Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
-
Phillip, welcome. I don’t think that we have met before, but I see that your spiritual journey resembles mine immensely. Relaxing into our faith is a very James phrase, and yes, you will find that.
Some years ago I studied Deuteronomy with a Hebrew speaking Jesuit, and it was a true revelation. ‘The Wilderness’ and ‘The Promised Land’ were not two strips of territory, but the absence and the presence of God. And it is in the wilderness, that is absence of God, that we grow spiritually.
James also has a remarkable anthropological aspect to his teaching which makes us realise that we find God, not only in Jesus, but also in the ‘other’. To quote him: ” Rather than grasping onto a theory, human beings learn by being inducted into a set of practices over time such that we find ourselves knowing from within how they work. ? Christianity is the process of finding ourselves on the inside of an act of communication that is developing in us a new set of practices. This means that we discover from within what the ideas really mean as we discover ourselves becoming something, or someone, we scarcely knew before.”
I hope this helps, and I look forward to further conversations.?
-
-
You seem to have an extremely good grasp of all that Andrew. These two definitions may be helpful:
Monolatry, literally, worship of one god alone. As a modified form of polytheism, the texts of scripture bear witness to monolatry, meaning “Plenty of gods exist, but you are to worship only one of them.” This is also indicated in the first Commandment.
Henotheism , effectively synonymous with “monolatry”– attention to a single god. Also as Indicated in the first Commandment, which takes for granted the existence of other gods.
I believe in Hebrew El-Shaddai means the godess with breasts. Have you read Margaret Barker’s “Temple Theology” ? -
-
Andrew, here is a brief summary of what James is explaining.
The struggle around interpretation is not imposed upon Scriptures, but something that happens within them. For a rather important example, this session looks at the different interpretations offered by Jeremiah and Ezekiel around the question of God’s involvement with child sacrifice. We’ll see how the Binding of Isaac passage from Genesis 22 reflects the movement away from understanding God as a God who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn.
The Marcionite and fundamentalist temptations were faced by the authors and editors of the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. ? The people we now call the people of Israel had as a regular part of their basic culture the sacrifice of firstborn children.
Jeremiah, a northern prophet, offers a pre-Marcionite interpretation when he says that it was not YHWH that commanded child sacrifice but another god.(Jeremiah 19:3-6)
Ezekiel, a fairly conservative Temple priest from Jerusalem, seems to have the fundamentalist temptation. He is saying that yes, child sacrifice was commanded by YHWH, but it was so people would find it so awful they would give it up. (Ezekiel 20:23-26)
Both prophets faced the same problem yet despite their different solutions they were both dangerously secularizing – they both agreed that true religion did not involve child sacrifice, contrary to their religious contemporaries.
The story of circumcision as a covenant of peace inserted into the narrative about Egypt may have been part of a history of the interpretative dealing with the moving on from child sacrifice.
The passage called the Akedah or the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19), may have been an edited version of an earlier story in which Isaac was sacrificed. So the current version, as it appears in our Bibles, reflects moving on from a God who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn.
Does that help? -
Indeed, Andrew. That is the process of inculturation that we looked at in previous modules. And, here in 2.3 we have the struggle around interpretation that is not imposed upon Scriptures, but something that happens within them. For a rather important example, we’ll look at the different interpretations offered by Jeremiah and Ezekiel around the question of God’s involvement with child sacrifice. We’ll see how the Binding of Isaac passage from Genesis 22 reflects the movement away from understanding God as a God who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn.
I look forward to your next post.
-
This is an excellent reading of James’ intent Andrew. As you say, reading the scriptures through the eyes of the Forgiving Victim is not an abstract theological exercise, but rather a learning about human behaviour. Seeing scripture through Jesus’ eyes is an extraordinary learning process, is it not?
-
Absolutely, Andrew. James’ intention in this section is to introduce two different approaches to reading Scriptures: the Marcionite way of reading and the fundamentalist approach. He then goes on to demonstrate that by approaching Scriptures as a progressive revelation, we can discover new and more true things about God and ourselves. In this course, Jesus is essentially the interpretative key.
He points out that Marcion thought some texts to be so violent that he proposed ditching the Hebrew Scriptures, as something to do with another god. While a fundamentalist reading says there is one God through the entire Scriptures. This leads to certain readings of Jesus’ death as being demanded by the Father.
James then posits another approach, that of a progressive revelation which sees the New Testament working as an interpretative key opening up Hebrew Scriptures and allowing us to see that the one true God was always making Godself known in and through the Hebrew texts as simultaneously God and Victim.
The point of approaching the texts as progressive revelation is that it enables us to be less frightened of the Hebrew Scriptures, to find them less of a “trap” that you must accept if you are to be a “good person.” ?
There is no such thing as reading these texts without an interpretative key. The Scriptures do not have an interpretative?free meaning of their own. ??? Moreover, prophecy is always read as a movement backwards from your interpretative key. It is going to nudge you into seeing certain words and deeds of the past as pointing towards a certain fulfillment beyond themselves, and sometimes a certain fulfillment despite and beyond themselves.
The following session three elaborates more fully on this theme. -
Well, Andrew we all have our demons of one sort or another and we all have to learn to forgive ourselves and allow ourselves to be loved. We need more heart knowledge and less head knowledge.
I have always found the following advice from the wonderful John Main and Dorothy Day to come from a deep well of experience, humility and compassion, which is so much of what Christianity is about, is it not? Do let me know what you think.
“…Our challenge as Christians is not to try to convert people around us to our way of belief but to love them, to be ourselves living incarnations of what we believe, to live what we believe and to love what we believe.”
? John Main author of “Word into Silence”
“The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them.”
Dorothy Day
-
Andrew, I’ve frequently observed that the concept that we desire according to the desire of another seems to be immediately obvious to some people but quite a struggle for others. The idea of the autonomous self really does die hard. Would I be correct in thinking that this is what you are observing here? Can you think of any examples or illustrations of mimetic desiring that would help the person of whom you are speaking?
-
Andrew, when you say “I don’t know that I have attained the ‘converted’ position required to do that yet.” I think that most of us spend our lives trying to attain this position and stay there, so fear not ! It is so easy to slip back into the archaic sacred.
Your description of the plight of the undocumented workers in the US is an excellent example of the voice of the victim not being heard. Curiously I think that it is much more evident in James teaching of the stoning of Achan, than it is with the workers you describe. With the exception of people like your self with a social conscience, it seems to be largely ignored.
-
-
-
-
Andrew, as I read your post, I wonder if you have thought to see all this as relational, not as an abstract concept. James is teaching an anthropology of Christianity, that is, how we relate to one another. Can you think of all the people in your family circle, the workplace and your social life and how you relative to them? Do you ever think that you would like to have x’s singing voice, or career, or social acumen, or intellect, or goodness, or spirituality or whatever, etc.etc.etc? Now, it is important to remember that so many of our desires are totally harmless, until they result in rivalry which can lead to conflict. Have you ever felt rivalry or resentment towards another? Do you ever feel dislike towards another or are irritated by someone’s behaviour or opinions and have not asked yourself why this person is pushing your buttons? All of this is the intricate web of desire that we live in, and of which we are mostly unaware. It is also extremely difficult to allow ourselves to be loved. But God is not judgemental, we have been taught of an angry, judgemental God, we it is we who are angry and judgemental.
Then there is positive mimesis, to desire or imitate good qualities of someone, as in Imitatio Christi, imitate Christ or the good. We really find God in the other. Does all this make sense?
-
