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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Law on Wittgenstein on Contradiction
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hatless
Shipmate
# 3365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
We have accounts of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the temple, and the arrest, trials and crucifixion of Jesus. These set the benchmark for the degree and sort of variation we should expect. The resurrection accounts differ in ways and to a degree unlike others.
Was he born in Bethlehem or Nazareth? Did his parents flee to Egypt or settle down? Was he crucified on the Feast of Passover, or the day after? Was the cleansing of the temple late in his career or early? There are tons of conflicting data before the resurrection. You paint a far too facile black line through Easter morning.
Those are the obvious ones. The two birth narratives vary wildly in detail because they are constructs. The day of the crucifixion and the year of the cleansing of the Temple are both down to John's theological purposes.
The pluroptic (just made that up) nature of the post Easter gospels needs an explanation, and I think it should take its cue from the mischievous God revealed in the tales.
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My crazy theology in novel form
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Dafyd, you appear to be making a false dichotomy. Either the resurrection language is truthy/falsey, or it is in-groupy/out-groupy. As if it can't be both.
I was just being a devil's advocate for a moment. It's hard to explain how it gets to be used as a shibboleth for a certain group if it isn't grounded in use as a way of describing the world.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
This is pin your colours to the mast stuff, but it's not about the tomb[.]
If you'll forgive me, for some of us it is very much about the tomb - because if the tomb still held Jesus's lifeless corpse the whole thing is (for us) hogwash.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
A few posts ago Chesterbelloc offered five bullet points to describe his resurrection belief. I really don't know what to say. Bullet points?
Why, yes - bullet points. Bullet points can be really useful in laying out precisely the salient issues in a discussion. The fact that this is shocking to you tells me how divergent our attitudes really are. As it happens, you speak in very broad and quite ambiguous terms about what the Resurrection is for you - I still can't get my head around whether you think anything really happened outside the heads of a few followers. So what I did was try to be very specific about pointing out some things that my belief in the Resurrecion entails. At least, I think, you were able to understand me.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
For me they exemplify the dead, fact bound, defend-the-certainties mentality that resurrection sets us free from.
This, for example, means nothing to me. Is there anything more than rhetoric here? Do you mean that believing - and believing that it is important - that Christ rose bodily from the dead and met, talked and ate with His disciples is incompatible with grasping the "real" point of the Resurrection? If so, it would be useful to know why preceisely you believe that.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Resurrection is not what happened to Jesus, it's what was always true about Jesus and which dawned on the disciples one by one, a sunrise that still happens to us today, not because of facts so old we can no longer check them, but because of a story unstale that invites us in.
Once again, what on earth does that mean?
If you'll forgive me once more, it seems to me very much as if, though you do not believe in the Resurrection of Christ as a historical reality, you can't deny how supremely important a role it has always played in the Church's belief. So you still need the event to be invested with huge meaning, power and significance. But so flimsy and vague an understanding of what the "event" actually was will not bear such weight (let alone tally with the cumulative testimony of the Gospels). And it is, to me, simply absurd to try to make it carry such a burden.
Why is it, as it seems to be, inconceivable to you that Christ's Resurrection should have been a historical, observable, bodily event? Why make the "significance" of the event an enemy of it's supremely Incarnational, historical and bodily actuality? It goes without saying that you can believe what you like, but I hardly think it's fair to make the rest of us look like dry pedants who are missing the point because our version of the event makes reference to historical particulars.
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"[A] moral, intellectual, and social step below Mudfrog."
Posts: 4199 | From: Athens Borealis | Registered: Aug 2002
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
The two birth narratives vary wildly in detail because they are constructs.
That is your theory and if it makes you feel good, all the more power to you. But you are stating as if it were a fact a modern spin on the facts. It has no grounding in the text.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
A few posts ago Chesterbelloc offered five bullet points to describe his resurrection belief. I really don't know what to say. Bullet points?
If you can't answer them, just say it and have done with it. Why not list ideas with bullet points? It's the content of the ideas that you should be addressing, not how they were displayed on the page. This is silly. You're better than this. We deserve your best, not this.
[ 04. June 2016, 23:16: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
But believing in the resurrection is a different sort of belief, the sort that makes you leave home and security, perhaps, that brings a reckless joy to you.
Maybe this is where we're coming unjointed. For me, this is the same sort of belief. Sure, I don't leave home and security, or routinely feel reckless joy, because of a belief in massive neutrinos. But it's not the believing that's different, it's the subject of the belief.
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Golden Key
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# 1468
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Posted
hatless--
Some people make the point that differences in the Gospel stories make them *more* likely to be about something that really happened. As with other real events, people remember different bits, and someone may know a crucial bit that no one else does.
I don't know what did or didn't happen. But if Jesus existed/exists, and was/is God come into the world in person,...heck, anything could happen.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
a sunrise that still happens to us today, not because of facts so old we can no longer check them, but because of a story unstale that invites us in.
There are other better stories. There's King Lear.
By any aesthetic standard except perhaps one King Lear is a better story.
The passion stories have J.S.Bach's music, but the resurrection narratives don't. What has the gospel got to offer considered as a story to compare with:
And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more,
Never, never, never.
Pray you, undo this button.
Just the one thing: the gospel story may be fact-bound.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
hosting/
quote:
It's the content of the ideas that you should be addressing, not how they were displayed on the page. This is silly. You're better than this. We deserve your best, not this.
Motes and beams, mousethief, motes and beams. This is way over the personal attack line and you know it. Knock it off.
/hosting
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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hatless
Shipmate
# 3365
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Posted
I don't think I know how to respond without repeating myself. My points about the resurrection appearances seem self-evident to me, and have only met counter assertions. It's an important observation, especially when coupled with the character of the stories.
As to the nature of 'belief in' I really don't know what further to say. It seems obvious to me that you can't believe in a historical fact, you can merely believe that it is the case. And in relation to the resurrection we are talking about very old, much discussed facts about which uncertainty is inevitable. And who cares? The empty tomb is not the resurrection, and the raising of the youth from Nain is not the resurrection, whether true or false.
But there I go, repeating myself.
I'm not convinced Lear is a good alternative to the Gospel. A contrived morality tale brilliantly told. But the question is, is it true? Not did it happen, (if Lear turned out to have been a real king and to have had three daughters it would change nothing) but is it true? Is this what life is like? Is Jesus the resurrection?
And this is a sort of truth that can only be expressed in story, in the human, in art, and in poetry (apologies to Dafyd for saying the p word). Definitely not bullet points.
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My crazy theology in novel form
Posts: 4531 | From: Stinkers | Registered: Sep 2002
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
As to the nature of 'belief in' I really don't know what further to say. It seems obvious to me that you can't believe in a historical fact, you can merely believe that it is the case.
* Counterexample to your assertion:
I believe in the existence of a historical Homer.
* To say, I believe in a theory, e.g. I believe in the dinosaur origin of birds is to assert that the theory is a fact, that it describes what is the case.
* If I say, I believe in a person, where the person's existence is not in question, that normally means I believe that person to be trustworthy and reliable. That is, I assert that the trustworthiness of the person is a fact.
* It is wrong to describe believing that something is the case as 'merely' believing that it is the case. People would have gone to great effort and expense to discover that it is the case that neutrinos have mass.
quote:
And who cares? The empty tomb is not the resurrection, and the raising of the youth from Nain is not the resurrection, whether true or false.
* Chesterbelloc and mousethief care.
quote:
I'm not convinced Lear is a good alternative to the Gospel. A contrived morality tale brilliantly told. But the question is, is it true? Not did it happen, (if Lear turned out to have been a real king and to have had three daughters it would change nothing) but is it true? Is this what life is like? Is Jesus the resurrection?
And this is a sort of truth that can only be expressed in story, in the human, in art, and in poetry (apologies to Dafyd for saying the p word). Definitely not bullet points.
* If there is any sort of truth that can only be expressed in poetry, then King Lear is an example of that truth.
* If King Lear is not true, then there is no truth that can only be expressed in poetry.
* The Gospels assert that if life is like the resurrection appearances it cannot be in virtue of any human or natural activity. The Gospels assert that left to ourselves, life is like the passion narratives.
* If I make a list of poems, they do not cease to be poems because I use bullet points in the list.
* To assert that stories and poetry are definitely not expressed in bullet points shows merely a failure to use one's imagination.
* Philip Hensher's Penguin Book of the British Short Story includes one of the passages from Swift's Directions to Servants, which is written in the eighteenth century equivalent of bullet points.
* Hensher says that modern writers have cast stories in the form of lists. He instances Lorrie Moore (whom I haven't read).
* An example I have seen: At the end of the Doctor Who episode Last Christmas, we see one of the characters holding a piece of paper on which is a to do list. If I remember correctly it has bullet points. (Numbered points in fact.) That list is in itself a story.
* I shall consider my cat Jeoffrey.
[ 05. June 2016, 21:04: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I don't think I know how to respond without repeating myself. My points about the resurrection appearances seem self-evident to me, and have only met counter assertions.
Kind of a stalemate then, isn't it? You assert one thing. We assert something else. The difference being that your points (could you list them with bullets, do you suppose?) are believed by you on the basis of their self-evidence (phone call for Mr. Descartes, line 2). We believe our bullet points based on documentary evidence and 2000 years of theological and practical reflection and development on those documents.
This may not convince you of our points, but then neither does your claim of self-evidence convince us of yours. They're not self-evident to us. Far from it.
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
They're not self-evident to us. Far from it.
Indeed, I for one don't even find them comprehensible, I'm afraid. I simply don't know what truth-claims are and aren't being made by them; hatless doesn't seem to want to help me out by telling me what they do and don't imply. I just know that, for some reason, he has a downer on any historical, bodily account of the Resurrection (or is it just a downer on people beleiving a bodily account is important? - I don't even know that!).
Thing is, the truth about the Resurrection of the Lord may be poetic, but it isn't a poem. And you can't hum it, neither.
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"[A] moral, intellectual, and social step below Mudfrog."
Posts: 4199 | From: Athens Borealis | Registered: Aug 2002
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
And who cares? The empty tomb is not the resurrection[...] whether true or false.
I think the problem here is that you seem to care about the empty tomb - enough at least to deny it any significance in the face of those to whom it actually has significance. You seem not to want to admit that, if it were empty, that would have any significance - even to the point of implying that to believe in it is to miss the whole "point" of the Resurrection.
That, in my book, is very much to care about the empty tomb.
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"[A] moral, intellectual, and social step below Mudfrog."
Posts: 4199 | From: Athens Borealis | Registered: Aug 2002
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
You assert one thing. We assert something else. [..] We believe our bullet points based on documentary evidence and 2000 years of theological and practical reflection and development on those documents.
One more thing: I think our account has much better explanatory power.
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"[A] moral, intellectual, and social step below Mudfrog."
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hatless
Shipmate
# 3365
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Posted
Faith is not the same as propositional belief, and if you attempt to reduce it to that - "I assert the trustworthiness of that person" - you lose the heart of it. If you have faith in someone you have a personal, emotional investment in them. It's not a truth claim, it's a live relational connection with them. It is love.
Unfortunately, faith is not a verb, and the only way we can say I faith Jesus, or Boris or whoever, is to say I believe in Jesus or Boris. That doesn't mean believing facts about him, though you might, it means a positive personal commitment. But belief, the roots of which are in the word love, has come to also mean a conjecture, an opinion that is not fully supported, like believing in a historical Homer.
This use of belief has come to contaminate the understanding of faith amongst its critics and some of its adherents. The new atheists think religions are belief systems, and that they don't believe in sky fairies or invisible friends like the bonkers religious believers. And we are bonkers because we often obsess about what we do or don't believe - the miracles, faith healing, Virgin Birth, empty tomb, limited atonement or whatever. People even try to believe things, as if effort could fill in for reason or evidence.
But it's faith we need, which is a personal disposition towards Jesus. It is calling him Lord with our choices and character.
The bullet point thing was partly a joke. We all use bullet points sometimes, but I for one do it mostly when I'm trying to pretend to a clipped, analytic and impressive clarity of thought. It's a great way to dazzle your colleagues and make them think you've really thought through the new policy you are presenting. Bang, bang, bang they go, bish, bash, bosh - any questions? Didn't think so.
Bullet points are out of place in a letter of condolence, or a love letter (unless there's a special shared understanding) or an apology. They would be good in a letter to the CEO complaining about your recent experience.
Faith has much in common with the first three sorts of letters. It is best communicated in ways that maximise the human and the open interplay between us where our personhood lives. Story, testimony, and all the rich communication of silence, waiting and listening.
The appearance stories are all one-offs. They offer no collective evidence. Most of them testify to confusion and doubt as well as faith, fear and sadness as well as joy. This is the nature of resurrection and resurrection faith.
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My crazy theology in novel form
Posts: 4531 | From: Stinkers | Registered: Sep 2002
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hatless
Shipmate
# 3365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I don't think I know how to respond without repeating myself. My points about the resurrection appearances seem self-evident to me, and have only met counter assertions.
Kind of a stalemate then, isn't it? You assert one thing. We assert something else. The difference being that your points (could you list them with bullets, do you suppose?) are believed by you on the basis of their self-evidence (phone call for Mr. Descartes, line 2). We believe our bullet points based on documentary evidence and 2000 years of theological and practical reflection and development on those documents.
This may not convince you of our points, but then neither does your claim of self-evidence convince us of yours. They're not self-evident to us. Far from it.
I didn't merely assert, I gave reasons. Here they are again. The resurrection appearance stories in Matthew, Luke and John are all unique. We don't have two or three versions of any of them. Throughout the gospels there is huge overlap, especially between the first three gospels. Miracles, healings, sayings, incidents are often present in two, three or four gospels. When we get to the passion narrative, though the accounts vary in certain details, there is coherence. The same is true of the triumphal entry and the cleansing of the Temple. There is no possibility that Luke and Mark, say, are describing different events.
But that's exactly what we have in the appearance stories. Plus Luke says it all happens in Jerusalem, with Jesus emphasising the importance of the disciples staying there, while Mark and Matthew have angels urgently telling the disciples to go to Galilee to see the risen Jesus. John has the appearance to Mary in Jerusalem, but the appearance at the lakeside, obviously in Galilee, and mysteriously located in time. Have the disciples taken up their old trades? Did they give up on Jesus? How does this fit with Acts?
Paul refers to his Damascus road experience as a final resurrection appearance like those of Peter and the others disciples. He doesn't mention an empty tomb; you'd think it might have seemed relevant in 1 Corinthians 15.
And then there is the content of the appearances, the materialisation and dematerialisation (far too Twentieth Century words, but you know what I mean) contrasted with the carefully described eating, the recognising and not recognising, the fear and joy and the 'but some still doubted'.
The very least you can say is that these incidents were not straightforward. We also have a picture of disciples 'getting' the resurrection one by one or a few at a time, over a period.
Reading the text well requires us to take these things seriously.
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My crazy theology in novel form
Posts: 4531 | From: Stinkers | Registered: Sep 2002
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Reading the text well requires us to take these things seriously.
It does not require us, however, to conclude there was no physical resurrection. None of these things do.
I mentioned before the inconsistencies with the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Indeed they're not so much inconsistent as two completely unrelated stories. Just as you claim for the post-rez stories. Yet from this you don't conclude he wasn't born. Why is that?
[ 06. June 2016, 01:01: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Unfortunately, faith is not a verb, and the only way we can say I faith Jesus, or Boris or whoever, is to say I believe in Jesus or Boris.
Fortunately, English comes equipped with the construction "I have faith in Jesus, Boris, or whoever" to mean precisely what you want.
And yes, I agree that that's much deeper, and more relational, than a mere belief in his existence, but that belief is where it starts. I can't have the faith without the foundation.
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Gwai
Shipmate
# 11076
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Reading the text well requires us to take these things seriously.
It does not require us, however, to conclude there was no physical resurrection. None of these things do.
I mentioned before the inconsistencies with the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Indeed they're not so much inconsistent as two completely unrelated stories. Just as you claim for the post-rez stories. Yet from this you don't conclude he wasn't born. Why is that?
Particularly since Luke at least* makes it quite clear there are many post resurrection appearances that he does not mention.
*Just read it through with my daughter and was struck by this
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A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea.
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.
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hatless
Shipmate
# 3365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Reading the text well requires us to take these things seriously.
It does not require us, however, to conclude there was no physical resurrection. None of these things do.
I mentioned before the inconsistencies with the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Indeed they're not so much inconsistent as two completely unrelated stories. Just as you claim for the post-rez stories. Yet from this you don't conclude he wasn't born. Why is that?
Do you really read the gospels to check that Jesus was born? Don't you read them to find out what he was like, and what he is like for us?
I think you are disagreeing for the sake of it.
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My crazy theology in novel form
Posts: 4531 | From: Stinkers | Registered: Sep 2002
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Faith is not the same as propositional belief, and if you attempt to reduce it to that - "I assert the trustworthiness of that person" - you lose the heart of it. If you have faith in someone you have a personal, emotional investment in them. It's not a truth claim, it's a live relational connection with them. It is love.
Well, that's a bunch of propositional beliefs. Apparently we can use propositional beliefs to talk about faith after all.
Just because faith is also a personal investment does not mean it can't also be a factual belief. You keep talking as if the two exclude each other.
They don't. Indeed, I'd argue that a factual belief that excludes even minimal personal investment or a personal investment that excludes personal belief is impossible. You can't have a factual belief without personal investment both in the belief, and also in the channels by which that belief comes to you, the evidence or reason for it. And you can't have a personal investment
And I can't assent to the claim that faith is love. It is possible to have faith in someone you don't love. It is certainly possible to love someone in whom you have no faith (one of those truths perhaps best expressed in poetry).
quote:
This use of belief (as conjecture, uncertain opinion) has come to contaminate the understanding of faith amongst its critics and some of its adherents.
The 'contaminate' metaphor and similar metaphors ring alarm bells for me: there's too much conservative or indeed reactionary far right political baggage associated with them.
The question as always with 'contaminate' metaphors is how does the alien contaminant get into the previously pure substance? The answer as always is that it has its roots in what is there already.
In this case, belief as opinion of fact arose out of belief in, because they are at root the same: to believe in a fact is to make a personal commitment to the fact being so.
This seems to be always what happens when contrasts are erect, such as belief as commitment vs belief as conjecture. One side seems to always get labelled bad (in this case, 'the dead, fact bound, defend-the-certainties mentality that resurrection sets us free from'), and therefore has to be expelled. And then when as is inevitable it refuses to be expelled it gets labelled a contaminant.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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hatless
Shipmate
# 3365
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Posted
You think I might be a conservative far-right reactionary? That's very surprising.
It's not that you can't have belief in facts alongside faith in someone, of course you can, but it's the relational bit that is important and is the faith or belief-in.
And, in the case of Jesus I do think that people have often focused on the belief that and forgotten the belief in. The empty tomb signifies nothing. Believing it to be the case, or not believing it to have been the case are irrelevant to faith and a distraction from it.
You're right that you can have faith in someone you don't love, and vice versa. I was thinking of faith in Christ at that point, which I think is how we love him.
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My crazy theology in novel form
Posts: 4531 | From: Stinkers | Registered: Sep 2002
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I think you are disagreeing for the sake of it.
I see no reason to continue this conversation, then.
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Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
You think I might be a conservative far-right reactionary? That's very surprising.
No. I think you were expressing your ideas in a form that when scattered about becomes fertiliser in which conservative and reactionary ideas can grow.
quote:
It's not that you can't have belief in facts alongside faith in someone, of course you can, but it's the relational bit that is important and is the faith or belief-in.
Important schmimportant. The Emperor Tiberius was important. A Jewish holy man executed for trouble-making in a provincial capital wasn't important.
Importance is relative to context. If someone is drowning, it's not important whether the person has belief-in Jesus or merely believes that or hasn't heard of this Jesus person at all. What is important is whether they help. And that they know how to swim.
Faith, belief-in, has no intrinsic importance. Whatever importance it has comes from where it is placed and from its results.
quote:
And, in the case of Jesus I do think that people have often focused on the belief that and forgotten the belief in. The empty tomb signifies nothing. Believing it to be the case, or not believing it to have been the case are irrelevant to faith and a distraction from it.
This no doubt all looks convincing to those who share your premises.
Faith, you say, is better communicated by stories than argument. The empty tomb you say signifies nothing. Odd then that the empty tomb is not in Paul, whereas the empty tomb is in all the stories. Indeed, in Mark the empty tomb is all there is to signify the resurrection.
Ah you say - but that's not belief that the tomb is empty. But no - the stories are emphatically stories about women and men who believe that the tomb is empty.
Faith is communicated in stories. And in this case I think I have more faith in the stories than I have in you.
quote:
And we are bonkers because we often obsess about what we do or don't believe - the miracles, faith healing, Virgin Birth, empty tomb, limited atonement or whatever. People even try to believe things, as if effort could fill in for reason or evidence.
The thing here is that all the above can just as well be explained as faith-in, rather than faith-that. What you call obsessing over is rather people having faith-in something that you don't believe that.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
The empty tomb signifies nothing. Believing it to be the case, or not believing it to have been the case are irrelevant to faith and a distraction from it.
You say this despite the fact that several people on this thread have already explained that the empty tomb is highly significant to their faith - and why that is so.
Ironically, it seems to be highly significant to you too - in that it seems very important to you to assert that we're not really supposed to believe that it was empty and even that to discuss it is "a distraction from" the faith. But I can't say that I've seen a coherent argument from you as to why that should be the case.
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"[A] moral, intellectual, and social step below Mudfrog."
Posts: 4199 | From: Athens Borealis | Registered: Aug 2002
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