The Perichoresis of the Trinity, The Holy Trinity May 22nd 2016

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 (RSV) The Gifts of Wisdom

Does not wisdom call,

Does not understanding raise her voice? 

On the heights beside the way,

in the paths she takes her stand;

beside the gates in front of the town,

at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:

“To you, O men, I call,

and my cry is to the sons of men.

Wisdom’s Part in Creation

22

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of old.

Ages ago I was set up,

at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,

when there were no springs abounding with water.

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth;

before he had made the earth with its fields,

or the first of the dust of the world.

When he established the heavens, I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when he established the fountains of the deep,

when he assigned to the sea its limit,

so that the waters might not transgress his command,

when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside him, like a master workman;

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the sons of men

 

Divine Majesty and Human Dignity

To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of David.

Psalm 8 

O Lord, our Lord,

how majestic is thy name in all the earth!

Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted

by the mouth of babes and infants,

thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes,

to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,

and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Yet thou hast made him little less than God,

and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;

thou hast put all things under his feet,

all sheep and oxen,

and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the sea.

O Lord, our Lord,

how majestic is thy name in all the earth! 

Romans 5:1-5

5 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

John 16:12-15 (RSV)

12 “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

 

The Holy Trinity May 22^nd 2016

Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31 Psalm 8 anthem v.2, Romans 5:1-5 John 16: 12-15

The Perichoresis of the Trinity

If you look at the Gospel lesson, you would have to say, “I declare!” The word “declare” comes up three times. The word “rejoice” comes up four times in two lessons and the gospel lesson gives us reason to rejoice. If you read the Romans lesson carefully, you will see that every sentence, almost every phrase packs a sermon. “The grace in which we stand,” “Rejoice in suffering!” “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us… these are just a few examples.

But because it is the Sunday of the Holy Trinity, it is with awe that we need to contemplate the triune God of creation, whose wisdom, Sophia drew the circles in space, so that all the planets circle the sun, the moon circles our earth, and our galaxy, the Milky Way swirls around our black hole, like all the galaxies around their black holes in the universe. The universe is created by God through the handiwork of divine wisdom, Sophia, in Greek, causing all children of humanity to rejoice, even as St. Paul bids us rejoice, and Jesus tells us to rejoice because he is leaving to us, i.e., bequeathing all to us that his Father God gives to him. “Rejoice in the Lord always and again Paul says, rejoice!” You know the song.

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

    the moon and the stars which thou hast established…

 Did you notice the sun-rise lately? I watched it on Thursday at 5:30 am from my Chicago hotel room and while the sun was rising it seemed that a bright full moon was rising beside it. In the Internet it says two suns were rising. How could a second sun be rising? Our sun is no twin. Tonight we will have the full moon, so I would wager it was the moon rising beside the sun. I have never seen that before. I guess Sophia just drew another circle in the sky for us to see.

Our Psalm for today, Psalm 8 is filled with awe and wonder. “What are we that God is mindful of us?” Our New Horizon’s spacecraft is sending pictures back to us on earth of the dwarf-planet Pluto and one of its moons Charon. It has taken ten years for the spacecraft to get there, because Pluto is over four and a half billion miles away. While no life could exist on Pluto, we now know that billions of exoplanets are in goldilocks zones, which are just the right distance from their stars for liquid water and life to exist. They are orbiting their stars like our sun, but they are circling in other far-away solar systems lightyears away from us.

Contemplating the universe is very humbling and imagine how magnificent and beyond conception our God must be to have created it all!

Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted

    by the mouth of babes and infants,

thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes,

    to still the enemy and the avenger.

Our psalm says that God chose infants and little children filling them with trust and faith to protect us from those who doubt and become adversaries of faith in God. Just like God is enthrones on the praises of Israel, God’s people, – so ever anew God fills babes and children with pure faith, trust and wonder to witness to us that God is in heaven and sends children like gifts of love as examples of faith for us to love and follow. Oh, what are we that God is mindful of us? But out of the mouths of babes and children, God defends us from doubt and unbelief.

So God is as simple and wonderful for our faith as the little kid who told his parents, “Heaven is for real!”

But at the same time the maker of this universe is more complex than anything in the world, because God is the source of the whole creation. In graduate school my theology professor gave me the assignment to tell whether the immanent Trinity preceded the economic Trinity in the philosophy of Hegel. The immanent Trinity is God in Three Persons per se apart from the creation. The economic Trinity is like we heard in the Proverbs lesson, all involved in creating and sustaining this world, sending the Son, raising him from the dead, and sending us the advocate, the counselor, the Holy Spirit to be with us.

Dorothy Sayers, the mystery writer, wrote a book about the Holy Trinity called The Mind of the Maker. She compared the Trinity to authoring a book. So the three persons were one, the idea for the book by the author is the Father, the concrete book itself is Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit is everyone reading the book and getting the same idea first had by the author God. It is all one book, conceived by the author, the book itself taken in hand as the Son, and the whole gist and story received by the readers, the Holy Spirit, one God in three persons.

St. Patrick of course took the shamrock, a three leaf clover and said like it was one plant with three leaves, so we believe in One God in three Persons. My brother Johnnie, a chemistry teacher, liked to show that all of nature and science are triune and can be classified in threes: for example, matter comes in solids, liquids and gases. The great Philosopher Hegel of about 200 years ago, who was a Lutheran pastor, also classified all of creation into threes. When his colleague, the theologian, Schleiermacher, in the University of Berlin hardly believed in the Trinity, (He considered it irrational.) Hegel had his whole philosophy and creation proceed out of the Trinity. Then he used his threefold way of thinking, called dialectics: the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to think through the whole world, and then his philosophy and the whole creation returned into the Trinity, God becoming all in all.

We have to approach the mystery of the most Holy Trinity, the triune God with awe. Maybe it was because the mystery writer Dorothy Sayers saw the Trinity as a mystery that she wrote a book about it.

William James in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience claims that we are not external to the Trinity, outside looking in, but we are internal to the Trinity. Thus we too can rejoice, because we too are invited to dance in what is called the perichoresis, the dance of the Three Persons, each with fervent and steadfast love, each for the other, standing in for the other, and, participating in the concern and work of the other. The Small catechism, which separates the work of each Person in the articles of the Apostles’ Creed gives us the wrong idea. And also it does not make us mindful of the continuous creation, in which God is sustaining and renewing the whole creation. The creation is not just an event that took place in the distant past. God is not finished yet. God is not finished with us yet.

What awe and wonder the choreography of the divine dance of the three persons of the Trinity inspires in us! Our God is one, but what we call the perichoresis is the communion and mutual indwelling of the three persons of the Trinity. Peri means around and choresis means dance, like choreography, means making a dance. The word chorus and thus singing can also be heard in the word perichoresis. So peri is going around and choresis is the dance of mutual, indwelling love of the three persons of the Trinity.

So we ourselves in the communion of our Trinitarian community can participate in the dance of the Trinity and we can sing the praises of the Trinity because of the witness that God has provided for us by the faith of little children. As the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father and we are in Christ and Christ is in us, so we ourselves become one heart and soul together in a communion that is greater than mere empathy. We are invited to join in the dance of the Three Persons of the One God of all creation, the continuous creation, filling us with creativity. We are invited to dance with the Son to save the lost in God’s great plan of salvation, and invited to dance in the procession of all the saints, who witness to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Blessed Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, invited to dance enraptured by the Holy Spirit, filled with awe for the majesty of God’s Holy name. Yes, how majestic is the name of the Blessed and Most Holy Trinity over all the earth. Amen.

A Response to Wayne M. Martin’s “The Judgment of Adam” and the Symbolism of the Snake

A Response to Wayne M. Martin’s “The Judgment of Adam.”

By Dr. Peter D.S. Krey

A Preface addressed to Prof. Martin:

Thank you for leading me to your article, “The Judgment of Adam“[1] after I responded to your study of “Hegel’s Bad Infinity.” Your thorough analysis of Lucas Cranach’s “Adam and Eve” painting in this study helped me see that there is a whole literacy involved in “reading” a painting that I did not know about. Lucas Cranach seemed to be presenting Luther’s theology through the medium of paint. The painting you analyzed was his Courtault picture of Adam and Eve of 1526.[2] In it all the layers of the interpretation of the snake 1) as the bronze serpent lifted onto a pole by Moses and 2) here painted on the tree with Adam and Eve and 3) as the snake that Cranach used for his signature can be reflected upon. Using the snake in his signature, Cranach following Martin Luther’s lead, probably wanted to imply that his painting like images and art per se were not evil, but just good or evil depending on their use or abuse, – the latter case if worshiped.[3] Islam strictly avoids all images. More relevantly for this study, at the time of the Reformation iconoclasm was in full swing, where Zwingli and Calvin white-washed the walls of their churches and proscribed not only art, but even music, both of which Luther championed.

When I first read the Genesis Lectures about how Luther called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil a church, it seemed bazaar to me. Now I realize that it was under trees that the ancients worshiped and they even sometimes worshiped the trees themselves – was it Boniface (or Winfrid?) who chopped down the sacred Oak tree of Thor? He did it to destroy a false ultimate. And in the book of Genesis, God appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre.[4] That these trees are mentioned with the theophany seems significant. They may also have been a place of worship.

According to Cranach’s painting and of course the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, shame and consciousness were awakened in humanity there so like a lion, we could no longer cruelly eat the warm meat of an animal that had not yet even died. While nature is red in tooth and claw, we received a conscience and we could feel shame. We could do right and wrong. We became aware that there was such a thing as good and evil. The Garden of Eden story can be related to evolution in the sense that we became human by dint of God, the consciousness of the universe, raising us up.

I also thank you for getting to the basis of Luther’s anthropology by declaring that we are in a helpless estate – Luther calls it being passive before God. Finding ourselves quite a way “east of Eden” and then when we are completely honest, we have to admit that we face evil choices whichever way we turn unless the Holy Spirit helps us live out of a new birth and a new strength from God’s consciousness on high. Perhaps the latter could be opposed to what you call our ontological self-consciousness: Adam knowing himself just enough to recognize Eve as his mate, but not yet really having human consciousness and conscience?

To admit that we face evil choices whichever way we turn, I’m thinking about our negative legacy here in the USA: the genocide of the Native Americans that continues in the reservations; the hangover from slavery and colonialism, where so much of our high standard of living has been at the expense of the oppressed. We never gave the slaves forty acres and a mule and have attempted to short change them at every turn for the unfair advantage of us Whites ever since, now as we realize we are in a new version of a Jim Crow era. Where is our protest against these injustices?

Thank you so much for writing that study and getting me to read it.

Part II: Now I am taking one more step in thinking about the symbolism that Wayne Martin discovers in Cranach’s painting:

Through his painting Lucas Cranach is superimposing the later story of Moses lifting up the bronze serpent in the wilderness[5] upon the snake in the sacred tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Paradise of the Garden of Eden. The former serpent, perhaps like a scapegoat absorbed all the evil venom of the people bitten by snakes, allowing them to be saved; the latter snake beguiles Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, making her become conscious and ashamed of being naked.

The symbolism of the snake or serpent has so many phenomenological layers, because one can take the next step into the New Testament as well: because Jesus also refers to his crucifixion with the same symbol: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”[6] And thus the Lenten prayer:

Who by the tree of the cross gave salvation to all humankind, so that where death arose, life might rise up again, and that he (the snake) that once overcame by a tree, might also by a tree (the cross) be overcome, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(Now we will not go even further and relate the serpent, Tiamat, the nature god of the sea, the personified ocean, representing chaos or Tohu va Bohu in Hebrew. Nor will we delve into the ubiquitous medical symbol, where two snakes are depicted climbing up a pole. Nor will we relate how a stick can be used to render a snake more harmless or the strange fact that poisonous snakes are milked of their venom to be used in vaccinations against snake bite.)

Lucas Cranach himself additionally, uses a winged snake with a crown, also looking like the primordial dragon, for his painting signatures. In this 1526 Courtault painting of Adam and Eve, he places his signature right onto the trunk of the sacred tree of the knowledge of good and evil.[7]

As already mentioned, Luther believed that that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the place of worship in the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve’s eating the forbidden fruit brought about the Fall of creation. Perhaps we could identify the cross of Jesus Christ as the Tree of Life, which brings about our human ascent and that of all creation, so that God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven. We may not be able to experience the feature presentation here on earth, but we can get the previews of coming attractions. We can go in reverse as well and say the same about hell.

Painting as an art deals with pictures and images and can be enhanced into sculpture so that churches are filled with statues and paintings. In Cranach and Luther’s time an iconoclastic movement was in full swing. Image makers had become image breakers. Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva emptied their churches of all the images and paintings, white-washing the walls of their churches. They did not even permit music, except perhaps, for intoning a psalm. On the other hand, Luther argued that Moses lifted up that bronze serpent in the wilderness, so an image was not good or evil per se, it all depended on its use or abuse. Thus to worship an image makes a person guilty of having a false ultimate and being idolatrous, but when someone like Cranach expresses Luther’s theology in paint, so that people can “read” his painting, then it represents no abuse, but a perfectly appropriate use of art. Wayne Martin asserts the latter conviction to be the most likely reason Cranach, Luther’s close friend, used the winged snake as his signature.

From the cross of Christ, absorbing all the sin of the world and becoming the scapegoat for the forgiveness of all our sin and evil, Christ was like that serpent raised up on the pole by Moses in the desert; and like that serpent in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, people trying to be like God, made all things ambiguous, now vulnerable and at the mercy of their use or abuse, able to be used for good or evil. But in the eating of the forbidden fruit consciousness was won as conscience, so that Adam and Eve realized that they were naked and became ashamed; but they became aware as well that they would one day die. After Eve eats the apple, the animals on her side of the painting also awake and the lion gets ready to pounce on the doe and take that poor creature out of Paradise. Thus consciousness was won, but Paradise was lost. They experienced how the earth also could be cursed and not yield its fruit, even with hard labor and the sweat of their brows. But Christ transformed that curse into a blessing on the tree of the cross, when he was lifted up like that serpent in the wilderness, drawing all of humankind heavenward too God:

“For when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.”[8]

These are some of the symbolic layers of interpretation:

1. Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness to save the snake-bitten people
2. Christ describing his crucifixion by means of the Moses story
3. Luther seeing Moses’ action as an affirmation of painting, sculpture, music and all the arts, because images are not evil per se, but good or evil in their use or abuse. Images cannot be done without in thought, language, and culture.
4. Cranach superimposing the Moses story upon the story of the Fall. He depicts the sacred tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden as a snake on a pole once more, where consciousness and conscience are gained but paradise is lost.
5. Cranach uses the image of a snake in his own painting signatures, even placing that signature on the trunk of the sacred tree affirming his vocation as an artist. But, of course, when culture represents the worship of elite secular people, it is an abuse of art. When art expresses the human condition before God, places a mirror before people, in which they can see themselves in, (like the deer in the painting seeing its reflection in the pond from which it drinks) generating consciousness and conscience for good and evil, right and wrong. Art can even be the painting the Gospel of Jesus Christ and him crucified showing the way of salvation.

____________________________

[1] Should you want to read Wayne M. Martin’s Study of Cranach’s painting, click on “Judgment of Adam”

[2] To view and study Cranach’s painting of Adam and Eve with a detail feature tool for the purposes of comparison, click on “Adam and Eve”: by Lucas Cranach

[3] Pope Gregory I (590-604) noted that “the illiterate could contemplate in the lines of a picture what they could not learn by means of the written word.” In a sense, Wayne Martin contemplates Cranach’s painting and in its lines reads Luther’s theology.

[4] Gen 18:1.

[5] Numbers 21:4-9.

[6] John 3:15.

[7] See a detail of his signature with the tool provided: Cranach’s signature

[8] John 12:32.

A Response to Wayne M. Martin’s In Defense of a Bad Infinity (2007)

Wayne M. Martin’s essay, In Defense of a Bad Infinity: A Fichtean Response to Hegel’s Differenzschrift. To see his essay in the Internet:

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~wmartin/BadInfinity.pdf

A response by Peter D.S. Krey

Again, I would argue that Hegel is a Lutheran philosopher and he gets a good deal of his philosophical inspiration from Luther’s theology. For example, one could interpret Luther’s justification by faith experience in terms of the bad and true infinities: locked into one’s own finite effort and strength one cannot fulfill what the infinite God demands. Thus to bring Aristotle’s critique of Zeno to bear: finite moments cannot traverse the infinite moments of infinity. But those that are infinite can traverse the moments of infinity. So the infinite effort and strength of God can fulfill God’s commands in Luther’s justification by faith experience. The passive finite understood in a Pauline sense becomes filled with infinite grace in Luther’s divine linguistic event. His experience needs to be understood in the contours of a language event, because he was struggling to understand the Pauline Passage, Romans 1:17:

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

Hegel thought that an infinite limited by the finite was a bad infinite. (I will go along with Wayne Martin and not call it a spurious infinite which would mean that a bad infinite was no infinite at all.) When the Holy and Absolute Infinite enters the finite and fills it, we have the fulfillment of the infinite demands, by the infinite traversing the infinite.

In Luther’s eighth point of his “Freedom of a Christian” he writes:

The commands teach and prescribe for us many good works. Merely prescribing them, however, does not make them happen. Laws point the way, but they do not help; they teach us what we ought to do, but they do not give us the strength to do it. They are set up only so that persons become aware of their incapacity for good and learn to despair in themselves. That is why they are called “old” testament and why they belong in the Old Testament.[1]

Luther then shows in point 9 how faith in Christ, how the Infinite accomplishes what the finite or even a bad infinite could not do:

Believe and you have it; don’t believe and you won’t have it.[2] For what is impossible for you through all the works of the commandments, which are so many and are of no use anyway, is quickly and easily done by faith. For I have placed all things in a compact form inside faith, so that whoever has faith has all things and whoever does not have faith has nothing. In such a way the promises of God provide what the commandments require and accomplish what the commandments demand, so that everything belongs to God, command and fulfillment. God alone commands and God alone fulfills. Therefore, the promises of God are the word of the “new” testament and belong in the New Testament.[3]

Faith is the way the infinite (God) enters and fulfills the finite such that the promises of God through their true infinity can fulfill the infinite requirements and demands of the law, because “everything belongs to God, command and fulfillment,” meaning that the infinite is at work though the finite.

Another way to say it: the finite through faith receives the power to grasp and contain the infinite. This is the way William Blake describes it in his famous poem, “To See the World”:

See a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.[4]

Thus justification by faith is the way infinite grace transforms the person, who no longer limits the infinite. In the Incarnation, God became a human being, as the Word became flesh. Mary can be beheld as the Mother of God, the Theotokos. The infinite body and blood of Christ is in the Eucharistic bread and wine. And while the finite “I” of Fichte cannot live the infinite Christ, the infinite Christ comes and enters and lives the life of the believer. Thus Paul can write, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” I first could not see how Wayne Martin could resolve the Pauline infinite demands with the teaching of kenosis or the emptying out of a person. But perhaps he means that the finite ego must become nothing so that the Infinite can completely enter the finite person.

Taking the side of Fichte and the bad infinite’s ideals, Wayne Martin keeps looking at our human condition from a human and finite point of view. Reinhold Niebuhr also spoke of our being responsible for ever increasing approximations of justice. Just because a person cannot do everything is not an excuse to do nothing. A person remains responsibility for the little something that the person can do. The bad infinity is like the perfect becoming the enemy of the thing that is possible.

I wonder what made the early Greek Philosophers, Aristotle as well as the atomists look askance at the infinite regression and progression. It does not lead to nothingness, but perhaps it defines the edges of the finite, beyond which the Creator God, the Absolute Infinite, as consciousness and word, is out there coming to us in continuous creation, incarnation, and the use of the sacraments.

Thus what I am arguing for is Hegel’s true infinity, in terms of being filled by the Holy Spirit or concretely, by the Word of God, Christ, so the dynamic of the Infinite accomplishes untold wonders amongst us finite being. From the view point of the ideals of the bad infinite, we are locked into the incremental approximations, but they also will not be possible without the power of the True Infinity giving us those breakthroughs.

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[1] Philip and Peter Krey, editors, Luther’s Spirituality, (New York: Paulist Press, 2007), p. 73.

[2] Glaubstu so hastu; glaubstu nit, so hastu nit. (In Luther’s German)

[3] Ibid., page 74.

[4] William Blake, Fragments from “Auguries of Innocence.”

Blogging my thoughts: Divine Performative Promises, 15. Nov. 2014

Blogging my thoughts: Divine Performative Promises 15. Nov. 2014
I’ve worked and reworked my book on Creation via Language over and over again for many years, after taking John Searles’ language philosophy class and hearing about his supernatural declarations, which for him merely constituted a thought experiment. Then I became discouraged with my work in the book and I thought, “Good thing I did not publish it, because God’s speaking seems inadequate, to say the least, in the face of evolution and the physics of this universe.”
But today I started thinking that perhaps God’s speaking is enfleshed, embodied, and concrete and, for example, the development of God’s thought could be the evolution of plants and animals on this earth biologically and, in the more elemental physics of God’s thoughts, they could become manifest in the big bang, the expanding universe, the galaxies, their black holes, the solar systems in those galaxies, our own particular “third rock from the sun” — our planet, earth and our very own moon.
When I was saying that Christ is the Word of God and (continuing with Luther), that we become Christs, by God’s grace, and therefore we too become Words of God, and then (I extrapolated and I wrote in Creation via Language) we do become the vocabulary, the living biological vocabulary of God’s language in a new social syntax.
Now language is an organic system that abstracts from our socio-biological reality of being human, but in terms of Hegel’s concrete spirit, language can incorporate, can become filled with its referents thereby becoming socio-biological and physical, in terms of the physics used to understand our universe. In God’s speaking everything into creation and thus into its existence, the theological comes into play.
In an analogy, an author can write a story, which is more abstract than if as a playwright he or she writes a play with real actors on the stage. At that level the author is thinking in terms of persons, (the terms as the persons) their relationships, and the speaking has gone up into the grammar or syntax of a plot, in which an acted story moves to its climax and dénouement from the in medias res in which it was begun to its end in the same.
Now people leading their daily lives and experiencing crises and their resolutions by calling upon God in their distress and being rescued and then embarking on the plan of God’s salvation, are on another level from a play performed by actors, in which life and death are merely imagined. In our real lives there are also stories and plays in which they take place, but pace Christian Scientists, people really live and die. But people could live in the Gospel in God’s speaking, in divine speech-acts, language acts, language events, and the salvation history in which they are nested, and continue in the Holy Spirit’s continuous creation (the living theology of God’s thought brought to speech) and continuous incarnation, as we live out the Gospel stories again and again in becoming Christs, the Words of God addressed to one another, the performative promises of God’s people in but not of this world.

Hegel and Augustine’s Triads and Hegel did not Deduce a Missing Planet

I just wrote an essay and it is published in Scholardarity: Instrumental Rationality as Opposed to Hegel: Hegel and Augustine’s Triads

If Hegel is right, could the structure of reality be triadic reflecting creation by the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity? Or do triads have a privileged place as Augustine argues in their being the traces left by the Trinity? Contrary to all Hegel disparagement since 1801, he did not deduce a missing planet between Mars and Jupiter. But where Venus, the second planet is twice the distance from the sun as Mercury, and Mars the fourth planet, four times that distance, why is Jupiter, the fifth planet 13 times that distance away? In this essay that searches for a non-instrumental rationality in Hegel’s dialectical logic of life, the question also comes up: in the violent birth of the moon, when the Mars-sized planet Theia struck the earth, where did it come from? A hypothesis requiring scientific feedback is presented.

Blogging my thoughts: Lighting up the Thoughts of the Mind

Blogging my thoughts: Lighting up the Thoughts of the Mind by Peter Krey

Reading about optogenetics in the New York Science Times for today (April 22, 2014) I read an article entitled, “Brain Control in a Flash of Light” by James Gorman. Reading it I had to think of the lightning flash of that preceded Luther’s entry into the monastery. (The incident took place before the Reformation on July 2, 1505 near the village of Stotternheim in Germany.)

Dr. Karl Dreisseroth and his team devised a practical way to turn neurons in the brain on and off with light. Is it far-fetched to think that the lightning strike that came so close to Luther that it knocked him down, also affected Luther, in this case, turning his mind on to ultimate questions? I’ve read how Karl Marx thought that that lightning flash began a change of mind not only in Luther but in all of Europe and I have somehow felt myself, that Luther’s whole Reformation came out of one flash of insight, that was not only intellectual but went way down to the enlightenment of his affects as well.

Dreisseroth talks of people with psychoses having a different reality from our own (New York Science Times, page D4). He describes bipolar disorder as “’exuberance, charisma, love of life, and yet how destructive’; of depression, [so] ‘crushing – it can’t be reasoned with.’” (D4) But what about on the positive side, that is, a brain that reaches a new level of integration and insight through an encounter with God? A Psalm speaks of God in terms of “the Light in which we see light.” (Psalm 36:9) Often we are locked with our thinking in the pathological, while we remain oblivious to the wholesome, the wonderful level of a new maturity in life. St. Paul on the road to Damascus and perhaps Luther, on his way back from home to Erfurt, experienced something along these lines.

Now to delve more deeply into the article: various laboratories experimented with using light to control brain cells. Needed in that process are proteins they call “opsins.” “When light shines on an opsin, it absorbs a photon and changes.” (D4) Smuggling opsin genes into nerve cells caused no harm. (D5) They found that one particular opsin called channelrhodopsin-2 “could be used to turn on mammalian neurons with blue light.” (D5) Dreisseroth used microbial opsins to get those neurons to respond strongly to light. With that Dreisseroth’s team could switch the neurons on and off.

Then working in his laboratory they took a step beyond optogenetics making the whole brain transparent in a method they have called “Clarity.” It cannot be used for living brains because a chemical called hydrogel has to be infused into the brain tissue, “which leaves the brain not only transparent, but also still available for bio-chemical tests.” (D5)

Dreisseroth’s aim continues to be helping people with severe mental illness or brain diseases “and he recently proposed ways that optogenetics, Clarity, and other techniques may be turned to this aim.” D5) It turns out that optogenetics is a crucial tool in understanding brain functions. “Clarity, on the other hand, is an aid to anatomical studies, basic mapping of structure, which, he says, is as important to understand as activity.” (D5) When as a psychiatrist he administered electro convulsive therapy (electric shock therapy) a general seizure results, in which the whole brain is disrupted. “’Within a few minutes the whole person comes back. Where does it come back from? From the structure,’ he said.” (D5)

It is interesting the way Dreisseroth speaks of the whole person coming back but then uses the pronoun “it” for merely the structure of the brain. Perhaps the mind envelopes the whole person, while the brain is just the seat of that source.

When Dreisseroth speaks of encountering a whole different reality in a person experiencing a psychosis then he needs to be completely cognizant that we all agree on a conventional, everyday level of reality which we call normal. This kind of scientific work, however, shows how there are deeper realities that go far beyond the everyday level of reality we accept as normalcy.

When a St. Paul or Luther experience the source of light, then perhaps they were treated to a shock therapy for a more wholesome reality through and after which the reality of the presence of the Divine has to be proclaimed. This ultimate reality, filled with healing love and compassion can also fill a psychotic person with healing light.

“Clarity” now for a live brain may provide a physical analogy to enlightenment, say of the Buddha, or the transfiguration of Jesus Christ. The transfiguration of the person or mind, if “mind” is understood as enveloping the whole person and the whole person’s intellect and affects as well are taken to be in the mind. When that mind becomes transparent, then perhaps the source of light can shine through a person.

Recently I wrote about the light of the eyes, as it was understood in Biblical times.[1] The light of the eyes, but really the light of the mind and all its wonderful functioning cannot hold a candle to “the Light in which we see light.” The whole verse from Psalm 36 also includes affects and more: “For with you is the fountain of life and in your light we see light.” That living light is the source of our being (structure) and consciousness (functioning and activity).

In blogging my thoughts here, I go all the way into opsins, photons, optogenetics, and “Clarity,” because Luther said that we cannot go into the flesh deeply enough. I first interpreted his sense of the word “flesh” to mean that we cannot go into everything concerning what it means to be human being deeply enough. In the words of Cicero, “I am a human being and I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” But here I interpret “flesh” as delving into this completely physical and natural study of the brain as a foray into theology.

Now Dreisseroth maintains that one cannot reason with depression. (D5) Of course not. But we should not discount the talking cure,[2] because insights enlighten the brain with optogenetic potential. And the encounter with the omniscient, compassionate, and wholly loving God, can bring a healthy person back from a “divine structure” into the wholeness of a new maturity, a fully functioning and fulfilling life. But God also has to encounter those like Dr. Dreisseroth, who go into a mind completely transparent or enlightened by the living Light of God to heal not only people with psychoses, but also as many of us who are walking around in an everyday reality unenlightened by the real presence of the One who “created the sun, moon, and the shining stars; for God commanded and these lights were created.” (Psalm 148:3 and 5)

 

[1] See “Your Eye is a Lamp for your Body.” Also see “Seeing the Light of God.”

[2] Check out Ira Steinman’s book Treating the Untreatable. I relate a story from it in my Sermon of Feb. 8, 2009 called, “Not just the Healthy, the sick are saved too.”  Here of course, I take the neuroscientific approach of this article.

Blogging my thoughts further: “Seeing in the Light of God”

A citation that I remembered today came from Theodor W. Adorno. It relates to being completely oblivious to thought and consciousness when the physicist deals with space-time. It is just like Plato, whose form of forms was invisible, because it was intellect. To translate Adorno: “Where science is dogmatically made into objectivity, [it is as if] it had not gone completely through a subject.”[1] Michael Polanyi refers to this failure of science as the “cult of objectivity.” In a similar way, Leibnitz had to remind John Locke, who opposed innate ideas, “Nothing that is in the intellect was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.”[2] What has to be remembered is that in the very recent discovery of inflation and the ripples marking the gravity waves, is the concomitant expansion of thought or intellect, knowledge.

On the Sunday before last, the subject entailed Jesus healing the beggar, the man born blind, found in the Gospel of John, chapter 9. Calling Christ the light of the World reminds very much of the Face of God shining upon us, the invisible sun of intellect, Plato’s form of forms, the source of goodness, truth, and beauty. Another way to speak about it comes from Psalm 36:9: “For with you is the fountain of life and in your light we see light.” The light in which we see light, Plato would call the intellect and others might call it consciousness. For the Hebrew tradition it would also have to include faith, trust, and compassion. Because God became flesh in Jesus Christ, because God became a human being in Jesus Christ, he is the “Son of Man” and the Son of God. That makes it tempting to change “Son” to Plato’s “Sun” and identify Jesus as the source of goodness, truth, and beauty in the Greek Philosophical tradition and the shining Face of God, bringing favor and blessing and growth in the Hebrew tradition.

The Preacher that Sunday, Monique Ortiz, made the point that Jesus was almost stoned and then thrown out of the temple. It is in that condition that he sees the man blind from birth, an invisible beggar, who because he was always there, no one could see, until Jesus saw him there in the light of healing and compassion.

So the light in which we see light is not merely reason the way Immanuel Kant would have it. His ideal was the fully rational person. The affect also has to be involved, thus in my treatment of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals in Kant and Luther in my website, you will see that I added “the fully mature person” as well. Graphically I illustrated Kant’s conception with a sphere. (The ascent up to the top axis is into Spirit and Freedom, the descent into the depths below is into necessity and nature.)

So in the light in which we see light, we are not only able to distinguish goodness, truth, and beauty, but those nouns become verbs. From Jesus the Truth, love and compassion flow out of him for this beggar representing all of humanity that is blind from birth and healing him so that he becomes a seer, like the prophets of old, and I believe that he also received physical sight as well. But as the chapter progresses his vision improves. He sees Jesus first as a good man, then as a prophet, then as the Son of Man, and finally as the Messiah of God.

This reminds me of the light of the eyes article Your Eye is the Lamp of your Body that I posted and to which my son, Mark responded. Like Kantian knowledge our sight is actively healing the world with trust, love, and compassion, affective components that have to fulfill the intellect, in the way Jesus proclaimed it.

The way the light of Jesus’ compassion heals the blind beggar, the man blind from birth, that creative love and compassion also makes us come into existence. The beggar standing there invisible to people must have felt like he didn’t exist. We sometimes feel as if we did not exist. The compassionate eyes of Jesus see us into existence, because we are contemplating the light of life, thought, and love, nouns that become verbs in the continuous creation of God.

We used to speak of active listening. Those who have ears to hear let them hear and faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17) and morning by morning God awakens my ear so I hear like an apprentice (Isaiah 50:4b). But all the senses have to become active rather than passive: sight and touch as well. Thomas Aquinas had all the senses come together internally into the common sense, an invisible hand, by which intellectual things could be grasped. Origen believed that spiritual senses intensified into higher sensations, spiritual sensations, to which the physical senses could not hold a candle.

Spiritual seeing is difficult to describe. A fellow seminarian, Dave Zimmer, saw a drunken man walking, no stumbling down the sidewalk, clinging and holding on from one parking meter to the next so that he would not fall down. David said, “See that fellow? He has never learned to walk.” Later I also thought, as an alcoholic, he has also not been able to give up the bottle, the way every baby has to learn to do. This is the kind of seeing that represents the spiritual sense of sight, but also filled with the compassion that brings healing.

We see with our minds – with our intellect and we see with our hearts – with compassion. That Sunday Monique Ortiz talked of sing the homeless in the streets of San Francisco with the eyes of the soul.

At the end of chapter 9, Jesus closes by reproaching the religious authorities in a Socratic way. Because you say that you can see, even though you are blind, your guilt remains with you. If they had confessed that they too were blind from birth and they too needed eyes that see and ears that hear and a heart full of compassion (participating in the light in which we see light and walking by the Light of the World and continuing the creation with Jesus) then they would have no sin. But because they said that they could see, their sin remained.

When a person said that they knew something, Socrates would begin questioning him. After some probing questions a person would soon come to the limits of their knowledge and become confronted with the great unknown. (The more we know the more we know we don’t know. The less we know the more we think we know.) When so confronted and so unwilling to face their ignorance, some left Socrates in a huff quite offended, while Socrates’ disciples laughed at the person’s ignorance. If the person confessed his ignorance, Socrates would put his arm around him and say, “Let’s try to learn more together. The unexamined life is not worth living.”

So because the religious authorities said that they could see, they were blind. Had they confessed their ignorance, that is, their lack of compassion, confessed that they could not see, then the Light of the World would have dawned within them.

________________________

[1] “Wo Wissenschaft dogmatisch zu einer Objektivität gemacht wird, die nicht durch das Subjekt hindurch gegangen sein soll…” Theodor W. Adorno, Aufsätze zur Gesellschaftstheorie und Methodologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 190.

[2] William F. Lawhead, The Voyage of Discovery, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Thomson Learning, 2002), p. 259.

Your eye is the lamp of your body, Luke 11:33-36.

Luke 11:33-36: Your eye is the lamp of your body.

By Peter Krey (12/27/13

with a Response by Mark (1/21/14)

and a Response of mine again to him (1/21/14).

In rereading the Gospel of Luke, it seemed rather foolish to consider Jesus merely a revolutionary peasant in the way of the Zealot, by Reza Aslan. Reading this passage and thinking about Jesus as the light of the World, as we are wont to do over Christmas, makes me realize that Jesus was enlightened and had fully become conscious of his unconscious in the experience of the fullness of self-knowledge and of others in God’s presence. Buddha can throw light on Jesus, but Jesus is not only completely enlightened personally, but also enlightening the whole people of God for the Kingdom of Heaven. Perhaps Jesus is not as individually oriented as Buddha.

No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a bushel, but on the lampstand so those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness. Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be full of light as when a lamp gives you light with its rays. (Luke 11:33-36)

Our enlightenment is for the sake of showing others the way so that they do not fall or lose their way or experience the hopeless and dumbfounding experience of the blind leading the blind. The body can also be understood as the collective of all the people as one heart and soul in Christ as well as in the body of the one person. Jesus sees a person as a beacon, as one who throws light on the path that people go and shows them the way so that they do not become lost.

Having your whole body be full of light seemed to me to refer to transfiguration as well as enlightenment. “If your eye is not healthy” – St Jerome in the Vulgate translates the Greek poneros in Latin nequam sa good for nothing or wicked, which the English “healthy” does not capture too well, even if one of the meanings could be “ill.” Sick eyes probably don’t see very well, but an eye that does not see, one that is useless, is probably what Jesus is referring to.

But comparing the eyes to a lamp for the body made me realize that we understand what our eyes do differently from the way Jesus and the people of his time understood what they do. We see the sun’s rays striking an object and that light going into our eyes and getting reflected on our lens, upside down, as we know, and then getting the recognition of its image in our brain. The eyes function, but they are passive, in our view, and the light external to them is active. Jesus saw the eyes the other way around; they were the active light shining inside the body but also shining outside and not merely seeing by means of the light outside. Sometimes pictures by the ancients showed beams of light coming out of the eyes of a seer. The seeing was not just sight but much more: perhaps spirit, faith, and knowledge. Thus this sight could also be involved in a change of mind that not only saw the world in a different light, but also changed the world by the way the eyes of the heart and mind saw the world.

“Eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, and a heart that does not understand” refers to useless eyes and a true seer or prophet had eyes, ears, and a heart that penetrated seeing with the light in which we see light. (Psalm 36) Thus God said, “Let there be light” and there was light before the creation of the sun, moon, and stars.

Immanuel Kant spoke of his Copernican revolution in how we know things. David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. Hume thought the mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which impressions from the outside marked and filled the passive mind. Kant said it was just the opposite. The active mind worked on the sensations out there actively shaping them for comprehension and grasp of the invisible hand, so that the representations of the senses could be perceived and reasoned and thought. When Jesus refers to the eyes as a lamp, he is making the spirit, what Kant called the mind, and what is sometimes called our consciousness, active the way Immanuel Kant did.

But Jesus is speaking about more than the mind, even though his call to repentance means a metanoia or a change of heart and mind. He sees the eyes as working when they participate in that light in which we see light. To merely speak about that as consciousness or even God consciousness does not take the presence of God into account and the Kingdom of heaven that Jesus is proclaiming, unless we subscribe to a Jungian collective consciousness. Really it is faith and that not merely understood as our trust but ultimately as faith or the light of the world, Christ as the Holy Spirit living and acting through us. “Your faith has made you well,” Jesus never tires of saying and that means the light of God shining in you and on you and making you well again, somewhat like our soaking in vitamin C while basking in our sunlight.

In the German Christmas Eve sermon this year I realized our living room became transfigured into the Christmas room by the candles burning on the tinsel laden Christmas tree and all the glowing and glistening candles and decorations with the presents lying all around us. Christ had a body full of light and no part of it was in darkness. We often are full of darkness without any light in us, except physical light. In that sermon I quoted hymns that identified the darkness with depression, sorrow, suffering, pain, sin, evil, death and destruction. The light was identified with life, love, forgiveness, compassion, and bliss and the light overcame the darkness.

The metaphors for Christ went from the light of the world, to the Sun of Righteousness, the Sun of Grace, and the Christmas Sun. Luther noted that God spread a heaven of grace over believers, from which God would never shut them out. God’s steadfast love and faithfulness endures forever. (Psalm 117) Christ, the Sun of Grace belongs up in that heaven of grace, making the dawn break on our day full of grace in our transfigured space and time. So for those who revere the name of God the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. (Malachi 4:2) And the friends of God are like the sun when she rises in all her splendor. (Judges 5:31)

Perhaps Plato can help us. He felt that there was another invisible sun, far greater than the merely physical one up in the sky. It was the form of forms, the sun that was the source of intelligence that shone with goodness, truth, and beauty. (I would add life, the source of life and intelligence.) For Plato, although that sun was invisible, it was the really real and it was the true source of all the merely physical copies seen with our physical eyes. Thus in the metaphor of the cave, to be completely captured by the physical sun, was to only see shadows, and to rise up and become enlightened, the way Socrates was, and the way Jesus was, would mean to come out of the darkness of the cave, where mere shadows and reflections could only be seen and up into the sunlight of that sun that was the source of life, intelligence, of thought, of seeing oneself and knowing oneself and seeing the world and knowing the world for what it really is.

So God and the kingdom of heaven is within us and through faith in the light of the world, Jesus Christ, the light shining in the darkness which the darkness has not been able to overcome, is the one who calls us to repent for the Kingdom of heaven at hand. Jesus calls us to have a change of heart and mind and get out of the cave and into the sunlight of the faith in God that heals, gives new life, reveals the real nature of the world, seeing the whole world and all the people in it in a new light, in which we and this whole world become transfigured.

Luther first sees faith as the foreman of all good works, then the captain, and finally as the pure act of God in, with, under, and through us. So faith means the Holy Spirit working in bringing healing, new life, continual reincarnation, as we become Christs to others by our baptisms and rebirths in the continuous creation by God, who is not finished with us nor this world yet.

M. Krey	3:06 PM (3 hours ago)

Hey Dad,

I really enjoyed your paper about the Eye as the Lamp of the Body that was inspired by the passage from Luke. It has been especially nice to read since I am 6 or so chapters deep into Zealot by Reza Aslan.

I will outline all of my thoughts, comments and the one or two typos I found below. Everything I state will be organized by page number…

( page 1)  “[Jesus] had fully become conscious of his unconscious in the experience of the fullness of self knowledge and of other’s in God’s presence.”

– Does this mean that Jesus had become aware of the power of      one’s own unconscious (i.e. that it shapes the world) and/or he had become aware that he in fact was God’s consciousness?

( page 1)  “… Jesus is not only completely enlightened personally, but also enlightening the whole people of God for the Kingdom of Heaven.”

– Jesus then attains enlightenment by enlightening the world around him, or his own enlightenment is the product of having enlightened the world around him. For example: seeing God in his neighbor.

( page 1) ” Perhaps Jesus is not as individually oriented as Buddha.”

– Jesus is the enlightened one, who is the enlightening of all   people!

( page 1)  ” Jesus sees a person as a beacon,”

– This inspired me to think that the word beacon could be interchangeable with Christ. Thus when we are a beacon for others it is like we are saying we are a christ for others. That is a very fascinating idea you put forth there, Dad, and it’s very well worded.

( page 2)  When you mention that Saint Jerome translates the poneros as wicked and good for nothing, I think that paints a very different picture of how someone’s eye is capable of being. Good for nothing almost sounds like the eye is defiant or a degenerate.

( page 2)  And further down the page you state “… but an eye that does not see, one that is useless, is probably what Jesus is referring to.”

–  That brought to mind that some people ( perhaps atheists) see all of God’s creation around them, yet they do not see God’s creation as miraculous and holy and they fail to see God’s promises and consciousness within those around them in their life.

( page 2)  The second paragraph on the second page captures perfectly the ideas you originally expressed to me that day as we walked through Andronico’s and I am satisfied with the way it is verbalized. ( The Sun reflecting light off of objects versus our own inner sun emitting a ray of our inner light that reflects off an object and gives the whole world purpose and order)

“seeing” by means of the light within, and that sight being perhaps spirit, faith and knowledge, as you state at the bottom of page two. Excellent!

( page 3) “When Jesus refers to the eyes as a lamp, he is making the spirit, what Kant called the mind, and what is sometimes called our consciousness, active the way Immanuel Kant did.”

–  That’s a wonderful way of putting it! Jesus activates the mind!!! Incredible that he was talking about this stuff in first century Judea no less!

( Page 4)  I thought it was very interesting that you make sure to include the participation of God the Father “To merely speak about that as consciousness or even God consciousness does not take the presence of God into account and the kingdom of Heaven that Jesus is proclaiming”

– So we don’t want our own consciousness / lamp to overshadow that of God’s consciousness. God is still ultimately in charge.

( page 4)  “Really it is faith and not merely understood as our trust but ultimately as faith or the light of the world, Christ as the Holy Spirit living and acting through us… the light of God shinning in you and on you and making you well again… [like basking in sunlight ands absorbing vitamin C]”

– This passage was very interesting to me, because firstly it gave me a more unique understanding of the trinity, in that it is the “Christ”part of Jesus that traverses the hearts and minds of people making a home in them.

GOD

(made heavens and earth and all of life)

v

v

v

SON

(God taking on the form of human consciousness / flesh / bone)

v

v

v

HOLY SPIRIT

(that consciousness of God that is somewhat conceivable to the human race. That consciousness that resided in Jesus of Nazareth, that can now reside in us through Faith)

– The part about the light of God shinning in you and on you and making you well again (Like the sun and vitamin C) reminded me a little bit of the idea that when we have the Holy Spirit, God can take us (as sinful as we are) and still use us for God’s will. God writes straight on crooked lines as you say 🙂

( page 4)  “Christ had a body full of light and no part of it was in darkness.”

– Do you think it’s possible during times of temptation for Christ, like when he was in the desert being tempted by Satan, that he was struggling with some darkness in his body? Perhaps it was a darkness that was inherent in him simply because of his human form. It’s just an idea. I’m not even sure where I stand on that idea.

( page 5)  The whole section where you compare Plato’s cave to the eye being the lamp of the body concept, is really great! You take your whole idea a step further and illustrate it in a very effective way. With the comparison to Plato, you begin to paint a picture of a heavenly realm. Perhaps we are a step closer to seeing that realm glimmer through this earthly realm we dwell in.

( page 6)  “Jesus calls us to have a change of heart and mind and get out of the cave and into the sunlight of the faith in God that heals, gives new life, reveals the real nature of the world, seeing the whole world and all the people in it in a new light, in which we and this whole world become transfigured.”

– The tradition of calling Jesus “the way, the truth and the life”, almost sounds prophetic to Plato’s cave allegory. Jesus is our path out of the cave into the sunlight of the really real as you state so beautifully. Because Christ incarnated onto this Earth, we have found a way to leave the cave and transfigure the world through him. I would think that if we as human kind meditated on this idea, that we could achieve a paradigm shift of the Earth’s consciousness.

( page 6) I was very interested in your usage of the words reincarnation and rebirths. I’d love for you to expand on that and tell me more in regards to what you mean when relating it to Faith, God’s Healing, Being Christs For Others and God’s Continuous Creation.

In that book you got me about reincarnation I read a wonderful story:

   A God Sage named Narada came from heaven down to earth on a journey which was customary for him. One day he was passing by a man who was meditating in the wilderness and he had been sitting and meditating so long that ants had built a mound around him. He asked Narada “Ask the God of Heaven when he will be merciful to me and when I will attain freedom.” Further down the road Narada ran into another man who was singing and dancing. When the man found that Narada was going to heaven he asked Narada “Ask when I shall attain freedom”.

       Some time later Narada was on the same road and he found the man meditating and the ant hill had completely grown around him. He asked Narada “What did God say? When will I attain freedom?”. Narada told the man “Four more births” and the man began to weep and wail and he cried “I have been mediating until an ant hill has been raised around me and I still have to live four more lives?”

        Narada continued down the road and ran into the other man. The man asked “Did you ask about me?” Narada replied “Oh yes. Do you see this tamarind tree? I have to tell you that as many leaves are on this tree, so many times will you be born and then you will attain freedom”. 

        Then the man began to dance for joy and he said “After so short a time I shall be free!” and then a voice came “My Child, you shall have freedom this instant”.

*****

One other idea I should share with you in regards to my reading of Zealot. Reza Aslan seems to be citing Jesus as a insurrectionist bandit in the passage of Luke where Jesus asks Peter to sell his cloak and buy a sword. Yet Aslan completely leaves out the following passage that Jesus does this so he can fulfill the scripture that said he would be counted among the lawless.

Pastor Jasa used to remind me again and again that Jesus through out scripture is going out of his way to fulfill the prophecies, so that those who know them will see that Jesus is the Messiah without having to be told.

This is comparable to what Artists in our day and age do. Some artists go as far as claiming to be the reincarnation of other artists, for instance Liam Gallagher of Oasis claimed to be the reincarnation of John Lennon. Liam went out of his way to sing like John, write songs that sound exactly like John’s songs as well as other things. He did this so people would see and believe that he was John Lennon reincarnated. Only problem was, John Lennon died six years after Liam Gallagher was born.

Regardless of that, I think Jesus ( or at least the writers of the Gospels whoever they may have been), are trying to give the reader the sign that Jesus is the Messiah and I don’t believe Jesus ever had any intention of using those swords on the centurions coming to get him.

I think he was just trying to make sure he met all the requirements of the prophetic Messiah and he even states it so it would be on the record “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled”.

I think the reason this Zealot book has been getting so much attention is because it’s a very different take on who Jesus was despite the fact I think it’s very inaccurate.

This paper on the eyes being the lamp of the body is very good. To allay your fears that you weren’t concise enough or didn’t express it as clearly as you did that day we were in Andronicos, I will tell you now that it goes above and beyond your original revelation and adds to it with Plato’s Cave. There’s nothing I would change in it, if I were you. I hope this response is something you can enjoy, Pop 🙂

Love

Mark

1. I only understand this as the psychological definition of full human maturity. A fully mature person has made conscious his or her unconscious. Jesus also had full self-knowledge and thus also the knowledge of others. I’m not sure about the word “God consciousness, because I’m not sure about everything associated with it.

2. Page 2. “God’s promises and consciousness” works for me. The former are the Gospel and the latter is that aspect of the Holy Spirit with thoughts and ways higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth.

3. Going right to

4. Sure I think temptation was threatening the Light of Christ. But his light shined in the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it.

5. Going right to

6. I don’t mean a reincarnation or rebirth of some else from the past. What I mean is a continual incarnation, meaning that we become Christs as Christ is born in our hearts in our rebirth and then matures as we continue his ministry and have our own passion stories and become raised with him. But our rebirth also means become the true and unique individual selves who we were really created to be. God also did not create the world way back in the past and now is resting from creation. The creation is not finished yet. New stars are bursting into existence and out at the edge of our growth God is also not finished creating us yet. I once thought John the Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah, but that is not a theological concept belonging to our tradition. John dressed like Elijah and resembled the spirit of Elijah, but they were two very different prophets. I think there are different conceptions of reincarnation, but the Platonic one has an eternal soul being recycled in an infinite number of bodies. In that way the individual, unique, individual person seems to become lost. Perhaps not if there are also an infinite number of souls. But we believe each person has his or her own soul. I confess that I often say that we have to be one heart and soul together in Christ. but let me go with Teilhard de Chardin: “True unity differentiates, it does not confound.” Unity does not allow conformity or uniformity. How can the same person have different lives? Sometimes in the same life, we face so many changes we feel like we already are living a different life and then a chain of another previous life is living a different life in the same life?

A Critique of Science (continued). 22. August, 2013, Blogging my thoughts

A Critique of Science (continued). 22. August, 2013

I’ve been reading Polanyi on religion and science this morning and that is giving me more thoughts about the piece I just wrote yesterday about the MD’s setting up that health outpost in the jungle under a shaman. The question becomes how could the shaman have understood things that the medical doctor only learned in medical school?

I think it has to do with his living in and understanding his world as densely populated by spirits, to use Dr. Herndon’s description of their cultural thought world. Thinking in terms of spirits is a way of thinking in terms of faith and thus thinking in terms of God, because “God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:24)

It is problematic when faith is replaced by one way of understanding, because, as a base,  a genuine faith is open to many paths on the way to understanding. As St. Anselm said, “I believe in order to understand.”[1] If we substitute one way of understanding for faith then a reductionism becomes involved that disregards the totality of the picture that a faith cognizant of the whole can provide. Faith, an open faith, that is, should not be marginalized for the sake of one way of understanding. It is rather foolish for some scientists of today to argue for the non-existence of God, as if science could replace faith. And it is as foolish for representatives of a faith to reduce their faith to one way of understanding.

Polanyi argues that the reductionism of science is problematic for human beings.

Modern science and scientific philosophy cannot analyze the human person without reducing it to a machine. This flows from assuming that all mental processes are to be explained in terms of neurology, which in their turn must be represented as a chart of physical and chemical processes. The damage wrought by the modern scientific outlook is actually even more extensive. It tends toward replacing everywhere the personal I-Thou by the impersonal I-It.[2]

To continue quoting Polanyi:

We can go farther. Evidently any attempt to identify the particulars of an entity would involve a shift of attention from the entity to the particulars. We would have to relax the intention given to the whole for the sake of the discovering its particulars which we had noticed until now only by being aware of them as part of the whole. So that once we have succeeded in fully identifying these particulars, and are in fact attending to them now directly in themselves, we clearly shall not be relying any more on our awareness of them as particulars of the whole and therefore will inevitably have lost sight of the whole altogether.[3]

The emphasis on ecology in science is now trying to correct this historical defect. Polanyi continues:

This fact is abundantly borne out by half a century of Gestalt psychology. We may put it as follows. It is not possible to be aware of a particular in terms of its contribution to a whole and at the same time to focus our attention on it in itself. Or again, since it is not possible to be aware of anything at the same time subsidiarily and focally, we necessarily tend to lose sight of an entity by attending focally to its particulars.[4]

That “entity” Polanyi is referring to is a person or spirit that even understands nature in an I-Thou relationship, let alone in relation to human beings. On the other hand, science has the tendency to make even human beings into objects in an I-It relationship.

The long citation from Polanyi above explains what Dr. Herndon described as “the narrow lens of science looking through a tunnel, becoming limited by what the scientist chooses to see.” Suddenly, the story about looking for a lost ring, that could have been lost anywhere, only under the street lamp of science, is the metaphor that came to my mind.

Dr. Herndon claimed that the missionary and the government officials destroyed the “shell of spirit” in marginalizing the shaman and the tribal world of knowledge, their treasury of wisdom, making the tribe completely dependent upon them. [5] (Teilhard de Chardin would speak of the particular self-generated envelope of thought as their “noosphere.”) Evidently tribal members think not in terms of concepts, or with an experimental scientific method, but through experiencing and thinking in terms of spirits, which is their path to understanding.

In his world of thought, the shaman claimed that an evil spirit was in a forest, because that was his way of thinking and understanding in terms of spirits. He did not know the scientific particulars, in terms of rodents in the forest spreading a microbial disease, but he was grappling with the fact that tribal members who went into that forest died and he could not cure them, thus an evil spirit was at work.

In conclusion, science is of course a very important and crucial pathway to understanding and impacting our lives and environment, but it is not the only pathway, and it still has to make way for faith, for an open faith, not one that distorts it or tries to replace it, but a faith that checks our totalitarian attitude about its being the only way to reliable knowledge. Did our false, dominating spirit of monotheism somehow get into scientists? Christ showed us the way and it’s a humble, suffering helpfulness, even in epistemology.

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[1] Compare St. Anselm with Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” This philosophical conviction is certainly a reductionism of living, acting, and experience to thought. These can all be thought but not be reduced to thought, for example, a relationship is more than the analysis of it.

[2] Michael Polanyi, “The Scientific Revolution,” in Hugh C. White, ed., Christians in a Technological Era, (New York: Seabury Press, 1964), p. 28.

[3]Ibid., Page 30.

[4] Ibid.

[5] From notes that I took at Dr. Christopher Herndon’s power point presentation. See my previous blog.

Hearing about a Health Outpost set up in the Jungle, Blogging my thoughts by Peter Krey

Hearing about a Health Outpost set up in the Jungle

Blogging my thoughts by Peter Krey

 

My friend Ron Moore and I attended a presentation by Dr. Christopher Herndon M.D.[1] on August 15, 2013 at 7:00pm in the Bone Room on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. His lecture or PowerPoint presentation was called, “Learning from Tribal Healers.” Over the last ten years or so, he has been working with remote Amazon tribes in South America, more precisely, southern Suriname. The card advertising his presentation read: “He will discuss his experiences learning from Amazon healers, that is, shamans and the relevance of traditional medicine to conservation and the importance of shamanism to their medical systems – and to our own.”[2]

Dr. Herndon’s purpose was to persuade us about the value of the world of knowledge of the traditional shaman of these remote tribes, many of which were becoming extinct.  This wisdom became lost after contact with the West, when government officials and Christian missionaries considered the shamans to be witch doctors, caught up only in negative superstition and evil spirits. But the shaman like glue held the whole tribe together. Usually from childhood he was brought up to become one and had long, even ten-year apprenticeships on his way to become the accepted shaman of the tribe.

Dr. Herndon told that when a botanist learned the language of a tribe one shaman could designate 2000 different species of trees by merely looking at the leaf from that tree. Usually a western PhD in botany needed another component besides the leaf and could not even name 25 trees in the area in which he lived. A zoologist with a PhD studying bees, asked a tribal member about them, who named 52 different varieties of bees, dumbfounding him by his knowledge of the flora and fauna.  A shaman also knew the healing properties of many leaves and vines, insects and the secretion of frogs, and medicines from under the bark of trees. They had diagnostic capabilities that were dumbfounding to a Western medical doctor knowing what he had learned in medical school. But it took the love to take the time to learn their language and the humility to listen to the shaman and learn what he knew. What opened up for the western MD was his universe of knowledge, his treasury of wisdom, which is ordinarily lost thirty years after a shaman was driven from the tribe. In this way cutting the whole tribe off from the source of its knowledge and culture, it was then placed on its way to extinction. Before that point it was made completely dependent on the West in unsustainable ways. In a medical health clinic set for western medicine, he was discussing a diagnosis with the indigenous staff. He looked through their microscope and discovered that it was broken. They were merely pretending to use it for their take on the diagnosis.

Dr. Herndon set up a traditional health outpost in Suriname in an Amazonian tribe known as the Trio and reinstated the shaman to be the tribal healer.[3]  This traditional health outpost is designed to complement a western medical clinic nearby. After he set it up and invited the shaman who had been shunned to return and do his work, Dr. Herndon did the best thing he could do. He left them alone. He flew to Washington, D.C. returning by plane after a few months. These remote jungle locations are only accessible by air. While landing, from the plane he could see a long line waiting to see the shaman at the health outpost.

Dr. Herndon presented many examples of the diagnostic capabilities and the treasury of wisdom possessed by the shaman lost to us because of our feelings of superiority and complete disregard of their knowledge and culture. Meanwhile contact with the West was destroying one tribe after another and many more are nearing extinction after becoming completely dependent on the West. (Not the pharmaceutical were threatening the tribes quite so much as oil, mineral, and lumber extraction.)

For example, some tribes use 12 to 13 foot long blow pipes with poison darts to hunt the monkeys they consume for food. The poison they use is a muscle relaxant that makes the monkey fall silently through the trees and vines to the ground. (Their “poison” is used in every operating room today, but of course, there is no way to give them intellectual property rights.) After contact with the West, tribal hunters use shotguns, disturbing the whole environment and making all the animals flee, with the wounded animal as well.  Because the monkey’s muscles do not relax, they remain inaccessible because they cling and stay way up in the trees. Then the hunters run out of ammunition and can’t afford to buy more, and to add insult to injury, they no longer know how to make the medicine.

Dr. Herndon’s talk provided me with many theological insights. To preach Christ and do missionary work that decimates the culture of the people contradicts Christ. “Who is as blind as my servant?”[4] asked the prophet Isaiah. To be a missionary means to continue the incarnation of Christ. That requires becoming one of the people, to become a tribal member by learning the language, learning their culture, learning the treasury of their wisdom. Tribal members are still very much in touch with nature and “know the leaves of the trees that heal the nations” as written in Revelation.[5] “Who is as blind as my servant?” The missionaries who preach Christ without continuing his incarnation in their lives impose an alien and unsustainable culture upon the tribal members that contradicts the incarnation of Christ. Why are we so inflexible and why have we lost the sensitivity and capability to become one of the people we are trying to win? St. Paul said, “To a Jew I became a Jew in order to win the Jews…to the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”[6] In a sense in our culture blindness we crucify not only the witch doctors but the whole tribe as well, because the extinction of the whole tribe with its language, culture, and treasury of wisdom is certainly comparable to their crucifixion.

Plus we have to thank God for a secularism permeated with wonderful values that freed an M.D. from the blinders of Christian missionaries and government officials to see the value in shamans, whom the missionaries swept aside as demonic witch doctors. They certainly are sinners[7] caught up in some deception and self-deception but so are we and in the self-righteousness and presumption of our faith we act as if we are not.

Dr. Herndon was not anti-religious or using this critique against missionaries, the way for the sake of self-criticism, I am doing here. But his talk made me realize our vast shortcomings, which we need ourselves as missionaries to become aware of, at this point. What a waste of lives, culture, and wisdom has followed our witness when we do not continue the incarnation ourselves when we preach Christ.

(I want to also include his critique of science and scientific, technological medicine below), but first more about what I mean by continuing the incarnation.  He spoke about the field coordinator of his organization, a David Fleck, PhD, who has lived with an Amazonian tribe full-time since 2008, became fluent in their language, wrote a grammar for it as his doctoral dissertation, and married a member of the tribe. This kind of loving embodiment and of their culture and world, this total cultural immersion by baptism is the continuation of the incarnation and provides the possibility for the grace that brings abundant life to these tribal members and whole tribes rather than their destruction and extinction.

“Dear God, forgive us Christians! We are such cultural barbarians! Forgive us for the things we have done. Intercede for us again from the cross, saying: “Father, forgive them they know not what they do!”

Dr. Herndon’s critique of science was similar to the critique I have mounted to our religion. Western science relies on reductionism to more and more simple elements. In that culture complexities and potency were also understood in a way that is outside the purview of our science. Without the unsustainable technology of our scientific medicine, the shaman could make diagnoses like the ones the doctor had learned in medical school. Dr. Herndon argued that because of its methodology of reductionism, science looked through a narrow lens through a tunnel, limiting us by what we chose to see and making us disregard the value of the knowledge of the tribal shaman and the treasury of their tribal wisdom.

While he was speaking, a telling analogy came to my mind: a person lost a ring at night knowing not where but looking for it under a streetlamp. Another coming upon him asked, “Why are you looking for it here?” “Because here is where I have light.” he answered. But the ring could lie anywhere in the darkness outside of the perimeter of the light thrown by the streetlamp. Scientific medicine in its knowledge does not grasp the complexities and intensities from a perspective of an ever greater wholeness, which lets the tribal members have sunlight in the places where our scientific streetlight does not shine.

Dr. Herndon said that the shamans lived in a world densely populated with spirits. Houston Smith claims that Jesus, who was filled with the Spirit, was completely acquainted with the spirit world and used his Spirit attendant powers for exorcism, healing, challenging people, and pronouncing a whole new social order. I guess our missionaries would have shunned and deposed Jesus Christ as a witch doctor!

When I asked Dr. Herndon about their spirit world, he said, “What is an evil spirit? They said a certain forest had an evil spirit. Don’t go in it if you value your life. We discovered a certain kind of rodent there that could give you a disease (He named the fever.) from which you died, because the shaman had no cure. That is what they referred to as the evil spirit.”[8] They may not know about germs and other microbes, like bacteria and viruses, or about radio waves and their frequencies, but they grasp and think through some of these phenomena in terms of personalized spirits in a way that helps them understand some aspects of reality in ways modern science cannot.

The question was asked about how effective the cures of the shaman in the health outpost were. This question could not yet be answered because there was no way to evaluate the practice, but when the missionaries were translating the Bible into the tribal language they had given some members of the tribe the literary skills to read and write and these members of the tribe were writing down the basic medical information about each case that the shaman was treating. [Note how missionaries did make a contribution, too.] These medical notes will provide the basic information to be used for later evaluation. How effective is our modern scientific technological medicine? He asked. Our technology is unsustainable and we really don’t know how effective our practice of medicine is either for cancer, for example.

Somehow, I think that secularism is a complementary place that Christianity provides, or has been compelled to provide, in order to make its faith one that can be accepted freely by persuasion without governmental or even social coercion and if it is not a stepchild of Christianity, it certainly belongs to Christianity in some way. Thank God for it, because it gives some the freedom to explore the world without the blinders that often accompany the faithful. These blinders make us stumble into the self-contradictory place where Christian missionaries would have shunned and driven away Christ as a witch doctor. The fact is that missionaries, especially scientifically trained medical doctors cannot be self-critical enough of their science as well as of their religion.

Now perhaps in a contradictory way, I ask myself, the way science has overtaken the “science” of antiquity and even the “science” of the deep past, i.e. the millennia before Christ; some human understandings in anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and psychology have also overtaken the state of knowledge of humanity represented in our theology. In other words, the science of scripture does not only need to be updated, but our understanding of the human being as well. We are stumbling around in the dark in our own culture, the way our missionaries have been among those Amazonian tribes.  Today we have to continue aligning the incarnation of Christ with the preaching of Christ more and more deeply, like the example given by Dr. David Fleck. That means listening and learning the Gospel of Christ for today. Thus the spirit world will have to be better interpreted to gain the holistic, complex, personal, social, and anthropological dimensions that tribal treasuries of wisdom contained – complementing the understandings of modern science. The spirit world interpreted as personal, internal, subjective wisdom needs to complement our external, methodological scientific knowledge as we seek to listen, learn, and incarnate Christ today.

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[1] http://beta.flavorpill.com/events/learning-from-tribal-healers-by-dr-christopher-herndon

[2] The Bone Room Presents its August Events, Solano Avenue, Berkeley, Ca www.boneroompresents.com

[3] See his article http://news.mongabay.com/2009/1110-herndon_amazon_shaman.html

[4] Cf. Isaiah 42:19.

[5] Rev 22:2, cf. Ezekiel 47:12.

[6] 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.

[7] Dr. Herndon discovered that they knew a great deal about human anatomy and shuddered to think how they learned so much about human internal organs.  Some of their superstitions are quite repugnant.

[8] Studying Houston Smith is well worthwhile: The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991, 1958) pages 318ff.