thread: 2007-01-04 : Self-identification vs. Membership
On 2007-01-10, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Pedantry break first:
Ralph: "There's lots of evidence that the Gospel of John was not (could not) have been written by the apostle John who would have been an eye witness to the events."
Yep, got that, hence my reference to "the Gospel of John—attributed to followers of the Disciple John." There's no pure first-generation eyewitness testimony from Jesus's own disciples; even for the literate ones, it wasn't a culture where you wrote down (or blogged up...) everything that matter, just everything you couldn't be sure to remember.
Ed Heil, part 1: "Any comprehensible explanation of the trinity turns out to have been condemned by the church as a heresy at some point."
Agreed. In fact, pretty much any single, coherent explanation of the core elements of Christianity—not just the Trinity, but the Incarnation, Grace, etc.—becomes a terrible trap for the mind if it is taken as "the truth" rather than "an explanation." C.S. Lewis was rather good on this, I think (unsurprisingly), saying that each of his explanations was a bit of scaffolding to be used if it helped understand and discarded if it didn't. We need to cultivate humility to avoid becoming attached to our own explanations and conclusions at the expense of the great truth which—like the precise location and velocity of an electron—is ultimately beyond all human knowing.
Ed Heil, part 2: "Jesus as God Incarnate is a focal point by which one can see the the whole universe as full of the incarnate presence of God. So 'inasmuch as you do this unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me.'"
That's beautiful, and beautifully put. Thank you.
