Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

So WJB takes the same position in 1924 that the ante-Nicene Roman Fathers took in the second and third centuries. The most dangerous enemies of the Church are the very members of the church that hold false doctrines to be true. That is exactly what the SBC faalderawl was all about in the late 1970's.

Fine-so be it. Kick them out! Kick all the misguided heretics out of the congregations. Now the droolers can't kill them anymore (or can they). So let's just dissolve everything but the true golden core of believers, those true elect, those chosen few. Create a vacuum so deep that all the chaff is sucked away.

Why do many of those recent mass murders in Africa (most recently Kenya)happen in a church? Just asking.

Say, you know how to kill most congregations? Just have the misguided heretics keep their check books in their pockets. The SBC found that out real fast.

Ever notice that most "Christian" theology these days is self serving, male oriented, circular, and manual in nature? Just asking.

Why is a book called "God Is Not Great" on the best seller list? Are Christians just misunderstood?

Why do Churchs in the sub-urbs have campuses, staffs, and ATM's?
How come the dollar value of all of the cars (re: same as SUV) in the parking lots exceed the value of even the mega churches they are parked in front of by a factor of ten. Just asking?

Say ER, when you said, "discuss" is this what you ment?
 

It's wide open. Blogger just ate my lengthy comment in response. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
 

Re, "
Ever notice that most "Christian" theology these days is self serving, male oriented, circular, and manual in nature? Just asking."

Most preaching is that. Most marketing of churches is that. I don't think most theology education is that.
 

Re, "Why is a book called 'God Is Not Great' on the best seller list? Are Christians just misunderstood?"

Hell, no. Focus on the Family and the other conservative "parachurch" organizations and their media machines make sure of that. Being a Christian in the United States now is about power, money, politics, winning the culture war, telling the rest of the world what do and defending the "word of God" against anyone who would dare read it and admit what it is and what it is not, clinging to premodern, tribal totems and those especially insidous tiny but exceedingly powerful idols, WORDS, SMUDGES OF INK and PAGES, to the bitter, bitter end.

Jesus who? God who? Love who?
 

I'm aklways this close to ditching ther term "Christian" altogether, but then I go to my own church, where most peopel; do seem to give of themselves for themselves in ways small and large, and where GRACE is as thick in the air as the oxygen at sea level -- and there's a potentially useful irony there, considering Transfiguration Sunday having just passed: Grace is more likely and prevalent at LIFE level, not on the mountaintops. And I calm down. But I do like the term Jesusian.
 

ER said: "I don't think most theology education is that."

No? Read some of the stuff being published today in "Theology". Check out the footnotes and bibliography, they are talking amongst themselves. Especially the conservative orthodox bent.

That book I recomended for your Lent meditation is listed as "occult". A mathmatician, musicologist, history of philosophy and the early church subject is occult.

When I read the currrent crop, they are like the political reporters used to be in the State Capitol when I did Legislative Liason. We would all attend the meetings and then they went off and explained it to each other and wrote their stories. My boss would read them and then read my briefings and ask if they were even in the same meetings I was. For those that have ears let them hear.

Church congregations are like family famers, they are getting old and few and far between. Unless you belong to the mega church or are Hispanic and Catholic you are part of the downward spiral.

Hit me bro!
 

Ever wonder why Dan Brown's book "The Da Vinci Code" was so brutally attack. There were at least a dozen anti-Da Vinci code books published in response and most of them were dishonest in the extreme. Why did they care. Why were they compelled to attack it? Brown's first book was about a meteorite in the Arctic and a Washington scandal. The pope didn't take a dump on that one.
Is there a clue here, about what's happening out there in the real world?
 

There's a reason yer little denomination isn't quite a million strong: "no creed but Christ"? Where's the power in THAT? Where's the contemporary guidance for life -- the fortay, I guess, of the megachurches -- in THAT?

And my denomination is what, less than 2 million? And its melting away. Why? Because of the open table -- and open door. Some people are taking their Communion from the open table and walking out the open door. God go with 'em.

The broad gate, the broad way, are the ones marked "Certainty."

But I promise there are remnants of THE Way out there. Sure, some of the libs are stuck in their own ruts. But, seriously, I recommend The Christian Century magazine for regular glimpses into a world where reason and faith work together, or "head and heart go hand in hand," if you will.
 

What I just noticed about this cartoon is that if you were to imagine people walking up the stairs instead of down, you get a pretty potent critique of fundamentalism. (ie. if you just believe these things you're a Christian, even though Jesus isn't mentioned on any of the steps.)

And notice that in the cartoon, the path from Christianity to atheism (ie salvation vs. damnation) is one that people take by moving back and forth. Apparently Jesus has nothing to do with it.
 

Now yer talkin' Alan. I have some thoughts about the cartoon itself, but wanted to hear some others' first. And that is a great observation.
 

Actually thinking more about it, what I most like about the cartoon is it's accuracy. This is, as we all know, precisely the slippery slope that fundies rant about all the time. At least, it's precisely what I've heard over and over and over. It isn't a misrepresentation of their beliefs about us heretics. But, when represented graphically, the silliness of their position becomes even more obvious.

So, it's a truly accurate representation of their beliefs, meant to criticize modernists, which in fact makes them look terrible. Gotta love that sort of MC Escher-esque irony.
 

Oh, and while I'm analyzing it, I think the fact that the person who is farthest down the slide looks like Freud is interesting. And what is he carrying? On my computer it looks like a retort, a piece of glassware used by chemists. Also seems to be wearing academic robes. If so, clearly they're making the science-atheism connection.

It's odd however that atheism is foregrounded, but Christianity is backgrounded in the composition.
 

I studied literary modernism long ago, and to me this cartoon is a gross oversimplification if not an outright misunderstanding of modernism. And I'm about to make oversimplifications, too, but hopefully not as misguided as WJB's.

Yes, faith and a comfortable certainty about man's (and God's) role in the universe was shattered by Marx, Darwin, Freud, and the Great War. But the modernists I studied weren't interested so much in tearing down storied institutions (that had been done for them, and often with personal consequences) as they were in salvaging what was left and building something back up. And the core of religious faith--a belief that man had divorced himself from nature through technology (the serpent in the garden), a faith in resurrection of some kind (even if only that of the natural world), a sense that there was some kind of universal truth, the need for a community, and the peace and unity that ritual could bring--were all things that they found salvageable. Some were definitely Christian; some rejected Christianity for its oppressive, soul-sucking impact on individuals and their culture (like Joyce and Lawrence) but still recognized the crucial role of the religious impulse and the need for its outlet, and regrettably that impulse took some frightening forms, such as Nazism and Stalinism (which is *not* atheism).

(Oh, yeah, Chris Hedges did a fantastic job of illuminating the links between modern American right-wing fundamentalism and the National Socialists).

T. S. Eliot was one of the great Christian modernists, but I doubt that his kinds of beliefs would be acceptable to the megachurches and their leaders. Too complicated. Too much doubt and uncertainty, and no new Lexuses. Yup, toss him into the outer darkness with the rest of the heretics.
 

What I like about the cartoon (and boy did I come late to this party) is how little fundamentalist arguments have changed in 80 years. Is this the best they can do?

If the cartoon were true, I would be an atheist. I'm not. The simple, and demonstrably false, notion that one has to either accept all the fundie claptrap or be a godless heathen destined for hellfire just has no emotional oomph for me. Forget "logic" at this point. Since my experience leads me, not down a staircase, but along a path, winding and festooned with all sorts of dangers, how do fundies make sense of that? How do they reconcile my experience, not just of faith, but of God as a reality in my life that leads me to think and believe and live the faith in a way that just cannot be easily summed up by such simplistic notions?

Yes, I do question "atonement", yes I do question "divinity", yes I do question the metaphysical pretzel logic behind traditional notions of "incarnation". Trying to puzzle out what is a mystery seems a bit like St. Augustine's interlocutors who forced him to write, when one asked what God was doing before creation, "Creating a place in hell for people who asked questions like this." In the end, faith isn't about figuring out all sorts of answers to questions, the answers to which are most likely all wrong. Faith is about life. It's about living in love towards God and towards our neighbors, who are everyone.

By the way, since I consider myself post-modern, have I stepped in to oblivion?
 

What, your eyesight goes and you age as you progress down the stairway to disbelief?
 

Say what?

ER said: "There's a reason yer little denomination isn't quite a million strong: "no creed but Christ"? Where's the power in THAT? Where's the contemporary guidance for life -- the fortay, I guess, of the megachurches -- in THAT?"

No Creed But Christ. That's all I need.

"There's a reason you little denomination isn't quite a million strong." Technically we aren't even a denomination.

"Where's the power in THAT? Where's the contemporary guidance for life -- the fortay, I guess, of the megachurches -- in THAT?"

Christ as the only creed has no power?
Shall we trade Logos for a logo?
Salvation by sound bite?
Superbowl commerical conversions?

Nope we don't have bandwagons available. Actually you don't join the Disciples of Christ as much as you participate with them.
 

GKS said: "What I like about the cartoon (and boy did I come late to this party) is how little fundamentalist arguments have changed in 80 years. Is this the best they can do?"

They haven't changed in 1800 years.
 

DrLobo, I HOPE you realized I was using a little fundie ventriloquism there. I was speaking in the voice of one who would ridicule "no creed but Christ" -- I was not ridiculing it myself.

These Internets can be dang confusing sometimes.
 

If I may get a bit Biblical here, quoting from the KJV, "The Spirit blows where it listeth". I take that as blowing apart the ideological, theological, and intellectual straight jackets we force around our attempts to come to grips with our experience of God. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't, or cannot, or what ever negation you might toss in there, make the attempt. It just means we shouldn't get complacent, believing the results of our attempts have any meaning other than, as ER so wisely and correctly notes, smudges on paper.

How in the world can something as transient and ephemeral as human language ever approach an understanding of the Divine? What kind of hubris, what kind of self-conceit lies behind the idea that the treasure in earthen vessels is not vastly, incalculably more valuable than the vessels themselves? To change the Biblical allusion (again), are not the old wineskins that burst when filled with new wine our smug assumptions that our words have made an end to the constant human search to make sense of God?
 

The notion that mere Christianity is at the top of the stairs in the first place is striking -- striking for a faith that is supposed to be fueled on self-sacrifice and humility, admission of inadequacy -- NOT assurance, blessed or otherwise.

So, I'd add some steps at the top, and I'd put some people walking up. First, I'd paint over "Christianity" and replace it with "Jesus." From Jesus, I'd label steps like "Faith," "Hope," "Communion with God," "Love of Neighbor," "Dying to Self," "Meditation," "Peace" ... and I'd have the stairs ascending into a mist somehow labeled "Unseen Now" or something.
 

Careful you might be seeing "knowledge" up there, then "gnosis". Then you will be guilty of what WJB labled the "religion of the mind".
 

Imagine.
 

Modernism was gone a long time ago, (seeing as we're post-post now), but I've come to the conclusion that we've needed every step of human philosophical striving in our attempt to categorize and better understand our existence.

Modernism was an important step in trying to explain why and where we've failed, why we do things the way we do and how to make everything better by simply relying on reason, trusting in new technology, and believing that science alone will save us -

but that in itself is the path to accepting contradiction, because pure reason never stands up to real life. Post-modernism accepts that living with the black,white and grey areas of life is real, knows that reason can't do everything, and that order never exists for long (I love post-modernism - it's so my experience of life!).

All these 'isms, in my opinion, are fragments clutching a tiny bit of the bigger picture, and I can't see how they don't all end up laying bare human inadequacy and pointing to our inherent need of God.

If anyone's ever read Homo Faber and can still accept that cartoon as depicting the essence of Modernism - that person is ignoring the human factor and trying to control the uncontrollable.
 

Ya know, that cartoon has a kind of darkness about it that has nothing to do with the obvious. Yeesh.

Karen, do you mean the novel "Homo Faber"? Tell me about it.
 

Yep, the novel by max frisch.
Faber, engineer and convinced modernist lives his life relying on his reason and the vision of a better world through technology.

He's felt this way since he was in university, and when his then love gets pregnant, he expects her to have an abortion (the rational thing to do) and the relationship falls apart, he never sees her again.

In the novel his reliance on science and his dogmatic control of his own existence is placed in juxtaposition to several things that happen that are suddenly out of his control, where technology fails (his plane goes down and he's stranded in a literal and allegorical desert,)nature encroaches upon man's striving (his experience in the tropical rain forest, the jungle covering ancient cities), and choices made in the past that catch up with him in a tragic and twisted fashion (he falls for his own daughter and has sex with her without either one knowing that they are father and daughter). His inability to act emotively causes her death. In the end, nature seems to win (open ending as he's carted off to have stomach surgery) when he finds out that he has cancer of the stomach, all the while finally facing his inner self and deep regret for actions ancred in a cold and overly-rational spirit.

Sorry this sounds so trite and soap-operatic - it really is a powerful novel contrasting man's striving toward an ideal but missing the essence by trying to bypass and replace human tendancies towards messiness and conflict.