From: masimo@netcom.com (Michael Maas)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: My last post on Re: Liberal vs. Conservative
Date: 11 Sep 92 04:23:59 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)

In article <Aug.27.03.29.17.1992.5298@athos.rutgers.edu> REXLEX@linac.fnal.gov writes:
>In article <Aug.25.01.29.56.1992.18575@athos.rutgers.edu> masimo@netcom.com
>(Michael Maas) writes:
>>And the bible is just a collection of theological attempts by our
>>Jewish and Christian predecessors and is therefore also only relatively
>>true.
>
>     Did you really say that Mike?  Come on, you're pulling my leg aren't you? 

Certainly I said it, moreover, I've been saying much the same thing all along.
If you haven't noticed it till now, I am concerned, really concerned that
you're not listening.  

>I hate to say this, but I'd like to refer you to my post "Limits of
>Criticism/4."  I just don't think your position is logical.
 
	much about Rosseau and Mill eliminated...

	I have never read either of them.  

>    Was it Sartre that said that the particular (you and me, your ideas and my
>ideas) become absurd without an infinite reference point?  I say that when you
>allow the Bible to become errant, you remove the only objective infinite
>reference point that we have today.  

Balderdash.  There is no objective infinite referrent to which we can directly
refer, only our rather relative perceptions of it.  I don't deny the existence
of the Absolute, only that the bible is, in any sense, it.  I find that to be 
a patently ridiculous claim and one that you continue to make over and over.  
I cannot but think that you have made yourself liege to the bible in the place 
of God.

There are those of us who are willing to open ourselves to the spontaneity of
the world, and to allow God to come to us as God chooses.  There there are those
who wish to force God to come only through the scriptures, through tradition
or through some other sacred cow.  The first group can be said to believe in 
God or to "faithe" (intended to be a verb} in God, the second to believe or
to faithe in a belief about God.  Unfortunately you have chosen the wider road
of the second order.

There is no guarantee that either of these roads will be successful, human
fallibility remains a trap into which individuals can fall on either road,
but our discussion has finally brought home to me this crucial difference
between our two ways of approaching God.

>Again, Schaeffer: If you have no absolute
>by which to judge society, then society is absolute.  

Pure sophistry!  Schaeffer, apparently unable to face up to the fact that
there are no concrete condensed atomic absolute values on which to depend 
decides that the best reason to assert that there must be is that the choice 
one is forced to, if one doesn't believe that, is to accept something else as 
absolute (he has chosen society, but he might just as well have chosen 
something else).  

Let's look at society.  What does the word mean.  As a referrent for someone's 
absolute it will quickly break down because each and every "someone" has a 
different, in a very real ontological and existential sense, society.  In
other words, there is no monolithic society that can take on the quality
of absolute.

What is clearly necessary is to go a step further into what it means to be
a human being.  The best expression of this philosophically I have found is
that of Alfred North Whitehead.  His thought and that of his successors,
is called process philosophy or process theology.  As you might have guessed,
Whitehead et al. think  of ones ongoing interaction with God and the world
as a process.  I personally think of God as entering into every moment (in
the physical sense of momentum, as well as that of time) and attempting to
persuade me to move in the direction of God, which is unavoidably the direction
of love.  I have the choice first of whether or not look for God's presence
in that moment, and secondly having looked or sought, I then have the choice
of acting with or for God or against God.  

Importantly this description is not to be used only for me today, but can be
applied to the history of our tradition as it is found in the bible.  The
bible is a record of those interactions between God and men.  It contains
examples of where men failed to notice God was around as well as when they
reacted and acted in complete conformance with the persuasion of God.

>In your relativism of
>truth (tell me now, how can it be anything else but) you remove the only moral
>guide/judge of the individual/society.  I would take Schaeffers statement and
>bring it a little closer by saying, If you have no absolute by which to judge
>yourself, then you yourself becomes absolute.  You have effectively set
>yourself up as judge and jury of what is true and what is not true in the OT
>and NT.  Don't tell me otherwise.  I know that you're a "greased pig" and would
>have me think otherwise, but when everything is thrown in the kettle and boiled
>down, that is what you're left with.

"Greased Pig"! nice talk.  Anyway yes ultimately what you have said above is
true.  However, you are deep in the woods and unable to see the forest for the
trees, for you, in asserting that the bible is your inerrant measuring stick
have made yourself the absolute just as I have.  I have never denied, this and
have said it in many different ways.  You, seem to have a blind spot, and to
believe that because you consider the bible to somehow be outside of the 
paradigm of subjectivism, that your assertion is more objective than is mine.  
Well, again I say balderdash.  Your stance is every bit as subjective.  The 
difference between you and I is that I accept that and seek through it to find 
God, while you deny it  and force God to come to you in a very limited and 
constrained way.  Moreover, you deny to God God's ability to reveal Godself to 
you outside of a very limited context.  If this were my way I would consider it 
to be unfortunate indeed.  However, I can accept that this may be the best way 
for you; we aren't all the same, and God is capable of working with us 
regardless of the constraints or limitations we put on God by virtue of our own 
weaknesses.  (By the way, I have plenty of these weaknesses -- and constantly
find myself admitting to God that I am a slow learner having to learn the 
same lesson over and over again.)

What I find most disturbing about your theology though is not the theology
itself but the way you and several other conservatives continually want to
push it on the rest of us.  I don't normally go out and try to convert
people to my way of thinking, primarily because only a few people can 
understand the way I think.  But what brought all of this on was a discussion
about the sinful aspects of certain sexual behaviors.  When I see condemnation
arise from such a limited view of God's action in the world, I am compelled
by God to speak out.  In this case, God has revealed to me that the most 
important aspect of relationship between two individuals, or for that matter 
between any number of individuals, is that of love.  Love is or should be 
primary whether it is the marriage bed, lunch with a colleague, purchasing 
cigars from a clerk, or putting your children to bed.  What I heard though 
was a condemnation of a specific type of relationship between two humans based 
not on whether it is a loving relationship but whether or not some other 
distant culture in some other distant time approved of it or not.    

>>Rex, please allow me to point out that when you decide to assert that the
>>scriptures are a "picture of Christ...revealed by God unto salvation..."
>>You are both allowing your presuppositions and making or taking a great 
>>leap of faith.  There is no objective external evidence that leads you
>>to take this step, it is purely subjective.  I don't claim that this is
>>inappropriate, in fact I believe it is unavoidable.  But you appear to be
>>either claiming or assuming otherwise.  
>
>No, that not what I believe, so I hope that isn't what is coming across.  Lets

Rex, how can you say that it isn't what you believe.  It is almost an exact
copy of what you said.  My only point about this this that it is a subjective
position.

Much mostly irrelevant stuff about worldview, metaphysics and epistemology
deleted.

>Actually, we are caught here.  So long as we live, we will live either the
>examined or the unexamined life.  It is my the assumption the former is
>preferred and yet "in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge
>{results in} increasing pain" as the "Preacher" claims.
 
My first reaction is to say "yours an examined life, you've got to be kidding."
but on reflection, I do believe that you have examined the possiblity of living
an examined life, and pretty much rejected it in favor of a non-spontaneous
rigidly constrained by an external theological schema kind of life.  Now it 
may be that you consider that to be an examined life, but I don't think that
is what the author of the statement meant by it.  

>
>>A stance of scriptural inerrancy basically requires you to assert that God
>>did so without even investigating the alternative.  
>
>No, that's not true.  What is true is that I don't have to CONTINUALLY
>investigate it.  
 
This is true insofar as you have investigated it and rejected it.  However
the alternatives are far too multifarious and changing for one to investigate
them in a whole life. This is again, what I find most disturbing, the road
you have chosen cuts off so many opportunities to experience God in so
many places in your own life in favor of making your life conform to this
rigid box that is defined by scriptural inerrancy.

>If you say "God, Godself, and God's
>relationship to me are enough" you're left with nothing but subjectivity.  God?
> Which God?  God's relationship to me!  What is more subjective.  

Again, this is precisely the point, you and I are subjects to God and God is
a subject to us.  This is the I-Thou relationship spoken of so eloquently
by Buber.  God is a personal God in the most intimate and existential sense
and the last thing God wants is for you to put God on some kind of sovereign
pedestal.  

>This whole
>thing could hinge on the fact of whether or not you're feeling good about
>yourself on this particular day.  

An interesting point.  I can feel bad about myself, and I can go to God with 
that on a personal basis, whether or not I successfully open myself to God in 
my misery, I will still believe that God is there waiting for me.  I am 
willing to live with this, and in fact cannot truly live without it.  I think
that you would largely agree with this.  However, I come to that faith through
my belief in God and in God's proven ability to heal and love me directly.  I
would expect you to maintain that you know this because it says so in the bible.

Again, what is important here is not our relationship to God, but what we do
with our understanding of that relationship in the world.  Let take for example
a meeting with someone who we know needs to realize that they are loved by God.
Let us say that this individual is a non-Christian.  My theology depending
directly on God will allow me to comfort this person without any preconditions
about the bible.  I will be free to do as God calls me to do in that situation.
Someone more of your conservative bent, I assume, will be constrained to relate 
to that person in terms of the inerrant beliefs in scripture they hold to be 
so important, and rather than being willing and able to meet that person where 
they are, will try to move them into their own conservative paradigm, one that 
is completely foreign to the individual in need of help, and one that will 
almost certainly result in obstructing God's love rather than aiding it.  

>This is where Xianity is NOT existential.
>You're saying X is true.  What gives you the authority to say absolutely, that
>I am wrong for saying -X is true? 

You have the right, as I've said everything we say is relative.  You are the
one who wants to claim the ground exclusively, not I.

What I have said is that there is nothing that can be said that is in
any ultimate sense true.  That is, God and God's nature, are ultimately 
not languagable.  As a consequence what you or I say is bound to be relative
by virtue of its incompleteness.

If you say -X is true you are probably ok.  But what you far more frequently
say is that X is true.  The former way of speaking is apophatic and the latter
cataphatic.  Generally cataphatic statements about God fail due to their
incompleteness.  I thought that you agree with me that God and God's nature
are not languagable.  If so, are you not contradicting yourself when 
attribute the characteristic of inerrancy to the bible?  This follows because
the bible is written by men, all of whom were stuck in the same relativistic
position in which we find ourselves and no more or less capable of understanding
God in any objectively true sense.  If you argue, as I suspect you will, that
God guided the hands of these writers in a more significant way than he
guides us today, I can only assert that such a statement is only a belief
and that there is no objective substantive support for it.  Such an assertion,
on your part would be, I repeat, no less subjective than those that I make
about God.  Again, the difference being that I accept the subjective label
while you appear to deny it.

I'm calling an end to my participation in this string.  I'm sure we'll meet
again on other issues, but I'm getting tired of repeating myself and I imagine
you are as well.

Mike Maas masimo@netcom.com