RE: I wouldn’t be a Christian
November 7, 2018 at 4:47 am
(This post was last modified: November 7, 2018 at 4:49 am by Belacqua.)
See, if someone said to me, "literature is banal," I would respond, sure, some of it is banal, but some of it isn't.
If that person said, "when I say the word 'literature' I am only referring to the work of Dan Brown," I would find that odd. Because "literature" in fact refers to more than that. That person has intentionally limited his definition to the most banal writer, in order to make his judgment.
So if someone is using the word "Christianity" to refer only to some small subset of the total tradition, it doesn't seem fair to me. If you are using "Christianity" to refer, for example, only to modern American sola scriptura literalists (as some people seem to do) that would be arbitrarily expelling from Christianity all of Renaissance Neoplatonism, British antinomianism, the apophatic Cappadocians, the whole mystical tradition of Mister Eckhart, et.al., the physics-related theology of the Oxford Calculators, and many more fascinating and historically influential, and very real, parts of Christianity. And that's not fair.
Some immigrants are rapists. But when Donald Trump says that immigrants are rapists, that's not fair.
If that person said, "when I say the word 'literature' I am only referring to the work of Dan Brown," I would find that odd. Because "literature" in fact refers to more than that. That person has intentionally limited his definition to the most banal writer, in order to make his judgment.
So if someone is using the word "Christianity" to refer only to some small subset of the total tradition, it doesn't seem fair to me. If you are using "Christianity" to refer, for example, only to modern American sola scriptura literalists (as some people seem to do) that would be arbitrarily expelling from Christianity all of Renaissance Neoplatonism, British antinomianism, the apophatic Cappadocians, the whole mystical tradition of Mister Eckhart, et.al., the physics-related theology of the Oxford Calculators, and many more fascinating and historically influential, and very real, parts of Christianity. And that's not fair.
Some immigrants are rapists. But when Donald Trump says that immigrants are rapists, that's not fair.
