A Yearning For The Hearth

I’m doing a course on the Sermon on the Mount, and as I’m sure you know if you’ve read it carefully, it carries a very challenging message. I’ve read the Sermon on the Mount many times, even preached on it once, but the materials I’m reading as a part of this course are bringing new things to light. Here are a few random things which are new to me.

• The Beatitudes are not simply a list of conditions and promises, but are descriptions (or should be descriptive) of the people of God: meaning we are to be the meek, the poor in spirit, hungering after righteousness and so on. 
• We are to be light to the world. This is an oft quoted and cited metaphor, and also an oft ignored and neglected one. Most church congregations have withdrawn so far into themselves it is impossible for them to be ‘the city on the hill.’
• We are to be the salt of the earth. John Stott made note of the fact that in ancient times salt was not simply used to add savour to food, but to preserve it from rot. The image makes much more sense to me now.
• Careful analysis of the mid-part of the Sermon shows how deeply Jesus understood and applied Mosaic Law and how he neatly undoes the Pharisaic readings of the same texts; further reflection reveals that we have at many points reverted to the Pharisaic readings of the Law. 

  There’s much more to be said on this topic, and I’ll write more on it in the coming weeks.

If you’re like me, you grew up with regular doses of Star Trek in its various incarnations feeding your imagination. It was one of the only thoughtful shows on for a lot of those years, and despite the utter cheesiness I still enjoy catching the odd episode when I get a chance. When I was studying literature at University one of Prof noted that he thought Star Trek was a pretty good bell weather for public philosophical and religious tendencies. In the original 60’s series pretty well everything had a scientific rational explanation. In The Next Generation there was some events and characters (Q) that operated outside the realm of human understanding, when DS9 and Voyager came along these became more regular. These were also religious themes, especially around the planet Bajor.

 

It’s come to my mind that Spock represents what went wrong with the Modernism. There can never be a Spock. Reason and logic don’t work in the way they are often imagined to. I wonder what a post-modern Star Trek would do with a character like Spock?

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,– cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor’d of them all,–
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

-From Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson

I love this poem, it’s not right to pull a few stanzas, but this is one of my favorite passages. Ulysses has returned from his travels and is made restless by the banality of his civil duties, he yearns for more. May we all ‘drink life to the lees!’

I won’t say too much on this, as my ideas aren’t fully formed yet, but I’ll say a bit. There’s a lot of noise being made about creation science and religion in education. I find the whole thing very vexing. Christians have devoted a huge amount of time and energy fighting the wrong fight. The wrong fight. There’s things we should get worked up over, fight for. This isn’t one of them. I don’t know how old the world is, but here’s the kicker - nobody does. Also, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t to say I’m not interested. I’m very interested in science and nature, and I’ve read a lot more about them than a lot of people I’ve heard talking about them. But it’s not a matter of faith! Fundamentalists have waged this war on someone else’s terms, using (and misusing) their tools and concepts. Has no one considered the consequences of making their faith contingent on science? Or pseudo-science? I can tell you one consequence: Jimmy grows up believing a specific way of reading and understanding the Bible - one that sees the entire Bible as being literally true and inspired in a very specific way. This includes a reading of the Genesis account as prescribing a young earth account of history, Adam hunting T. Rex and so on. Jimmy goes to University and is exposed to compelling evidence that blows this apart, Jimmy has no other way of understanding his faith, so he loses it. The Bible says the Earth is five thousand years old, now he has evidence it isn’t and if that’s not true then neither is any of the rest of it. Building your faith on science is a fool’s errand (science is fallible and is changed and revised constantly), and building it on pseudo-science is down right dangerous. Ask yourself this: what do a bunch of dead lizards have to do with Christ dying on the cross?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWn-vt7SeNo

 

I don’t know how to ‘embed’ videos, sorry. Also, it’s not really a video, it’s just audio with a picture (try to imagine an old white guy).

Anyway, N.T. Wright is great, and this series of lectures is really interesting.

I bought the new Bruce Springsteen album, ‘Magic’ on iTunes. I read the Rolling Stone review, they gave it five stars and said that it’s a better album than ‘The Rising,’ so my expectations were high. Well, I think it delivers. Is it better than ‘The Rising?’ It’ll take me some time to digest it enough to decide. However, I can say already that it’s very good.

As requested by Tarski, this expands on “Ethics of Virtue.” As I alluded to at the end earlier post MacIntyre now considers Aquinas to provide the best account of practical rationality available to us. Part of what he finds compelling about Aquinas is how he is able to integrate two rival systems of thought into one cohesive tradition.

When Aquinas arrived at the University of Paris the faculty was split between those reading and beholden to Augustine and those who were beginning to read and interpret Aristotle, whose works had only recently come to the West via contact with Islamic scholars. A controversy was beginning to develop due to the fact that while Aristotle was consistent and coherent, the conclusions drawn from his work were often at odds with Augustine and Christianity. So, it appeared there were two incompatible and incommensurate systems of thought in rivalry, and it seemed impossible to reconcile these differences.

The most important issues were:

·Aristotle’s ethics were designed for a particular class of Athenian gentlemen. Women, slaves, and ‘barbarians’ weren’t even considered capable of rational judgement. Christianity on the other hand, seeks an ethic for all people.

·Aristotle’s account of the virtues are at times inconsistent with the Christian notion of virtue.

·The Augustine Christian’s notion of the will is utterly foreign to Aristotle.

·The Creator God central to Augustine Christianity is also foreign to Aristotle.

MacIntyre demonstrates how Aquinas is able to address each of these in such as way as to demonstrate the weaknesses in a way comprehensible to the system in need of critique (on its own terms) and to remedy them using the resources of its rival.

MacIntyre sees Aristotle’s account of the telos and the virtues and flawed and incomplete, but when supplemented with Christian notions of humility and grace they are made complete, and available to all people. Aristotle is unable to account for the invariable nature of wrong actions; the Augustinian concept of the will accounts for this. MacIntyre goes on to demonstrate how he believes Aristotle’s philosophy of truth was flawed and in fact required the Augustinian Creator God for completion. On the other hand, MacIntyre sees Augustine’s ethics as unsystematic and prone to generalizations, and the integration of Aristotle’s systematic and carefully considered account of virtue and practical reason is necessary for the comprehension of Augustine’s own account of the virtues.

This is necessarily brief, but it outlines what MacIntyre sees as Aquinas’s crowning achievement in reconciling what appeared to be irreconcilable traditions, and reconciling them in such a way as to show, in terms both could comprehend, how each improved and required the resources of the other.

I’ve drawn on MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? pgs. 155-208 and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry pgs. 105-126.