Dear friends on these luminous lists I would beg you to have a look at this talk of the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams in Washington last week
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/040329.html http://www.edow.org/news/window/special/williams/lecture.html?menu=undefined It starts like this ***In the year 156 of the Christian era, Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, was arrested and brought before the magistrate, charged with being a Christian. He was in his eighties, and his age and frailty prompted the magistrate to offer him a quick discharge if he would acknowledge the divine spirit of the emperor and say ‘Away with the atheists.’ The latter, at least, you might think would not be difficult for a bishop; but of course at this period an atheist was someone who refused to take part in the civic cult of the empire, to perform public religious duties and take part in the festivals of the Roman city. Christians were atheists, by this definition; Polycarp had a problem after all. His response, though, was an elegant turning of the tables. He looked around slowly at the screaming mob in the amphitheatre who had gathered for the gladiatorial fights and public executions, and, says our eyewitness chronicler, he groaned and said, ‘Away with the atheists.’ The magistrate did not fail to grasp the theological point, and Polycarp was duly condemned to be burned alive. But this poignant story is one well worth pondering for reasons beyond the study of early Christianity. It is a reminder that ‘atheism’ may be a less simple idea than either its defenders or its attackers assume. People often talk as though ‘atheism’ were a self-contained system, a view of the world which gained its coherence from a central conviction – that there is no transcendent creative power independent of the universe we experience. But the story of Polycarp reminds us that to understand what atheism means, we need to know which gods are being rejected and why. Thus an early Christian was an atheist because he or she refused to be part of a complex system in which political and religious loyalties were inseparably bound up. ‘Atheism’ was a decision to place certain loyalties above those owed to the sacralised power of the state. But, moving across the world of faiths, Buddhists are sometimes described as atheists by puzzled observers, aware of the fact that Buddhist philosophy has no place for a divine agent and that Buddhist practice concentrates exclusively upon the mind purifying itself from self-absorption and craving; here, ‘atheism’ is a strategy to discipline the mind’s temptation to distraction by speculative thought. Whether or not there is a transcendent creator is irrelevant to the mind’s work; preoccupation with this is a self-indulgent diversion at best, and at worst a search for some agency that can do the work only we can do. ... ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill him’ is a well-known Zen dictum, from a tradition deeply aware that personal agenda and history are easily capable of distorting any supposedly clear vision of where enlightenment is to be found. Any conceptual form that can be given in the abstract to the Buddha (i.e. to the enlightened awareness)will take its shape from the unenlightened awareness, and so has to be dissolved. But this is not that different from the conviction of much Hindu thought, that the divine is ‘not this, not that’, never identifiable with a determinate object, or from the principle, deeply rooted in the Abrahamic faiths, that God cannot be given an ‘essential’ definition, classified as a kind of object. This may be expressed in the form of the apophatic theology of an Ibn Sina or Maimonides or Nicholas of Cusa: Ibn Sina (like Aquinas and all that flows from him) insists that there can be no answer to the question, ‘What makes God divine? ’ as if some ‘quiddity’ could be identified that grounded a divine definition. God is God by being God – by being the necessary, uncaused active reality he is; nothing else. But the same point is made in wholly different idioms by twentieth century writers such as Karl Barth and Simone Weil. For Barth, all systems for which God is an object are unsustainable: he always speaks before we have words to answer, acts before we can locate him on some intellectual map. He is never ‘available’, though always present. And Simone Weil, in an argument of some complexity, concludes that when the human ego says ‘God’, it cannot be referring to any reality to which the name might be truthfully applied. Because the ‘I’ that says ‘God’ is always self-directed and so wedded to untruth, God cannot properly be spoken of. Any God my selfish mind can conceive is bound to be a false, non-existent God. The true God is known only in ways that cannot be reduced to theory or third-person language. If you meet God (in the language of systematic theology or metaphysics), kill him. ...*** [limited quotation because of copyright] but it is most interesting and to my humble mind it has many many links with this Message of the Universal House of Justice: http://www.bci.org/reno/writingsuniversal_house_.htm To the World's Religious Leaders The enduring legacy of the twentieth century is that it compelled the peoples of the world to begin seeing themselves as the members of a single human race, and the earth as that race's common homeland. Despite the continuing conflict and violence that darken the horizon, prejudices that once seemed inherent in the nature of the human species are everywhere giving way. Down with them come barriers that long divided the family of man into a Babel of incoherent identities of cultural, ethnic or national origin. That so fundamental a change could occur in so brief a period — virtually overnight in the perspective of historical time — suggests the magnitude of the possibilities for the future. Tragically, organized religion, whose very reason for being entails service to the cause of brotherhood and peace, behaves all too frequently as one of the most formidable obstacles in the path; to cite a particular painful fact, it has long lent its credibility to fanaticism. We feel a responsibility, as the governing council of one of the world religions, to urge earnest consideration of the challenge this poses for religious leadership. Both the issue and the circumstances to which it gives rise require that we speak frankly. We trust that common service to the Divine will ensure that what we say will be received in the same spirit of goodwill as it is put forward. http://bahai-library.com/published.uhj/religious.leaders.html And both the Archbishop and the Message of the Universal House of Justice are in contrast to the Vatican's Dominus Iesus http://www.cin.org/docs/dominus-iesus.html As a remedy for this relativistic mentality, which is becoming ever more common, it is necessary above all to reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ. In fact, it must be firmly believed that, in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), the full revelation of divine truth is given: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Mt 11:27); “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed him” (Jn 1:18); “For in Christ the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9-10). Faithful to God's word, the Second Vatican Council teaches: “By this revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines forth in Christ, who is at the same time the mediator and the fullness of all revelation”.9 Furthermore, “Jesus Christ, therefore, the Word made flesh, sent ‘as a man to men', ‘speaks the words of God' (Jn 3:34), and completes the work of salvation which his Father gave him to do (cf. Jn 5:36; 17:4). To see Jesus is to see his Father (cf. Jn 14:9). For this reason, Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making himself present and manifesting himself: through his words and deeds, his signs and wonders, but especially through his death and glorious resurrection from the dead and finally with the sending of the Spirit of truth, he completed and perfected revelation and confirmed it with divine testimony... The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away, and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Tim 6:14 and Tit 2:13)”.10 no further public revelation __________________________________________________ You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Baha'i Studies is available through the following: Mail - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web - http://list.jccc.edu/read/?forum=bahai-st News - news://list.jccc.edu/bahai-st Public - http://www.escribe.com/religion/bahaist Old Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] New Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
