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Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip

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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:
My view is that the Gnostic reading of Paul as explained by Professor Pagels is vastly more plausible than Orthodox literalism, as I explain in my review. What does this say about the motive for concealment of Gnostic cosmology? Essentially, the social context of the rise of Christianity was the building of a mass movement within the turmoil of the Roman Empire. As Christianity grew through the second and third centuries, this context included a very strong Roman ban on sedition, and the rather bullying context that Rome had completely obliterated Israel from the face of the earth as a demonstration of Rome’s might and intolerance. Now, if the Paul school had associations with a range of mystery religions, and wished to use ideas emerging from these sources to create a new mass movement based on the idea of the presence of the prophesied Jewish messiah in history, then we have a good explanation for the motive for Paul’s epistles to speak at two levels, for the initiates and for the public.
The "rather bullying" example of Rome's destruction of Israel--I should say so!
My understatement here was intended with some irony, given that views about the moral qualities of the Roman Empire vary rather spectacularly. Rome is often depicted as tolerant, as allowing diversity of religion as long as subjugated people acknowledge the suzerainty of the Empire.

For some reason the unwillingness of the Jews to go along with this led to the most massive and bloody suppression imaginable, with the Roman War against the Jews in 67-70 AD chronicled in remorseless detail by Josephus, reportedly the biggest war the Empire ever fought. The expulsion of the Jews from Israel, the complete destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem except for the wailing wall, and the renaming of the city in honour of Jupiter were a frightening example of tyranny and intimidation by Rome.

But then we see a systematic effort to rehabilitate Roman reputation, through to Dante’s inclusion of a range of non-Roman conquerors such as Alexander among the tyrants of hell while exculpating Rome. It seems the virtues of stability, making a desert and calling it peace, were often seen to justify a lack of compassion. This is an imperial value system that remains influential today.

In considering the intimidatory nature of the Roman domination, we should accept that we look at ancient Israel through Roman eyes, and that a society that was physically in the East is often imagined through the distorted prism of the West.

The example of how Paul spoke at two levels about Christ, physical and spiritual, could be read as indicating that the physical Christ was depicted for the western dunderheads who could not understand symbols, while the spiritual Christ was for the Eastern Gnostics. But such a reading will infuriate Western readers who insist they are not stupid and can read the plain literal meaning that Paul intended.

When the Gnostics encountered this type of debate, their orthodox opponents said the Gnostics were so arrogant that they thought they alone had access to special spiritual knowledge. But maybe the reality was that the Western thinkers' minds were so corrupted by the empire that they simply could not see plain meaning. This is what Pagels implies with her comment that the church failed to engage with the mystical dimensions in Paul’s epistles.
DWill wrote: But I see nothing in what Paul wanted to say according to you that would have increased the heat on Christian sects.
Despite Paul’s instruction in Romans 13:1 to obey the state, there is a profoundly subversive core in Pauline Christianity with its assertion that Jesus is Lord. A secular king brooks no rivals, and yet Christianity finds a range of stratagems to insist that its rival king Jesus is compatible with imperial stability. Especially in Romans 8 we see the delay of the Parousia, with the pangs of childbirth experienced by the creation as mother deferred to the future while the church prepares the way.

Paul did not use the Gospel method of displacing the possibly proscribed status of the Nazarene gnostics onto the newly invented place of Nazareth. However, he did present ideas that are in jarring conflict with political norms.

The centrality of compassion in Paul’s vision of politics emerges in texts such as Colossians 3:12 “Put on therefore, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, humility, and perseverance.” This moral framework may seem a recipe for angelic sacrifice, but it is also a denial of legitimacy to Rome, for its failure to apply these values.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote: There was, after all, little interest in politics in gnosticism, which was all about individual spiritual fulfillment.
I completely disagree. Note Pagels’ comment that I quoted just above, “Scholars, besides taking information from the heresiologists, have adopted from them certain value judgements and interpretations of the Gnostic material” (The Gnostic Paul, p3). This depiction of Gnosticism as a later mutation of orthodoxy entirely begs the question of the real existence of Jesus Christ, assuming its conclusion that Christ must have been an actual man. But if we analyse Christian origins against the hypothesis that Christ was invented, the entire political framework of the clash between early Christianity and the Roman Empire takes on a different hue. The story that starts to emerge is one of a broad culture of traditional mystical wisdom which provided a social framework with a long continuity to earlier stable practices.

As the successive barbarian empires swept across the Middle East – Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome – the religious priesthoods with their links to earlier stable social arrangements found themselves in bewildering desperation caused by the power of the sword over the pen. They had to imagine how eventually the pen, expressing ideas of moral legitimacy, could overcome the sword, which expressed the brute force of domination and conquest. The Old Testament Book of Daniel provides a fascinating study of this clash between spirit and flesh in its study of the four kingdoms, summarised at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_kingdoms_of_Daniel.

The relevance of this material to the question of whether Gnosticism is political is that these teachings gave rise to the prophecy of a messiah as a political leader who would overturn the power of the sword. Daniel 7:13f predicts "one like a son of man, given authority, glory and sovereign power.”
My reading is that this core Jewish prophetic tradition has a clear blueprint in ancient astronomy, and that the disappointment resulting from the failure of Jesus Christ to appear as predicted at the time of Pilate led to the need to invent him. This original story was entirely Gnostic and spiritual, but also messianic and political. The problem was that to maintain the political momentum and traction of the prophecy, the church found that it had to pretend that it had actually come true, and this pretense gave rise to the orthodox literal faith we all know and love.

Hence we see the ambiguity in Paul which Pagels describes, between a Gnostic spiritual mystic reading and an orthodox historic magical reading. The original intent was Gnostic and mystical, but the popular interest was orthodox and magical. As so often happens in politics, messages adapt to what people want to hear. So Paul was systematically misread by the church, with his emotional yearning for an incarnate messiah mistaken for an actual claim that such a man had really existed.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:What was threatening about Christianity was that it was separatist, a private cult rather than a civic institution as Roman religion was.
Responding in detail in a line by line way to these comments illustrates the depth of content in this debate about the real origins of Christianity. The threat posed by Christianity to Roman beliefs and systems was multi-faceted. I would rather say that the threat was that Christianity proposed a coherent and plausible new paradigm, whereas the Roman Gods represented continuity with traditional authority.

The separatism of Christianity was a result of its coherence. Separatism as such was not in itself a threat, but a vehicle to nurture a threatening belief system. There are many belief systems which are sectarian but pose no threat, because they do not present a plausible alternative basis for social organisation on the scale of empire.

My view of the plausibility of Christianity is that its threat to the ways of the world rests in the depth of its cosmology and ethics, both of which had far more content and traction than the Roman Pantheon. The Christian assertion that its God was real while the Roman gods were fake was a key to its power, as Augustine would later say. But if Christianity had also invented its God then its influence would be undermined, so this process had to be concealed.
DWill wrote: "Orthodox" Christianity, though that didn't exist yet, was a threat in itself, whereas exoteric doctrines would not add to the threat and would not need concealment.
I suspect you may mean esoteric rather than exoteric? Orthodoxy is exoteric, or public, while Christianity systemically asserted that it had secret or esoteric teachings which Jesus had conveyed to the disciples in private.

The frisson from the sense of participation in a mystery religion was part of the allure of Christianity, but the content of the possible secret teachings provided to initiates is precisely the point at issue in this thread. Romans 8 hints at a cosmology which is only extant in fragments, but which can be reconstructed.

My contention is that it is possible to reconstruct how Christ was invented on an astronomical blueprint, in a way that was possible and necessary for the Gnostic inventors of the Christ Myth. This involves forensic analysis of existing texts and artifacts, setting aside the conventional exoteric dogmas.

The reason that these secrets had to be concealed was that public knowledge of the mythic methods would puncture the balloon of popular faith. Like laws and sausages, the methods for making religions are best concealed from the end users. The threat of orthodoxy rested on its political appeal, which rested on the claim that God had actually intervened in the world in the person of an incarnate messiah in Palestine. Believers must suspend their natural suspicion about this miraculous claim. As with a magic trick, showing how it is done destroys the sense of magic and miracle.
DWill wrote:The existence of many gnostic writings from the time attest to the openness of expression by Gnostics. Why didn't those documents use similar cloaking mechanisms?
The Gnostic writings that we have are from later than the Gospel composition period. And they do assert the existence of secret knowledge in a tradition going back to Plato and other sources.

My view is that the role of astronomy in the construction of the Christ Myth was a central secret, discussed by Gnostics in the theory of the twelve ages, for example mentioned by Irenaeus as the ‘duodecad of the aeons’, and underpinning the mention by Clement of Alexandria of the Valentinian teaching that the apostles represent the twelve signs of the zodiac.

The time of the construction of Christianity was a period of immense upheaval and war. The church later systematically targeted heresy for obliteration. So the challenge is to reconstruct the most plausible oral teachings from our extant texts, and this is where the systematic role of astronomy is crucial. It is entirely possible that the later Gnostics had only a partial understanding of the earlier oral teachings behind the Epistles and the Gospels. The absence of a simple explanation is precisely the problem.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:Your analysis also misconceives the literary form of the epistle, a form by which the writer addressed a particular audience. That Paul would have used this this form to write to other factions, outside of the churches at Rome or Corinth, to which the letters are addressed, makes no sense. I wish that sometime you would read all the Pauline letters in sequence merely as a reader and think that you would see that the preponderance of the content relates unambiguously to Paul's mission, even if precisely what Paul means isn't clear in these letters supposedly dictated to a scribe. Proportionality is very important in judging any literary work, and in my view you sometimes distort meaning and intention by inferring the entirety of both from isolated passages.
An excellent scholarly study, The Historical Evidence for Jesus by GA Wells, argues against this assumption of a simple epistolary reading of Paul’s epistles. Rather, Wells argues the composition of documents such as Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians indicates clear evidence that they were patched together from various sources.

On proportionality, the point at issue, as I explained in quoting Pagels’ introduction to The Gnostic Paul, is that the orthodox tradition has been wildly disproportional, with early heresiologists completely ignoring ideas in Paul that have Gnostic implications of a purely spiritual understanding of Jesus Christ.

Straws have been rather desperately clutched to deny this strong hypothesis that the absence of evidence for Christ in Paul is evidence of absence. If Christ was real then Paul would have unambiguously honoured him as the founder of Christianity.
DWill wrote:
The lack of biographical detail on Jesus isn't a serious argument that Paul believes Jesus is the expression of other myths.
I am finding that for sake of economy and progress I would like to respond to whole paragraphs, but each sentence has so much content that I have to break up the response into detail. This phrase “the expression of other myths” is not one I recall seeing before. I would rather suggest that the Gnostics, including Paul, understood the story of Jesus Christ as explaining the connection between time and eternity, between history and the cosmos, between humanity and God.

This sense of rational connection is also expressed in other myths, which to that extent also makes those myths what Jesus called 'the way the truth and the life', which in Gnostic terms could mean the way of life in truth.

The absence of evidence within Paul for an historical Jesus does not indicate that Paul consciously saw Christ as a way to retell the old myths of Horus and Dionysus, but the continuity between these mythemes is important for understanding the cultural evolution of religion. It is like today we could see how technology evolves in cars or computers or planes without insisting that the designer of the latest method must be fully aware of earlier methods.
DWill wrote:
His purpose in the letters is crystal clear, to meld into a single unit the fractious groups that claim Christ as their god.
“Crystal clear” is an exaggeration. This assertion invites the question of how and why these alleged disparate early Christian groups had come to see an obscure Galilean peasant as the king of the universe, even though there is absolutely no evidence for how this myth was promulgated in order for Paul to have the opportunity to meld them into one unit as you allege. If Paul thought that Jesus of Nazareth (a title which by the way was not invented until well after Paul wrote) was the real founder of Christianity, why are Paul's references to this Jesus so scanty and ungrounded?
DWill wrote:
It is natural that he would not be interested in telling about "Jesus in the flesh." That he regarded Jesus as having lived is not in doubt, in my opinion, as well.
Both these assertions are absurd on face value, designed purely to explain away a yawning hole and paper over the abyss of faith. It is like asserting that Lincoln or Roosevelt would not be interested in telling about Washington or Jefferson or Columbus in the flesh, or similarly for Stalin on Lenin and Marx. In these cases where there are real people involved their influence is not ambiguous, completely unlike the alleged influence of Christ on Paul.
DWill wrote:
The whole argument about Jesus is what kind of being he was. Even Gnostics or figures like Marcion who said he was pure spirit refer to someone who appeared along with other regular mortals. There is no school that claimed Jesus didn't assume personhood.
Again that is all baseless. There is a need to explain the problem of Bible verses such as 2 John 1: 7 “many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world.” Your phrase alleging Jesus is said to have appeared “along with other regular mortals” is pure speculation designed to shore up historicism. Even Paul does not have any of this “along with other regular mortals” text in his descriptions of Jesus except for a couple of highly ambiguous straws.

If Jesus was a purely spiritual being, the challenge is to explain his nature. We can similarly say that other fictional characters are ‘purely spiritual’. But the nature of Christ as the mediator, as described in texts such as Hebrews 9, extends beyond a purely fictional archetype.

This is where my hypothesis on the central role of astronomy in constructing Christianity appears to me essential. The slow drift of the spring point through the stars as observed by the ancient seers has a precise and powerful match with the Christ Myth, fully explaining the prophetic Logos tradition, and also providing the clear and direct basis for iconography including the Chi Rho cross. The nature of Christ is seen in the imagined presence on earth of the objective cosmic order seen in the heavens.
DWill wrote:
Even the Romans, who of course ridiculed Christianity for several centuries, didn't say that this man-god never existed, only that the god-part was false. Of course, I have no idea what supposed details about Jesus' life were circulating during Paul's time. And Paul may have had little interest in them, perhaps partly because of the tension between him and those apostles who claimed to have known Jesus.
Your assertion here about what Romans may have said goes beyond the available evidence. We do not know what Romans said because the church for more than a thousand years had a clear policy of destroying writings that were seen as blasphemous and heretical and killing anyone who owned or advocated them. So we had the writings of the heresiologists, with their distorted reading of the views of skeptics, and texts such as Origen’s answer to the Roman Celsus, but we do not have Celsus’ own writings or anything comparable. What we do have is an abundance of variety in the alleged timing and events of the life of Christ, even within the Gospels, presenting strong evidence that this story was fabulous rather than factual.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote: are you really saying here that in an Old Testament context, the assertion of the "magical God", Yahweh, was consciously done by an elite in order to--well, for what conceivable purpose I couldn't possibly say. This theme of a controlling, elite cabal persisting over centuries is getting old.

The story of ancient Israel was of a tiny nation surrounded by big empires, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Assyria, Greece and Rome. In order to maintain national security, the Jews could not rely on military might, but required diplomatic skill. When this skill failed, security collapsed, as in the captivity in Babylon and the destruction of the temple by Rome.

The monotheistic concept of Yahweh is explained by King Josiah in the Books of Kings, and in the Torah, as a method for the Jewish religion to set itself apart as superior, focused on the one true God rather than on a myriad of idols. The constant refrain of the prophets is that the problems of Israel are due to failure to adhere to the word of God.

The invention of Jehovah was a national security device for Israel. This is connected to why the Gnostics decry Yahweh as a demiurge, indicating a lesser creator of the cultural world through constructed belief systems rather than the real creator of the physical cosmos.

The characteristics which came to be valued among the priestly elite of Israel included conformity to the teachings of Moses, based on the patriarchal monotheist tradition of a single father god who revealed himself in the burning bush and the pillar of fire and the splitting of the red sea and the ten commandments.

This claim of revelation was used by the priestly elite to justify their social position, but this covenant framework collapsed with the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, building upon the humiliation inflicted by the Greek invasion of Alexander.

While your term “cabal” is rather loaded, it well describes the practice of the priesthood in constructing the mythology of Yahweh. What is interesting to consider is the various agendas of secret societies in the ancient world. As well as social control, these agendas also included mystical understanding, as seen in the Pythagorean traditions of secret signs and mathematical knowledge. The fish cabal in Christianity with the sign drawn by foot in the sand is one example, with its deeper meaning illustrated in the 153 fish caught in John 21:11.
DWill wrote:
Robert, you're confusing me with all this concealment. After the first concealment by Paul, hiding from the Romans his true intended message, we now have the early church in effect concealing the concealment? It decides it's better to go with the pedestrian account it knows is false, for marketing reasons.

Well of course there is no point in concealing something if you admit that is what you are doing. The fact that the myth of Jesus Christ was based on transposing observation of cosmic order into historical politics is something that would undermine the Gospel message if the facts of the method of construction gained any traction. So an aggressive suppression was needed, as seen in the verse from 1 John that I quote above.
DWill wrote: But you're right that in the esoteric stuff there would be little to worry the Romans. That isn't what you said initially about this, however.
My point about the subversive content of the astral basis of Christianity has to be understood against the long term agenda seen in statements such as ‘my kingdom is not of this world’. (John 18:36). My reading, and this touches on other discussions about the motivation and coherency of Christian theology, is that the astral foundations of Christian theology imagine a very slow transformation of human culture. Matthew 24 depicts this change as occurring in the Age of Aquarius, with Jesus saying ‘the end will come’ after the message of Christ has been spread to the whole planet over the course of the Age of Pisces. But the Catholic Church picked up and corrupted this message of transforming cosmic grace in its alliance with the Roman State. The politics are complex, and it is a topic that profits from more detailed analysis.
DWill wrote:
Also, I don't think you're on solid ground historically in supposing that in the 100s and 200s there is some massive resistance against the sometimes faltering empire by diaspora Jews.
My point was that the Jews could largely see that military resistance was futile, and that their natural resentment at Roman tyranny was displaced into non-military subversion, including within Christianity. But the question of the relation between Hellenistic Jews and Gentiles within Christianity is again highly difficult given the later distorting background of the anti-semitic attitudes of Catholicism once it was captured and subverted by Rome.

The Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 AD illustrated the simmering tension, the Christian focus on non-military organisation, and also the impossibility of defeating Rome at that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:
I am only interested in secret information that has a simple coherence with scientific knowledge. I know there are moronic bigots out there who will try to distort and malign the discussion of such topics, but I prefer to ignore the hypocrites and focus on scientific analysis.
This is not meant to offend, but your always bringing science into this is the strangest part of your thinking. Certainly, whether we're talking about either orthodox or gnostic Christianity, the supernatural plays a huge role. It's as though you're doing a cut and paste, with regard to your beliefs of the present and the people of the ancient world.
Let me try to summarise why I bring science into analysis of the Bible.

A main intended purpose of religion is to explain the nature of reality. These explanations can be true or false. When true, religious explanations are in accordance with other true statements, notably those of science. True statements are not simply matters of belief, optional claims which can equally be rejected, but have a compelling status as matters of knowledge. Astronomy fits in this category as dealing with true scientific knowledge rather than arbitrary cultural belief.

The great ancient civilizations of Babylon and Egypt based their cultures for hundreds and even for thousands of years on an intimate connection between astronomy and religion, including regular accurate scientific observation of the night skies. This observation produced explanation of what the Egyptians termed cosmic order (Maat). The distinction between enlightened and popular forms of these religions centres on the enlightened ability to see myths as metaphors for nature.

Your claim that “Certainly, whether we're talking about either orthodox or gnostic Christianity, the supernatural plays a huge role” simply accepts the orthodox distortion. Gnostic thinking did involve some texts with supernatural content, but this is arguably as metaphor not as literal belief. In focusing on the texts of the New Testament, the supposed supernatural ideas are far better explained as originating from allegory for scientific observation of nature.

The Christian effort to shoehorn Paul into an anti-scientific mentality originated primarily from the political interest of the church in popularising a literal miraculous Gospel, and was only possible by doing intellectual violence to Paul’s ideas, which in their essence are entirely compatible with modern scientific knowledge.

My central point is that by assessing the cosmology of Romans 8 against modern astronomy we can gain a far better understanding of the motives and ideas of Paul and other ancient writers, and of their enduring relevance today.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Here’s a quote from Pope Francis about part of Romans 8 that I would like to share.
The Holy Spirit leads us to divine life as "children of the Only Son." In another passage from the Letter to the Romans, which we have mentioned several times, St. Paul sums it up in these words: "All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And you… have you received the Spirit who renders us adoptive children, and thanks to whom we cry out, "Abba! Father. “The Spirit itself, together with our own spirit, attests that we are children of God. And if we are His children, we are also His heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we take part in his suffering so we can participate in his glory "(8, 14-17). This is the precious gift that the Holy Spirit brings into our hearts: the very life of God, the life of true children, a relationship of familiarity, freedom and trust in the love and mercy of God, which as an effect has also a new vision of others, near and far, seen always as brothers and sisters in Jesus to be respected and loved.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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This" Romans 8" has some staying power. I apologize if I'm skipping some response you've made before this one. I went on a brief vacation to Pittsburgh and the Laurel highlands of Pennsylvania (saw F.L. Wright house "Fallingwater," and at this point I think I'll just resume the thread from here.
Robert Tulip wrote: Let me try to summarise why I bring science into analysis of the Bible.

A main intended purpose of religion is to explain the nature of reality. These explanations can be true or false. When true, religious explanations are in accordance with other true statements, notably those of science. True statements are not simply matters of belief, optional claims which can equally be rejected, but have a compelling status as matters of knowledge. Astronomy fits in this category as dealing with true scientific knowledge rather than arbitrary cultural belief.
Okay, you've just in effect said that the polytheism of the Babylonians and Egyptians--all of which was by way of "explaining the nature of reality" (I would amend to say "defining the nature of reality"), was false, clearly not scientifically verified. You also no doubt would include here the powers imputed to the one god in whom the Hebrews were commanded to believe. But you appear to reserve some belief that, in actuality, the Egyptians and Babylonians went in for some kind of rationally-based appreciation of the heavens as they were observed to exist, divorced from the deities of whom we have some knowledge, deities that represented the powers of the sun, moon, stars, etc. I can hear you about to object that these were only metaphors , or perhaps designed for the more ignorant subjects of the kingdom. I have a large amount of "Missouri" in me about all of that.
The great ancient civilizations of Babylon and Egypt based their cultures for hundreds and even for thousands of years on an intimate connection between astronomy and religion, including regular accurate scientific observation of the night skies. This observation produced explanation of what the Egyptians termed cosmic order (Maat). The distinction between enlightened and popular forms of these religions centres on the enlightened ability to see myths as metaphors for nature.
Yes, here is what I anticipated. You would need to "show me" that the deities were not central to this cosmic order in a manner much more than metaphorical.
Your claim that “Certainly, whether we're talking about either orthodox or gnostic Christianity, the supernatural plays a huge role” simply accepts the orthodox distortion. Gnostic thinking did involve some texts with supernatural content, but this is arguably as metaphor not as literal belief. In focusing on the texts of the New Testament, the supposed supernatural ideas are far better explained as originating from allegory for scientific observation of nature.
I distrust your use of "orthodox" here; it has a whiff of politics. It trades on the current connotation of the very word "orthodox," as indicating hidebound self-interest, shutting its eyes to new facts in an effort to hang on to the top position. In the same manner, creationists call the academic acceptance of evolution "orthodoxy"; climate change deniers call global warming an orthodox view; and mythicists say that anyone who thinks that Jesus lived is orthodox. What is the fact in each case is that the position being assailed is the consensus based on all the available facts.

If you can show that the supernatural doings of the NT are originally symbolic representations, I will be impressed. Your reasoning seems to be that since we know that these things couldn't have happened, those who first wrote them down must have known so as well. That is far from a given.
The Christian effort to shoehorn Paul into an anti-scientific mentality originated primarily from the political interest of the church in popularising a literal miraculous Gospel, and was only possible by doing intellectual violence to Paul’s ideas, which in their essence are entirely compatible with modern scientific knowledge.
Saying that Paul was anti-scientific is like saying that Sir Thomas More was anti-evolution. The terms simply don't exist in the times, so I really don't believe anyone has been ragging on Paul for being unscientific.
My central point is that by assessing the cosmology of Romans 8 against modern astronomy we can gain a far better understanding of the motives and ideas of Paul and other ancient writers, and of their enduring relevance today.
And I say that you can repurpose as much as you see fit to do. The "shoehorning" here is the presentism of forcefitting current notions onto the ancient world.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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bionov wrote:Here’s a quote from Pope Francis about part of Romans 8 that I would like to share.
Hi bionov. While I prefer to go through the comments from DWill and Flann 5 in order so that I don’t miss any, I would like to respond immediately to comments from others such as yourself to encourage a wider discussion. The new pope is certainly an interesting thinker, as your quote here illustrates.
bionov wrote: The Holy Spirit leads us to divine life as "children of the Only Son." In another passage from the Letter to the Romans, which we have mentioned several times, St. Paul sums it up in these words: "All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And you… have you received the Spirit who renders us adoptive children, and thanks to whom we cry out, "Abba! Father. “The Spirit itself, together with our own spirit, attests that we are children of God. And if we are His children, we are also His heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we take part in his suffering so we can participate in his glory "(8, 14-17).
In reading this extract, and the pope’s commentary, the theme that leapt out to me was a sense that the natural creation is venerable. The pope seems to imply that Christians are children of Christ, which is a formulation I don’t recall seeing before. But it makes sense in the context of Paul’s description of Christ in Colossians as the stable cosmic order, the idea which John came to interpret as the Word of God or the rationality of the cosmos. The pope’s point here is that as heirs of divine grace we participate in cosmic reason and are therefore children of the eternal Christ.

If God is understood as the unifying principle of cosmic order, then we naturally inherit this principle in our own lives because our own ability to sustain complex life depends on the orderly structured patterns that we share with all of nature.
bionov wrote: This is the precious gift that the Holy Spirit brings into our hearts: the very life of God, the life of true children, a relationship of familiarity, freedom and trust in the love and mercy of God, which as an effect has also a new vision of others, near and far, seen always as brothers and sisters in Jesus to be respected and loved.
Here the pope illustrates the sanctity of life, not in the sense that life should never be destroyed, but rather that life derives its special qualities from building upon a natural order and turning the simple patterns of inanimate nature into something highly complex and evolving. This sense of respect and love for complexity is what I understand as the essence of grace.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Thanks DWill, rather than respond to your latest comment, I will continue my responses in order to your earlier comments.
DWill wrote: Oh, yes, an excerpt from a review of Pagels' book by Dan Geddes. I believe that if Geddes is accurate, Pagels is very judicious in her appraisal of the reasons that Christianity had to reject gnosticism in order to become a world faith. Gnosticism died a natural death. When its texts were suppressed, it was already on the mat. It does seem too bad it had to be this way, but so it does go.
It is useful to compare your sanguine regrets for Gnosticism with other examples of imperial conquest, and to place this process within the bigger cycles of historical evolution and change. Here in Australia, we see a slowly emerging social respect for indigenous culture, with the view that the imperial conquest by England failed to recognise valuable features of the indigenous identity. I imagine a similar thing may be the case with other native cultures. The evolutionary pattern is that local myths get suppressed but return in a subordinate form due to their inherent authentic integrity as an expression of what it means to live in a place.

I view Gnosticism as akin to an indigenous myth which had to be suppressed in order for Christianity to harmonise with the Roman Empire and transform itself into an imperial faith. So we see the orthodox displacement of the guilt of the Roman crucifixion onto the Jews, the deferment of the messianic transformation until the second coming of Christ, and a number of other ideological decisions serving the alliance of throne and altar within Christendom. Gnosticism could not possibly have served as a basis of imperial stability in the way Christianity did, because Gnosticism put up the Gnostics as a social elite in competition with the magistrates and bishops and nobility of Rome who gained their power from the sword. Religion is subordinate to politics in the short term, so this Gnostic refusal to accept prevailing power relations had to be suppressed.

But in the long term, politics is subordinate to religion, and this is the key Gnostic message emerging from Paul in Romans 8, of an eventual birth of liberty out of bondage, the hope and faith that the spirit of freedom and truth will triumph over the corruption and decay of worldly values.

The clash between Gnosticism and orthodoxy is between Gnostic authentic moral integrity and orthodox degraded moral corruption. Jesus, in the story, trod the moral authentic path of the cross, insisting on total integrity against the corruption of the world. This way of the cross was not possible for the church which had to ally with the state. But now, since the gospel has been preached to the whole planet, morality has evolved to the point that a presentation of the gnostic message will not result in crucifixion for heresy.

My essential point on this vision of hope is that it actually aligns perfectly with the real underpinning evolutionary driver of the slow cycle of time. Just as the day and year cycle between light and dark, so too does the slow cycle of climate, based on the date of the perihelion, which is now at 4 January and advancing by one day every sixty years due to precession. So we passed the depth of the iron age about a thousand years ago, and are on an upward path to the next golden age in ten thousand years time, but headed immediately for a cusp as the culture of decay and corruption is confronted by the culture of love and grace.

A key to this shift is the recognition that Christianity in its supernatural form is a false and degraded corruption of the original message, but this degraded form was a necessary stage over the period that the Bible calls the fall from grace, a stage that matches directly to the darkest phase of the climate cycle. So when Paul says in his famous chapter on love in 1 Corinthians 13:12 “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known,” we see he speaks of gnosis three times. The degraded mirror of supernatural delusion will be replaced by a perfect prism enabling accurate scientific knowledge. This vision of a shift of ages from the orthodox to the gnostic maps directly to the actual orbital shift of ascent. Jesus Christ is therefore the presence of the golden age in the midst of the iron age, and the story of cross and resurrection indicates the incomprehension of ignorance in the presence of knowledge, and the power of knowledge to overcome and dissolve ignorance.

Far from dying, Gnosticism will re-emerge triumphant as the true resurrection faith of Christianity, expressing the power of logic and evidence and knowledge over irrational traditional belief. This is a key to the message in Paul that faith and reason can be reconciled.
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