If such instruction guides existed, we probably would. You haven't perused Berkeley's or Harvard's class catalogues lately, I can see. How the hell did you know that?
--- thank you for being good-natured about this. i avoid class catalogues from fascist institutions like Harvard. my dad went there, btw, but didn't graduate. he was an all-City football player in Boston and was going to Harvard for the sole purpose of playing football ( but maybe meeting wimmen would have become a pastime, too -- hard to know ). he tore up his knee, long before simple surgical procedures would have made him a star. i didn't KNOW that you don't wear panties, and now that you haven't actually denied it, i'm less certain...
Gnostic Christians I know about (though I don't see how anyone who can claim that Christ's death is propitiation for all sin...but only if you have received some secret knowledge can call themselves "christian"), but what is a Coptic Christian?
--- the indigenous Christian minority in Egypt is called Coptic, in association with the Copt language, it seems. they believe that Jesus had only a divine, as opposed to dual ( divine and human ) nature, and the Council of Chalcedon declared their view ( monophysitism ) heretical. while they consider themselves disciples of Jesus Christ, an argument that they deny his human nature, being heretical, casts them beyond the pale of orthodoxy Christianity, just as the LDS view of Jesus, as the brother of the angel Lucifer, raises questions as to whether LDS "Christianity" is orthodox enough to be considered genuine.
It is my understanding, and I don't have time to go research it right now, that Coptics had resolved this issue. There were things like differences in styles of baptism where there was really no theology involved, that existed but they too have been resolved. In the end, language and traditional separation from non-Coptic speaking churches was the only difference. In that they are rather like Opus Dei who believe that the Mass should only be recited in Latin.
Except that comparing them to LDS, which only began 150 years or so ago, is inappropriate, since Coptics were around since the beginning of Christianity. You can only say that their line of reasoning is "heretical" because you are in the group that disagrees with them. They can just as easily call your view heretical, and what makes one group the correct group - the fact they your group is bigger? This was the point I think Mel was making - the decisions over what is "truth" and what is "heretical" are man made decisions, and have been, and will continue to be, debated, argued, and probably never agreed upon, for eons to come. So as I was saying, not all "Christians" would agree with your essentials. If you want to then limit the definition of "Chrsitians" to "only those who agree with your essentials", then your comment is logical, but silly (A=A)
I'm sorry too. Your very conception of what can comprise spirit is itself limited and dogmatic; that is, you launch the above discernment between rational thought and spirit as if each conception of those notions is mutually exclusive. Hint and a half for ya...it isn't always the case, for all kinds of thinkers. IOW, the only answer you can give to the question "How can you possibly submit, external to yourself and your dogma-frame, what is spiritually discerned or not?" is "My dogma tells me so." Such a set of dogmatic rules cannot, definitively, allow for the idea that Spirit might manifest itself in ways not dogmatic. It's why you say what you say above, and it's also why you are unable or unwilling to regularly process other ways of coming into relationship with the Numinous. Everything returns to "because I'm possessed of the Singular Truth, which emerges from my regular relationship with that Truth, because it's True." Not much room for alternatives to each and every facet of a typical conception of the Numinous there, is there? Not much room to fully consider the idea that every single facet of any particular dogma is subject to critique not only ostensibly rationally, but in a Revealed, spirit-driven way. It's true that I don't know you, who you've been and who you are today, not from the posts on a board, but there's no doubt that you do indeed present yourself here, through such posts, as the perfect catch-22-esque intersection of logic serving a particular strain of faith; inded, the type that organized religion's leadership prays for daily. I'm talking there about the definitive underlying tenets of a typical notion of "post-modern," which you launched into; my argument is not that, as you submit, examining the NT as literature is post-modern, but the abandonment - your abandonment - of the spectrum of human meta-narratives, across all spacetime, through the assumption - your assumption - of being possessed of the One Truth (as opposed to the abandoning of meta-narratives due to, for example, there being no One Truth, or no knowable Truth, capital "T," as Lyotard and many other post-modernists might argue) is a particularly debilitating form of post-modernism, an extreme strain of the incredulity toward all the tools of Knowing (myth, narrative etc) Being and Becoming that produce ways of being in the world, and ways of producing civilization each day...one that possesses its incredulity, in a post-modern sense, precisely because it springs from the faith-driven position of Absolute Truth as offered by currently common interpretations of hundreds of works and the melding together of 66 disparate ones.
--- not me who considers them heretical; it was the council of Chalcedon. that was in about 560, i think. all heresy begins with an inaccurate characterization of God. if Copts deny that Jesus had a human nature, then they must be viewed as heretical if a discerning view of scripture supports that view, which the overwhelming percentage of Christians have held throughout history. it is possible that the majority of Christians is wrong, but it is not likely.
I would wager quite a but that the majority of Christians throughout time have never even given that specific issue any thought. All you are saying is that the group with more numbers and more power is de facto correct in their interpretation, because they have more people and more power. And that's just horse-hockey.
I've gotta be honest here: I've never much cared about whether or not other Christians think I'm "Christian enough."
--- and they haven't given the issue any thought because it has not been put before them. there are 16 million Coptic Christians in the world, maybe. there are probably in the neighborhood of 400-500 million other Christians. my guess is that around 300 million have never heard, except in passing, the term "Coptic", and of that 300 million, maybe 10% would have any inkling regarding the distinctives. let's get one thing straight here. i'm not saying that Coptic Christians aren't Christians. the Council of Chalcedon said they weren't about 1500 years ago. if their position regarding the nature of Jesus has been modified (in recent times), then my guess is that their inclusion into what would be considered orthodox Christianity would also be reexamined. but what you don't seem to realize is that the individual decides himself whether he believes what has traditionally be thought of as orthodox and the assessment of his belief follows his own decision. if you want to believe that Jesus was a cow before he became a man, you do so at the risk of being labeled heretical. maybe that doesn't matter to you. but you are not getting your view from the Bible, and you would not be taught that view by any form of orthodox Christianity i know of.
--- if you are a member of LDS, and you know what that denomination teaches about Jesus, then you know that that teaching differs from the Bible. the Mormon Church has many unorthodox positions regarding God and Man, and frankly i don't know why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints wants to be included in the category of "Christian", in the traditional sense of that word.
Because the traditional sense of the word "Christian" means you believe that Christ was who he said he was, namely the savior of mankind. Anything beyond that regarding orthodoxy is just another matter of viewpoints.
Hey kids... I'm up for a good threadjack as much as the next guy, but this was first a thread about a book comparing the literary merits of the two Testaments of the Bible, and then a correllary developed about the appropriateness of considering the Bible as anything other than scripture; in this case, literature. Moving into whether or not the C of JC of LDS is a Christian denomination is significantly off topic, even if conversation comes around into the Book of Mormon. **Plus, veiled cries of 'heresy' are simply not appropriate for this forum, capice?** We now return you to your regularly scheduled bickering
Okay. Well, the NT starts off as a good yarn. It has a classic hero, some political intrigue, a few unexpected twists, and some magical/fantasy elements. Howeverthe happy ending was kind of tacked-on and it felt a little forced.
I've gotta be honest, I don't look at them as literary works like some novel on the bookstore shelf. It's not how they're constructed and thus I don't think that's how to get the most out of 'em, if you actually care to do so. Unless you want to compare the Gospels to In a Grove.
*nod* For the forum about which the Supers were so apprehensive, there is so much less need for heavy-handed moderation here. Now fix your spelling, bitch, before I yellow-card your ass. It's spelled "marshmallow."
A previous poster was correct: the Old (First) Testament is a highly edited collection of Near East revelation, mythology, and advice that was collected over a 1000-year period and as literature is superior to the crude and (relatively) lightly edited collection of documents in the New (Second) Testament, collated over a 90-year timeframe. To royalstilton (IIRC), 2 Peter is not generally considered to have been written by the apostle Peter. It is the latest book of the NT and (appropriate here) has the best quality of Greek. Even the early Fathers debated whether it should be included in the Bible. Of course, since this is Bloom we are discussing he probably said "The Old Testament is a superior piece of literature to the New Testament, but both are rubbish compared to Shakespeare." Mods: since this is a discussion of literary merit, doesn't this belong in the Books forum?
The matter of 2 Peter has been the subject of study by scholars due to the fact that the Greek in 1 Peter is of higher level than that in 2 Peter. However, this is explained by the fact that Silas, a highly-trained scribe (Ac 4:13), worked closely with Peter in the form of what we would now call a secretary, a situation not unknown it those times as now. This relationship was also confirmed by Peter himself in 1 Peter 5:12 where he says he wrote "through" Silas. Though Peter spoke Greek, as did many in that region, it was not his first language and the question of authorship is legitimate in 2 Peter. However the authority of the book has never been in question as early church fathers such as Tertullian and Irenaeus quoted both 1 & 2 Peter on numerous occasions. Thus the consensus opinion is that Silas, with his more polished Greek, assisted in 1 but Peter's rougher Greek (lacking the assistance of Silas) is obvious in 2. Source: Zondervan Publishing
Mel - you are a gracious soul. I wish I had more time for this board, but job change cut into my daily dalliance with BigSoccer.
I don't look at them strictly as literary works, but each of the books of the Bible were written with specific audiences in mind, and with specific intentions. I mean, the ARE constructed in various ways, and if you read books in ways that they likely weren't intended to be read, then you won't get as much out of them. Personally, I get more out of the Gospels than I would if I didn't take into account the contexts of their composition (as best as we can tell). It means something when John says (paraphrased) these are just some of the miracles, there were others, and that this was "written that you may believe...". On strictly literary grounds, I think there are more great stories and poems in the Hebrew Bible, but there's some pretty good stuff in the New Testament, too (though nothing that resembles the psalms in terms of quantity and quality).
Interesting point, but I thought the fact that there are spiritual questions that will affect our responses to Bloom, this forum would be a better place for it. Though when I think about it, I'm not sure this forum would be an ideal place to discuss "the spiritual dimensions of Harold Bloom's reading of Hamlet."
You make a very good point about different audiences. If one were to just look at the 4 Gospels and expect to read the same or similar accounts, you would not find what you sought. But when you realize that each one was written for quite a different audience, and John's was written quite a bit later than the other 3, and the core theology was much more settled, then you begin to see why they are different. So if you really read them in the context in which they were written, you gain a great deal more insight into what was going on with the early Christian church.