DM,
I have long hoped that theologians like Cupitt and other members of the
Jesus Seminar would have some impact on Christianity. Christianity today
seems weighted down by its reflexive reaction to Darwinism in the form of
inerrancy. It is a turtle retracting into its hard safe shell where light
and reason need not intrude on its peace of mind.
A couple of people you might find interesting are Steven Mitchell who is
something of a new ager. In his "Gospel According to Jesus" he follows
Jefferson's example and edits the four gospels in a very interesting way.
Reading it you get a better feeling for the wisdom of Jesus.
Marcus Borg also talks about Jesus as a "spirit person" along the lines
of
Buddha or Lao Tsu. He sees him as one having an intimate and personal
relationship with the Father. For me, Borg helped show the way for
Christianity to actually make some sense by striping away the more
superstitious aspects and getting to the really important parts. His 1997
book "Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings" put the words or Jesus and
the
Buddha side by side and blurs the distinctions between them.
The real problem in the pews is that once you strip away the superstition
the pews tend to empty. The decline of the mainline denominations really
resulted in large measure from their more liberal theology. They provided
what Time magazine once called a theological justification for
agnosticism.
The rise of the religious right filled in the gap by ignoring the head
and
appealing directly to the heart and gut.
Krimel
Hi all MOQers
Just been reading Nigel Leaves book about the UK ordained theology
Cambridge
fellow Don Cupitt called Odyssey on the Sea of Faith. Cupitt made a TV
programme called the Sea of Faith in 1984 that introduced me to Nietzsche
and Jung and intellectual history generally. Don is an interesting
theologian, who many consider as being an ordained atheist. He describes
himself these days as a post-modern thinker and as a post-Christian
creative
religions thinker. Check him out on WIki if you like. In the US he is
associated with the Jesus seminar and the Weststar institute. He is
interested in Buddhism and anti-essentialist thinking and calls himself a
non-realist. Anyway, here are some quotes from Don given in Nigel Leaves
book. There are some very interesting points that seem very close to the
MOQ. The first two from his book Mysticism after Modernism, the third
from
The Religion of Being (that is largely about Heidegger and is very
interesting and MOQ relevant) and the 4th quote is from a letter to Nigel
Leaves. Cupitt is very strong on the value of change or DQ, and how the
linguistic turn fits in with MOQ friendly notions of experience. For
Cupitt
religious experience should be found at the leading edge of
now-experience.
Anyway see for yourselves what he has to say below. By the way, despite
the
below, he is disinclined to think the word god is very useful these days.
Once again the really out-there talk of god sounds like talk of DQ to me,
especially when theologians even question whether the word god is really
a
very good one to be using.
David M
"The older "platonic" kind of mysticism was usually claimed to be
noetic -
by which I mean that people saw religious experience as a special
supernatural way of knowing something Higher that was itself
correspondingly
super-natural . . .But now, with the end of metaphysics and two-worlds
dualism . . .we should give up the idea that mysticism is a special
wordless
way of intuitively knowing the things of another and higher world . . .
The
mysticism of secondariness is mysticism minus metaphysics, mysticism
minus
any claim to special or privileged knowledge, and mysticism without any
other world than this one. We now get . . . that feeling of eternal
happiness, not by contrast with, but directly off everything that is
merely
relative, secondary, derived, transient, sensuous and only skin-deep. We
have quite forgotten the old hunger for what is basic, rock-solid,
certain
and unchangeable: we are content with fluidity and mortality . . .
Relativism should not be a bogey to us: it is true, and religiously
speaking
it is good news . . . Why shouldn't we just give up the idea that there's
something wrong with being secondary and fleeting?"
"Esse est deus is Eckhart's formula; Be-ing is God. Here, I suggest, we
should (with Martin Heidegger perhaps) locate Eckhart's idea of God.
Be-ing,
life, the outpouring play of secondariness in the Now-moment: that is as
close as language, or we, can ever get to God . . . We experience
everything, totalized into the Now-moment; eternal happiness in the solar
efflux of pure contingency. All eternity, here and now . .. All we have
to
do is to get our own relation to existence right. Just get on the leading
edge of the Now-moment and wait very still and attentive, until you find
yourself beginning to surf it . . . Eckhart has found a way of writing
religious happiness."
By Being Heidgger means:
"...pure groundless fleeing contingency, already passing away even as it
arrives, which is why Being does resemble God in allowing us only to see
its
"back parts." Capital-B Being is being that is prior to any
determination,
pure transience. It cannot be described in language and it cannot be
grasped
in thought; but it is always presupposed by language, and it sustains
language. It gives itself to us, and it emerges within language. We know
nothing but the field of view, the field of our own experience. This
field
is differentiated by language into a field of Be-ing in beings. So Being
comes out in our world, the world of language, the only world."
"On non-language, everyone seems to find the point hard to grasp. I've
argued that all our thinking is transacted in language . . . Therefore
all
our apprehension of the world is language-mediated. But in that case
what's
the difference between a complete description of A and A's actual
existence?
We can't say in words, so we use the non-words "non-language" of Being
(under erasure). Being (under erasure) is prior to the distinction
between
Plato's timeless Being and temporal becoming. So it may be written as
Be(com)ing. It is the indescribable, gentle, constant-yet-only-contingent
forthcomingness of everything. Being (under erasure) gives itself to
language. Being (under erasure) is not a thing, not even a proper noun,
but
it deserves religious respect . . .It is not an Almighty Lord, as God
was.
It is immanent and ubiquitous. It supports our language as hot air
supports
a balloon . . . we do indeed need a sort-of-idea of something out there
beyond all the equations; but it must remain indescribable and purely
immanent."
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