faith without hearing about Christ (and contrary to popular opinion, without placing primary weight on the law), the New Testament comes alive with a completely different way of looking at it. Every instance where salvation is mentioned in relation to Christ or the Son of God would relate to this Logos identity. To be saved is not to respond to the external Christ, but the internal Logos through the proclamation of the historical Christ. The external, historical Christ, is more like a diagnostician in pointing out the depravity of human nature. He points to salvation, which means sinlessness, which means doing what is right while rejecting what is wrong (James 4:17; Romans 14:23) -- both ideas intuitively grasped, sensible only if there is a pre-existing inner law that makes sin, and its opposite (faith), possible. He says, "live by faith, and sin no more," and in living by faith, we are living in Him; He is the historical mediator, and the ontological mediator: He has, through His teaching, diagnosed our spiritual problem; through his life, revealed what the ideal life should be like; and through his spiritual identity (Logos), given us a light through which righteousness through faith is possible.
This Logos, again, resides in all, whether muffled or not. The task of religion is to uncover this Logos; and because all authentic religions do this to a degree, they are all relatively valid; but because Christianity does it the best, it is the end of inclusivism. Nonetheless, other people from other religions have found it, oftentimes infinitely better than the so-called Christians who associate themselves with Christendom. Think of Siddhartha, of Gandhi, of Maimanodes, of Socrates. The list goes on and on.
"The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is; "Not really," then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God - a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being - before ordinary people, we have gone wrong." - Dallas Willard
There's a danger to conventional theology. If salvation is consummated explicitly through external means -- i.e., hearing about Christ, accepting Him, etc. -- and individuals from other religions clearly show the fruits of the spirit (gentleness, kindness, etc.) but haven't heard of Christ through external means or accepted Him through such are not saved, and the revelation of these fruits in no way necessarily indicates that salvation has taken place, we run into an epistemic difficulty: how does one know that he has really heard Christ proclaimed? Maybe the objective gospel contains an infinitesimally different Jesus than the gospels we've heard, and infinitesimal or infinite one is still in error because conception doesn't line up with the "real", objective gospel. That is to say, if salvation means hearing about Jesus and accepting a particular "version" of Him (namely, the "biblical" one), and "fruits" signify nothing, even if an individual from another religion clearly shows stronger virtues than so-called "saved" Christians, we have a problem of certainty.
Add to this the preternatural absurdity of what I call the theory of the Divine Transaction: that salvation, because it is centered externally, is a business transaction between the saved and the savior. The moment someone "confesses" that Christ existed, rose from the dead, and such and so on, God writes this down in His big divine business book, and salvation is precisely acknowledgement of this deed. Human beings are essentially rather expensive cars, promised some nice racing-ground in a future life, while being destined to a spiritual garage in this one; and every deal is a scandal by virtue of the ludicrous requirements: being born in the right time, at the right place (where the gospel is preached), and believing the right things. Positive change in character is secondary to "right belief". This theory, as prevalent as American Idol, makes way for what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace: the cognitive-assertive, at times sentimental, superficial faith without sanctification, without a necessary transformation of the character of the one saved.
In addition to the problem of salvation as an external deal, we have the problem of the misconception of salvation as quantiative. Salvation, etymologically meaning “wholeness” or “healing”, is biblically elucidated by Christ as precisely a qualitative relationship rather than a quantitative one:
"This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." -- John 17:3 (NASB)
That is to say, salvation is essentially relational, and relatedness implies the ontological present. Moreover, any conception of salvation as the prolongation of the righteous soul to eternity is absurd because it is (according to the quantiative model) redundant: the wicked are also said to live forever. If this is the case, there is no semantic value to the phrase "salvation", seeing how the condemned undergo the exact same thing. Salvation must undergo the paradigm shift and be replaced with an immanent, present-centered, qualitative ideal.
Getting back, we need to define salvation as an internal process, at least intrinsically. Fruits need to count as they were meant to count: symptoms of inner goodness, not juxtapositions or coincidences. Here we come to the mystic idea of the "inner light", or even, at a stretch, approximations to Hinduism and concepts of Atman -- salvation is the "really real" part of the soul that transcends phenomenal reality. A good doctrine that fits with this -- as well as the general Old Testament idea of salvation prior to Christ -- is Logos Christology. According to this, Christ is the Logos, or living word of God, mentioned fleetingly at the beginning of the gospel of John. This Logos is the essence of salvation, and being internally founded (John 1:4), it is universally accessible without explicit external means to finding it. All men have it; it's fused with the soul.
What is the essence of this Logos, this Word? Exactly what it says it is: an eternal Word. Consciousness, after all, is constituted in the fusing of signifier with signified -- with the "thing" and the title of the "thing". When a person attempts to express something, he may speak a word. This word in itself does nothing (think of how semantically useless foreign languages are to you if you can't speak them: because you have no idea what the words "mean", they remain words, and nothing more); it is what it signifies that is important. So it goes from a trinitarian perspective: God the Father "speaks" a particular Word to every man, and this Word (this Logos) is literally the Son of God Himself (that is: Christ stripped of the historical qualifications of Christ: the Son of God) stamped in the consciousness of each individual. Kierkegaard called it "the Eternal" -- the trans-temporal ideological fusion constituting man's higher self -- this higher self that allows the real self to actualize through freely choosing it, ideally on a continual basis. The person who chooses to continually fulfill this Logos-commandment, particular for each person, is within salvation: his being is pure, undivided; contrariwise, the person who refuses to fulfill this Logos-commandment is outside of salvation. More:
Faith means the voluntary existential consummation of this Logos-commandment. Voluntary because nobody can do it for you; existential because it involves your existence, your self. This particular Logos-commdandment, this ideal, defines man's spiritual hope. Whereas in an earthly sense hope means placing a wager on something external, spiritual hope means the Logos-commandment for each individual self. Sin is understood as whatever lies outside of faith (Romans 14:23), or the refusal to do what one knows to be right (James 4:17); it is antithetical to faith, and just as the righteous live by faith (Hab 2:4; Romans 1:17), the sinful man lives against it -- that is, in sin. Sin, thus, means a working against the Logos-commandment found within you, and by so doing this and contravening your true spiritual hope, sin is thus despair. To sin is to kiss off your authentic hope. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I see no other place for our salvation than the Logos itself.
Of course, the point of Christianity, theologically understood through the lens of this perspective, means directing every man to the pre-existing Logos within through the external preaching of Christ without. The "good news" that defines the Gospel is that there is a "wholeness" or "healing" (literally the etymological meaning of salvation) present at hand -- through the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is at hand -- that is, within reach. It needs nothing external for it to exist, for "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). Nevertheless there still is a gospel that exists through external means: through the preaching of what universal human existence contains within it (i.e., the Kingdom of God, and as a corollary, salvation), human being can take advantage of what is within them. Salvation is more like a kernel found within each man -- a kernel of particularity by virtue of being his own particular Logos-commandment, different in relation to the man next to him; a kernel that must be actualized through freedom; a kernel that, first of all, needs to be realized for what it is. After all, if the kingdom is based within and man is ignorant of it, he must discover it; it is a hidden treasure, right before our noses, "a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field" (Matthew 13:44).
Nonetheless, the point is: if "salvation" is a universal kernel, and fruits reveal the inner goodness of a person -- his relative climb up the varying (or not?) gradations of salvation --, is it not possible that a person can be saved without hearing of Christ?
Seeing how salvation through external means entails the problem of certainty regarding which "version" of Christ you hear being the "correct" one so as to make the divine transaction complete, we left with ascertaining on the basis of "fruits": "A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit" [Matthew 7:18]. And surely people from other religions -- even people not considered "religious" -- have clearly revealed their fruits to be positive. Well, then, are they saved?
It gets a little philosophical. Salvation, being wholeness or healing, can be seen as a completion and an end: one is technically saved when he is absolutely whole or healed, or on the way to getting there. Yes, salvation can take the form of becoming, of being-toward-wholeness or being-toward-healing. The important point is discerning what the telos (end) is that makes the process of becoming possible. And in the case of Christian inclusivism, it's Christ, in the form of the Logos.
Why this ends in inclusivism and not pluralism is that salvation ends in Christ; which is to say, it isn't that other religions are absolutely wrong, but that, at least metaphysically, they're not completely right. Pluralism can't work because it means a resignation of differing religious metaphysics by virtue of the law of non-contradiction: you can't have certain threads of Christian metaphysics with Hindu metaphysics (one believed in reincarnation, one didn't; so both must be thrown out to accomodate the homogenizing tendencies of pluralism); which essentially means the end of the specific religions themselves, seeing how the credibility of the savior figures of each particular religion are tied in with their metaphyics. Buddha, for instance, preached anatta, or "no self", whereas Christ preached the self to its very brim -- particularly the self's dedication to, and reformation through, relation to God. If a particular metaphysic is considered wrong in order to work with pluralism, that's implying the person who made such an emission has a break (minimal or major) to his credibility. Nonetheless, it seems the farther West you get the more specific your God-concepts are -- the less He becomes impersonal, the more He becomes personal, interventional, and so on. Eastern religions, from the perspective of Christian exclusivism, penetrate the periphery and are on their way to the center of objective theistic truth; special revelation, being a particular product of interventionalist religions (i.e., Christianity, Judaism), transcends the general revelation of other religions -- the revelation that comes through inherent wisdom, reasoning, and so on in terms of religious discovery. Of course, Islam, for instance, seems a twin of Christianity by virtue of its almost identity religious makeup (save such things as trinitarianism, for instance); obviously this creates a problem for Christian inclusivism.
But the reason a person would find completion in Christianity, rather than, say, Buddhism or Islam, is that Christianity has the most explicit, precise theological claims; and it is also (in the case of juxtaposing Christianity with Islam), the most practical. It fits the best and its metaphysics reach the deepest: not an impersonal deity, but a personal one; not pantheism, but (a subtle but important difference) panentheism; not salvific weight on the necessarily doubtful interpretive process of holy texts (as is the case with Islam), but interaction with a real, spiritually palpable living Word etched in the soul of humanity, the specific identity of which is revealed to be the Son of God, who walked this earth at a particular point in history.
Chinese Christians have Taoistic translations of the New Testament that fascinatingly hit on this idea: "In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God." -- Such runs the beginning of John according to such translations.
Presumably Christ the (God-)man is the historical qualification of the Logos -- it is technically not Christ involved in the process of salvation, but the Logos, the Son of God. When Christ refers to Himself in the gospels He is speaking of the spiritual essence, the true deity-aspect of the Godhead: his Logos-identity. And as such, considered in this light, especially considering how salvation in the Old Testament was possible through faith without hearing about Christ (and contrary to popular opinion, without placing primary weight on the law), the New Testament comes alive with a completely different way of looking at it. Every instance where salvation is mentioned in relation to Christ or the Son of God would relate to this Logos identity. To be saved is not to respond to the external Christ, but the internal Logos through the proclamation of the historical Christ. The external, historical Christ, is more like a diagnostician in pointing out the depravity of human nature. He points to salvation, which means sinlessness, which means doing what is right while rejecting what is wrong (James 4:17; Romans 14:23) -- both ideas intuitively grasped, sensible only if there is a pre-existing inner law that makes sin, and its opposite (faith), possible. He says, "live by faith, and sin no more," and in living by faith, we are living in Him; He is the historical mediator, and the ontological mediator: He has, through His teaching, diagnosed our spiritual problem; through his life, revealed what the ideal life should be like; and through his spiritual identity (Logos), given us a light through which righteousness through faith is possible.
This Logos, again, resides in all, whether muffled or not. The task of religion is to uncover this Logos; and because all authentic religions do this to a degree, they are all relatively valid; but because Christianity does it the best, it is the end of inclusivism. Nonetheless, other people from other religions have found it, oftentimes infinitely better than the so-called Christians who associate themselves with Christendom. Think of Siddhartha, of Gandhi, of Maimanodes, of Socrates. The list goes on and on.
"The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is; "Not really," then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God - a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being - before ordinary people, we have gone wrong." - Dallas Willard
Friday, May 04, 2007
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Dance
We're dancing for others or dancing for ourselves. Or dancing for God. But that's tautological: God is the basis of the self; nevertheless one can dance for oneself and not for God -- and this dance is more dangerous, albeit less revolting, than dancing for others. To dance for others is to have virtually no concept of self. To dance for others is to float.
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