FredP

I proudly identify myself with beer.

I understand what you're saying; I was merely trying to stand in a pair of conservative shoes and read your comments. I agree that the concept is what matters. Actually, I'd say that "historical truth" is somewhat of a misnomer. The concept is what is true, and worth arguing about. Hope I haven't offended...

I've always hated the term "moderate"... it just sounds like I've arrived at some sort of warm compromise. I prefer to hold all my extreme views in tension with one another and see what ferments. I've even thought of labelling my ideas as "Progressive Orthodoxy"! "Radical Orthodoxy" was already taken, and besides, I have a lot of issues with it (even though I really like a lot of it too). Anyway, yes -- the Jesus-as-role-model variety of Christianity just doesn't compel me at all. And I don't think I'm playing clever word games when I say that I believe passionately and wholeheartedly in the Incarnation and Resurrection. They are the fundamental lens through which I view the entire world and everything in it. I can't put it any less strongly.

My whole foray into the typology thing was an attempt to argue that we are both completely one with God, and at the same time completely what we are naturally, and to try not to collapse either one of those down into the other. I'm sure this or that thing I say probably sometimes sounds more like one than the other, but a lot of that is probably due to the inherent limitation of language and concepts. By a return to the Eternal Source, I'm simply talking about the process, within the nature/space/time realm, whereby we identify with what is higher (and disidentify with what is lower) in ourselves. I don't think the idea is inherently monist or dualist... maybe the "culmination point" is different in either case. Perhaps, I'd say that our "return to the Eternal Source" is the recognition of our ultimate oneness with God in the realm beyond distinct forms; and our "being born out of the Eternal Source" is our participation in the manyness of God, within the realm of disctinct forms. Both realms are real. Don't put too much weight in this just yet. This is like unedited brain droppings here!

You must have known you'd get a throng of "no" responses for this. But it's a fair question. What I hear you saying is: "All your metaphorical versions of the resurrection are nice, but at the end of the day, what's really REAL is whether Jesus actually came back to life, came out of the empty tomb, talked and ate with his disciples, and returned to the right hand of God. It just sounds like a bunch of excuses for not believing what God said and did. The resurrection IS fantastic, and I believe it happened just the way the Bible says." Does that sum it up? Part of the problem, as I've said before, is that non-literal approaches to the resurrection DO frequently end up sounding at best like watered-down excuses, and at worst like it doesn't even matter at all. I don't mean to pick on you Cynthia, but I'm going to read your post like I imagine a more argumentative version of Darby might do. You said, "Whether or not Jesus was bodily raised from the dead... He calls me to radical compassion..." This statement maneuvers around the resurrection, and sounds like the concept doesn't really matter. All that matters is compassion? "Awake, or perhaps, resurrected"? That's all resurrection is: accepting, acknowledging, and getting close to God? That just doesn't sound like enough. Let me put it this way. What's more real: Eternal Life overcoming eternal death, or the resuscitation of a human body? Of course the reality of Eternal Life-from-death, expressed in biological terms, is going to sound bizarre and fantastic, but only such a story could possibly reveal the truth. Don't confuse the more fantastic with the more real. Eternal Life is so real, that the empty tomb sounds like a bedtime story by comparison.

Lily, These are all very good thoughts. I think you are quite correct to say that, if Jesus as a human individual is uniquely the incarnation of God, then we are indeed hopelessly "human, sinful, and fallen," and saved only vicariously. This is the hardline Reformed Protestant view, incidentally. It is also the conventional Catholic view; however, there is enough talk of mystical transformation in Catholicism for me to say that the theosis idea sits a little more comfortably there than in a Reformed outlook. (It still sits pretty uneasily though!) On the other hand, I think the view you are suggesting leads to other big problems -- namely, we've now lost any sense of God's initiative in restoring us. I know you're trying (with good reason) to avoid a literal vicarious sacrifice, where the blood of Jesus washes away our sins, and makes us gruesome creatures fit to stand before God. But the "grain of truth" in this idea has always been that God first reaches out to us to make our reconciliation possible. The view you suggested seems to make our salvation based solely on personal effort, wherein God rewards Jesus for his exemplary manifestation of the divine nature. I think the typological way in which I regard the doctrine of Jesus Divinity/humanity (http://tcpc.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=333&pid=4044) pays off really nicely here. What would the crucifixion/resurrection mean if Jesus Christ stood not for a human individual who lived long ago, but for the created universe itself in its fulfilled (perfect) state -- the state of being for which Jesus' life and death was a sign? I know this idea resonates with things you've written in the past. I propose it means this: that God, in the great act of self-creation and self-reconciliation we experience as the manifest universe (they're just the downward and upward aspect of the same event), perpetually generates the conditions necessary for all lower forms to die and return to their Eternal Source. (I take the Virgin Birth, by the way, to mean the inverse: that God perpetually generates the conditions necessary for lower forms to be born out of their Eternal Source; but that'll be a topic for another day!) The idea is, the condition for our reconciliation always appears at the initiative of God -- not in some bizarre legal pronouncement by which we become righteous, but in the fact that even our own effort comes to us as a gift of divine grace, the gift of God's own being, given to us as our own. Hope that gives you something to chew on at least.

This presumes that the most important issue is the literal facticity of the resurrection, rather than the meaning of it. The resurrection is absolutely not a lie: the cross is always a place where what is lower is sacrificed to reveal what is higher, and the Cross of Calvary for Christians is the supreme revelation of this. The disciples knew beyond any doubt that they had experienced the truest thing in the universe. Everything you mentioned that Jesus' followers sacrificed is lower (power, comfort, fame, riches, indeed their own mortal life), and they now knew their own crosses must also lead inescapably to the renunciation of these things. McDowell has touched upon a crucially important point: whatever the disciples experienced in Jesus must have been powerful enough to change the world. Any watered down version of Jesus' mission and ministry is clearly and obviously false. I do not believe the empty tomb stories are an exaggeration of the truth; I think it's the other way around.

So, does anybody actually STAY in Chicago, then? Wishing more of you were here!

It is truly a pleasure to have your participation on this topic Lily. I'm quite certain you could carry it without me!

Absolutely! I would go even further and say we do more than just fail to appreciate it: we often deliberately choose to repress and reject it.

That is true, but it isn't quite enough. It doesn't tell us anything about how Jesus the man -- and by extension, how all of us as persons -- are related to this nebulous "Christ consciousness." What are we supposed to do about it? What does it do for us? The Christian answer is that these "two natures" somehow coexist in a single being. Exactly how that takes place may ultimately be paradoxical -- which explains why most attempts to explain it have bordered on the downright ridiculous. In my earlier post, I tried to clear a space for (at least) appreciating the classical formulation of the nature of Christ, but I didn't actually offer any thoughts on what it might mean in a progressive context. But that will have to wait for another time I'm afraid...

My point wasn't to hold up the conventional interpretations of these views and judge between them. In their ordinary, straightforward meanings, I don't find either one very compelling. I mean, if you reject the idea of Jesus as "God as a baby" for whatever historical, scientific, philosophical, etc. reasons (which I do), the claim of Jesus being the first thing God created doesn't really solve your problems any better. In fact, the Unitarian rejection of any divine aspect of Jesus whatsoever, is arguably the least troublesome from a scientific standpoint. But then (I think) you lose the levels of meaning that the orthodox formulation provides. That was really the point of my original post.

Yes, I did mean to say that God is incarnate in all things all the time. I'm hesitant to say whether individual selves survive in an infinite extension of time and space. On the one hand, it is part of the nature and dignity of selves that they have a beginning and ending in time. Only God "survives" eternally; material manifestations are real, but not eternal, except in the knowledge of God. On the other hand, who am I to say that God's eternal knowledge and experience of me isn't infinitely more real than my temporal experience of me? I'm speculating here of course. That's not really it. I've been moving towards the term "divine self-creation" to describe the manifest universe, to emphasize that it's creation, and that it's also God, but I wouldn't tell you I know what that means exactly.

Alright, time to liven this up. I was going to post this on Beach's topic, "The Nature of Jesus - Different Views," but since I already started my own thread for this discussion, I thought I'd be a little biased and put it here. Plus, since this is in the "debate" forum, it lends itself to more, well, debate. I'll still quote her post, since that's what got my message started. The words Trinitarian and Unitarian actually refer to conceptions of God's nature, not to how Jesus is, or is not, God. Trinitarianism of course presumes that there is a Christ figure in the Godhead, and is therefore amenable to the view that Jesus of Nazareth was that figure incarnate on Earth; while Unitarianism does not have that notion, and so is not amenable to that view (or historically speaking, is amenable to its denial). I think it's important, actually, to differentiate the issue of God's nature from the issue of Jesus' divinity. I (at any rate) want to affirm with Trinitarian thinking that Godhead does include the figures of Christ and Holy Spirit, while also affirming that the relationship between the divine Christ and human Jesus is ... well, a little complicated. Historically Christianity has adopted the Chalcedonian formulation of the two natures of Christ (you know, that pesky thing about Jesus Christ being fully divine and fully human in one person), and I am therefore inclined to say it holds a very important key to the truth -- something that I think we as progressives ought to take seriously. To finally put my cards on the table, I interpret this doctrine typologically: the reality that scripture and theology call Jesus Christ signifies a mode of being which is, mysteriously, both essentially divine, and at the same time essentially exactly what it is naturally. The entire manifest universe, in its true nature, is Jesus Christ, as yet in its infancy; but perfected it will be self-consciously so. So I offer this: Jesus Christ is not merely a great human example of divine sentiments (the popular liberal notion), or a divine person temporarily visiting an otherwise ordinary world (the popular conservative notion); but a real prototypical sign of the universal divine/human mode of being that is God's creative self-gift. Incidentally, what seem to us to be long, dead theological alternatives, are also worth exploring typologically. Take the Arian view that Jesus was God's first creation, but not himself divine. I suggest that, at its best, this corresponds to the conventional view (Catholic and Protestant) that the universe is merely the "handiwork" of God: beautiful, artful, expressive, but not gifted with God's own being, except by a short visit long ago. We stand in relation to God as works of craftsmanship, created to love and serve and glorify God, but not ultimately to be united with God in God's own being. At its worst stands an atheistic materialism which denies not only that the universe is divine, but that anything at all is. On the otherhand there is the Docetist view, that Jesus was fully divine, but only appeared to be human. I submit that this evokes the currently popular New Age view (which also shows up in a lot of Eastern thought) that the universe is an illusion: things are not really what they are, it's all a divine game of hide-and-seek, in which our ultimate goal is to wake up from our collective dream, and "remember" that none of this really exists in the first place. This view robs the natural universe of its dignity precisely as nature, and fails to take seriously the role of freedom and dignity -- and that taboo word, sin -- in making our reality what it is -- sometimes sublime, sometimes horribly messed up, usually both -- and in fixing (with God's help) what we have made of it. What if this age-old doctrinal formulation contains the key to this problem, in a way that even its formulators didn't fully realize? That somehow, in a manner we may always fall short of comprehending, we are both truly divine, and truly human? The Eternal God emptied into material form. With all the dignity and responsibility that entails. Something to think about.... Fred

I scribbled down some thoughts on this a number of years back, when the Catholic parish I was attending was having an evening discussion on this very issue. Here they are: If a person must "make a decision for Christ," in Evangelical lingo, isn't this "making" a work? Mustn't a Fundamentalist also "do" something to appropriate salvation, even if it is just saying the sinner's prayer in her heart? Catholics emphasize works because they "exercise" the spirit and "till the ground," allowing faith to grow. A helpful analogy might be this: When a farmer works the soil, surely he doesn't believe that he is making the seeds grow by his effort. He merely tends the soil, to make it receptive to the seeds. "Good works," then are not merely an outpouring of gratitude (though they are at least that), but a tilling of our "spiritual soil," so that grace and faith can take better root in us. In the same vein, Catholics lay more emphasis on the cooperation between humanity and God, in contrast to the Protestant emphasis on the complete and utter sovereignty of God. In the language of the council of Trent, we "cooperate" with the Spirit in our salvation. This is much different than "earning" our salvation with good works; it is that the grace that has been provided on the cross of Christ must find a willing and open heart to take root. Once again, we must prepare our hearts with good works to receive the seed which comes from God alone. My last and final thought is this: Isn't it all grace anyway? Isn't the open willingness of our own spirit just the awakening of God's Spirit in us? Isn't the fact that we're here at all just the outpouring of grace? Without the cosmos' inherent drive to be one with its Source and Destiny -- the drive of God's creative grace -- the Logos who was with God in the beginning, and IS, in fact, the very presence of God -- there wouldn't even be earth, or life, as we know it, to ask these questions, to begin with. The question whether there could be salvation without grace, rests upon the false assumption that it is conceivable for ANYTHING to exist without grace. We are born out of grace, and die into grace. So it is with our spiritual birth.

Well, I suppose the question is whether Prog/Non-Prog debate is a different animal than inter-Prog debate (as opposed to less heated inter-Prog conversation ), and whether there should be another major form to make it clear which type of debate is requested.

Of course this legislation is a ridiculous witch hunt, but I really dislike the Spong approach of raising unwarranted biblical speculations to twist the Bible into backing your point of view. When it comes to the Bible and homosexuality, let's face it, you're not going to find the Bible either overtly or covertly praising it. Passages like this are just too ambigous to depend on; and in fact, referring to them will more than likely result in a throng of "Is that the best you can come up with?" types of responses. Let's have an inclusive framework based on a robust theology of love or diversity.

Turns out I'm younger than both of you. Don't know about James... Actually the thing that has helped me most in this regard has been a long-time friend who is a hardline Reformed Lutheran -- a passionate intellectual and articulate defender of Christian orthodoxy. Believe me, I spent my entire life up until I left for college in a Fundamentalist Baptist church, and there is a vast difference between my long-time friend and many of the ignorant, bigoted people I grew up around. I respect the hurt and anger you feel from growing up in denominations like this; but it's too easy to label every orthodox or conservative viewpoint as bigoted and ignorant. (Even many of the people at my church were mostly harmless.) In my personal experience (and I don't expect this to be yours either), I feel an enormously strong pull towards much of Christian orthodoxy, even though I don't regard it in quite the special, supernatural way that an orthodox person does. I view it as the ongoing process of the total revelation of God, processed through reason, tradition, and experience, and thus as having enormous weight and precedent for Christian thinking of any kind. I would say that I'm not a progressive Christian because I don't care about theological issues, but precisely because I do care, and because I want to discover what contemporary worldviews bring to the interpretation of Christian doctrine and practice (and just as importantly, how Christian doctrine and practice challenge contemporary worldviews). As a progressive Christian, I think it's important to understand my orthodox heritage, lest I repeat the philosophical and theological dead ends of the past. It's like saying, "I hate my parents; I want nothing to do with them, and I'm not going to be anything like them!" ... and then you turn out to be either just like them, or the mirror image of all their worst qualities, which is probably just as bad. (Think obsessive political correctness vs. obsessive censorship, for example.) At the same time, there will certainly be orthodox folks who I will passionately disagree with about what constitutes a theological dead end. But we'll at least have the common ground to stand on, that we're arguing about the same thing. Of course, this isn't to say that there always has to be argument. If this thread wasn't intended to be a progressive/non-progressive engagement, that's fair enough. Nobody wants to argue all the time, and some people don't want to argue any of the time. There's nothing wrong with that. I just want to challenge us as progressives, and say that we have a special and explicit committment to be respectul of other people's views, even ones we don't like. Fred Phelps doesn't have to respect us, and he never said he would. But we have said we would, and that holds us to a certain standard. Peace, Fred

Sorry in advance if this comes off as a rant. If I may say so, personally I have very much appreciated James' respectful treatment of us as persons in everything he has written. There have been no polemics or insults. Nobody here expects him to agree with the Progressive "line." He has openly and consistently stated his perspective in an informative, non-threatening way. The funny this is, you appear to be more threatened by his presence than he does by ours, and this is our "home territory"! To state the obvious, this IS a thread on Joseph Ratzinger, is it not? A solid understanding of the way things proceed in Catholic thinking and motivation seems eminently appropriate here, no? The "we don't care," "your dogmas don't matter to us," "I don't give a damn about your debates" tantrums seem callous and insensitive to me -- not to mention, they betray a shallow grounding in your own beliefs. It's easier to criticize than write a well-thought-out response. You went through the trouble of highlighting rule #5 in your last message. It's a good one. Why don't you do some of it?

I have to give you credit for one thing though: You have a lot of courage to post a topic like this on a board with skeptical people who love to debate!

Lily, Thanks for having the courage to do what I couldn't! Frankly I find the whole "Conversations With God" schtick nauseating, and I don't feel the least bit honored that my questions were chosen as the launching pad for another round of it. Personally I'm going with the "Please feel free to skip my postings in the future" option. I have too little time to post here as it is. Respectfully, Fred, the Not Quite Perfect Questioner

The Distance to the Sun Spock's Beard There is no peace Here in my mind There's no way to see We're all born blind To some place some time When we could feel like We're joined inside We can't always See it with our eyes But there is a world apart from what we know There is a time the eyes will never show We can be as one And be farther than the distance to the sun There is no use you'll never win They'll only kick you back again Back where you've been And you're never satisfied Your wants just change You've been playing an unwinnable game But there is a world apart from what we know There is a place the eyes will never show We can be as one And be farther than the distance to the sun Half the time we're gone, we don't know why Half of us are crying to the sky Once we're there we'll wonder why it took so long Once we're there we'll know what we became

This is a good place to start because it brings my fundamental issue with PP into nice sharp focus. As always, please take my remarks in the spirit of honest exploration and debate. If I've been paying attention to previous posts, according to PP all "actual occasions" are finite in nature, yes? So, there is nothing "actual" that is absolute, ineffable, beyond comprehension, etc.? If I'm remembering correctly, in PP God contains all possibilities and remembers all actualities, but that's the only sense in which God could be considered absolute. Is that understanding correct? By contrast, of course, the classical philosophical conception is that God is not some entity above but alongside other entities (despite popular belief to the contrary); but the infinite ground of (finite) existence itself. You have rightly acknowledged that the entire PP system hinges on the crucially important Ontological Principle. While I grant that there is a certain logical and methodological simplicity in saying that "what is, simply is," nevertheless the idea of a self-meaningful finite world strikes me personally as a contradiction. In my view, only the higher can grasp, and therefore produce, the lower. (The reality of evolution is not an argument against this claim; it merely causes us to see that higher forms and patterns are often enfolded into lower ones.) Therefore, in contrast with PP, I take it to be axiomatic that only the infinite could be self-grasping, self-producing, self-meaningful, etc. Does PP attempt to address this question directly, or is "there is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real" the end of the story?

Amen to that!

Sorry, but my stomach just churned at the thought of Hollywood as the geographical symbol of my spiritual path! Somehow Boulder or San Francisco seem more appropriate... Not that I wouldn't attend a conference in Siberia if it sounded like it had potential.