Reflections on Realisations behind the Resurrection

[Thomas]

This obviously follows the post by @otherbrother, and subsequent comments by himself and others. I city them here not to oppose or refute them, but rather to offer a response from my particular Christological perspective, and for three reasons:
1: It seems to me that responses align with a tendency to rationalise the meaning of Scripture to suit a contemporary self-referential neo-spirituality that is largely agnostic with regard to the religion and the cosmos.

2: In offering my responses I hope to bring out some perhaps less immediate aspects of Christian contemplation for the general benefit of anyone who happens to read my posts.

3: To help me get my thoughts in order.

Comments and criticisms welcome, but don't expect me to stand on the same spot, because this is a work-in-progress.

And let me repeat I am not refuting or belittling anyone in my comments – that is not my intention. I do rebut the positions I highlight, but only to reason how and why I see things from my position.

When Christian references are made, I reserve the right to comment. As I hope I will make clear, I think the reflections put forward are not dependent on the doctrines of Incarnation or Resurrection, which reflects back to my original question: If the resurrection never happened, would that make any difference?

 

[Thomas]

As an afterthought, I have mentioned a book "Magic and Melancholia"

That has some relevance, as a foreword, and so I've posted a couple of the reviews which highlight a salient point in my first reflective point:

"McCormack’s achievement is ... a clear philosophical critique of secular and mechanistic assumptions"
Stephen R. L. Clark – Professor emeritus of philosophy, specialising in the philosophy of religion and animal rights, a Christian Platonist.

"McCormack challenges the reduction of the soul to the mind, and the self-referentiality of therapeutic practice, by realigning therapy with its mystical, metaphysical, and magical foundations: genuine wellbeing requires more than the mind’s reorientation to the body; it requires the soul’s relation to the entire cosmic order."
Marcus Pound, Associate Professor of Theology at Durham University, where he specialises in the intersection of theology, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Author of Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma.

"Between the psychological subject ... and the living soul ... is a vast qualitative difference."
David Bentley Hart.

 

[Thomas]

As examples, I have listed below where I think the 'reduction of the soul to the mind' loses sight of the 'mystical, metaphysical and magical' (to which I might add 'mythological', a tautology for the sake of emphasis) significance of the biblical texts.

I will be returning to the '4M view' in later posts.

Jesus Christ death on the cross and His subsequent resurrection didn’t give us anything we didn’t already have …

John 15:5-6 "I am the vine, you are the branches; the one remaining in me and I in him, this one bears plentiful fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Unless someone remain in me he is like the branch that has been cast outside and has withered ... "

John 13:36 "Where I go you cannot follow now, but you will follow later."

My overall takeaway was that the realization behind the resurrection story is that we, like Jesus Christ, our teacher by example, each have a spirit.

But that was not unknown to the Jews or the Greeks – In fact I'd say it was more real to them than to us – Antiquity had a far more real and concrete sense of the immanent spiritual worlds and the transcendent abode of God.

I think this last point is at the root of my thinking – that contemporary self-oriented ideas regarding scriptural categories limits the scope of those categories in the sense of falling short of that to which they point; the understanding occludes (and in the worst cases eclipses) that which the Sacred Scribe had in mind.

By 'self-referential' I do not mean the ego or its operations, rather, the self-referential speaks of the anthropocentic.

+++

The Gospels mention the word spirit, pneuma numerous times, but nine times out of 10, in reference either to 'an unclean spirit', or to the divine – I can only think of a couple of occasions when the term designates the personal spirit of an individual, such as "The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak" (Mark 14:38), which even then, can be construed to imply the trans-personal spirit ...

And then there's Matthew 5:3 – "Blessed are the poor in pneuma ... "

 

[Thomas]

Where does grace sit in the schema?