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February 02, 2007
The Ultimate Train of Thought
It is impossible to historically narrate Christianity in a forward chronology. It is inspirational as a reflection, but impossible to begin, and impossible to tell as a story except as a kind of nostalgia, or a fairy tale. Christianity is still coming into existence as a historical reality and a fact. Stunningly, the Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered in 1945, and this sets up a drastic recapitulation of early Christians, which simply cannot be retrofit with the traditional (already learned) past, without awareness that it is new information, gained by modern means, with modern tools that are as if ready and waiting to interpret the very findings!
Once again, the formula, the design, is there: the past exploding upon the scene. You can’t say, oh now we know and understand what actually happened, and use that to construct a new plodding chronology. It is just too spectacular a gap in historical time. One is forced to employ a different kind of thinking, in which this historical past is co-created in our own consciousness, and recognised as incomplete and impossible in its time. --If it’s own time was like ours, with our premises operating, which sounds silly. We know perfectly well people were thinking differently then. So therefore, this past, it wasn’t like this, and thus reality itself must have changed! Lord! A difficult train of thought alright!
But now, it is absurd to say that being a Christian depends upon whether you believe one or two propositions, and then assume that the rest of reality happens in the same way for anyone whether a Christian or not. And this is not just in the area of morality; it is a matter of whether reality changes, as a kind of backward result of a difference in reality, in history. Yes! It isn’t simply a matter of whether one has decided they are a Christian, on some personal criteria, but it is a matter of whether one is living in a Christian reality, which ought therefore to be in some kind of turmoil. Since it is brand new! It isn’t enough to have inward conviction and faith that is only reflective. If you enact a belief system and nothing happens to your sense of reality, then what is it? Pure conviction can’t stand, it will wither and fall; one has to be armed with continuous insights . . . derived from what one knows is the truth about history and what history has influenced, which includes the present. Which, indeed, must more and more be controlling this very present. God!
This of course is, at first, impossible, and always gets one is a corner, fascinated with the paradox, unsteady in their perception of what could, now, be a dangerously shifting world. The only solution is a style of backwards thinking, where the pure novelty of the world is seen as one half of truth itself . . . Ah, this I know.
But then, what kind of thinking is causing the other pure novelty we see happening literally everywhere, in the world born overnight of crazy instant communication, the cellphones all these travelers have, say, and the crashing incoming media! Surely this is not the future of the Christian reality! Is it? Stop the train. I don’t know. I was riding back from New York City and I kind of snapped out of these reflections, as the train pulled into a station somewhere. Like I suddenly worried I had missed my stop.
I looked out the train window. This fellow was walking by. Jesus!
Posted by mortimer at February 2, 2007 08:52 PM