From: altheimm@nextnet.csus.edu (Murray Altheim)
Subject: Re: Hitler and Christianity
Keywords:  Christology, Fundamentalism
Organization: California State University: Sacramento
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 00:11:57 GMT

In article <bszu8q.m2p@wang.com> smayo@wang.com (Scott Mayo) writes:
>cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>>I honestly think that christianity needs to undergo a long, hard period of
>>self-reflection and examination to find out why bigots are so attracted
>>to it.
>
>I think Christiandom need to do a *lot* of things. It is in no position to
>rewrite its original creeds, but I for one don't think those creeds are the
>problem.  A little clarification of what its creeds *are* would go a long way
>(and that, originally, is what a fundamentalist was - someone who only
>held the core creeds of Christianity. Boy is *that* term lost forever.)

Scott, I appreciate your lucid and reasonable attitude in many of your posts,
and while I am a long way from calling myself an evangelical Christian, I
thought I'd add a comment or two, since I just finished one responding to
the thread about the appearances of the Virgin Mary in which I recommended
a few books on Christology. As you are probably aware, both the Roman 
Catholic and Protestant faiths have had to backtrack a lot in the past 
few decades, as research has begun to find where the origins of Christian
dogma end and the beginnings of Church progroms begin (not to suggest there
is some defineable "line"). For example, there is fair agreement among most
religious scholars inside and outside the Church that Jesus did not consider
himself the Jewish messiah; that the title "Christ" was probably not 
applied to Jesus of Nazareth until many years after his death; that he may
have been much more of a political figure than was previously believed;
that much of the dogma surrounding the Jesus cult may have been derived 
from Essene doctrine coupled with contemporary eschatological beliefs, etc.

I don't believe it is in the best interests of the church to promote these
ideas within its clergy or laity, insofar as the foundations of the Church
are founded on Christ's (read "not Jesus'") assertion of his divinity. As
D.H. Lawrence points out in his book on the Apocalypse of John, the church
came to a crossroads when it was forced to accept or reject Revelation, in
that it had to decide whether Jesus Christ was the God of Love, or that
he was the Judge and was "poised with an axe at the root of the earth."

While the elements of the God of Love still can be found in the New Testa-
ment, the need for political legitimacy and power drove the church leaders
to accept Revelation and steer a course of control, whereby modifications
and "further revelations" (such as the pseudo-Pauline letters) were used
to justify political and social movements within the Church (and Christian
society), such as the position (or lack thereof) of women in the church. 

Note that the first person Jesus appeared to after his resurrection was not
a man, but Mary Magdelene, who has a gospel named after her that was never
included in the New Testament (see any publication regarding the Gnostic 
Gospels or the Nag Hammadi texts).

I guess to summarize what has become a *long* post, most of what I've read
gives a pretty dim view of our ability to recover the true words and life
of Jesus of Nazareth. The Aramaic (Syriac) version of Bible, the Peshitta,
may bring to attention some of the distortions of the Roman Catholic church
when dealing with the original texts, but the most authentic extant texts
we have are in the Greek, sort of the same difference between the original
Aramaic as between English and Chinese. I think scholarship can still learn
a great deal, but "truth" is a very relative term in this field of endeavor.

What I have learned lends me to believe that the actual life and teaching
of Jesus the Nazarene was either completely inconsequential to history (as
apart from what the Church did), OR that he was a truly transcendant,
and profoundly revolutionary political/philosophical/spiritual leader who
was for radical consciousness revolution, completely against the formation
of churches, and probably an incredibly more important and _thrilling_
person than the church has recorded. In response to what could be considered
damning archaelogical/linguistic/etc. scholarly evidence, contemporary
Christianity would love to embrace the latter concept of the life of Jesus,
but in reality we have almost NO foundation on which to build a scientific
justification for this argument.

If we want to descend (or ascend, depending on your orientation) to the 
level of belief and faith, then one can argue anything one wants.  As I've
promoted before, it is a mistake to USE science to attempt to justify a
spiritual belief, but IMO I don't think a belief is valid when science is
able to _disprove_ it empirically -- maybe science cannot explain or 
predict it, but it shouldn't contradict it. And many creedal beliefs have
now been shown to be Church-based, not Jesus-based.

I realize you must only accept this as my opinion, but there it is...

Blessings to you and yours,

Murray

-- 
Murray M. Altheim      "Ils ont l'orteil de Bouc, & d'un Chevreil l'oreille,
Instructional Consultant    La corne d'un Chamois, & la face vermeille
CSU, Sacramento          Comme un rouge Croissant: & dancent toute nuict
altheimm@csus.edu       Dedans un carrefour, ou pres d'une eau qui bruict."