further …

… to yesterday’s post, what if, here is a section from Kierkegaard:

But as in Christendom everything has been brought to confusion, so also this; and thereby the point has been reached where Christianity has become paganism. In Christendom they preach perpetually about what happened then after Christ’s death, how He triumphed, and how His disciples made a triumphal conquest of the whole world-in short, one hears only sermons which might properly end with Hurrah I rather than with Amen. No, Christ’s life here upon earth is the paradigm; it is in likeness to it that I along with every Christian must strive to construct my life; and this is the essential object of the sermon, this is the end it should serve, to keep me alert when I would become slack, and to strengthen me when I would become disheartened. In such a sense He is the paradigm in the situation of contemporaneousness; in that situation there was no stuff and nonsense about what happened afterwards. But Christendom has abolished Christianity – on the other hand, it would like to inherit Him and His great name, to gain advantage from the immense consequences of his life, coming pretty close to appropriating these consequences as its own meritorious achievement and making us believe that Christendom is Christ. Every generation has to begin all over again with Christ and thus to present His life as the paradigm; but instead of this, Christendom has taken the liberty of interpreting the whole relationship simply historically, beginning by letting Him be dead-and then it triumphs! Since that time Christendom has been increasing in numbers year by year-and what wonder; for people are only too eager to take part when there is nothing whatever to do but to triumph and to join the parade. And therefore to be a Christian in Christendom is as different from being a Christian in the situation of contemporaneousness as paganism is from Christianity.

Training in Christianity, 109

what if…

Hear me out!! What if all the reforming movements (within Christianity around the world) have themselves fallen into the worst heresy of all? Christendom needs reforming. But Christendom is not Christ.

Not faith, not works, not right doctrine “save”. Only Jesus!!!! And Jesus is not an idea, not a book, nor a doctrine. Jesus is a person. A person who seeks an encounter with me, not an experience. No institution can give me that encounter since it is fundamental personal and individual. Jesus calls me. Jesus calls you. It is Jesus and the individual! Anything outside of that is heresy. Anything apart from the person of Jesus is not relevant.

So let me ask a question (for a friend): can a heretic be saved? Or, using Kierkegaard’s questions, what is better: a heretic with passion or christendom without passion?

another quote

Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

THE SAME OBJECT SHOULD PRODUCE IN SEVERAL MEN’S MINDS DIFFERENT IDEAS at the same time;

Locke, John. John Locke: Complete Essay on Human Understanding, 161

[The capitals are in the original – not yelling! Also the gender specific language.]

How do I know that your experience of reality is the same as my experience of the same “object”?

experience necessity

According to Hume, Descartes’s cosmological proof of the existence of God relied on a conceptual foundation that he had left unquestioned, the conceptual foundation of causality. Hume argues that if you really tried to build knowledge back up from the most basic elements of human nature (e.g., perception), then you could not claim that causality is something we can know to be true rather than something we can only believe to be true. Though we may see one event follow another, and see this sequence of events happen over and over again, it is impossible to see that this sequence of events must happen. In other words, we cannot experience necessity.

Gertz, Nolen. Nihilism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series), 19.

In the end, we are always free to act.