SAILING IN THE WINTER SUN: JOURNAL OF AN OLD MAN AT THE END OF LIFE
A reliance on propositional falsehood is far more dangerous than propositional truth. Theology is, ultimately, a philosophy about one’s religion. All that is essential proceeds from the Symbol of Faith [the Nicene Creed] and all essential theology is an expansion on the elements of the Symbol of Faith. Alas, much theology is based on the social conventions and ideologies of a given era of time, with the reality tunnels that exist in every era.
Orthodoxy, from our point of view, does not mean reactionary, ultraconservative or right-wing: it means proper glorification, true worship, and sometimes that is not particularly conservative. The truth is not harmed by reality and reality is not the enemy of truth. Ossified minds are the enemy of truth and reality, and ultimately, the enemy of sincere faith. Honest faith in God, in Jesus Christ, does not consist in trying to preserve obsolete concepts of reality and the ideologies of former eras, but in the encounter with unfolding knowledge in a graceful and steadfast manner, without fear, with integrity and a sure faith that God is true and so is not in conflict with reality, however much our encounter with that reality and that knowledge that unfolds might unnerve us and shake our blind ideologies. If one stubbornly holds to late iron age ideologies as if they constituted the basis of one’s faith, then one is essentially an atheist and does not have a sincere faith, or perhaps has a faith in their ideologies but not in God Himself.
The reason that we need a theology about the Scripture Itself is because there are so many often radical differences in how it is understood. This is particularly true of the Old Testament. In the East, the Orthodox Churches use the version of the Old Testament that Christ Himself quoted from, whereas in the West they seem not to trust Christ and so they use a different version of the Old Testament than the one He himself was familiar with and quoted from, as if they thought that Christ Himself did not know which version was correct.
Secondly, some of the narratives simply do not make sense without the application of theology, the creation narrative being primary amongst them. We can see that there are radical differences in the understanding of the meaning of ransom and redemption and of the word Gehenna in the New Testament, and often interpreters do not relate Christ words about Gehenna back to the prophecies and times of Jeremy the prophet and the Babylonian invasion. Since neither the word nor the concept of “Hell” exists at all in the Old Testament, they have to be read into the text by people who have a pre-existing ideology about it – even though it is simply not there and there was not even the concept of it in the era of the Old Testament.
The metaphors “ransom” and “redemption” are also understood in various ways by various sects. Many of them have no relationship with the apostolic understanding at all. Some, perhaps most, of the sects in the West – and there are more than 4000 of them, understand these metaphors literally, even though metaphor contains an internal dissonance that warns us not to literalise; and the fact is, when we literalize a metaphor we automatically create an idolatry.
Much of the West believes in salvation by human sacrifice, even though it is only one human sacrifice, and believe that God was constrained by some immutable law of the cosmos over which He had no power, so that he had to have the human sacrifice of his own Son in order to overlook our transgressions – we cannot say “forgive” our sins, because if Christ was punished and took on some kind of “just death penalty” for us then it is impossible for us to be forgiven because punishment and forgiveness are mutually exclusive. If Christ was punished on our behalf then punishment has been had, vengeance has been fulfilled, and in that case there is no such thing as forgiveness, there is only the acceptance of the punishment of one for many – punishment and forgiveness are mutually exclusive: you cannot have both, you can only have one or the other. So this idea, the Western doctrine of atonement, is simply a legal fiction and nothing else – well it is something else, it is placing God Himself on the same level with Molech and Baal, both of whom required human sacrifice in order to assuage their vengeance and anger, and the doctrine of atonement places God on exactly the same level with these two pagan idolatries.
As far as the creation narrative goes, there is absolutely no possibility that it is a true story, but it is rather an allegory which needs a theological explanation, and we do have one. But since the earth is 3.5 billion years old, give or take a mere million, and since the female was the first to appear, and male appeared somewhat later, we require a theological explanation for this allegory.
We also need some explanation for the fact that, according to biblical chronology, Adam would have died during the reign of King Narmar of Egypt, and the so-called “flood of Noah” would have taken place a full 200 years after the building of the great pyramid of Giza, and the story of the Tower of Bab’El [nothing to do with the Hebrew word babbel] occurred will after the foundations of Tamil society, the fact that there was no “Ur of the Chaldees” and the time of Abraham – the Chaldees did not even exist as an organized tribe in Abraham’s time, and did not appear in Sumeria until about 900 BC. So theology is necessary in that sense, but it still remains that all truly essential theology flows from the Symbol of Faith and is an expansion upon it.
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