Discussing “Jerusalem and Athens,” debating “Jerusalem and Athens”: such an age-old waste of time…
Or is the true conflict(?) between: “revelation and observation,” “faith and rationality”?
Conflict or a true duality of God’s Creation? With which duality men have dealt badly, most choosing but one part of a greater truth and rejecting the other part.
Suppose we can allow angels and demons their say? Or should it be “engineers and poets”? “Scientists and theologians”? Or…
“Poets and engineers”? “Theologians and scientists”?
Or should we consider the possibility that we Christians are making the same error I see in Jewish thinkers, the Jews I admire as well as those I see as stuck in the tribalistic hatreds of the Book of Joshua and the Book of Numbers and even the Book of Deuteronomy which holds some of my favorite passages in the Bible?
Some modern Christians and many (most?) Jews have used their understanding of Jerusalem to build barriers to keep away Creation, barriers to keep away the Creator Himself? To be sure, Jews have their God hovering over them, the God who is one with the Torah and the People of Israel and is engaged in a war of conquest, along with the People of Israel, against the rest of Creation.
Man becomes separate from nature, as when men walked on the surface of the moon (and may do again and soon at that). Human technology had allowed Neil Armstrong and others to survive for a short while as they walked through a landscape hostile to human beings and to nearly all earthly forms of life…and then they returned home. The environment of the moon remains hostile to human beings, though technology may change that situation; that is, we may colonize or conquer the moon but it shall never be our true environment. To those Christians and Jews I referred to in the prior paragraph, the earth—even all the human beings and human societies outside of their own community of salvation—are alien and hostile regions, maybe at the start of their efforts to wall off Creation or maybe after they’ve been walled off for a while. They have turned all but small regions of reality into those alien and hostile regions. Blasphemy! And dangerous, suicidal blasphemy at that.
I’m far from an expert on Kafka, having once read a few of his works, but I suspect that nightmarish world he explored was the world of Talmudic thinking in which he felt trapped. It is the result of developing arbitrary, self-serving ways of thinking about reality, trapping even God into a role so convenient to those rabbis and their flocks. Christians can also fall into such errors, though never so completely as have a large number of Jews. For now, I’ll go no further into this controversial subject of the ways in which Jews, a diasporic people, have evolved and have developed mental and emotional strategies to survive and often prosper in the midst of other peoples—while retaining their separateness.
I will write a little more about this sort of thinking on the part of Christians, the construction of worldviews not tied to reality or perhaps once tied to reality but increasingly `ghettoized’ as understandings of some parts of reality have changed due to archaeological studies and historical studies of Biblical events as well as due to research and theorizing in quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology. And many other fields of study of the reality of God’s Creation rather than the study of ways to avoid reality.
Etienne Gilson claimed there was an identifiable, though perhaps approximate, breaking point for the Catholic Church. By 1800 or so, the Church had established a pretty good relationship with practitioners in the physical sciences and mathematics. So far as I know, the relationship was also good with the archaeologists and linguists and historians who were questioning the mainstream understandings of history, that of the Church as well as that of the Bible. Some Church thinkers, laymen and clerics, were even questioning the preferred political philosophies of the Churchmen, if only in the process of defending them. Meanwhile, the political idealists were starting to chop off heads of aristocrats and lots of others—randomly chosen in many cases, to destroy churches, to re-engineer families and entire societies, and to carry out other acts of manifested idealism. Etienne Gilson told us: the leaders and scholars of the Catholic Church (and others—my addition) found themselves incapable of responding to the later developments of the Enlightenment, some of which developments were bad and bloody, and led the Catholic Church into an intellectual ghetto in which it is still stuck, able to come up with `new’ ideas only by borrowing from long-rejected theological heresies or more modern political heresies. Jews are in a similar, but historically different, situation because of a nurturing of `separateness’. The Catholic Churchmen since 1800 have acted in this way to protect the Church, in a bad way, and to protect themselves from confessing they weren’t up to the task they faced and, as a consequence, were bound to prepare their students to carry out a task those leaders and scholars didn’t even understand; the Jewish leaders for a millennium or more, have acted in such a way to enable the survival of the Jewish people, often to the great cost of individuals, and to sometimes enable their prosperity in the midst of a people kept at length.
Thus it is that many Christians and perhaps nearly all Jews have eliminated an important check upon their ideas, a check provided by God in His acts of creating and shaping the world in which we live and in which we evolve and develop. Those Christians and Jews don’t leave open the possibility that evolutionary theory has anything essential to say about human nature or that physics has anything essential say about the Creator and His acts-of-being.
There is some reason to believe Jews to have been self-trapped for perhaps 2500 years or so by their ways of reasoning—that is, that Yahweh, to the Jews, is One who made this world from some chaotic stuff of no interest to most Jewish thinkers; if true, and it seems true from the writings of Rabbi Jacob Neusner and other highly regarded Jewish thinkers, then the Jewish God might be a Creator but Jews are only concerned about what the Almighty has done for them in this world. Salo Wittmayer Baron, described as “the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century” claimed Judaism to be a this-worldly religion, consistent with my claims about the constraints upon the thoughts, and feelings, of perhaps nearly all Jews, as well many Christians. And then there is Karl Marx who considered Judaism to be `practical Christianity’ and Christianity to be `theoretical Judaism’, a proposal only seemingly at odds with Neusner’s mostly correct claim that Judaism and Christianity are two entirely different religions with common roots; nor does he admit to most other proposals of a Judeo-Christian way of thought or feeling. Yet, many modern Christians and nearly all modern Jews have the same strategy of protecting their human members and human institutions by refusing to considering the changing understandings, of historians as well as physicists and biologists, of what the Universe is. Obviously, a changing understanding of the Universe should force a changing understanding of all Creation and of its relationship to its Creator.
This is not a problem to be solved by technology but rather by a more trusting and faith-filled opening of mind and heart to God’s Creation. It be not just coincidence that much of our recently developed technology isn’t so good for anything but capturing control of the information of citizens and, consequently, capturing some level of control of their minds. This has happened because few human beings have any morally well-ordered understanding of human nature—individual or communal, no morally well-ordered understanding of even our local environments—let alone of all of Creation or even an understanding of that part of Creation which is our Universe or our planet.
But what about those Christians, and perhaps some Jews, who speak of the wonders of Creation, the wonders which lie outside of their own selves and their own community or communities? Appreciating the colors of a sunset isn’t the same as trying to understand what God was up to in creating a universe dominated by evolutionary and developmental processes rather than by stable things and stable relationships.
I suspect many of those Christians and Jews think Creation to be no more than a pretty setting for a human play, both drama and comedy. It seems to me that many think Creation to be a theater stage and not an environment through which the Creator gives us our stuff which both evolves over generations and develops over our individual and communal lives—as does the environment itself; in recent centuries, men have developed the ability to shape their environments in ways beyond the imaginings of pre-Modern men.
If I am so blessed as to go to Heaven to share the life of Jesus Christ and His Father and Their Holy Spirit, I expect that realm of peace and spiritual bliss to be a perfected and completed version of God’s Creation as we can know it here on Earth, including the abstract regions explored by metaphysicians and mathematicians and others. Those so blessed will share the life of God but in an environment suited for perfected and completed human beings, individual and communal, not an environment suited for angels or other immaterial creatures. In fact, my understanding of God’s Creation leads me to believe there to be no immaterial creatures.
To retreat from the best understandings of human beings, understandings arising from our currently best empirical knowledge of human biology and psychology and history, is to retreat into a fantasy region of human construction. To retreat from the best understandings of God’s Creation in its thing-like and abstract aspects, understandings arising from our currently best empirical knowledge of physics and geology and chemistry is also part of that retreat into a fantasy region of human construction. It can even be said that a retreat from our currently best theoretical understanding of relationships (as in mathematics and in the sorts of metaphysics not often done in recent centuries) is also part of that retreat from the Creation of God—an act blasphemous as well as unwise. It is to think of the work of one’s own mind, or the minds of members of one’s community, as being superior to the work of God. It is part of a collapse of morality to instrumentality.
So it is that any Christians who believe God to be the Creator of this world and more have to accept the ways of Jerusalem (rarely in doubt) and the ways of Athens (often denied by those who think God doesn’t reveal Himself in His acts-of-being or acts-of-creation but only through Scripture).