Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 11:36 pm
They're distinct concepts. If you've never found reason to take a look at Systematic Theology, you wouldn't have reason to realize how precise these concepts actually are. They're not nearly so fuzzy as it appears you imagine they are. There are able scholars who have literally gone through every Scriptural mention of them, evaluating their respective nuances and implications, and arriving at quite firm definitions of terms.
Obviously, you and I can't do all that here: a good book on Systematic Theology is a really big, heavy tome. But it's worth knowing that such things exist, and that the philosophical work has been done on these things to create the kind of precision of discussion that you seem to be imagining not to be there.
Not to nit-pick too much but, at least in respect to the
Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, redemption and salvation are notions that deeply connect one with the other.
One of the benefits, among numerous benefits of course, of engaging with you here is that it helps me to clarify a general sense I have had and which is not decreasing but increasing. I would express it like this: the more that I examine Early Christianity the more I recognize, and the more it seems undeniable to me, that even the early Christian movement was not *one thing* alone but a current of numerous different things. One could say "Yes, but Jesus Christ is One Thing and thus the revelation of Jesus Christ must be not a 'current' of different things, but one intended thing". I think that your position, IC, attempts to establish itself within this position. So salvation, for you, can be acutely defined, but though your reference to *what it is* is presented as thorough and let's say absolute, nevertheless you cannot quite spell it out. So you, and in this sense like everyone, attempt to define something with a 'systematic approach' that remains, and perhaps must remain, elusive.
So in this sense I would say that your 'version' of Christianity -- and if I say such a thing it is by no means deprecating -- is similar to all the versions of Christianity, and one need only turn one's gaze back the the first and second century to see the degree to which different people, with different emphasis, defined Christianity in varying ways. I thought this morning that your version would correspond with the version of Christian belief known as Ebionism or Nazaraenism. These sects (I do not know what else to call them) later became vilified by the *power-structure* that developed so that, one might say, what was most original and fundamental to Christianity, came to be understood as heretical and dangerous to a developing orthodoxy.
But that other trend, the developing orthodoxy, is the *school* that came to define a structural Christianity that can be compared to the *system*, as it were, expounded in the
Apostolic Constitution. It is a rigorous, declarative, assertive document that seeks, as no one could deny, to take possession as it were of the message and the meaning of the Christian Revelation. Such will always, then as now, involve power-struggles. The heretics are a useful foil for the concretizing of the doctrines of the 'responsible' and those who wield authority.
In the sense that I am now speaking, and given the predilection of different persons, one could choose to advance in varied number of different directions as one defined, for oneself, one's relationship to the figure of Jesus Christ. This to me seems a simple fact. It is not even controversial or in any case it should not be. One could feel attraction to a mysticism and even an interpretation of modern day monasticism and find any number of sources that would support that choice and direction. Or, one could accent and emphasize a Christian activism that would have a great deal in common with modern progressive-political activism. You could legitimately define a Christian path that involved vegetarianism and *purification* as one's own spiritual path of discipline. The possibilities are in fact endless. Because all of these tendencies are, in fact, part-and-parcel of those first *currents*. These involve 'the confusion of peoples' that the naughty Houston Chamberlain identified (in his controversial but very interesting book
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century).
The object being, I gathered, to clarify-out some essence; to arrive at it; to struggle to get it.
It may be interesting to note here that as I proceed further into
The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages Upon the Christian Church that the Greek reception of these ideas did not necessarily help to clarify them, or fine-point them, and in at least one example of a questionable or negative outcome Hatch describes Neo-Platonism as "that splendid vision of incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek philosophy set".
Ouch! (But the book is very helpful and very detailed in describing the Greek influence, which was very real indeed, and not negatively.)
Salvation has generally been defined as liberation from the dark, determined, fallen world of *this, our world* and release, by God's grace, into an eternal life beyond this world -- and that means into a supposed and predicted other-world. And I think this is the version that best describes your own version of salvation, IC. And the notion of 'redemption' is, quite literally, that God offered to pay the price. It is not necessarily that anything is *fuzzy* to me, though I can definitely and fairly say that those early centuries embody a 'confusion of peoples' and thus a 'confusion of concepts' about what, in fact, is actually being talked about.
There is nothing that has necessarily become any clearer nor any more obvious or clearly defined today, if the truth be told. In fact I would say that if we were honest (about the surrounding world) everything is falling more and more into profound confusion and chaos as a result. Just try to extract yourself! I do not mean to say that a given person cannot find some 'sound platform' to carry out their own life. But there is huge differences of opinion and vast powers vie to capture people into defined ideological currents.
What do I take away from this --
personally? You have to make your own choices. You can, if this is your predilection, choose to follow an outlined and developed plan and a structure of belief that you merely need to adopt and follow. Or, you can choose to investigate the whole complex issue yourself and, as a result of struggle, then be able to say "No, I think it is thus-and-such" and then choose to live it out. But to one degree or another, and this is just a fact, someone or something is vying to get hold of you, and to set you on following some version, which amounts to an interpretation, of what Christianity is (against what it is declared not to be).
It is very curious, in this sense, that here on this forum -- generally the denizens here are opposed to religious belief and see the whole mess as unreal and primitive -- it is all couched in the terms of a battle. But it seems to be a vast synthesis of the entire problem just as it was (more or less or in any case to significant degree) as it was in the first century.
There is an alternative! Don't despair! We can turn back to the Golden Era of American musicals and find a way to live within them. Is the
Mysterium Tremendum there? Oh please let it be there . . .
"Hot dog! Hallelujah!"
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. . .
Good Morning, Good Morning! . . .
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