Robert Tulip wrote:The old emphasis of the church on the literal truth of its teachings has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The likely result, as the cultural evolution process determines what aspects of traditional religion remain adaptive, is that emotionally comforting messages and rituals will continue to assist in social binding, while their literal content will gradually come to be viewed as entirely symbolic and poetic. That is a good thing, and looks like a return to how Bible teachings were originally intended.
I think this summary of the change underway does not go nearly far enough. Your paragraph defined a decline in literalism accompanied by a continuation of ritual and emotional comfort, in keeping with pre-Constantinian Christianity. What is actually happening is a much more thorough organic development of social practices associated with mutuality.
There is a large academic infrastructure in place whose purpose is not well-defined: train the next generation of pastors/ministers, but train them to do what? What seems to be taking hold there is a sense that we can use modern methods of systematic investigation and linkage between able and motivated minds to put the heart of religion to work in people's lives without having to nail down the "beliefs" involved. Applied religion is not replacing theoretical religion, but people are voting with their feet for the social infrastructure of applied religion.
Megachurch development of small accountability groups were an early example. Large festivals such as Wild Goose and Greenbelt were a development along the same lines. Most hospitals now have chaplaincy, and the growth of Hospice has put in place some of the learnings from the chaplaincy programs. The feedback loops with psychology and sociology departments are naturally growing apace.
Robert Tulip wrote:Harry Marks wrote:
It's one reason I like your vision of interpreting the mythology in terms of natural cycles (I realize you didn't originate it, but you do explain it often).
In fact Harry, I am not aware of anyone else who has taken the analysis of myth in terms of astronomical forcing to anywhere near the extent that I have, such as in my recent widely ignored essay on
The Precessional Structure of Time. My argument there is entirely original. I propose that the actually observed natural cycles of our planet should be regarded as the base upon which the ideational superstructure of religious myth has evolved. While there is an element of astrological speculation in such discussion, just in seeing the heavens reflecting earth over long periods, I try to limit the arbitrary factor by a focus on the orderly physical cycles that drive natural climate change.
Well, I suppose I drew the wrong inference from references to Jung's discussion of Aions, etc. Thanks for explaining. I have my doubts as to whether a tradition of remembering climate cycles could have managed to be preserved and passed on to Bronze Age astrologers, alchemists and gnostics, but, well, some surprises are no doubt still waiting for us from pre-history. I don't want to engage on the specifics, in part because I think natural order influences are likely to be a minor part of the root system of ancient and medieval religion, despite the heavy influence already noticed from the annual cycle of seasons and days.
People have fed in lots of other strands of human experience, including sibling rivalry and family dysfunctionality in general, pride and folly, greed, oppression, militarism, sadism, totemic animal traits, storms, shipwrecks, herbal lore, evil witchcraft, animal breeding, and on and on, into mythological story-telling. I suspect we have a better chance positing psychological forces as the controlling factors than natural forces. Still, the appreciation of "order and stability" is one of those psychological forces, and work like yours may help to give it its due.
Robert Tulip wrote: The most elegant dimension of this analysis is how it provides a parsimonious scientific explanation of the emergence and meaning of Christianity, based on the hypothesis of unconscious reaction to encompassing natural cycles.
Sometimes parsimony is in the mind of the analyst.
Robert Tulip wrote: Harry Marks wrote:
It has some potential to bridge between the old "enchanted" view and a scientifically sound view.
The bridge here rests in the placement of Christology within an accurate modern cosmology, viewing the actual cycles of the solar system as the wholistic context for the evolution of life on earth and for how Christianity can remain an adaptive ideology.
I suspect other bridges are possible and may be opened up by archetype-based investigation.
Robert Tulip wrote:The entire point of Christology, the study of Christ, is to explain how human life connects to ultimate truth. This theory of connection was previously postulated through the mythical equation between Jesus of Nazareth and Christ the King.
Recent Pauline scholarship suggests that he made a strong connection between the Resurrection and the commencement of the Messianic Age, or Kingdom of God. Paul's own vision seems to have cemented this for him, and his calling to the Gentiles was evidently encompassed in the transformation he experienced. It seems to have been connected to Messianic beliefs that the whole world would be reached before the End of the Age.
For Paul, ultimate truth was evidently strongly tied to agape, loosely the idea of altruism. His binational origin and strong Pharasaical training may have led him to contrast Yahweh's ethic of covenant over against polytheistic ethics of appeasement. He handles the Lordship of Christ lightly, and seems more attached to community identification such as "the Church of God" and "in Christ." The connection, for him, between human life and ultimate truth seems to be more in terms of destination than revelation.
Robert Tulip wrote:Conventional theology describes this connection in terms of the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the one messianic person. Such language has the character of idealistic myth, forming the basis for an enchanted world view, replete with miracles and supernatural cosmology.
There seems to be a bumbling process, which one might call Progressive Mysticism (exemplified by Thomas Merton and Simone Weil but gathering momentum), toward re-enchanting in a post-modern understanding. Easily moving between poetry, metaphor and hesitant psychology, it perceives the enchantment within ordinary life. I copied a quote onto another thread (Ch. 5 of this book, I think) which exemplifies it wonderfully.
Robert Tulip wrote:The interesting thing for Christianity in terms of my astronomical analysis is how the Biblical theory of Jesus Christ as the least being first, redeeming humankind from the fall from grace, can be understood within a coherent epistemology.
I am most interested in rendering that sort of thing in terms of the redemptive possibilities opened by modern economic forces. Instead of an eternal round of extraction by violence, we have voluntary exchange as the sine qua non of advanced living, and the great task of subduing violence merges with the great opportunity of seeing meaning in ordinary, reciprocal and mutual relationship.
Robert Tulip wrote:As we have discussed, values live within stories. This context is rather like how cells live within blood and die when they are separated from their living source of sustenance.
I rather like that comparison. As with the way Hariri sees structures of understanding leading to large scale coordination of efforts, we can understand the longing for meaning as a longing for some overarching narrative into which the other narratives can fit. I still think science is just the backdrop for that - it is one kind of "ultimate" narrative, but lacks the capacity of self-control that we find in religious understanding. As much of Christianity moves toward suspicion of authority claims, it should not be surprising that suspicion of scientific authority claims come with the process.
Robert Tulip wrote:It is very hard to tell how well values will survive outside the mythological framework of the traditional stories that gave them social meaning. That is a big part of why Young Earth Creationism has proved so robust against challenge, that Jesus is defined by Paul as a reaction against Adam, as without Adam the Jesus story loses much of its imagined salvific power.
YEC has drawn much of its resilience from the dynamics of counterculture. Just as Wm J Bryan opposed Darwinism partly because he detested Social Darwinism (and his counterpart in the Scopes trial defended Leopold and Loeb), today's YEC's resent academic arrogance and the insistence that society should elevate technical competence over mutuality and living right. There's also a nasty side to that counterculture, claiming that elites are oppressing "Christian culture" (as the KKK inevitably branded itself) in order to maintain power.
Robert Tulip wrote:The meaning of postmodern in this context is just the analysis of traditional beliefs to see how they hold concealed meaning.
I'm not too sure about "just" in that sentence, but I do think that is how the process mainly goes in Progressive Christian circles. It seems to me that there is a certain self-consciousness about getting behind the authoritarian use of text in the traditional framework (see "deconstruction" below) and a suspicion of supposedly value-free scientific analysis in the modernist framework.
Robert Tulip wrote:This process is called deconstruction, removing Christianity from its privileged status of unquestioned traditional authority as Gospel Truth by challenging its assumptions.
Technically, deconstruction doubts all privilege for authorities and urges questioning of all assumptions. In practice it seems to boil down to a search for hidden, implicit claims to authority and pats itself on the back most heartily when it can find a kind of conspiracy between the hidden authority claims and the overt value claims.
Examples could include deconstructing "bourgeois democracy" which manipulatively maintains a hold on power by money in contrast to its claims of democratic goals, or "disaster porn"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uninhabitable_Earth
Robert Tulip wrote:The postmodern approach here is not about the relativist claim that rival meanings are equally valid. From my close study of Heidegger, one of the fathers of postmodern deconstruction, I have an intense suspicion about use of postmodern reading to relativise meaning in the sense of the claim that alternative approaches can’t be measured against each other. Deconstruction of conventional logic is however often essential to raise important questions about how we test our views.
This sounds right to me. At its lowest, deconstruction can be just knee-jerk "what about"-ism, claiming to show that all perspectives are manipulative and in the end if you aren't using other people you are being used. More sensibly, it can be a source of humility about one's own claims to moral authority.
Robert Tulip wrote:Harry Marks wrote:The connections between story and values are somewhat flexible.
The attempt to retain values while discarding the story that was its carrier vessel seems one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of religion. Rationalising tendencies can have unintended consequences of hollowing out the vitality of faith. I think it is important to retain a respect for stories even where a conventional literal reading is discarded.
You make it sound like the vitality and the respect are quite voluntary. This is a doubtful proposition. I think the most successful efforts at "re-vitalization" or even "re-enchantment" go about it by setting up the values tensions which were released by the powerful mythological stories, seeing how the "events" operated on that tension, and translating it to equivalent tensions in the lives of the listener.
A really oversimplified version is Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus." He isn't really much interested in the original, except as a dramatization of his view (also found in "The Plague") that we don't achieve salvation but we achieve purpose by pursuing it. A much better version is in talk of the "Resurrection Event" by which even the sheer persistence of the radically caring early church amounts to a story of the Resurrection of Jesus. It has the virtue of fitting the spiritual and sociological orientation of the early church, as well as the Messianic confrontation by Jesus the Suffering Servant. What it lacks, of course, is appeal to the supernatural for divine enforcement.
Similar re-enchantments can be done with Achilles and Odysseus, with Orpheus and even Persephone, and famously with Oedipus and with Jason and Medea. Garry Wills' "Nixon Agonistes" might be seen as an example, playing as it does on Milton's comparison of Samson's tragedy to that of (putatively) Cromwell's Commonwealth.
Robert Tulip wrote:The big change for Roman Catholic dogmatic conceptions of faith such as Augustine’s idea of Original Sin arises from the collapse of the union of church and state. I quite like the hermeneutic of suspicion in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, where imperial value systems are subjected to searching deconstruction. There is a major unconscious factor in conventional moral teachings like Original Sin, for example in how they support social stability, and how people prefer stable order over the chaos of messianic politics, leading the conventional church to reject the alternative epistemology of original blessing.
Well, that's good enough, but the perils of Anarchy don't need to be reinforced with notions of Original Sin, and original blessing does not have to reinforce messianic politics. I have read 100 pages or so of a different work by Said, and found him insightful enough if rather plodding and rather dedicated to blaming his chosen villains for every wrong in sight. I am fine with using deconstruction to bring us to a less certain, but more empathetic, reading of power structures.
Robert Tulip wrote:Symbols gain their power through their unconscious resonance with factors that create emotional appeal. It is possible to deconstruct symbols in order to bring these unconscious factors into conscious awareness. The inherent uncertainties in analysis of the unconscious in psychology require caution, humility and tentativeness in conclusions. Yet I do think one source of insight in analysing the psychology of religion is how the myths about God map to actual natural processes, especially the role of the sun as the source of light, life, order and stability.
I was challenged by our church to take up some of the work of Thomas Berry, on finding an I-Thou relationship to nature. Not sure where I will start - maybe "The Great Work". But I would tend to see integration with science along those lines. Just as a working knowledge of psychology can help us engage more insightfully and generously with the people close to us, so science can help us recapture the awe and gratitude that are despoiled by a priority on extracting from nature.
p.s. another glimpse at post-modern communication in religion:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletter ... ood-place/