They will hold that Christianity consists and always has consisted in a certain definite set of beliefs, and that theologians who seek to modify or 'reinterpret' those beliefs are being disingenuous: it would be more honest of them frankly to abandon the faith as no longer tenable.
To this it must be replied that modem scholarship has shown that the supposed unchanging set of beliefs is a mirage. The phrase may be understood in a looser or a stricter sense. The looser meaning characterizes Christianity as a religion in which man's approach to God is through the physical world rather than by escape from it. In its narrower sense it constitutes a description of Christianity as a faith whose central tenet affirms the incarnation of God in the particular individual Jesus of Nazareth.
Incarnational faith in this sense need not be tied to the specific categories of the Chalcedonian Definition, but it does affirm that Jesus of Nazareth is unique in the precise sense that, while being fully man, it is true of him, and of him alone, that he is also fully God, the Second Person of the co-equal Trinity. The question that I shall be asking in this chapter is whether incarnational faith in this second, more precise sense is in fact essential to Christianity.
Wheeler that the cosmos originated as a thought that became material and tangible and that we participated in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. Vary gives examples of how we may traverse the entire cosmos and visit its worlds in spiritual chariots of thought. This implies that extraterrestrials from distant parts of the cosmos may also travel in spiritual chariots of thought to visit and inhabit Earth.
Vary argues the existence of adjacent realities - the mesostratum reality and the phyiostratum reality - which when taken together may form the basis of a new physics that can explain the interplay of the transcendent, the spiritual and the material.
Vary introduces the idea of the mesostratum - by means of which we may realize and crystalize unique DNA structures, exotic mathematical objects and innovative ideas. Our survival machines are essentially hedonistic while our spirits are essentially altruistic.
This results in a conflict in which the machine may prevail if the spirit is weak or concedes control. World history testifies to this ongoing conflict which persists despite human and societal evolution. Our transcendent consciousness is in this sense unbounded and extraterrestrial. This may not be experimentally provable. It needs to be experienced. Examples of such experiences are abundant in the cited literature. This oneness allows us to materialize our spirits in a vast variety of living entities.
There appears to be a basic spiritual awareness in intelligent, purposeful cells and the trillions of differentiated cells that form our bodies. Freddoso, Oesterle Professor of Thomistic Studies, University of Notre Dame ""According to Vatican II, the chief remedy for modern unbelief is 'to be sought in the proper presentation of the Church's teaching' and 'the witness of a living and mature faith' Gaudium et Spes, In this rich and wise new book, Glenn Siniscalchi offers Christians a complete course in how to acquire both.
It is an honor to recommend a work of apologetics that is so well informed by history and theology. For Pagans and Christians alike, Jesus Through Pagan Eyes offers a provocative portrait ofJesus—as a compassionate, life-affirming, nature-inspired spiritual teacher, freed from the limiting ideology of the Church.
Mark Townsend sets the stage by exploring the historical evidence of who Jesus was as a human being before delving into the realm of metaphor and mythology, the notion of Christ, and the Church's conception of Jesus as Christ. The heart of this unique book lies in the thoughtful and deeply moving collection of stories, essays, and interviews about Jesus from today's most respected Pagan, Wiccan, and Druidic leaders.
Whether you envision Jesus as an ascended master, a human teacher, or a mythic god-man, this remarkable book will introduce you to a Jesus who fits fully into the Pagan imagination. Praise: "Townsend uses Jesus to initiate dialogue, and he does so in way that is accepting and inclusive of many understandings and interpretations of Jesus, his purpose, and his relevance or irrelevance in the religious practices of contemporary Pagans.
Interprets the history of Christology as being defined by a central distinction between those who assign to Christ an absolute role and those who do not. Wildman theology, Boston U. He claims that modest Christologies are more faithful to the actual history of Christological development than are absolutist ones, and that the absolutist view can be shown to be incongruous with much that we have come to know about human history and the cosmos.
Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc. Philosophical Theology and Christian Doctrine surveys and comments on recent work by philosophers of religion in the analytic tradition on the doctrines of the Christian creed. Topics covered include creation, Incarnation, Trinity, salvation and eschatology, and the ultimate future of creation. Comprehensive survey of core Christian doctrines.
This major work, now available in English, is considered by many to be one of the finest and most significant contributions to modern Christology. Preeminent scholar and theologian Ingolf Dalferth argues for a radical reorientation of Christology for historical, hermeneutical, and theological reasons.
He defends an orthodox vision of Christology in the context of a dialogue with modernity, showing why the resurrection, not the incarnation, ought to be the central idea of Christological thinking. His proposal is both pneumatological and Trinitarian, and addresses themes such as soteriology, the doctrine of atonement, and preaching.
Nearly two hundred alphabetically arranged entries cover such topics as Christian worship and prayer, interactions of Christianity with other world faiths, and Christian beliefs. Davis has reason leading faith rather than faith leading reason. The result is that Davis is so committed to the intelligibility of the Incarnation that he resorts to major ad hoc tampering with the concept of God.
Is the doctrine of Incarnation so important for Christians that they should give up the traditional doctrine of God for it? I should think not. Sacrificing necessary attributes is far too high a price to pay in order that a divine-human life on earth can be made intelligible. One is not initially aware of the radical extent to which Davis actually wants to revise the concept of God. Recall that in the Incarnation Jesus will have only those divine and human attributes which are consistent. This means that besides omniscience, at least the other three divine attributes Davis mentions--omnipotence, necessity, and being a creator--will also be declared accidental and therefore absent during the Second Person's time on earth.
Jesus of course is mortal so the divine attribute of immortality will also have to be voluntarily set aside. What is left of God's nature that is not inconsistent with the humanity of Christ?
One immediately thinks of the divine attributes we share with God by virtue of being created in the divine image; but rationality and conscience, the traditional contents of the imago dei, are found in all human beings. Davis does claim Jesus as God could forgive sins, and this again seems to be inconsistent with Jesus as human. The scribes who criticized Jesus' healing of the paralytic in Mark 2 were assuming the Hebraic principle when they declared that only God can forgive sins.
Davis has paid a high price to get God and Jesus together without contradiction, but this sacrifice is all in vain: there is virtually nothing left of the deity of Christ.
Davis certainly complies with Bloesch's insistence that the Incarnation not be viewed as a theophany, but in Davis' Jesus there is very little "deity Augustine has Jesus "holding fast to his own divinity," 27 as the creeds demand, but Davis has the Second Person throwing off divinity in order to conform to the law of contradiction.
Taking the Incarnation literally, and especially trying to make it logically coherent, has led to a veritable theological disaster.
Davis is not a creationist nor a detailed inerrantist, but he is an evangelical rationalist when it comes to the faith-reason question and the coherence of the Incarnation. Davis' claim that his defense of the Incarnation remains within the framework of Chalcedon is puzzling in light of the fact that earlier in his discussion he admits that his formulation is not "classical" but "kenotic.
The word "kenotic" comes from the Greek kenosis and the following hymn from Phillipians is the textual basis for this subordinationist Christology: "Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied echense himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men" Donald Bloesch claims that an acceptable interpretation of kenosis must be found because it is "solidly biblical," but he warns against two heresies which we have just identified: "If the divine attributes were renounced by Christ when he became man, If the humiliated One is not the very same as the Exalted One, then Jesus becomes little more than a demigod who lives on earth.
Michael Green also turns to a kenotic Christology similar to Davis' as this citation indicates: "It means that Jesus had always been one with God; that he voluntarily laid aside those aspects of his deity that would have been impossible to combine with sharing our human conditions This comment is absolutely baffling in light of the concession Green has made in the passage just quoted.
Green's ad hoc tampering with the doctrine of the Incarnation--that Jesus "voluntarily laid aside" certain aspects of his deity--reveals that Green does not have a clear understanding of the divine nature. Like Davis, Green somehow assumes that the divine attributes are accidental and can be jettisoned so that God could become a human being.
In recent years the most radical kenotic Christology has been the "death-of-God" theology of Thomas Altizer. Altizer argues, not very successfully I must stress, that the real meaning of Christianity is found in the total self-emptying of God in the Incarnation.
According to Altizer, the transcendent God of the Hebrew Bible pours out his divinity into the world so that not only is Jesus divine but "every human hand and face" is as well. Altizer fully embraces an Hegelian dialectical method, so it is difficult to tell whether the Incarnation involves the complete humanization of God or the complete divinization of the world.
Although I believe that Altizer would opt for the latter, I would argue that he is actually doing the former. In any event, Altizer believes that the Incarnation is so important that it is indeed worth sacrificing the traditional concept of God for it. Kenotic Christologies do not have to be as radical as Altizer's in order to skew the original intentions of the early fathers. Altizer's view, to my knowledge, is the only one which eliminates the transcendent divine, although we have seen that Davis comes very close to this for Jesus' life on earth.
Other kenotic Christologies speak of the coincidence of a God of glory and a God of humble subservience; or they alternatively propose an omniscient Jesus together with an ignorant Jesus unsure of his destiny.
All sorts of problems immediately appear. First, there is a confusion of predicates just as severe as in the orthodox formulations. Only Davis, who denies to Jesus all divine predicates inconsistent with human ones, escapes this charge. Second, the unity of the nature of the Second Person seems to be directly compromised: are there two consciousnesses in Jesus Christ and perhaps even two wills?
The latter was declared heretical centuries ago. The arguments of this chapter have attempted to show that there are decided advantages to a religion without a literal divine incarnation. First, one avoids the basic logical problems involved in the concept of a man-God. Why should one add unnecessary logical problems to a world-view which atheists already find burdened with logical difficulties? In other words, the cause of theism is enhanced significantly without the myth of God incarnate.
Second, one preserves the seminal discovery of the ancient Hebrews: that God is God and that creatures are creatures; and that one should not mix the nature and attributes of one with the other. Third, one avoids the mythologizing that is inevitable when one wants to speak seriously of a literal God- made-flesh.
The ancient Hebrews were correct: Philo of Alexandria said that "neither is God in human form, nor is the human body God-like"; 30 and Yahweh himself allegedly declared "I am God and not man" Hos. With regard to the Incarnation the evangelical rationalists would like to have more logic and less mystery, but I believe that conservative Christians generally ought to be content with less reason, weaker beliefs, and more faith. My real sympathies, however, lie with the Christian progressives, primarily the authors of The Myth of God Incarnate, who partially justify their actions with a little history lesson: in the 17th Century the church survived when it was forced to give up a three-story, geocentric universe; with the rise of textual criticism Christianity has not only survived but benefited enormously; and most Christians, even some conservative evangelicals, have also managed to come to terms with modern evolutionary theory.
With these major historical adjustments in mind, the Christian liberals see no reason why Christianity cannot give up the myth of God incarnate. Michael Goulder Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, , p. John H. Radmacher and R. Preus Grand Rapids: Zondervan, , p. Mark M. Richard P. Quoted in Bruce A. Augustine, The City of God, bk. I also found a good response from Augustine to Davis' contingent omniscience: " What are we mean wretches that dare presume to limit His knowledge?
Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel. Carousel Previous. Carousel Next. What is Scribd? The Myth of God Incarnate. Uploaded by M. Taylor sets out God's incarnation in Jesus and his interaction with the world.
Particular attention is given to the hypostatic union, the two natures of Christ, the knowledge and obedience of Jesus, the passion and death of Christ, his descent into hell, and resurrection. A central concern of the book is to argue for the perennial importance of ontological principles of Christology inherited from patristic and scholastic authors. However, the book also seeks to advance an interpretation of Thomistic Christology in a modern context. The teaching Aquinas, then, is central to the study, but it is placed in conversation with various modern theologians, such as Karl Barth, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Ultimately the goal of the work is to suggest how traditional Catholic theology might thrive under modern conditions, and also develop fruitfully from engaging in contemporary controversies. According to Hick, Jesus did not teach what was to become the orthodox understanding of him: that he was God incarnate who became human to die for the sins of the world.
0コメント