peter krey’s web site

For maturity is the integrity in and through inter-relationships, which makes it possible for each individual member of a group to be him or herself in togetherness and in togetherness each to be him or herself.  (Paul Lehman)

While in psychoanalysis, maturity is self realization through self acceptance, Christian maturity is self acceptance through self-giving. (Paul Lehman)

Self mastery: the battle we fight with ourselves is the toughest battle we will ever fight and it is the sweetest victory we will ever win. (My father often said this.)

The tone of a classroom: There are two kinds of order. We do not want the conscious order that ends in respectability, but the unconscious order that looks like chaos on the top, but is the hustle and bustle of real learning. (Sylvia Ashton Warner)

We do not want uniformity but unity. A false habit of mind sets off the individual against the group. True unity differentiates, it does not confound. (to paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin)

Comparative Religions – Spring Semester, Los Medanos College

Dr. Peter Krey

Introduction January 18^th through 20^th 2003.

The ecumenical movement brought many Christians from different traditions together. Many times, in my ministry in Brooklyn, the police brought clergy together, New York’s finest, by picking us clergy up in their vans to bring us to their meetings dealing with intractable city problems. When Rabbis and Imams were also present it was an inter-faith meeting. When only Christian denominations were together, then it was ecumenical.^[1]

In one of the meetings, a lay leader, i.e., non-clergy, compared the church to a coffee: Chock Full O’Nuts. We all laughed. He later ran off with the treasury.

In that ecumenical meeting, hearing Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic priests and Protestant clergy talk, it occurred to me that they were representatives of former Greek and Roman empires whose values their churches continued to keep alive. I later came upon this thought in Thomas Hobbes:

If a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.^[2]

But to be attached too closely to the secular times seems to some religious people to take away human freedom. Why not live out of previous cultures in present circumstances, if the values cherished are positive, that is, if Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox actually do so?

Reinhold Niebuhr speaks of the need for personal or individual transcendence in several of his books. Why not live in Western culture out of Eastern values? Why not be Caucasian and live out of African-American ethos, or vice versa? Some people are even in the body of a man, but want to live out of the life of a woman, or vice versa. They sometimes even surgically and with the help of hormonal treatments change their bodies to transcend, I should rather say, change, their gender into the opposite one.

Reinhold Niebuhr is far more conservative and does not refer to what is happening here on the edge and margins of our culture. But he says:

Part of the anatomy of human self-hood is to be able to stand beyond and outside his [or her]self and his [or her] communities.^[3]

Niebuhr means that a human being has to be free to transcend the given community s/he is part of. Religions may provide ways to participate in such freedom. He speaks about the “transcendent dimension within the human soul” in one of his later books.^[4]

His concept of transcendence helps me, a practicing and deeply rooted Christian of the Lutheran denomination, as traditions are called here, to learn about and understand other religions. But the same concept also more basically explains why many people feel unfulfilled, duck-taped to and caught in, an impersonal, depersonalizing secular order.

Niebuhr also provides a criterion for determining whether religion is positive of negative in the place just cited:

It was a mistake of the religious ages to regard the religious dimension^[5] as good in itself and an equal mistake of the secular age to regard it as purely the source of evil. It can be both destructive and creative. It is creative when an ultimate norm or value is set in judgment over the historically relative and ambiguous achievements of [hu]man existence. It is destructive and a source of evil if a simple identification is made between the ultimate norm and the norms and values, which we cherish.^[6]

There are huge gyroscopes on ships that keep them stable in the stormy waves – in the same way, the longer compass and the gyroscopes of stability for society are sometimes provided by religions to people and cultures. What about states? Question: What happens when the deep cultural strain is merged with the state?

To repeat: Often we fear to study other religions because we are afraid our own beliefs and convictions will become undermined. The concept of transcendence can also help us here. We are free to investigate other religions and do not have to forsake our rootedness in our own religion. It even becomes our experience that it takes knowing other religions to understand our own.

And we can investigate these religions from many different scholarly stand-points:

± phenomenology of religions: the source of religion is an encounter with the holy, {Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)} and the holy is the numinous, while the manifestations by which religions display themselves are their phenomenology. The religious phenomena that undergo rigorous descriptive observation and analysis (via Edmund Husserl’s method) are authentic records, (sacred texts, symbols and doctrine), (piety, social structure, and their idea of the holy), historic settings, career of the founder, saint, or philosopher. Thus the phenomenology of religion is the objective analysis of religious essence (the numinous) as it displays itself on the world stage.^[7] “Religious phenomenology demonstrates the primitive, folk, and world religions live through the stress and strain of interaction with law and ethics. They are quickened through ritual, social change, and historical interpenetrations.”^[8]

± Comparative religions: religions studied side by side and compared to highlight their similarities and differences. “Only what has been understood can be compared.”^[9] Seeing the ways that various religions solve the same social and historical problems confronting human beings help bring out the particular nature or essence of each one. For such a study of religions to succeed one needs sympathy for things that are religious, personal religious experience, and impartiality.^[10] Actually to understand a religion an inner participation and commitment are also a prerequisite.^[11] For example in comparing religions the teachings of one are often compared with the reality of another. Doctrine ought only be compared with doctrine, however, ideal with ideal, and reality with reality.”^[12]

± history of religions: a religion can be studied as it progresses and changes through history, from its founding to it most modern manifestations. In doing so, the historian does not need to limit his or her study to one religion, but can trace the origins and interactions of the world religions, starting with the most ancient e.g., the Hindu, to the latest, e.g., Islam, or Protestantism, if you will. (Karl Jaspers has an Axial Theory of religions, where Protestantism – with Luther and the Reformation -is considered an early modern breakthrough into the numinous after Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, and Mohammed.)

± sociology of religions: Robert Bellah theorizes that

there are three approaches to religion:

1) the cognitive propositional

2) the expressive experiential

Using a Noam Chomsky expression, there is a deep structure to all religions and there are surface structures. (Perhaps phenomenology of religion tries to get at this distinction with the numinous and the phenomenal.)

3) the cultural linguistic

Religion is a whole way of life, according to Bellah. Learning religion is like learning a language with a whole grammar into which one is inducted over a long period of time. Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred creating a moral community. This moral community is critical. Private religion violates moral community. [A constant theme of Bellah.] This definition of religion marginalizes private religion.

See a sample lecture of Robert Bellah using a cultural-linguistic approach: “Being-consciousness and Deficiency-consciousness.”

± theology of religions: such a study views other religions from a Christian theological stand-point, pointing out that a scientific approach to religion is doomed to miss the essence of religions. Schlette argues there is special sacred history and general sacred history of the non-Christian religions and they are willed and sanctioned by God with their negative as well as positive elements. They encounter God’s divine guidance and presence and are embraced in God’s universal salvific will. The non-Christian religions are ways of salvation, while the Christians walk the extraordinary way, whose election is for the sake of other religions. Christianity is not a superior way of salvation, but an epiphany for other religions. The ways lead through the darkness into the way through clear light. (I might add to Schlette that some of Christianity still needs to muddle its way into clearer light as do other religions.) Schlette presents an interesting way of one religion affirming the participation of the other religions in salvation history. As in the case of Judaism, other religions are like an Old Testament to the New Testament of Christianity.

± anthropology of religions: the many methods used by this discipline make such a study unwieldy. Interestingly enough, one study speaks of making a “hiérography” of a religion, much the way anthropologists do an ethnography of a culture.^[13]

± Philosophy of Religions: religions as grist for the mill of metaphysics, except that the truth question would be unavoidable, where other “scientific” studies might avoid evaluation and attempt neutrality. Everything in religions is submitted to philosophical questioning. In an important sense, this discipline is like the theology of religions, if Greek Philosophy is understood as an alternative to Christianity. Jaspers argues that Greek Philosophy also belongs to the great religions launched in the Axial Age.

A question: I wonder if there is a psychology of religions and if one might be possible from a Jungian, if not a Freudian perspective. Although, Freud’s Future of an Illusion need not preclude a psychoanalytic investigation of religions.

---

^[1] Οiκoυμέvη: “ecumenical” the civilized world, social responsibility for the whole world, locally as well as globally. œkumenical, from oiκoς i.e., oikos house, household, kingdom.

^[2]Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962), p. 500.

^[3]For example in The Structure of Nations and Empires, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959). P. 290.

^[4]The Self and the Dramas of History, (New York: University Press of America, Inc., 1983), p. 240. He even claims that the social dimension of the self has to be allowed for the transcendence of an individual self even if it seems irrelevant to any sense of meaning the community may have. (Ibid.)

^[5]Niebuhr writes that “The sense of the ultimate can be defined as the religious dimension of existence” (P. 290).

^[6]Ibid. Paul Tillich’s great rule of the ambiguity of all human phenomena, especially includes religions. Tillich is a great Christian theologian, who believed Luther’s theology should be translated into modern language and symbols. God is the ground of being. Faith is ultimate concern. Justification by grace is acceptance of the unacceptable, etc.

^[7]Edward J. Juri, Phenomenology of Religion, (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1963), p. vii-viii, 3, and 293.

^[8]Ibid., p. 4.

^[9]Heinz Robert Schlette, Towards a Theology of Religions, (London: Burns & Oates, 1966),p. 46.

^[10]Ibid.

^[11]Note how much Huston Smith answers these strictures.

^[12]Ibid., p. 131. Schlette is citing T. Ohm in an endnote.

^[13]Schlette, p. 46 and n.130.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sociology of Religion: Robert Bellah’s Lecture

Deficiency Cognition         Being Cognition

manipulation                 Participation

partial                      Total

subject/object split         Identity

means                        End in itself

standard time                Non spatial, non-temporal

University of California at Berkeley, Sociology 112

Robert N. Bellah

Parallel to the theorizing of Alfred Schutz on daily reality we have the thinking of Abraham Maslow concerning Deficiency cognition and Being cognition.^[1] In the latter what he describes as peak experiences come close to what tribal people experienced as “the felt whole”. (See the chart.) Maslow would argue that D – experience characterizes the anxiety of daily life. It is a mode of relating to the world in a partial reality, a deficiency reality. One is not concerned with how things are, but how to use them. One is concerned with manipulation, even of people. Things and people are used to get ahead. In deficiency reality the full immediacy of being in the presence of anything is absent or severely limited. In contrast to this, Maslow speaks of B-cognition in which participation is predominant, that is, “being with” – and being with is its own end. This is the classical ideal type which predominates in B-cognition. Not how to use, but to be open to totality has primacy.

D-cognition has a complete split between subjects and objects. I am clarifying that I am me and not you. I am an independent person relative to anyone. Thus parents cannot nor can you tell me what to do. This goes into our very self definition.

In B-cognition the subject/object split is for the moment abandoned. If I am really with you this moment, the distinction between you and me is not gone, but not salient. In D-cognition there is a great sense of difference from the Other. I am me! Such an emphasis makes a big deal about the Other. But for Being cognition there is no other.

Another distinction between B and D cognition is that in the latter one looks at things as means, because one always looks ahead. But in the former, the means is its own end. We are a very means oriented culture and hence we are very manipulated, while also being keyed into standard time and space. B-cognition is a-spatial and atemporal. Eternity is not endless existence in time but out of time. Something going on forever and ever is not heaven, but the worst nightmare. First Maslow did not have the question of religion in mind at all. B-cognition can occur in all kinds of places. He called them peak experiences, and occurring in athletic feats they can rival contemplative graces. Joe Montana reports entering a “zone.” He reports no longer hearing the crowd – all become one. The difference between player and game, dance and dancer disappears. The minute you worry what will happen next it is gone and you are out of the zone. This is an experience of the felt whole. The feeling proceeds through participation.

Is this experience in sports the same as a religious one? Richardson speaks about feeling a finite whole, while in religion one feels an infinite whole. But is there really a distinction? A finite whole is like the immensity of the ocean, or the presence of another. Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan of the eighteenth century spoke of an infinite whole. -There came into my soul and was as it were, diffused through it, a sense of divine being. How excellent that Being was. And wrapped with him in heaven. And he wanted that excellence to remain his whole life. He continued about feeling the general rightness of all things, and perfect being.

In life dominated by deficiency cognition things are not that great. The consideration is how to respond to the next challenge. This is the expressive experiential point of view (See p. 1 above) with cultural definition.

Another peak experience comes from P. Havel, the current president of Check Republic, who had it when he was in prison. It is recorded in his Letters from Prison.

On a hot cloudless day Havel gazed into the crown of a gorgeous tree that stretched over the fences alongside the watchtowers of his prison. Its branches quivered in the fragile sky. And he went into a vision – all his memories became co-present with an acceptance of the inevitable sovereignty of being. (That is merely the gist of a much longer description of his vision.) Being is one of the definitions of God. Havel felt he was trembling at the abyss of meaning, standing at the edge of the finite. I was struck by the love, he said, I don’t know from whom or from what. He described participation, rightness of things, personal well being.

These experiences are often expressed aesthetically in music or poetry. Wallace Stevens brings in an awakening: Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake, to watch a definition become certain. A cock crows on the left and all is well. Not the balances we achieve, but the balances that happen, moments of awakening, sit at the edge of sleep. Behold the academics as structures in the mist. (These notes should identify his poem so that it could be more accurately transcribed.)

Is there a method to achieve enlightenment?

Sit in order to be enlightened and you will not be. It cannot be manipulated. The sense of enlightenment comes or doesn’t come by itself. You cannot force it. These are trance states. Sometimes dances or bodily movements induce trance states. People in sports don’t seek them, it suddenly comes to them. Quiet meditation and prayer are the background for it often. Taking the Eucharist can be shattering, an incredible experience – when you know you are the body of Christ. Certain things set it up and make it more likely. Samsara is the world of suffering. Even in the world of deficiency something can break.

Can it be achieved through morality?

Morality has a prohibitive and punitive aspect, but also a positive aspect, an attraction to the good component. The former is quintessential to the problem. But for Plato beauty equaled the good. Morality is constraint but also attraction to good. Morality has a special relation to Being cognition.

In B-cognition realities come together. Objects can have different realities. Havel saw the world tree. But it could be just another tree. An object can have another meaning from the one it has in the world of working. Communion bread and wine, for example. A symbol has an ordinary meaning in one realm and can have another meaning in another realm. In the world of daily life we are constantly surrounded by symbols or potential symbols: a tree, a room, a teacher, can mean a lot of other things. Part of us thinks about it in our consciousness. We can train ourselves to become sensitive, but it is of itself. It cannot be manipulated.

Maslow himself had a B-cognition as the Dean of Brandeis University. (Brandeis is located in a suburb of Boston.) A procession was going to take place, and he was expected to attend in full regalia. He had always avoided these processions as silly rituals. We often say, “That is just a ritual.” But without rituals we would not be human. He was the dean, so he could not very well avoid the exercise. As the procession began to move, he suddenly saw it stretch out before him. He saw Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Freud and others before him, all in their place until he himself took his place. Behind him were all his students, and his students’ students yet unborn. He experienced an apprehension of the academic procession of academic learning extending backward through time and space, seeing the real basis of the university. If we no longer glimpse that sacred foundation, then it is gone. There is no wholesale knowledge outlet for the consumer society, no ideology factory, but a community devoted to the search for meaning, and if only for a job, all is lost.

Kenneth Burke makes ‘beyond’ into a verb, and speaks of ‘beyonding.’  It is symbolic transcendence. There is something deeper, something truer. One can be trapped in the world of dreadful immanence, totally captivated in the deficiency world with no way out. Like Weber one can be trapped in the iron cage. Sole response can be determined by desire and need. Thus one needs beyonding. One needs to break the dreadful fatalities of this world of realities. To hold everyday reality as the paramount reality is a dangerous assumption. It is just a necessary one for a time. But those locked into this time fail to overcome the deficiencies, and thus ceremonies are necessary, practices whose goods are internal to them. They are not means to an end. It is not what we achieve, but what happens. Meals, sports, concerts, the Sabbath, day of rest, rituals, Time, in part, out of time, with the anxieties of life temporarily allayed. A break seems to be essential.

---

^[1]Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1968).

Several weeks ago I finished reading Moltmann’s, Sein Name ist Gerechtigkeit (His Name is Righteousness). I hope it gets translated into English soon. I translated a whole lot just taking notes, but I’m pretty sure the Gütersloher Verlagshaus (publishing house) has its own translator.

I’ve been struggling to write a book about performative declarations and God’s continuous creativity via language. John Searle underscores facts to such an extent in his work, The Construction of Social Reality, that he even emphasizes their existence as “brute facts” in the external reality of his naturalism.

I just read a reflection by Ronald E. Burmeister, “On the Atoll,” in (The Lutheran: January, 2009; page 3) that underscored Moltmann’s contention that nature is not just replete with facts but with signs that amount to speech directed to us. Climbing up an atoll in a gale, a 300 foot high column of rock in the Arctic region, Burmeister felt  a spiritual stirring. Struggling up to the summit represented all of life’s struggles. The sentinel-like rock stood for God’s everpresence, the undulating green tundra for God’s grace, the waters for baptism, the perspective from the summit, God’s promise to be with us always.

Compare my song “Route 128″ with that. Nature’s “resounding sound makes the Word abound, so naturally.” The physicality of nature matches the contour of the physical sound of words, and then their speech is heard. Also read my poem “Mount Chocorua.” It speaks of climbing into maturity.

Then look at Psalm 19:

The heavens are telling the glory of God

and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.

Day by day pours out speech

and night to night whispers knowledge.

There is no language nor are there words,

in which their voice is not heard (verses 1-3).

I found this note I penned after reading the section on Psalm 19 in Artur Weiser’s commentary on The Psalms (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1962): “The creation speaks and was also created by what God has spoken. It utters words and was uttered into existence by words.”

I wrote those words a long time ago, but now Moltmann has revived my attention to it and I see how it fits in with my performative declarations book.

Here are my comments and some notes that I took out of Moltmann’s book:

The speech of nature is directed to people (page 175). We divide and conquer nature [via science and torture it for its secrets]. But it is in its composition, it is in its organization as the Book of Nature, by means of our participatory grasp of it in the highest culture and spirit of humans,  that it speaks to us. [This requires] our companionship and connection with nature. We want to know nature and become one with it, connect with it and participate in it. [The scientific enterprise began with the pre-Socratics.] The point, however, is not to understand nature via natural explanations, but through awe and amazement. [I remember reading about Max Weber, Matthew Arnold,  and so many others, who grieved having lost the enchantment which science had taken away from them.] The act of nature toward us is like speech, which is meaningful to us.

As persons we need a relationship with nature, which is like the relationship of our body and soul. “Every environment is filled with meaningful symbols…every meaningful symbol of a subject is at one and the same time a meaningful symbol of the personal/ bodily form (Gestalt) of the subject.”

“Dis-covery or Ent-deckung in German has the same meaning as “revelation” (page 176). [I have often struggled with the distinction between discovery versus invention; for example, was logic discovered or invented by Aristotle?] Moltmann writes, “[for discovery] its object is presupposed, while in an invention, it is produced.”

The genetic code presents us with a universe of signs for interpretation or meaning. “In the human understanding of nature, it becomes conscious of itself.”

[We need a] theological hermeneutic of nature (page 178). Nature is a book whose signs we can learn to read. Like the Holy Book, nature is just as intelligible as the spirit is rational. This metaphor [the Book of Nature], understands the language of nature and calls the “signatures” of nature legible writing. Theologically speaking, all creatures are creations of divine words: God spoke, “Let there be light and there was light.”

As I began reading page 179, I wrote: “Genetic codes could be considered biological performatives, producing the organism that they are expressing, but their language, their speech acts are those of God, the Divine Logos.” To continue my thoughts, then Searle’s brute facts, in so far that they are biological organisms, are also language dependent.

Moltmann continues on page 179 with all the historical, theological concepts of the Book of Nature. Nicholas of Cusa felt that sensual perception was appropriate for nature: “Things are for the book of the senses. In them the wishes of Godly reason are described in sensual pictures.”

He quotes the abbot, Anthony, the third century monk, “My book is created nature, one always at my disposal should I want to read about God’s works.”

Basel the Great thought that our reason was created so perfectly by God that we, “through the beauty of creatures, as if they were letters and words, could read the wisdom and providence of God.”

Augustine called the book of nature, the book of the universe. So alongside scripture, we have the book of nature, universe, and more seldom, the book of creation.

Maximus the Confessor held, “The scriptures and nature were the two garments of Christ, which lit up in his transfiguration, his humanity [for] nature and his divinity[for] scripture.”

The Celtic, John Scotus Eriugena, considered the two books, theophanies, one read by means of letters, the other by forms.

Averroës [influenced by Aristotle] separated faith and reason; he stood against the inner harmony of faith and reason brought to expression by the two books, the Holy Scriptures and the Book of Nature.  [The Holy Book for Averroës would, of course, have been the Qur'an.]

The Book of Nature was always read in the light of scriptures. Through natural understanding of God one became wise but not saved; through understanding revelation one became saved, but sadly, not wise. The direct understanding of revelation founded another communion with God from the indirect understanding of nature, because every understanding founds a community (Gemeinschaft). We can also reverse [this perspective] and read the scriptures in the light of the book of nature. [I have always given an historical account of the progress of science. Back then in the time when the creation story was written, the elements were earth, wind, water, and fire. Now our table of elements has 112 from Helium all the way to Lawrencium.]

Every culture is a universe of signs (page 180) and for its survival dependent on their hermeneutic of interpretation. The stars that we see could have existed in the past and could be long gone and deep in the background there is still the Big Bang. We see the presence of the past. In the building of matter and living forms a memory of nature has accrued, which can be called wise, because connections hostile to life have been thwarted and life-friendly connections were furthered and advanced. There is a history of nature and there are new ways of scientific thinking. Culture and nature inform each other because the cultural code is part of the natural code. The way scientific technical methods have dominated nature has made this historical memory illegible (page 181).

Ultimately modern science belongs to the culture of humanity. Science is culturally conditioned to the highest measure, even to Jewish and Christian religion, as any comparative study with Asian [scientific enterprises] easily demonstrates.

[Now this helps me counter John Searle's emphasis on facts, even brute facts!] We can read the book of nature, only if we do not register it as a world of facts, but as a world of meaning (page 182). There is the speech of nature or nature speaks, where everything is full of signs and everything is full of meaning. [Note: that's where Max Weber and Matthew Arnold's enchantment went!] The hermeneutic of nature is thus the art to be able to interpret the natural world of signs, the signiture of things.

Moltmann quotes Jakob Böhme: “and there is no thing in nature, created or born, which does not reveal its inner form (Gestalt) outwardly, because the internal always works to reveal itself…therefore in the signature is the greatest understanding (Verstand), in which the human being not only knows him [or her]self, but in it can also know the nature of all nature…everything has a mouth for revelation. That is the language of nature.” (We’re still on page 181.)

Moltmann counters Plato’s “everything is an expression of its nature” with “[for] Christians, everything is an expression of its Godly Word.”

A. “The internal dimension of things gives signs for something in them or lying over them.” Natural configurations are read by physiognomy, like the face reveals the particularity of the soul (page 182). In this way the face of nature can also be read.

B. Every natural sign has a directional character, which shows the connections and relationships of things with each other. They point to the relative whole, of which they are a part. The cross-sectional are pointed in networks of relationships, whether bottom-up or top-down in their relative wholeness, and are nested in each other (sind ineinander verschränkt).

C. Not yet last of all, the signs of nature are related to the human beholders and actors, and then the signs become signals, which say what the natural environment means for people. Nature is [actively] giving signals and not only receiving them. It is a sender and not only a receiver from people. That presupposes a stepped-down subjectivity or sentience of nature, its forms, and worlds of life.

[Nature, creation] is not finished yet, but [presents] fragments of what is to come. [We have] anticipated, open signs of the future. As St. Paul states in 1 Corinthians 13: “for we know only in part, we prophesy only in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end” (verses 9-10). and “Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (verse 12).  Moltmann continues that the relation of the fragment to the perfect corresponds to that of the knowledge, prophesy relationship. We know reality and prophesy the future. It is important to realize that, the perfect does not develop out of the fragmentary, but comes to it. Nature is a world of forms and the relationships of nature are not only an exchange of energies, but also an exchange of information. The art of taking up information, interpreting, and working it through, is Hermeneutics. Primal matter of the universe, it is said, is information and reality [and both] are the same. (Here we turn to page 183) Reality is efficacious [as information]. Nature is forma informata and informans. We live in a world of mutual information and participation. We also discover the world of performative anticipations. Reality is formed out of the possible. The creative part of reality as realization is efficacious (Wirklichkeit als Wirksamkeit). “Life is the impressed form that livingly develops” (Moltmann is quoting Goethe).

Moltmann compares the language of signs in nature to reading symptoms for the diagnosis of a disease. We have to register the sign, then interpret it, and then name the disease. Nature can be interpreted that way too.

The theological interpretation of signs went from the kosmos to history, because history becomes the quintessential concept in Europe since the French Revolution. If the stars were no longer signs, then the signs of the times had to be interpreted. The signs of the times were interpreted as the signature of history.

Grace precedes nature (page 184), but now grace precedes history and the interpretation of the signs of the times now became a function of the theologia naturalis (natural theology). But the signs of history were ambiguous; there are the signs of progress and those of catastrophe, signs of the end. “When will that all happen and what will be the sign, when it will all come to an end?” (Mark 13:4)

The coming presence of Christ in Holy Communion is the center of the Christian teaching of signs. In Holy Communion the signs of the presence of Christ are still in culture and nature.

The empirical, sensual, concept of nature no longer relates to the word “essence” from which it was derived (page 185). In science we observe, weigh, measure, etc., but we do not reflect about its nature. The change in the concept of nature came about because of the theological concept of creation. Creation is finite, in time, and contingent, because it is creation and not the Creator. Nature is therefore a necessary expression of God’s nature, but is contingent and depends on observation, not deduction.

These notes are my translation and come from Jürgen Moltmann’s, Sein Name ist Gerechtigkeit (His Name is Righteousness), (Gütersloh, München: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008). Moltmann overflows with mature wisdom in the chapters of his book and it needs to be translated and studied in the English. peterkrey

PLTS Prof. Robert James Goeser Lectures

for the course “Advanced Luther Readings,”

February 9^th 1998 through…May 12^th 1998[1]

Notes Taken by Peter D.S. Krey, his Teaching Assistant.

Lecture of February 9^th 1998: Luther wrote in the vernacular or the common language. He published a virtual media blitz of pamphlets starting in 1517. Pamphlets or tracts are called Flugschriften in German, libella in Latin, or again in German Büchlein, which are small books. They are polemical, meaning that they are fighting and argumentative; they are arguing something. These pamphlets are like a genre, a literary form, like for example a novel.

In 1520 Luther writes the famous treatises “The Freedom of a Christian,” the “Treatise on Good Works,” “A Treatise on the New Testament, That is, the Holy Mass,” “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the Improvement of the Christian Estate,” and the longer work in Latin, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.”

First Reading: Martin Luther’s “The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ — Against the Fanatics.” (1526)[2]

On Easter Day 1526 Luther preached two sermons that dealt with those on the left and the right [in the Reformation movement]. A variety of people were to the left. To these two sermons, associates of Luther added another of his sermons on confession and compiled the three sermons together to make the above tract. Luther did not publish it himself nor would he have put “Against the Fanatics” into the title.[3]

Huldrich Zwingli held that Christ cannot be on the altar and at the right hand of God at the same time. Luther held that Christ is everywhere because Christ is in the Word. The Word is more than words and the Word is less related to the Greek logos than to the Hebrew word, DABAR.

We have

Jesus and the logos

Time and eternity

History and eternal truth

Theology and philosophy

The Word is proclamation as address not as eternal truth. God speaks and it is done. God speaks and it is created. The Word makes Christ real in the bread. The Word calls me to responsibility. A parable uses the language of address, for example the Prophet Nathan addressing David: “You are the man!” The parable engages the hearer in such a way that she or he cannot weasel out.

For John Calvin, Christ has a spatial limitation. Luther held that Christ’s body was ubiquitous. He denied any circumscription of Christ’s body. The right hand of God was not spatial. The Ascension was not spatial. Heaven is not a place but a condition. We do not have a three story universe. The issue was not how to get Christ down from heaven and to the altar, but to get Christ recognized. For example, how do we recognize Christ in our neighbor? Christ is already present, too close, too involved. How do I recognize the Word Incarnate everywhere? How does the Word of Address make us responsible? I spend my life-time weaseling out. I use my intellect to weasel out. A great deal of literature addresses you like the Prophet Nathan did David, “You are the man” and you can’t escape!

In the novels of Joseph Conrad, a person cannot finally escape the truth. The question posed is how to open my eyes and make me own my past.

It’s not Christ from the right hand of God brought to the altar. We have to bring them together in one construct, [in the Word]. Luther writes, “Again I preach Christ and with my bodily voice, I bring Christ into your heart.”[4] That means in my heart and not that he sits there in a chair.[5] But Christ is at the right hand of the Father and is brought into the heart. By the way: in that sentence you have all the course of homiletics that you need. Make the “Right Hand of the Father come into your heart” work for you on all kinds of levels.

Now Luther is a peculiar 16^th century fellow for us. We have many different problems issuing from him. But just hear to the text.

We do not have objective certainty, ecclesiastical or theological. Nor do we have subjective certainty, where you can believe anything you please. Christian communication has a special kind of certainty. It has a distinctive character. For communion, there is a uniqueness to Christian communication. Get beyond the theological definitions. The heart, for example, does not mean either the intellect or the emotions. [It is the center of the responsible self.] Luther’s imagery is not fair, but it is awfully good. He’s good at making catalogues. Luther connects belief and certainty. If Christ enters into the heart, Christ can enter the bread and wine. If Christ can enter the heart without putting a hole in it, then he can enter the bread without putting a hole in it.[6] Christ is around us, in us, and in all places. Ubiquity is not like a definition of the sacrament, but it is recognized in life. A function of a play is to bring characters to recognition and then bring the audience to recognize themselves. If it fails, it is a matter of language or the audience.

Luther opposes the arguments that

1. It is not fitting, appropriate, and reasonable that Christ is in the sacrament.

2. It is not necessary that Christ be in the sacrament.

For those who hold that argument you do not have an incarnation of the Word in the sacrament, but for Luther you do. He insists, “This is my body. Christ said it.”

Theology is not creating problems, but wrestling with

some real problems. If you do not mean the physical body, then what do you mean? We mean presence. What kind of an “is” is it? “Is” correlates exactly with what you mean by body, by presence. When the opposing side takes the literal or symbolic interpretation of “is,” then Oecolampadius, for example asks “Why do you need a baked God?”

The crucial term is “physical.” What is the importance of something physical in this? Are you getting a theology that is not well baked? The question arises, what is the relationship of the spiritual and the physical? Did Lutherans trap themselves in something as if the physical is the reality?

Theology raises these kinds of questions. They are real issues and you can come to different resolutions. What is the relation of the spirit to the body? For Luther the spiritual and the physical cannot be separated. The spiritual has to be embodied. What is the connection between creation and redemption? Is it the created which is redeemed or is only something spiritual redeemed? Do you leave your body behind when you go to heaven? Is the body irrelevant to salvation?

For Luther Christ always comes embodied, coming in, with, and under the physical, the created. You do not escape the fact that you are a creature. You do not escape body, time, and history.

Zwingli had another view of reality. In a certain sense he is a dualist with a sharp distinction between the spirit and the body. He held that the physical was not an adequate medium of the spiritual. [Finitum Capax Infinitum][7] Zwingli reflects a Hellenistic position that opposes spirit to matter. He feels that you always have to protect the spirit from the body. In a sense, he sees evil partly in the body and matter.

For Luther the problem is not the body but sin. Not “sins” but sin. The problem is not something external from me. It is not my body. The problem is my self; the problem is the person.[8] The problem is not external, but in here, in my responsibility. The problem is not that I have a body. It is the very best in me that gets distorted. It is “better-than-ness.” I want my identity by being better than you. An example is the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, as well as in the Fall. I fall out of trust, because I do not want to be in relationship. I want to have it on my own and I want to have it on my own by being good.

The problem is not the limitation of my mind, body, or “creatureliness” but I want it in my isolation and I want to be better than you. We are so worried about sins, it never get to sin. I do not want to recognize evil for the wretched thing it is. I use people as things and I alone am a non-thing. I do not want to join the race. We continually say “they” and not “I”. Oh! We are happy to say “I” when it makes us special. Maturity, however, is to say “I” in responsibility. In taking responsibility we become strangely dumb and somehow we cannot utter the word, “I.” We do not want to take evil seriously and we distort the good ourselves and say “they” instead of “I”.

It is not the problem that we have a body, but our unwillingness to accept our “creatureliness.” I am an embodied self. I accept the physical. I am free. There is the “Bondage of the Will.” But the bondage does not come from the outside. It is my body. (Here in the sense of ownership.)

That Christ is in the sacrament is miraculous.[9] Luther takes issue with Zwingli’s view of reality. The heart is the problem. The problem is me. It is located in the realm of commitment, of decision, etc. The creature is a miracle. Look at a grain of wheat or a seed. The metabolic process is a miracle. The problem is not in the created. Creation is a miracle. You participate in creation and it is not the spirit against matter. It is creation versus sin, creation versus the heart.

In freedom I own that I did that. Just think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. The Rev. Dimmesdale is in the height of his glory while Hester Prynne is experiencing one more moment of absolute rejection.

For Hester: the quintessence of shame is good.

For Dimmesdale: the quintessence of good is evil.

This is enough for Luther’s tract, “The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ — Against the Fanatics.”

Next time Luther’s “Eight Sermons Delivered at Wittenberg in 1522” during the student uprisings.[10]

Assignment: write two pages each on the Word and sacrament, Law and Gospel, Theology of the Cross and just the basics about what they mean in life.

Goeser responded: “This ‘despair with the self‘ is what I consider the quintessence of existentialism. Later in Lutheran orthodoxy, what Luther had was lost to a kind of generalized experience, and Pietism went over into affect which Luther, however, never disconnected from intellect.“

“We Lutherans often do not understand Luther, because our familiarity with his words, somehow obscures the radical nature of what he says, and we remain in our ‘dogmatic slumbers.‘ Those who criticize him from outside our tradition, have usually never read him – that, of course, goes for many Lutherans as well. They have never read him.“ I offered.

“What we are reading and experiencing here is not just a question of Lutheranism, nor of a question of Luther‘s being German. It is a question of a great thinker dealing with the human condition.“ Prof. Goeser concluded. “Let’s read 50 pages more for next week.”

Dr. Peter D. S. Krey

This view an iceberg is from:  http://londoncoder.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/iceberg.jpg

Positive I Messages in Communication

A Workshop given in the Metropolitan New York Synod,

May 15^th through May 29^th, 1979

Listening is the only way really to help another person who has a problem and listening to others and to oneself is an art that we have to learn.

When we become upset, our thinking and our feeling become jumbled. When we listen to a person patiently, we allow them to pass through all their feelings, until they come to the point where they can think it out themselves.

Active listening needs to be learned. We are not active when we are speaking and passive when we are listening. Active listening is the hard, empathetic work that we do when we listen intently to another person, for example, to understand the feeling under the person’s words. We see the person through hearing them. Active listening compares observations that are also non-verbal with what the person is saying.

Like an iceberg, you see the tip above the surface and the whole huge mountain looms under the water. Like a grapefruit, therefore, there is much more to a person than meets the eye. At what level is the person’s self-esteem? Is it so low that criticism will be received as rejection? If so, then first you have to help pick up that person’s self-esteem with some affirmation, appreciation, encouragement, a compliment, and / or affection. When a person’s self-esteem is high, then constructive criticism will be received with appreciation.

Now when trying to communicate by means of leveling with each other, or bringing something up, we first have to situate the problem. (Today we usually say, the issue. Although the word “problem” is slightly harsher, let’s stay with the old word.) The question becomes, who owns the problem?

When there is no problem we have the positive I message.

When the other has the problem we use active listening.

When I have the problem, I use a negative I message, being careful not to start my words with the pronoun “You”. That pronoun will seem like an accusation and bring conflict. Thus use “I” messages and not “You” messages.

For example: “You hurt me with what you just said.” That “you-statement” will make the other become defensive because it feels like an accusation. Thus the Negative I Message starts by saying, “I feel hurt by what you said, because it made me feel stupid.”

A “you” statement designed for trouble: “There you go again. You twist everything to have your own way!”

As a Negative I Statement: “I feel very frustrated about what you just said, because you take our words your own way and not the way we meant them.”

I feel _______ about________ because_______

Try formulating some positive and negative I messages from your statements that sounded like accusations and brought about conflict, rather than getting at the issues involved.

This box shows thoughts that feel acceptable and those which do not.

For the no problem category: + I message:

I feel ___________ about ____________ because ____________.

Example of a positive I message: I feel happy about your being so well prepared for this meeting, because then we really get something done.

When we deal with a problem, which is unacceptable, then we do not use the word “you” and sound like we are accusing someone of something, but we use a Negative I Message. When we give a Negative I Message, then we have to shift into active listening, because the feeling barometer of the other person goes up.

For example, someone has just indicated that they are leaving the board, because they are moving away. You feel a sense of loss and inadequacy, because this person was helpful and supportive when others on the board were not.

A “you message” is not helpful. “You would leave now, right when I needed you the most!” That accuses the person of abandoning you and being unhelpful, when you really appreciated their help. The helpful Negative I Message might be said in this way: “I feel a real sense of loss about your leaving the board. I will miss you because I really appreciated your help and support in the difficulties we face on the board.” After the negative I message, you shift into active listening to help the person leaving, work through their feelings and express their own sense of loss and regret for the separation.

You use the + I Message when there is no problem.

Active listening, when the other owns the problem.

Neg. I Message, when I own the problem.

Neg. I message when the other owns the problem.

What do we do when we own the problem, all of us own the problem, when for example, the whole board is coming late and missing too many meetings?

Now we own the problem, we have shared the negative I statement, but the values in the group are still at odds. This calls for brain-storming for a solution. Get as many as possible to have a say in the solution. For the group process, it is necessary to take the following steps:

D Define the problem (all need to be involved here).

G Generate ideas for a solution

(Set no limits here in G. Do not evaluate yet at all.)

E Evaluate: criticize, weigh, see what makes sense.

D decide on a plan.

I Implement.

F Follow through

Recognize who has compromised in the situation. Some may have had to compromise more than others. Give those a break next time. The more people that buy into a solution, the more of a chance you have of carrying it through.

What happens when you have value-collision? Say that you are dealing with teenagers, who are challenging your authority to try to assert their own authority. Mostly, they will not listen to you. Find a way so that they want to listen to you. “Try to get hired as a consultant.” Model the behavior that you would like them to follow. Give them data that is relevant in a non-authoritative way. Choose the important issues to confront. Don’t confront every issue. In value-collision, when all else fails, pray.

Good counseling is not like giving advice. Person have to work their issues through themselves, while the counselor patiently supports them through the process.

Perhaps this little workshop demonstrates that communication is an art and these skills in speaking and relating to one another, show how much more could be learned in the art of communication. Better communication can lead the way to more growth and maturity on a personal level and a less dysfunctionality on an organizational level. This workshop in communication contains not a little wisdom and I wish I coyuld remember who the leaders, the presenters, were. They deserve our gratitude.

For FG and RG with my heartfelt gratitude for their friendship.

Pastor Peter Krey

from notes taken in Coney Island, New York, May 15^th, May 22^nd, and May 29^th, 1979.

Faith and Prayer

Faith is life-help. It is the making-easier of life. [It helps life. It makes life easier.] In this sense, doing without faith is heroic, because wanting to have an easier life presupposes that the human being is weak. But we have to face the difficulties of life making our lives become harder and as Isaiah says, it is the strong whom the Lord captures. /1

The cross is the attack of the old life on the new. Some why questions are not really necessary for life and it does not depend on answering them. But the question, for what am I called? is not of that sort of question, nor questions about suffering. The Greek word peristasi refers to apostolic suffering in II Cor. 6: We are continually suffering, but behold we live; filled with anxiety, but behold we live. The latter way of putting it is psychological. But it is our calling to be set aside to undertake the harder life, the life fraught with difficulty.

Thus important provisos are needed in our vocation. Amen, for example, does not mean, “I believe that… , but it means entrusting oneself to a person or relying on a promise. Faith draws a person into an assignment, a task, a mission and questions have to be asked:

A. Does the cause have some hope of success?

B. Am I left to my own resources? Does it all depend on me?

C. How will I change in the course of doing it?

Will I also accomplish the goal of my life in the course of it?

D. What will happen to me if I make mistakes or if I fail?

E. What will happen to me and to this good cause if the Sender remains hidden?

Answer: You are not alone, along with this call you will achieve the goal of your life, your failure is forgiven, and he will be present with all the promises. He is going with you. So consider his word far more true and more trustworthy than all your inner experience, [all your internal misgivings and trepidations].

A. Faith is different from having faith (Glaeubigkeit).

Faith is always a new act; one cannot have faith.

B. Faith is not a Weltanschauung, not a way to view the world

and does not stand in competition to ideologies and life systems.

Faith is not holding something to be true, i.e., believing statements to be true.

C. Faith cannot be achieved by means of inner speculation. It is looking up to another. I do not know if I believe, but I know in whom I believe.

On this issue,

1. Althaus held that we cannot believe in our faith, [or believe in our belief. ]

2. Barth held, however, that we can only believe in our belief.

D. Faith itself is an act or deed and not a psychological disposition. It is a good work in which the other good works are grounded – it is mighty in itself, and emancipated. It is all involved in and all about the sending.

E. Faith is not acting by oneself or doing something by oneself, nor is it a belief that is then externalized, so that faith stands chronologically or psychologically before the act. It is there together with all the other acts; in, with, and under the act there is faith. It does not come first before the act, but our faith inheres in our doing. Faith does not precede works.

CALLING – PARTICIPATION – FAITH

- WORKS -

 

It is not upon our works that we depend, but we depend completely upon him. Luther said, faith is the doer, love is the deed. For your sending remember that God’s name means “I will be with you.” The I am will be with you and has sent you. Here the one who sends you promises to be with you in the future.

Faith is the hope of love. Faith makes life harder, more difficult, through the sending. And there is always an attack on the new life by the old and sharing oneself is very difficult.

PRAYER

In the identity of prayer and faith, four questions are directed at the Sender. I grasp the answers for them from the one who promises. These are questions of faith with hefty complaints directed to God. Struggling and arguing with God can be a form of trust that is acceptable to God./2

Concerning bidding prayer: we have discovered that the events of nature occur by means of specific laws. It is not true that wonders violate these laws. The word used for miracles in Greek is dynamis and it means “signs of strength” or “astonishing signs” or “things that astonish us.” Prayers often step aside into praise and thanksgiving and these terms cannot be understood apart from one another. There are two ways of questioning God, one that is metaphysical and the other that poses questions from personal experience. God is a limit-concept, which is completely irreplaceable. Prayer is conversation with the Sender.

 

Some Notes on Helmut Gollwitzer’s Last Lecture in Berlin

(taken by Peter Krey, as an Interim Pastor of St. Ann’s Church in Dahlem-Berlin at the time)

¹ Die Starcken soll der Herr zum Raube haben, which in German means that the strong are the ones whom God takes as spoils (Isaiah 53:12). In English it is translated, “and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.”

² This is a very difficult German sentence: Vertrauen kann die Gestalt des Hadern mit Gotte Annehmen.