Entries Tagged 'Christian' ↓

[This post is a work-in-progress, a draft.  Please comment.  On anything - even suggest a better title.  If you don't understand something say so - I'm not the best communicator.  Comments will be removed if they are no longer relevant due to changes made to the post]

Alex posted a comment saying:

History fulfills my thirst for knowledge, my curiosity. I’ve always just wanted to know why things are the way they are.

Now it was a throw-away remark so I’m not having a go at Alex for it, but I’ve heard this uttered before and it cannot be true!

Or rather I don’t see how it can be true.

Our life is relative.  Our experiences are relative.  We are shaped by our previous experiences, our upbringing, our surroundings.  Thus our interpretations of events, of history, are shaped by our background (our worldview).

This is a problem in

• Theology.  It’s a vital question because without an answer how can we determine what is (more) right (than other views)?  The problem can be seen just by looking at the development of Christian theology over the past 2000 years (I know nothing about the time before).  Views have changed as the world-view of the time changes.  Does that make one more right than another?
• Life itself.  Is there any such thing as a right or wrong decision any more?  I’m not thinking of morality in this case (others can tackle that one) but of mundane, every day decisions.  Should I drive to X, should I do better on this piece of work?  [weak examples, will revamp - please suggest some]
• Analysis of history, events etc.  I’m not going to talk about this, as it’s similar to the impacts on theology.

All this is fairly depressing.  If we don’t know why things are the way they are, or what is true, how can we make sense of things?  Does life have to be a confusion from which we hide, carving out our small world of sense, burying our heads every time something comes along (or being buffeted with the flow of others’ thoughts)?

Why is understanding how to handle this relativism important, for me and for others?

• It affects every aspect of looking at the past, and the present.  For example: I am English, so my reading of colonialism will be very different to that of someone who lives/lived under colonial rule.  My thoughts about colonial rule will also be less positive than they would have been 60 years ago.  In 400 years time people will view it from their own perspective.  Which will be different, and because they won’t be living now may be more ‘correct’.
• As a Christian, grown up in the Western Protestant tradition, I know what is taught as being correct.  Yet basic investigation shows that very different views were frequently held before the 16th century (the reformation), and have changed throughout history, including this century. If the views I hold are right then I want to be able to explain, both to myself and others, why it is and why I hold these beliefs.  If they are not, I want to understand why, and what is (or more likely to be) right.
• I am the kind of person who is bothered by such questions.  I’ve thought about the nature of truth for about 4 years.  I need to reach some kind of consensus so I know what I think, and I dare to handle texts, opinions and statements I make with some kind of certainty.  I don’t like uncertainty but I have to think my way through to a position where I can handle it.[To be rewritten - what I mean to communicate has slipped my mind] It impacts on every day life.  Can decisions still be made?  Is there any such thing as a correct decision?  Helga Drummond would say not (the ART of DECISION MAKING is a fascinating book - in the uni library)

I don’t like the notion that everything is experiential, that nothing is totally right.  It may be that many things are right (”Who can know the mind of God” after all - perhaps we see different facets of the same truth).  Some things must be wrong, purely because the interpretations are too separate - eg “Jesus was a good chap who unfortunately got killed in a local power struggle” vs “Jesus was the Son of God who followed his Father’s will to the cross as a sacrifice to atone for our sin”.

(I’m excluding anything that’s known to be wrong from the existing evidence and background, such as the Gospel of Judas being a Christian gospel hidden by a jealous church.  There have to be facts around, otherwise we’d live in a world comprised solely of conspiracy theories.)

The pragmatic approach is to say ‘we can never know everything, but we can use historical facts to define what we know, use reasoning, logic and intuition to reach our own conclusion, and then we can live with that as “our truth”.  Others will disagree with some of it but as we have reached the decision ourselves that’s OK - it’s ours and it cannot be wrong.’

One issue relativism appears to impact heavily is whether all religions lead to God.  Need to write this up…

I can feeel a rant coming…. I’ve just watched The Lost Gospel of Judas on Channel 4 (a UK TV station). I thought this could be a really interesting program, examining the evidence for it being true or not. Instead it was 60 minutes of speculation, tension-building (”Could this be…”) and tedious reconstructions.

Why is it that whenever there is a question up for debate, the lone voice against perceived wisdom is given as much airtime and weight on TV than the generally held viewpoint? In this case a lady from an American university, going against 1700 years of Christian tradition, was given a prominant position to put the view that the gospel of Judas was another valid telling of the gospel story with equal weight of that in Mark or Luke - that it should be read alongside them but had a different role, being advanced level material (ie if you were a clever Christian you’d read and understand it).

Bollocks to that. While their main thrust appeared to be that “There were many different Christianitys around following 30+ gospels and they were slowly crushed”, there was no weight given to the fact (yes this is one of the few facts around!) that the gospel of Judas was written by gnostics. Well to be fair to them one male scholar commented on how gnosticism was considered heresy by Christians, however this lady continued to push the point that they were just another branch of Christians, who Irenaus was jeleous of and so wrote out of the Christian story (one man’s heresy is another man’s choice, implying that therefore Christianity today is not valid and yadda yadda yadda).

Now I am not theologian or old testament scholar, but to have gone on the wrong track for nearly 2000 years seems pretty damn impressive. There’s plenty of evidence that gnostics were considered heretics by the mainstream Christian church back at the start as well; not that there was an equal split and both were compatible. Most scholars consider gnosticism not the be part of Christianity but its own sect.

Oh, and Happy Christmas all