Christianity
CHRISTIANITY DEFINED
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings. Adherents of the Christian faith are known as Christians. The internet has a myriad statements and overviews, studies and specialist investigations of this now 2000 year old religion. A good overview is found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity This sub-section of my website does not make any attempt to deal with the history and teachings, the theology and the cosmology of this major relgion of the West, a religion with its roots in the Middle East. Readers, will find here some personal perspectives as they do in all the sub-sections of my site.
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CHRISTIANITY: DOMINANT FORCE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION: A BAHA'I PERSEPCTIVE
A dominant force, perhaps, the dominant force in the last several 1000 years in creating a common culture is religion. The famous poet T.S. Eliot(1888 to 1965) emphasized that "the tradition of Christianity has made Europe what it is." If I was writing a story of my life in the context of the history of the last two thousand years I would write drawing heavily on that Christian paradigm. But I write in the context of both an emerging global culture and the context of a set of values, beliefs and attitudes--in a word---a religion I have been a part of for nearly 60 years. My comments, then, about Christianity are from the perspective of my religion, the Baha'i Faith. Balancing the unity and diversity of different cultures is a key to an understanding of each poet's, and certainly this autobiographical poet's, conceptionalization of region, nation and world.
THE FRUIT OF SOLITUDE
In order for solitude to bear fruit, Eliot and the famous American poet Robert Frost, as well as many thinkers like the historian Arnold Toynbee who has influenced my thinking---and myself, are convinced of the necessity to both retreat from the world and to return into that world, a world in which the cultural differences and similarities and the ensuing conflicts and sympathies are "favourable to creativeness and progress." At present, I am in my life's major retreat or withdrawal in the early evening of my life, the years of late adulthood(60-80). Within the context of this retreat I do minor exercises of 'return', short involvements of usually a few hours, at most, of social interaction in either cyberspace or real space. I no longer spend 60 hours a week at a job; no longer go to long meetings associated with various forms of community activity as I did for decades; I no longer spend a great deal of time raising children and engaging in the inevitable social and psychological demands involved in family responsibilities, although as a grandfather and husband this is not always the case. I have become, by degrees in the last decade or so: a writer and poet, an author and editor, a publisher and researcher, a scholar and retired person from the host of roles I had during my working life from about 1959 to 1999. "The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveler returns," as Shakespeare wrote, impels me to "bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of." It also impels me to plot a course for myself that has the greatest meaning and, with that American theologian and commentator Reinhold Niebuhr, try to attain that serenity to accept the things I cannot change, have courage to change the things I can, and have the wisdom to know the difference.
ERA OF A THOUSAND CHRISTIANITIES
I don't want to get into all the refinements and divisions, sects and denominations, cults and isms within Christianity. Readers can google all this to their theart's content. Niebuhr, to chose but one of literally 1000s now of interpretations of the meaning and purpose of Christinaity, battled with the religious liberals over what he called their naïve views of sin. He was not impressed with the optimism of the Social Gospel. He battled with the religious conservatives over what he viewed as their naïve view of Scripture and their narrow definition of "true religion." I do not intend to get into all the nuances of belief in the Christian fold. We have arrived in this age in the era of a thousand Christianities. For the view of a famous 20th century poet, for the position of W.H. Auden on Christianity go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/dec/06/auden-and-god/ For a recent article on Christianity in the USA go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jan/17/taking-the-gospels-seriously/?page=1
SAINT PAUL AND CHRISTIANITY
Tertullian called Saint Paul “the apostle of the heretics” and he was right. Ever since Marcion, the second-century theologian who thought Paul taught that the Christian God was a deity wholly distinct from and superior to the Hebrews’ Yahweh, the Pauline corpus has been creatively misread. It is hard to find much in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to inspire heretical thoughts, but Paul’s epistles, with their powerful intimations about sin, grace, and imminent redemption, are another matter.
As Monsignor Ronald Knox put it in his classic study Enthusiasm: The mind of Paul has been misunderstood all down the centuries; there is no aberration of Christianity which does not point to him as the source of its inspiration, found as a rule, in his epistle to the Romans.
Paul continues to breed strange enthusiasms, which is why even today many Christians blame him for ruining the simple faith of the Apostolic Church. He has been denounced as a Hellenizer, a gnostic, a hater of the body, of Jews, of women, as the great destroyer of the pristine Gospel, a traitor worse than Judas. Even Nietzsche, who was no fan of Jesus, thought Paul had done him wrong. For more on this subject go to: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/oct/23/a-new-political-saint-paul/ and http://bahai-library.com/uhj/apostle.paul.html
CHRISTIANITY AND MY LIFE-NARRATIVE
I draw on the Christian paradigm, the Christian mythology, from time to time, to provide an insite into my life-narrative, my life-history. Malcolm S. Knowles, a very influential figure in the adult education field, a field I worked in for more than 25 years, defines a person's life-history as "a critical epistemological construct illuminating the intersection of human experience and social context." For an mini-biography of Knowles go to the following link: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-knowl.htm To put his definition another way: life history is about the intersection of the individual and community, the individual and the group or society. Many of my essays illuminate this intersection, an intersection which draws on many traditions of religion and philosophy as coping tools and meaning constructs, as frameworks for understanding man, the individual, in community and society.
The scientific method, which for me simply means "the systematic use of the rational faculty" as applied to any phenomena, has led social scientists to produce studies that are often rigid, linear, and formulaic. By contrast, life-historians, historians of the life-narrative, and I make pretensions to be one, use what might be called an arts-informed approach to convey my representation of human experience. Historians and biographers have been debating the meaning and application of the words objectivity and subjectivity since the days of the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides. More recent studies of the "objectivity question," such as That Noble Dream by Peter Novick and Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob are neglected, as are classic works about oral history methodology, like Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History. My autobiography does not dwell on philosophical and epistomological issues like objectivity and subjectivity, although from time to time I comment on them when it seems relevant. Readers here should not concern themselves with these names. The field, the disciplines, of autobiography and biography, are worlds unto themselves and, unless readers have some special interest in these fields of knowledge, they should not trouble themselves with my analysis here no matter whether they be Christians or Occultists, Baha'is or Buddhists.
GIVING AND RECEIVING ADVICE
I have been giving and receiving various forms of advice and wisdom for some 68 years now: 2011 back to 1943 when I was in my mother's womb and she was imbibing, as she so often did, the earliest 20th century form of positive thinking and Christianity from Norman Vincent Peale's radio program which my mother first heard in the years before she met my father circa 1940. The radio program was called "The Art of Living" which began in 1935. In 1952 Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking which has now sold over 7 million copies. My life has been spent in two major national cultures: Canada and Australia, both deeply conservative, extensively secularized and increasingly in my lifetime(1944 to 2011) more and more multicultural and complex, industrial and technological, post-industrial and post-modern. The Christianity which was the dominant religion throughout the history of both these countries has gone through massive changes. I don't go into these changes here.
By the early 1950s my mother began to read passages each morning to me from The Daily Word, a publication of the Unity School of Christianity with its world centre in Madison Wisconsin, if I recall correctly after all these years. I see those readings and their affirmations now as the experience of a type of mantra. Then, in those same early fifties, when my mother began to take an interest in the Baha'i cause, I was exposed to Baha'i prayers and teachings, Baha'i activities and history. Baha'i was a religion that had been in Canada then for more than fifty years and the books my mother read from, English translations of Persian and Arabic Baha'i, were just beginning to be published by Baha'i publishing houses. I found these words beautiful and intellectually attractive then and I still do after the slow, sensible and insensible evolution of nearly sixty years.
THE CONSPICUOUS AND INCONSPICUOUS:
Christianity on an Historical Timeline: President Kennedy's Speech in September 1962
Nine days after I began my pioneering-travelling life in Dundas Ontario the then President of the United States, JFK, made a speech at Rice University. On that day, 12 September 1962, he said: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade….not because it is easy, but because it is hard." Kennedy cited accelerating scientific progress as evidence that the exploration of space is inevitable and argued that the United States should lead the space effort in order to retain a position of leadership on earth. I was also part of another inevitability associated with the great drama in the world's spiritual history, an inevitability given voice by the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith and Their successors.
In order to get some perspective on where I and others stood on that September day in 1962 Kennedy said: "No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover themselves. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only 5 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than 2 years ago. The printing press came this year and then, less than 2 months ago during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. "
A Bahá’í might have added that "last month the greatest Being to have drawn breath on this planet came and went; and last week the nucleus and pattern for a new world Order, the administrative structure of the Bahá’í Faith, was given its first shaping. Last month or, I should say, last week its divine teaching Plan finally began to be implemented." My pioneering life had begun whilst the machinery of the national and local institutions of a nascent Order was in the first four decades of its erection and perfection.
Last week, penicillin, television and nuclear power were developed. America was now about to reach the stars just before midnight tonight. The Baha'is were about to achieve a unique victory in the world's first global democratic election in 1963 and in subsequent elections, also before midnight tonight. The pace was indeed breathtaking and such a pace could not help but create new ills as it dispelled old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space and the new global undertaking by the Bahá’í community promised high costs and hardships as well as high rewards. It is not surprising that some would have us stay where we were on earth and not go to outer space and, in the case of the Baha'is, not attempt the utopian experiment for the unification of the peoples of the world.
Kennedy went on to mention a William Bradford speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony. Bradford had said, Kennedy pointed out, "that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage." Kennedy also said, referring to his brief survey of this capsule of history, "if our progress teaches us anything it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time……Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it-we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond." There is no doubt that the co-heirs of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, the North American Baha'is, would lead the global undertaking for the spiritual conquest of the planet. It is a conquest having nothing to do with guns and swords, uniforms and aggressive forms of proselytism.
In the 24 hours before his speech at Rice University, Kennedy pointed out that he had just seen facilities then being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. He said that he felt the ground shake and the air shatter due to the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn and generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. He said he had just seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined which would be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48-story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field. Beginning in 1961 at least 45 satellites had come to circle the earth. Some 40 of them were "made in the United States of America."
The Mariner spacecraft then on its way to Venus was the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot was comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in the football stadium at Rice University between the 40-yard lines. Transit satellites were helping American ships at sea to steer a safer course. Satellites were giving Americans unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and would do the same for forest fires and icebergs.
The city of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, would become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years, 1962 to 1967, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expected to double the number of scientists and engineers, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion in the City of Houston. The rise of the World Administrative Centre of this new Faith within the precincts and under the shadow of its World Spiritual Centre in Haifa Israel had begun in the last 24 hours, indeed, in the last two or three minutes outlined in a letter written by Shoghi Effendi in 1951.
Many years ago, Kennedy concluded his speech, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he wanted to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." "Well, space is there," said Kennedy, "and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." For the Baha'is, too, there are hazards and dangers in this the greatest drama in the world's spiritual history. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 23 November 2006.
Little did I know, then, of
those plans and programs
for the conquest of space
as I got started in another
year of high school and of
football and my final year
in that town by the lake
where I had grown up,
been a child, adolescent
and discovered a new
religion with its hopes
for knowledge and peace.
Little did I know, then, of
the tenth and final stage of
history that was just about
to begin and the full-blown
institutionalization of that
charismatic Force, a unique
victory, that would take us
to galaxies beyond our wildest
imaginations and lead us to
a struggle of decades and a
window on the cyclical nature
of our history, our experiment
and its conspicuous and quite
inconspicuous beginnings.
Ron Price
22 November 2006
Some of my internet posts on the subject of Christianity and related subjects:
http://www.christianforums.com/t7528514/
http://www.interfaith.org/forum/trying-to-find-jesus-god-1764.html
https://www.dropbox.com/home#/Christianity:::
(readers must register at this site to read my posts)
http://designcommunity.com/forums/search.php?search_author=RonPrice&showresults=posts
(readers must type 'RonPrice' into the 'search for author' box to access my posts)
http://jollyroger.com/renaissance/htm/Forum12/HTML/000018.html
