CHALLENGE: This thread is about Christian theology. The key assertion of Christian theology is that a God exists in the real world. Please explain why we should look for this God in the symbolic world, ie. in theology?
It seems to me,
Esteemed Interlocutor, that you have your predicates wrong. First, it is a thread started by one who declares he is not a Christian and yet finds good reasons to defend at least some aspects of Christianity. And it seems to have been less specifically about 'theology' and more about certain ideas, or ethics, or moralities, and cultural factors which have gone toward the creation of a Western person.
Recently, and perhaps in the evolution of this thread, it seems to have become more about what I think, and how I organize a theology and of what that 'theology' is composed. At this point it is fair to say it really has not a great deal to do with historical Christianity and in fact some part of it, and perhaps a great deal of it, runs quite counter to Christianity. In fact, I am personally not terribly interested in Christianity since, in so many ways, its tenets have become untenable. One applies analytical pressure to it and it gives way. There is not a great deal that is solid in it, except insofar as a given man finds solid things in himself, or his experience, and thrusts this back on Christianity (as an 'edifice'). Personally, again personally, I think that Christianity needs to be radically restructured---rewritten in fact---from the ground up. And radical of radical notions I also think that Jesus-Spirit-God need to be totally re-conceived. It is almost that you have to wipe everything off the table and then replace items, if even you can, one at a time. But even that may not be enough. So, one needs to (somehow) plunge backward, back down and through essences, down into and even beyond any specificity of predicate/assumption and to (somehow) extract the most core and basic details, and ones that a man can use in life as it is now, and in a thoroughly strange present, as is our present.
Now, you make some statements about Christianity. You say that 'the key assertion of Christian theology is that a God exists in the real world'. This formulation is strange to me. Is there a Gospel that I have not yet seen that makes distinctions between the real and the unreal? Please locate for me and quote, if you'd be so very kind, where this aspect of Christianity is spoken about. I am especially interested in the use of the term 'real'. Or please speak about how this idea derives from Christianity, even if it is some later notion.
You have made a distinction between a 'real' world and an 'unreal world', and yet I simply cannot see how and perhaps even why you make this distinction, since everything that occurs
must occur within a real world. So, please speak about who or what is 'in a real world'. Is a tree in a real world? A star? Is a dog who barks---that is by his barking---in the real world? Talk about exactly what you mean. I do get your notion that a photograph of a man is not the man. I also do get that a word 'fish', though intelligible to you and me, is not the fish itself and no one (among animals and plants and stones) but ourselves would understand what the vocalization refers to. Does this make it
unreal?
Thoroughly unreal? Are you really and truly sure? To be honest with you, I don't now and I haven't spent much time trying to penetrate your metaphysics.
Maybe you wish to refer to some meaning such as from the Gospel of Thomas?
- His disciples said to him, "When is the kingdom going to come?" Jesus said, "It is not by being waited for that it is going to come. They are not going to say, 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it."
Is that the 'real world'? A 'world' that men cannot see?
I would make a case that man lives--and must live---in symbolic worlds or that his relationship to how world is 'symbolicized'. Because that is the *place* (the event-ground?) where meaning can occur. Meaning does not occur in the 'real world' as you seem to refer to it. In that world, I reckon, there is really no one or nothing to perceive it (except lizards, or monkeys, etc.) who interact with what is seen strictly for immediate reasons. Man has a different relationship not only to 'the world' in this strict sense, but in so many other senses and in different dimensions of senses. Are these 'unreal'? Who says? Who decides? But more importantly to what does the distinction refer? Is 'Felasco' in the real real world? Is Gustav (*genuflections*) not?
Hypothetical: Let's imagine for a moment that we were to uncover 100% perfect proof that bowling, not philosophy, was the most useful method of pursuing the religious inquiry. / What would you do with this fact? Would you head to the bowling lanes, or keep doing philosophy?
I am reading right at this moment a book called
Bushido by Inazo Nitobe. It is about Japanese samurai ethics. Your question, though silly, is not completely without merit insofar as some people, in some periods of time, understood that it was not about what you
thought but about what you
did. That there are other levels in being than 'thought' and 'thinking'. The doing part was privileged over the thinking part. Or, the thinking part was understood as brittle, even useless, if it was not attached to a strong, guiding ethic: an energetic principal.
How one came to this 'ethic', or how a man came to this 'energy center' are indeed interesting questions. There are many different examples possible where a doing is a way to knowing, too. Or the two function together. There is the Catholic/Christian notion of
credenda and
agenda also. ('Things to be believed and things to be done'). A great deal of what I desire to communicate stems from the notion of What is known or What a man chooses to place in the field of the known, and What a man does with what is known.
You will please note that I 'simply' place very different items in the
To be known column which, naturally, extrude things quite different in the
Things to be done column. In fact all of our differences begin here, as I see it.
So, I find that I cannot answer your question, not honestly, which also means that I will not be corralled by you toward your Favorite Conclusions, odd as they are.
But if that's how they do it in Gainesville, who am I to argue?
A man finds those activities that help to define his being, and he
is.
Being in certain ways nourishes certain aspects of self and these seem to function in a circle, so to speak, with what is thought. (Just speculating here!) For those who are called to work with language and meaning, the road itself has its rules and its 'order'. But I do not rule out the possibility of 'being' in other ways. I just tend to think that the 'conceptual' realm, and that of words, meanings and concentrations of ideas is particularly relevant. It is my area, I suppose.
Finally, I hope you will recall that I made the assertion that theology has more to offer man than 'mystical revelation'. I extend 'theology' to all sorts of other areas and allow much more within my 'theology'. In fact, unfairly perhaps, I broaden it to 'literacy'.