THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE SCOUNDREL CHRIST

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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I am pasting this NYT book reiview here, not because I agree with it, but as a stimulus for discussion. I will post my reactions to it later.

In the Name of the Father, the Sons . . .

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS/NYT Book Review

THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE SCOUNDREL CHRIST

By Philip Pullman

245 pp. Canongate. $24

Belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and belief in the virtue of his teachings are not at all the same thing. Writing to John Adams in 1813, having taken his razor blade to the books of the New Testament and removed all “the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests,” Thomas Jefferson said the 46-page residue contained “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Ernest Renan, in his pathbreaking “Life of Jesus” in 1863, also repudiated the idea that Jesus was the son of God while affirming the beauty of his teachings. In rather striking contrast, C. S. Lewis maintained in his classic statement “Mere Christianity”: “That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.”

As an admirer of Jefferson and Renan and a strong nonadmirer of Lewis, I am bound to say that Lewis is more honest here. Absent a direct line to the Almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it “moral” to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry and take to the stony roads? How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs? Such a person if not divine would be a sorcerer and a ­fanatic.

Philip Pullman, whose magical books for children are intended to displace Narnia and depose Lewis, is also very much interested in the Jesus myth and its ambivalence. The makers of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” dared only to propose that a very naughty boy had been born at the same time as Jesus in a stable adjoining his. Pullman outbids Python in profanity by having the Virgin Mary give birth to twins. One of these, Jesus, shows little gift for scholarship but exhibits charismatic talents. The other is full of scriptural knowledge and guile, and is his mother’s favorite on account of his sickliness. She gives him an ordinary name (not specified) for public purposes but to herself calls him by the pet name of “Christ,” meaning Messiah in Greek. We do not learn the names of her many other children, but then the New Testament, which mentions several of them, doesn’t name them all either.

This is almost literally to split the difference, and to raise the possibility that Christianity can be salvaged from itself, or at any rate from its later accretions, by a sort of “back to basics” revisionism. The difficulty that Pullman never quite confronts is that this involves what is vulgarly known as fundamentalism: an unmediated contact with the original message. Atheist though he is, Pullman turns out to be a Protestant atheist.

His method is to show Jesus more or less as we “know” him, giving moral lessons to ever larger crowds. Sometimes what he says is common sense, sometimes it is alarming or inconsistent. After a failed attempt to persuade Jesus to proclaim himself a leader and savior during a sojourn in the wilderness — in which he seems to stand in for the Devil of the Scriptures — Christ retreats to the fringes of the growing crowds, discreetly filling up tablets with his own accounts. He puts me in mind of Robert Burns’s poem about Captain Grose:

If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,
I rede you tent it:
A chield’s amang you takin’ notes,
And faith he’ll prent it!

One day Christ is approached by a mysterious Greek stranger who seems to know everything about him and his ­brother. The crux of the book occurs during the Sermon on the Mount, where Pullman has Jesus delivering a very toned-down and almost secular version of the Beatitudes. The stranger tells Christ to keep up his work as a reporter: “Sometimes there is a danger that people might misinterpret the words of a popular speaker. The statements need to be edited, the meanings clarified, the complexities unraveled for the simple-of-understanding. . . . Keep a record of what your brother says, and I shall collect your reports from time to time, so that we can begin the work of ­interpretation.”

Christ goes on to witness and write up a non-miraculous Feeding of the Five Thousand (everyone simply shares the extra food they have brought) and to suborn a disciple of Jesus to give him secondhand accounts of events at which he cannot himself be present. At night, he transcribes the tablets onto scrolls. The stranger turns up regularly to take these scrolls away, and silkily tells Christ: “If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was. I am sure you understand me.”

Flattered by this, Christ begins to “improve” his narrative, causing Jesus to make larger claims for himself than he has actually done. Most daringly, he ­invents the idea that Jesus has offered his disciple Peter “the keys of heaven.” Meanwhile, he continues to quote Jesus verbatim, on such troubling questions as the repudiation of family and the awfulness of gentiles, because there are too many witnesses to these ravings to justify excluding them.

Pullman continues in this manner, parable by famous parable (including the celebrated one about the adulterous woman and casting the first stone, which most scholars now agree was added centuries after the Gospels were written). The ­stranger, who appears each time in more cynical ways, makes it clear that the secret plan is to take the simplistic teachings of the itinerant Galilean and elaborate them into the dogma and structure of “a church.”

Eventually he makes it plain to Christ that in order for those scheming for this powerful church to get their way, someone will have to die. He holds out the hope, though, that at the last moment a ram may be offered, as with Isaac, in place of a human sacrifice.

The denouement is quick and cruel. Christ and the Greek stranger and the Jewish high priest Caiaphas make a pact to betray Jesus, with Christ substituting himself again, this time in the Judas role. In the course of a long monologue in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus himself expresses the hope that no church ever ­arises where mere mortals can claim to be doing God’s work. His address to heaven is met with silence. The terrible end comes, and the wretched disciples are duped in the most terrible way, which I dare not spoil for you.

This little book is part of a series of contemporary retellings of myths. It is not merely a reweaving of the synoptic Gospels with the supernatural dimension left out. It is an attempt by an experienced storyteller to show how even the best-plotted stories can get too far out of hand. I said earlier that Pullman was a Protestant atheist. Even so, he may well have been annoyed at the welcome given to his book by the clerical establishment in the person of the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who has described the “Jesus” character as “a voice of genuine spiritual authority” and the book itself as “mostly Pullman at his very impressive best, limpid and economical.” Pullman himself, echoing the common modern question of “W.W.J.D.?” — a question that in most modern contexts comes with no answer at all — claims that “my version is much closer to what Jesus would have said.” We in the infidel community do not pronounce anathemas or proclaim excommunications, or make the easy distinction between religious faith and “organized religion,” but this latest attempt to secularize Messianism is a disappointment to those of us who can never forgive the emperor Constantine, not just for making Christianity a state dogma, but for making humanity hostage to the boring village quarrels and Bronze Age fables that were drawn from what remains the world’s most benighted region.

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. His memoir, “Hitch-22,” has just been published.

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I don’t think Jesus ever threatened waverers or anyone with everlasting fire. He just wasn’t the hellfire and brimstone type like old Senex in the OT was.

As for C.S. Lewis, I have a kind of fondness for some of his ideas, particularly this one: Every moment is a ray eternal.

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So for you, Jesus is, in this sense at least, not Christ. I wonder how many New Testament verses you would have to throw out to get to your picture of Jesus.

Nice quote. I often found Lewis’ thinking clear and refreshing.

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Of all of this what is left in me is the oxymoron of a “protestant atheist”. Perhaps ironic, perhaps it is also a telling note that sometimes “atheist”, as an adjective, is misplaced. Some are unbelievers on any “theo”, but others are just men and women who are somehow turned off and away with what is defined, by some overbearing institutions as “theo” and their methods of honoring such conception of the divine.
I think that often people apply to themselves the name “atheist” because “theism” has come to mean, in their cultures “Christianity”. Since there is no God outside of Christianity, they accept the name most likely to be given by the institution which they are choosing to abandon. maybe this is done ironically, tongue-in-cheek, I don’t know. Pullman is a “protestant atheist” but could very well have been a protestant, period. What denies him this possibility is the overall Christian consensus about Jesus Divinity. When Jesus’ essense is made human, all too human, when the bridge is one of many, when the exclusivity of Jesus, the necessity of his death, are denied, what remains is not necessarily atheism but certainly becomes arguably non-christian and this in turn, as there is no real God outside of Christianity, according of course to Christianity, is “atheism”. But Pullman is not a consistent atheist, and seems to me simply a man prepared to revert to the religions of Jesus while he abandons the religions of Christ.

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Maybe atheism is protestantism pursued to it’s reducio ad absurd conclusion.

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Maybe, but then it would not be declared a “protest”, but like Marx, a “revolution”…if indeed the thinker has abandoned all beliefs in any and all conceived forms of “theo”.

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Protestantism is a revolution. The protestant principle is not to make ultimate what is not. Eventually even the traditional conception of God is subject to the principle. To the atheist, that conception is all. Without an adequate conception, faith has no object for the protestant atheist. The faithful protestant theist must recognize that her conception of God is not ultimate either and worship the God that is rather than the conception of God in her mind.

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That is an odd take. Is that what you think Luther was doing?

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He was one in a long line. Muhammad preceded him. The principle was already there in Judaism and New Testament Christianity to be uncovered again. Let’s call it radical iconoclasm. Atheists go all the way. Hence the zeal of the most radical of them. Personally I’m more moderate. I adhere by faith to a God beyond my conception of God.

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Alright Felix. I would disagree…although it is possibly because of how we use the terms here.

— Protestantism is a revolution. The protestant principle is not to make ultimate what is not. Eventually even the traditional conception of God is subject to the principle. To the atheist, that conception is all. Without an adequate conception, faith has no object for the protestant atheist. The faithful protestant theist must recognize that her conception of God is not ultimate either and worship the God that is rather than the conception of God in her mind.
O- Luther was not a revolutionary but a reformer. He did not speak for the upheavl of the Church’s traditions but a RETURN to the Church’s tradition, which he felt were best reflected in St Augustine. There is a difference, of course between the reformer and the revolutionary, or between Marx and Luther and Muhammed. Reformers like the last two are the only one’s that can remain religious. Revolutionaries cannot be religious. They may be spiritual, but even that is debatable because of the source in both of these activities, which is God.
The reformer does oppose the establishment, but not God. He opposes the establishment in the name of God. What is vigent in the present is of course not ultimate, but the REVELATION is ALWAYS FINAL, is always ultimate. Luther opposed the interpretation of revelation, the ultimate, by a non-ultimate establishment. His own opposition signals a lost or forgotten ultimate principle, which in his case was the authority of scripture (revelation and thus ultimate) over the authority of the Pope. If scripture said one thing then nothing the Pope said could ever take precedence over that.
The faithful protestant theist will have a conception of God as is, and this is fully revealed to her in Scripture. God, as He is, is not a mystery, but is there in Revelation.

same stuff with Mohammed. far from a revolutionary, Mohammed was a slave, a servant of that which is ultimate. And again, we could say that God is a Mystery in Himself, but the revelation for Muhammed was as ultimate as it’s source.

In each case, revelation is not necessarily that which is ultimate. It may as easily be argued that it is from Man or Satan, as it is from God, but the reformer takes it on faith that it is ultimate from the ultimate.

The revolutionary, the atheist, Marx, is under no such self-limitation and takes everything to the test: God, Church, State…which he binds often together because the ultimate is now within himself alone. The revolutionary works from a tabula rasa, while the reformer has to contend with has been revealed. The protestant cannot put in question, however he questions the Church, that Jesus Christ is our saviour and that belief in him is crucial in the salvation process- that is in revelation. The revolutionary makes revelation a fiction and proceeds to overthrow it as an obstacle to the ultimate which is now himself.

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OK Omar. It seems that you subscribe to a special lexicon. Luther’s avowed intention was reform. But he sparked a revolution.

I agree with the first two points. Point three is problematic. Revelation can’t be ultimate, because it is always conditioned by a proximate receiver–us. Luther did champion the authority of scripture and with it the conscience. But even the scripture must be subjected to the protestant principle–i.e. to put anything in the place of the ultimate is idolatry. So , worshipping the Bible as God is idolatry.

That’s impossible. The human mind is incapable of fully grasping the awesome eternal.

The reformer who takes his vision to be God himself is making a mistake. It would be like mistaking my concept of Omar for Omar himself.

If the member of a particular denomination publicly rejects the creed she might get formally excommunicated. Beyond that your statement is questionable. Questions probably occur in the minds of believers frequently. How does that effect their salvation? Doubt and faith may coexist in the mind. They might even depend on each other. Your last statement seems to have a particular revolutionary probably Marx in mind. He doesn’t define the term for me. I’m thinking of revolution in the sense of a fundamental and widespread change in the way of thinking about an issue. The protestant reformation was a revolution in that sense.

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Hello Felix:

— I agree with the first two points. Point three is problematic. Revelation can’t be ultimate, because it is always conditioned by a proximate receiver–us.
O- So the requirements of salvation are variable? Depedent on how we interpret it? Luther goes toe to toe with Erasmus over this and his point in the debate is that certain parts of scripture are literal- beyond the sphere of interpretation or modification by a mediator which is not needed or permitted. To this day this is a staple of protestant fundamentalism. That Jesus was resurrected is not conditioned by the receiver, as you say, but either accepted or not, but not modified or conditioned. Christianity, for Luther, represented a radical choice, and something had to be clear and consistent for this to be the case.

— Luther did champion the authority of scripture and with it the conscience. But even the scripture must be subjected to the protestant principle–i.e. to put anything in the place of the ultimate is idolatry. So , worshipping the Bible as God is idolatry.
O- The Bible was not worshipped as God, but venerated and respected as FROM God.

— That’s impossible. The human mind is incapable of fully grasping the awesome eternal.
O- The protestant does not pretend to know the mind of God, but as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:16: “But we have the mind of Christ.” And what do they say about Christ and God?

— The reformer who takes his vision to be God himself is making a mistake. It would be like mistaking my concept of Omar for Omar himself.
O- Your concept of Omar can either be based on your prejudices or on what I reveal about myself. Now I can lie and thus what I am and what I tell you that I am can differ. But in God’s case, what He reveals about Himself is what is the case. There is no separation in revelation.

— If the member of a particular denomination publicly rejects the creed she might get formally excommunicated. Beyond that your statement is questionable. Questions probably occur in the minds of believers frequently.
O- they do, and inquisitors were well aware of this. They had…means to retrieve the wandering minds of the flock.

— How does that effect their salvation?
O- It depends on what you doubt. If you that Jesus Christ died for your sins and was raised from the dead on the third day, then I don’t think that your salvation is a fact.

— Doubt and faith may coexist in the mind. They might even depend on each other.
O- Not as faith is defined in Hebrews.

— Your last statement seems to have a particular revolutionary probably Marx in mind. He doesn’t define the term for me.
O- The constrast I am trying to create is between a Protestant believer and a known atheist.

— I’m thinking of revolution in the sense of a fundamental and widespread change in the way of thinking about an issue.
O- Depends as to what one defines as fundamental, and as long as you retain God, as Luther and Mohammed did, then you retain the foundation of the establishment you wish to overthrow. So even by the definition you provide, you could not avopid the argument I make that questions the credentials needed for a true revolutionary.

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The lasting impact of Luther on thought is that, whatever salvation is, it is not a matter of papal authority but of the authority of the individual conscience to determine. This aspect of Luther’s thought influenced secular society in the form of individualism.

A message is always conditioned by it’s receiver. Hence the vast differences in interpretation of what is required for salvation among professing Christians not to mention the opinions on the matter among non-Christians.

Fundamentalists are bibliolaters who think that possessing the Bible, they possess God concretized, the divine oracle, the Word of God. They replace God with the Bible so they don’t really need God himself.

Who is this “the protestant” you speak of? That would be the ideal protestant wouldn’t it? That person doesn’t actually exist. As for Paul, let us try and guess what he may mean by his claim. Nevertheless, he isn’t explicitly claiming the mind of the eternal almighty God.

Whatever my concept of Omar is based on, my concept of Omar is not Omar himself. If I mistake my concept of Omar for Omar himself, I delude myself. Likewise, and to an infinitely greater extreme, one’s concept of God is not God.

How many saved minds have you peered into for comparison? The only mind you have direct access to is your own.

Well your going to have to explain that, because faith as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen seems to me to imply and therefore necessitate its antithesis–doubt. Otherwise, why would the faith of all the “witnesses” listed be laudable?

OK I got your point. I was talking about the protestant principle as a broad historical principle. As such, it goes beyond the protestant denominations.

The Protestant Reformation revolutionized Europe and significantly influenced the character of American society in ways that Luther didn’t anticipate. It began as a reform movement within the Catholic Church, but ended as a revolution which brought religious pluralism to Europe.

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Hello felix

— The lasting impact of Luther on thought is that, whatever salvation is, it is not a matter of papal authority but of the authority of the individual conscience to determine. This aspect of Luther’s thought influenced secular society in the form of individualism.
O- Luther considered salvation, whatever it might be, a gift, an unearned gift from God, bestowed solely on the Authority of God and not determined by individual conscience, which is what the Papal office offered by selling salvation. In that case salvation was determined by the individual conscience. Luther lifted salvation from the actions of men, ALL men, be it Pope or sinner.
Luther’s legacy for humanism was that Luther placed on the individual the power of the Pope. That is, Luther was not a Pope but he had declared on this matter from what was already there in scripture. This scripture laid for him, instead of the Pope, the will of God. With the printing of the Bible, all individuals could now claim the same benefit, an unmediated access to the will of God. Now that may seem dangerous, but Luther was not worried because he was not a revolutionary, as we see from his own actions, siding with the Status quo in at leeast one occasion. The writing had a literal and unequivocal meaning. It would be others who would move humanity past this obstacle.

— A message is always conditioned by it’s receiver. Hence the vast differences in interpretation of what is required for salvation among professing Christians not to mention the opinions on the matter among non-Christians.
O- As Eco has argued, I think convincingly, interpretation is not unlimited, but follows certain paths of least resistance. As interpretation is a phenomenon of language and language a social phenomenon, I make the argument that interpretation is condition with a social response. The individual contains his meanings to what still allows him a communion, a possible communication with others. Words, like “salvation”, could mean whatever, but a member of a society will want it to mean SOMEthing and not just ANYthing at all.

— Fundamentalists are bibliolaters who think that possessing the Bible, they possess God concretized, the divine oracle, the Word of God. They replace God with the Bible so they don’t really need God himself.
O- Don’t forget: “Protestants”. The Catholics had the Pope, a man traditionally linked to a direct contact with Jesus Christ: Whatever their office binds, or frees, would be so in heaven as it would be on earth. THEY TOO had no need for God, under this understanding. Which brings me again to my point. From Pope to Bible what we have is a reformation of how the same fundamental principle is applied. No revolution.

— Who is this “the protestant” you speak of?
O- Paul of course.

— That would be the ideal protestant wouldn’t it? That person doesn’t actually exist.
O- My ideal Protestant is Paul, who was the first to protest/oppose a clerical body in the Council of Jerusalem.

— As for Paul, let us try and guess what he may mean by his claim. Nevertheless, he isn’t explicitly claiming the mind of the eternal almighty God.
O- So what is he claiming?

— Whatever my concept of Omar is based on, my concept of Omar is not Omar himself. If I mistake my concept of Omar for Omar himself, I delude myself. Likewise, and to an infinitely greater extreme, one’s concept of God is not God.
O- The concept that the Christian is trying to form is not about God’s Being, or what would be like to be God, or Omar, in our analogy. The goal is to know what is God’s will, just as you could ask about a master’s will or even my will. Hopw would you go about finding the will of Omar? Well, if I am around, you can ask me and I could tell you, or I could leave a written account of what is my will and refer you to that. Either way, you would not need to know what I am like. Your concept of my will needs only to conform with what I TELL you to be my will, either in print or in word.

— How many saved minds have you peered into for comparison? The only mind you have direct access to is your own.
O- Felix, we DON’T have access to our “minds”. Minds are just abstractions, shadows that fly on by. “We” or “I” is a river in which we cannot step in twice. We don’t “access”, we just are.

— Well your going to have to explain that, because faith as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen seems to me to imply and therefore necessitate its antithesis–doubt. Otherwise, why would the faith of all the “witnesses” listed be laudable?
O- Faith is laudable, not for it’s doubt, but by it’s sureness, it’s certainty. NIV: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. 2This is what the ancients were commended for.” It is not that they were commended for their doubt, but for their certainty about what most would have doubted.

— OK I got your point. I was talking about the protestant principle as a broad historical principle. As such, it goes beyond the protestant denominations.
O- But if it is, if there actually is such a principle, shouldn’t it be present in the historical protestant movement? Maybe it goes beyond, but it ought to contain protestant denominations or I would question the term as incoherent, inapplicable to it’s contents, to it’s ostensive meaning.

— The Protestant Reformation revolutionized Europe and significantly influenced the character of American society in ways that Luther didn’t anticipate. It began as a reform movement within the Catholic Church, but ended as a revolution which brought religious pluralism to Europe.
O- Religious pluralism? It may have sparked the decline of religion, to the level of Nietzsche labelling the Zeitgeist as characterized by the Death of God, but it did not introduce what does not exist. Luther was still a Christian in his mind. Protestants in Europe and America consider themselves and Catholics as Christians. The disagreement over the role or meaning of the Papal office did not revolutionize their self-image as when Christianity insisted on the divinity of Jesus.
Luther, nor Protestantism, brought religious pluralism, as anti-semitism continued it’s march into the 20th century with historical results. Monotheism does not translate well into pluralism, the way that Hinduism or Buddhism could, in whatever shape it took, and in this case, the shape may have been different, but as the word implies, the action was to reform and not to overthrow what was of fundamental importance and this is why protestants could and still can to this day, call themselves “Christians”.

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I’m not sure you comprehend my point. You proceed to introduce material irrelevant to it. I don’t think you will want to deny the importance the authority of the conscience to the Protestant Reformation or to place the conscience and salvation at odds.

What have I said that would imply denial of all meaning?

I don’t know what your problem is with the metaphor of revolution. Do you think it’s evil or something? Have you ever hear of the Copernican revolution? It seems you wish to deny the reformation it’s world historic significance.

Isn’t that an anachronism by about 1500 years?

I think we ought to stick to the Protestant Reformation when using the term so that we don’t hopelessly confuse the issue. We seem to be having enough trouble understanding each other without doing that.

Your guess is as good as mine.

No Omar, no will of Omar. No God, no will of God. If I don’t know what Omar is like, I have no context with which to interpret his words. Likewise God. If he tell me to go to hell, I don’t know if he is serious or joking.

That’s a topic for a thread a book or a library. If the mind is consciousness itself, it is arguably ALL we have direct access to. We are not “just are”. To be “just are” is to be not reflective. The mind is self reflective. That which is not self reflective is no mind.

Well you’re making my point. If it weren’t for doubt, faith would be nothing to laud.

Yes and it is. The principle is that putting anything in the place of God is idolatry. The Pope by presuming to determine who was saved put himself in the place of God. The Protestantism rejected the Pope’s authority to do that.

— The Protestant Reformation revolutionized Europe and significantly influenced the character of American society in ways that Luther didn’t anticipate. It began as a reform movement within the Catholic Church, but ended as a revolution which brought religious pluralism to Europe.

Right well the Reformation didn’t go beyond Christian pluralism until more recently, but it did spawn new Christian religions. So that’s a kind of pluralism.

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Hello Felix

— I’m not sure you comprehend my point. You proceed to introduce material irrelevant to it. I don’t think you will want to deny the importance the authority of the conscience to the Protestant Reformation or to place the conscience and salvation at odds.
O- Ahhh, how I love criticism for no reason. I’m not sure you “comprehend” my point and the origin of my responses. The material is highly relevant. You haven’t shown how it is irrelevant. Do so, and then you can make sound criticisms. The protestant reformation DID deny the primacy of conscience. Not that they are at odds, but Luther placed conscience as an effect of a salvation given for free and not as the key ingredient that determined salvation.

— What have I said that would imply denial of all meaning?
O- “A message is always conditioned by it’s receiver. Hence the vast differences in interpretation of what is required for salvation among professing Christians not to mention the opinions on the matter among non-Christians.”
There are “vast differences”, you say, which are there because “a message”, and what is meaning but a mesasage?, “is always (there is YOUR “all”) conditioned by it’s receiver”. So what is left as far as meaning? What is meaning and HOW is it possible, if what you have described is the reality of things?

— I don’t know what your problem is with the metaphor of revolution. Do you think it’s evil or something? Have you ever hear of the Copernican revolution? It seems you wish to deny the reformation it’s world historic significance.
O- What is my problem? First of all, it is called a “reformation”, and probably so because of a reason, which I understand, and which I am trying to explain to you. The reformation had historical significance without you changing terms. But changing terms modify the reasons why the event had historical significance, inventing pseudo effects and dropping it’s actual effects.

— I think we ought to stick to the Protestant Reformation when using the term so that we don’t hopelessly confuse the issue. We seem to be having enough trouble understanding each other without doing that.
O- By understanding my reference to Paul and to that conflict, you could understand my points about Luther. But that is fine…

— Your guess is as good as mine.
O- My guess is that he meant what he wrote. You’ve no reason to say that he did not. This is the response a protestant fundamentalist like Luther would utter.

— No Omar, no will of Omar. No God, no will of God.
O- You only need to know my existence and rationality (capability to let my will be known), not what being me is like. Surely only the fool, the atheist, the actual revolutionary, would question this religious foundation.

— If I don’t know what Omar is like, I have no context with which to interpret his words. Likewise God. If he tell me to go to hell, I don’t know if he is serious or joking.
O- But you can know what Omar is like. I know what you are like, if I have an experience of you. You couldn’t know, ever, what it is being me, but could know what it is like, as there is the correspondence of both sharing the quality of having a mind…or does God lack consciousness?
When it comes to wills, felix, there is no room for humor. Whatever is said, is taken with much seriousness. If I want the dog to have everything, and I put that on my will, the law treats it seriously. A covenant is not a joke. It may seem laughable, the whole thing about drinking wine and eating bread as if it was the consumption of either a god or a man…yet it is Jesus’ will and as such it is taken seriously. Now, could you doubt the seriousness of the requirement? Sure. But on what grounds? If you think that Jesus was joking about this and who knows what else, then you do not know and cannot know anything. I would go even farther and say that knowing is a matter of faith and that without some faith, some biased assumption, even reasonable doubt is impossible.
What is a baby like? If you happen to have experienced what you believe to be a baby, then you could answer that question. The experience of X is conditioned by what it is like besides a sea of what it is not. What is the will of a baby? The cry of a baby is taken as meaningful, as delivering the will of the baby to us. is the baby joking? I could only think that when there is evidence or an experience of this baby stating what is not the case. Eventually babies reach this capacity, but until you have experience this, you treat a baby’s cry with upmost seriousness, because you may not know exactly what it means, but you know by the quality of the medium, crying, that it is something of upmost seriousness.
I bet that you’re going to miss the point…

— That’s a topic for a thread a book or a library. If the mind is consciousness itself, it is arguably ALL we have direct access to. We are not “just are”. To be “just are” is to be not reflective. The mind is self reflective. That which is not self reflective is no mind.
O- The reflection is as likely to be a fake as it is to be reality, that’s the point. Just because you reflect on yourself as sane, does not mean you are sane. If psychoanalysis is correct then there are parts of our minds that are beyond our conscious reach…at least initially, and self-deception, through reflection, is a common subject of human literature. So we have access to our own lies as well as truth, which means that self-reflection may only give us access to our own spin, and what we are, in reality, might not be known even by us…I love that movie with John Cusack. The mind is reflective, period. Whether the reflection is itself or it’s own fiction is something it cannot know.

— Well you’re making my point. If it weren’t for doubt, faith would be nothing to laud.
O- Your point is that faith implies doubt. My point is that it raises over doubt. You think that it co-exist, and I say that it battles and banishes doubt. It does not go hand in hand, but faith sits over doubt like a hero over a monster it has killed.

— Yes and it is. The principle is that putting anything in the place of God is idolatry.
O- For Luther that meant putting anything above scripture, which is the Revealed will of God. Even for him, God lacked a sense of humor or the will or inclination to defy His own revelation and go in a totally different direction…hence his anti-semitism.

— Right well the Reformation didn’t go beyond Christian pluralism until more recently, but it did spawn new Christian religions. So that’s a kind of pluralism.
O- Not even Mormons consider their religion as “new”. A roman bias was retained to favor that which is most ancient in religious matters. So, for example, Luther did not bring about a “new” religion in his mind, but returned Christianity, the same religion of St Augustine and St Paul, to it’s proper practice. Protestatism spawned Christianity. The West remained Christian. Again, you probably think that I am unjustly down-playing the historical significance of the movement. This “pluralism” changed nothing for other religions at the time. Intolerance towards judaism remained intact. But protestantism created a self-critique with the viciousness usuallu reserved for judaism and paganism. This intolerance turned onto itself, basically, sparking wars that lasted decades decimating the population. It was this that brought about religious pluralism and more importantly, if not the same, religious tolerance. And let’s go back and say, again, that this would not have mattered if the Church still had a monopoly on interpretation, but the press democratized religion. So the factors are two really. One the opportunity to find things yourself, and two, the motivation to do so after you see religions of “peace” tear themselves to pieces. After that: toleration.

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Omar --You’re right I don’t comprehend the origin of your disagreement. My contention is that the protestant revolution went beyond the intentions of the reformers to become a relgious and cultural revolution. But hey reform and revolution are metaphors at a fairly high degree of abstraction so it is unlikely that everyone is going to agree on this sort of thing.

I submit the Religion forum as evidence for the differences of opinion regarding salvation. How does one decide?

Let’s just agree to disagree shall we?

No doubt he meant what he wrote. But what did he mean?

The question remains alive and well.

Who knows?

My point is that without a context of decisions about foundational theological questions, more specific questions can’t be answered.

So you agree with me.

A monster that is killed doesn’t return. I doubt that is your experience. It wasn’t Luther’s It’s not mine.

Luther didn’t make the Bible his God.

Mormonism was a new religion despite their disclaimers. The leaders of Moromonism have been in the process of watering it down now to make it more palatable to mainstream America for quite some time. I’ll be back to support why I think Luther introduced a new Christian religion. While we are at it, we might actually want to discuss the topic of the OP.

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Evening Felix:

— My contention is that the protestant revolution went beyond the intentions of the reformers to become a relgious and cultural revolution.
O- Right, but just not through the theological ideas of Luther, and so, if there was a “revolution” it is not necessary, in my opinion, to classify it as a “protestant” revolution. One could as well call it a return of paganism, an industrial revolution, or a scientific revolution. The revolution that changed the world, I say, changed protestanism rather than protestanism changing the world we knew.

— No doubt he meant what he wrote. But what did he mean?
O- The literal meaning of what he wrote.

— So you agree with me.
O- Not quite. You wrote: “That which is not self reflective is no mind.”
I wrote: “The mind is reflective, period. Whether the reflection is itself or it’s own fiction is something it cannot know.”

— A monster that is killed doesn’t return. I doubt that is your experience. It wasn’t Luther’s It’s not mine.
O- Many monsters, like Jason, return again and again, even after they are killed. That wasn’t the point however. I would restate it, but you seem to be tired and would prefer getting back to the subject in the OP.

— Luther didn’t make the Bible his God.
O- Who said that he did?! Again that was never the point…

— I’ll be back to support why I think Luther introduced a new Christian religion.
O- By intention or accident?

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So, it’s taken a bit of work, to see that our opinions are not as divergent as they appeared. The denotative ideas of Luther may not have been revolutionary, but there connotative meaning or what they implied were and that includes his placement of the individual conscience above papal authority. Think about that as it relates to Henry VIII for example. As to your idea about other historic event changing Protestantism, I agree and of course in such matters, cause and effect can’t always be determined.

I don’t know what literal meaning he intended. The only common phrase for having someone else’s mind is figurative. It means you have their opinion on some issue. But Paul held that he lived in a state of mystical union with Christ. Is that what you mean by literal? It seems that literally to know what he meant you’d have to be in the same state. Even if you were in the same state, how would you be certain that you were? In any case, references for spiritual matters are always figurative never literal. There is virtually no way to talk about spiritual things literally. One guy who understood that clearly was Augustine.

Only in extreme hypothetical situations like the brain in a vat or Descartes’ evil demon, or if the subject is dreaming is it usually a problem.

Quibbling about the metaphor you missed the meaning. My point was that doubts return.

This discussion is interesting enough, I don’t have a problem letting it go where it will.

But that’s an illustration of my point about the “Protestant Principle.”

I don’t think it was ever intentional. As far as I can discern, Luther’s intention was to return to true Christianity.

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Hello Felix:

— So, it’s taken a bit of work, to see that our opinions are not as divergent as they appeared. The denotative ideas of Luther may not have been revolutionary, but there connotative meaning or what they implied were and that includes his placement of the individual conscience above papal authority. Think about that as it relates to Henry VIII for example. As to your idea about other historic event changing Protestantism, I agree and of course in such matters, cause and effect can’t always be determined.
O- Above Papal authority, sure, but not raised as an authority itself. Scripture remained for Luther authority even above the conscience of the individual…he would not have condoned Jefferson’s Bible, edited as Jefferson, the individual, saw fit. Luther simply translated what he took as inspired by God and sacred. He raised the individual to the level of the Pope from the authority of the Bible, not his own authority, not on his say.

— I don’t know what literal meaning he intended. The only common phrase for having someone else’s mind is figurative. It means you have their opinion on some issue. But Paul held that he lived in a state of mystical union with Christ. Is that what you mean by literal? It seems that literally to know what he meant you’d have to be in the same state.
O- As Jesus was in the Father and the Father was in Him, so too were they in Christ as the Christ was in them. They had the same idea. As Jesus knew the mind of God, so they knew the mind of Christ. Having the mind of Christ is knowing the mind of Christ. In a reasoned discourse, the only possible meaning must be figurative, but in reasoned discourse Jesus could not be God and the Trinity is unreasonable, absurd. Which means that it was a literal understanding from the context of faith, or irrational discourse.

— Even if you were in the same state, how would you be certain that you were?
O- By faith of course.

— In any case, references for spiritual matters are always figurative never literal.
O- Except when they are, as we see in the Nicean Creed.

— Only in extreme hypothetical situations like the brain in a vat or Descartes’ evil demon, or if the subject is dreaming is it usually a problem.
O- Though extreme, still possible and so, such possibility must condition what we are able to say about the mind in reasoned discourse. Irrationaly? Sure, it is taken for granted that “I” “reflect” “upon” “myself”.

— Quibbling about the metaphor you missed the meaning. My point was that doubts return.
O- I don’t doubt that doubt returns…heh, heh…but that it is the intention of the faithful that it should as a component of their faith. Rather it returns as a challenge, and challenger, to faith.

— But that’s an illustration of my point about the “Protestant Principle.”
O- But is it “protestant” at all? By whose definition? Obviously not by the original protestor. I think that based on what we have discussed so far you might as well relabel it as the “Revolutionary Principle”, thus removing it from the sphere of the religious movement started by Luther, and reduce the chance of a misunderstanding, because in Luther you will not find this Principle, so what is the use of a “Protestant Principle” if it is absent in “protestanism”?