Different traditions know God differently : the limits religious of dialogue

I’m often at a loss when speaking to Muslims on theology, it’s not that I disagree, it’s that I simply cannot understand how they are thinking about a thing.

This is because the way one lives, the community in which one is uncultured in, has a specific grammar to how they think about God, with its own way of interpreting scripture, shaped by its particular practices. The “rules” of how we think about a thing are very different.

There's a reason why all practicing Calvinists ( or Catholics or atheists) will each interpret scripture in the same particular way. If you wish to know how a Calvinist understand what faith in God is, you must live like one.

Stanley Hauerwas remarks :

“Of course, for this faith to make sense, it must be connected with the practices that make it intelligible: prayer, the sacraments, and the virtues.

Dr. D’Costa suggests that, 

“prayer is the necessary condition to secure the objectivity of theology, because theology cannot be done with intellectual rigor outside the context of a love affair with God and God’s community. 

The formal object of theology is God, and, like other disciplines that require practices and virtues constitutive for knowing the object of their investigation, theology requires prayer.”

Thus, logical proofs are of little use if their truth is not CONNECTED to our lives, one must love one’s way into knowing God, within some particular historical community.

Religion, for the ancients at least, was as a certain virtue, a certain habitus of the mind, a certain willingness to be open to the divine, to what it shows itself in nature.

Liturgy and lifestyle shape this mental orientation.

After all, Christ did not come to bring us doctrines, but His body, the Church, which enfolds us into its economy of life, shapes how we receive, and think of, the world , scripture, and God.

The rhythms of the liturgy attune us to the music of the spheres, it trains us to listen.

Doctrines are, in a sense, derivative from practice.

Religion is not a set of propositions that one believes but rather a (communal) way of life. 

Religion is a matter more of initiation than of information, a matter of know-how before it ever becomes a matter of know-that.

In most religions, you're sharing a meal with God, in sacrifice, forming a relationship to Him, even becoming one with Him, a mingling of His life with ours, an embodied dialogue takes place within a framework of specific rules.

In short, a religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices precede and shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways.

One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly "articulated."

"Religion" helps us "feel" the world in a certain way, orient ourselves toward it.

A religion works like a language in this respect: "It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and nondiscursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which this vocabulary can he meaningfully deployed" - Lindbeck

Our doings precede our thinkings. Practice is primary.

It's  is not primarily a set of propositions to be believed, but is rather the medium in which one moves, a set of skills that one employs in living one’s life.

Thus while a religion’s truth claims are often of the utmost importance, it is, nevertheless, the conceptual vocabulary and the syntax or inner logic which determine how we think about a thing.

Ritual worship forms the grammar of our thought.

Doctrine make explicit the norms that were already embedded in the community’s practiceIn other words, doctrines make explicit the know-how that was already implicit in our practice. To confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”is to articulate what was already implicit in our prayers, a worshipful way of life nourished by the Scriptures.

Reminds me of Larry Hurtado's insight, the first Christian's sang God, it's only when we try and speak of Him, utilizing not our hearts and desire, but our intellect, that the trouble begins.

But it’s always been like that - narrative coherence has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.

For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.

The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic. 

That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense.

Theology and doctrine make explicit the commitments implicit in—and entailed by—our proclamation, praise, and prayer.

Rituals do not express belief, they shape how we know. It is impossible to understand religion without FIRST being formed in worship, HERE Peter Leithart remarks :

"....we do not find Israelites in the Hebrew Bible described as thinkers who then act. Rather, the prophets’ expect Israel to practicea nexus of ethically-induced rituals aimed at intellectual formation.

Israel’s rituals—are meant to form knowers and not merely express what is already believed or known..

False worship blinds Israel so that she can no longer discern YHWH’s actions from her false gods’ actions we will come to understand our world through our ethical behavior and our rituals. Whether they are prescribed by our culture or the prophets. 

The question centers on whether we will know foolishly or wisely, and whether or not we will bring a life trued to God’s instruction to the rituals of the church.”

So, whether I’m speaking to Muslims, or modern systematic theologians, I can’t find their way of thinking intelligible since it’s outside my tradition, the grammar of my thought is different.

John Behr asks,

“what happens when one takes these supposed core theological elements (Trinity and Incar nation) out of the context in which they were composed—the particular practice of reading Scripture and the celebration of liturgy within which they had meaning, both leading to a praxis of piety, practices of identity formation shaping the believer in the image of Christ, to be his body—and places them in another context…?”

We receive revelation from God and yet one needs to "learn" to receive it as such, we need “training" through the community of practice that is the body of Christ” and our reception of this as revelation is dependent upon our inculcation in the community of social practice that is the church.

I've written about this more HERE 

Only the erotic gaze can disclose the reality of God

 

I'm all for skepticism, in fact, one reason I finally opened up to Christianity was because after examining my own assumed beliefs I found how flimsy they were.

Most skeptics are scarcely skeptical of their own beliefs, truly, it's as if they never even questioned them. 

This is because we usually believe what we desire to believe, and what we desire is dependent upon how we live. If you wish to desire to believe or know a thing, you must live a certain way.

Indeed, the liturgy is to form us into the types of people who desire to know God, and then are capable of receiving His spirit.

Rituals do not express belief, they shape how we know. It is impossible to understand religion without FIRST being formed in worship, HERE Peter Leithart remarks :


"....we do not find Israelites in the Hebrew Bible described as thinkers who then act. Rather, the prophets’ expect Israel to practicea nexus of ethically-induced rituals aimed at intellectual formation.

Israel’s rituals—are meant to form knowers and not merely express what is already believed or known..

False worship blinds Israel so that she can no longer discern YHWH’s actions from her false gods’ actions we will come to understand our world through our ethical behavior and our rituals. Whether they are prescribed by our culture or the prophets.

The question centers on whether we will know foolishly or wisely, and whether or not we will bring a life trued to God’s instruction to the rituals of the church.”

One truly only knows what one loves, this is true even of mathematical propositions. 

This is why truth always must begin with beauty, to evoke desire, one must want to know a truth, and for this one must perceive it somehow as beautiful, or else one's consciousness will never intend toward the horizon of that truth to begin with.

As Plotinus discovered, love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it.

Only once the senses are “rendered rational” by ascetic education is the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.

This is true, and also why knowledge of God must, *begin with desire, and beauty, neither of which is contained within dialectical reason, it requires a subjective *intention on the knowers part.

Hence the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing.

I’ve written how reality itself must be trusted to be known HERE

Esther Lightcap Meek in his “A Little Manual for Knowing” explains how we can adopt a posture that will bring us into contact with God:

“We love in order to know. Love, not bare information amassing, should characterize the way we relate to the world.

The goal is no longer comprehensive, mystery-eliminating, reality-denuding information. The goal is communion—the communion of knower and known. Communion is the fulfillment of love. The goal is ongoing friendship. Friendship requires our ongoing pledge.”

We pledge to give ourselves to the yet-to-be-known, and to consent to its being. We pledge to take the risk to follow something that may prove not to be there, something that may prove to be way different from what we imagine. ”

We pledge also to open ourselves to the transformation and to the new reality that the yet-to-be-known will bring us. We must be willing to have it change us, without specifying or holding at arm’s length the change we will undergo. ”

The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.”

She says elsewhere,

“…philosophical arguments aren’t the natural foundation of religious belief, so ‘God exists’ gains its meaning not from philosophical arguments but from how people experience human life.

….people don’t normally acquire religious beliefs by argument or testing evidence. Instead, they come to an understanding of the world that is expressed in values and a way of living. When someone converts to a religion, what changes isn’t so much intellectual beliefs, but their will, what they value, how they choose to live”

Some things can only be known in this way, from within a commitment to them, a commitment which may be called ‘faith.’

                                   

When first I entered the Faith, I did not believe in the physical resurrection of Christ. God does not require that, he condescends to us.

To have a relationship with God, as with anyone, one needs to offer small tokens of trust.

"God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.”

- Olivier Clement

Walk with God and you'll come to know Him, the person of Christ is embedded within the rhythms of the liturgical calendar.

The resurrection may have happened 2,000 yrs ago. I think it did. It would explain a lot, like how entire civilizations bloomed alive over the breaking of bread to some dead backwater peasant.

But, it's happening today. You can actually do this. Marry the rhythms of your deadened life onto the life-giving movement of God’s, tuning your soul to the music of paradise.

You can practice the resurrection, perform theology, live with God.

Discursive knowledge, in every realm, will never be certain, but, cleanse the nous, and direct perception of Gods beauty can be apprehended.

Of course, you have to educate your senses to receive God, generally, people know what they desire to know, desire intends consciousness

Yes, as if yearning itself was not a religious experience, and although we cannot grasp God, our desire exceeds what's possible for conceptual knowledge, erotically beckoning us to leap into the Divine unknown…

Participative knowing requires personal transformation, and living the virtues can disclose more of reality.

The virtue of humility is central to this unbounded receptivity so as to be filled with more.

Reminds me of Larry Hurtado's insight, the first Christian's sang God, it's only when we try and speak of Him, utilizing not our hearts and desire, but our intellect, that the trouble begins.

Met Hilarion Alfeyev once said, 

"The theological authority of liturgical texts is, in my opinion, higher than that of the works of the Fathers of the Church,

"...The lex credendi grows out of the lex orandi, and dogmas are considered divinely revealed because they are born in the life of prayer and revealed to the Church through its divine services.”

And Francis Martin says,

"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."

David Bentley Hart puts the problem well :

"In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or “adequate” a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic.

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For Christian thought, then, delight is the premise of any sound epistemology: it is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation’s beauty – only in seeing that creation truly is beauty – does one apprehend what creation is.

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Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. "

Paul Tyson has written on how, for the ancients, philosophy wasn’t about thinking, which can bring no truth :

“….right action and right feeling in an actual lived life are clearly a more significant measure of philosophical validity to Plato than smart thinking.

Merely intellectually “believing” in the transcendent existence of the form of “The Table” does not make you either a philosopher or a Platonist.

Plato refuses to put his philosophy in clear propositions before us for the very specific reason that he mistrusts written statements as being “dead” propositional substitutes for the communal and individual spiritual practices of the truly philosophical life.

Other than as an active, affective, aesthetic, and embodied existential stance…such spiritual formation cannot be imposed by mere argumentative force and cannot be “obtained” with a mere proof.

Thus receptive prayer, quiet attention, and right worship are keys to truth and success in the active pursuit of meaningful knowledge.”

So Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception.

By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.

These things are not anti-reason, they complete reason itself.

Why do Christians think the Bible has prophecy’s about the modern state of Israel ?

Many wonder, why do Christians think the Bible has prophecy’s about the modern state of Israel ?

Here’s what happened. Christians claimed various prophecies in the OT were fulfilled by Jesus Christ coming as the Messiah and the various events surrounding that time - the destruction of the Temple and others.

Well, the Israelite religion was made up not numerous various sects, each with their own unique beliefs and their own idea of which books were legitimate. In 70 ad the Temple was destroyed, and many of these sects dependent upon it ended right there and then.

Two Israelite sects survived though, the Pharisee’s, that became today’s Rabbinic Judaism, and the sect that believed Jesus was the Messiah, which become Christianity.

For example People unfamiliar with the differences between modern Rabbinic Judaism & ancient Israelite religion may be surprised to learn that trinitarian thought is perfectly Jewish.

It is the unitarian monotheism of Rabbinic Judaism that is the innovation in the centuries after Christ, not the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. You can read more about that HERE

Indeed, today it’s commonplace to hear scholars today argue that it is Rabbinic Judism, with the Talmud codified in the 5th C, that is much more of a "new religion" than Christianity, which theologically is more continuous with many of the Judaisms at the time, HERE the great Jewish scholar Jacob Yuval speaks also of the rituals Rabbinic Judaism actually took from Christianity.

Indeed, Christianity is a continuation of the Israelite religion, while modern rabbinic Judaism is deviation.

There was also briefly a sect immediately after the Temple’s destruction who believed Shimon bar Kokhba was the Messiah, even the famous Rabbi Akiva thought so.

Now, plenty at that time knew the prophesies of Daniel, Isiah, and Ezekiel, that the Israelites would be destroyed, a small remnant left, which the gentiles, unbelievably, would then join to worship Israel's God, at which point the nations would come to worship as well.

Well, that kind of looks like exactly what happened back then.....

BUT, obviously the Rabbinic Jews didn't think Jesus was the Messiah, so they strategically chose only certain texts for the Tanakh, with particular translations, even changing certain original words, so that what we apply to Jesus they apply to Israel in the future.

St Justin Martyr famously recorded all this with his dialogue with Typho the Jew in the 2nd Century.

One example, - who is the seed of Abraham ? Well, in the original Greek it is singular, meaning it refers to one person, which Paul believe is Christ. He didn’t make that up. This was how it was understood, Chronicles also, after noticing David’s dynasty did not last forever but was wiped out, states the promise to Abraham’s offspring must refer to some individual that will raise a new dynasty from David’s line.

Well, the Jews translated seed as plural in the Hebrew and tossed out the Book of Chronicles.

See HERE

                                                     

Ok. Now, centuries later, Luther comes, knows the Catholic Latin translation is corrupt, finds the Greek Orthodox fleeing the destruction of Constantinople, and uses the Orthodox New Testament....

BUT, the Greeks don't have the OT with them....so, he goes to the Jews, and uses their translation, which is the very one they used to deny Jesus is the Messiah, applying these passages to Israel !

Flash forward, evangelicals toss out more OT books to print a cheaper Bible….complete ignorance of centuries of Israelite history…..and you get a million insane endgame prophesies…Luther, Jonathan Edwards, and thousands today, all certain that NOW is the time these prophecies are happening…and all wrong again and again.

But, many of these prophesies have already come true, which I’ve written about HERE.

Of course, if you’re missing several centuries of history, haven’t read the book of maccabees etc, the sure, you’re going to apply, say, the prophecies of Daniel not to the coming of christ but to some future fantasy scenario involving the state of Israel.

The other factor was the “zionist Bible” - the Scofield Bible. Scofield was neither a pastor nor a scholar, but a lawyer, position, and con-man who left his wide and family for a younger women ands even spent 6 months in prison for forgery.

Scofield's role was to re-write the King James Version of the Bible by inserting Zionist-friendly notes in the margins, between verses and chapters, and on the bottoms of the pages.

With limitless advertising and promotion, especially by Samuel Untermeyer a Jewish wall street lawyer who would later be famous for being in the American Jewish Committee, it became a best-selling "bible" in America and has remained so for 90 years.

He actually copywrited it ! And made a fortune. Now, there was also no "State of Israel" when Scofield wrote his original notes in 1908, so they merely added references to Israel as a state were added AFTER 1947, and removed a few other things.

For more on the traditional Christian idea of who Israel is, I’ve written on that HERE

Who Is Israel ?

The early Church fathers did not see themselves as a “New Israel”, but as Israel itself.

In fact, not all ethnic Jews at the time of Christ were considered part of Israel either.

The great Jewish Rabbinic scholar Daniel Boyarin argues that within Judaism itself, there was a distinction as to who and what constituted Israel :

“the Mishna strongly supports this analysis, even suggesting the conclusion that "Sadducees" were not considered "Israel," although in this instance on grounds of ritual difference, not doctrine…

….for rabbinic discourse there are Jews who are outside of "Israel," and that these Jews are called variously minim and Sadducees…..there are historical and genealogical Israelites who are not "Israel."

….the Rabbis are in these texts appropriating the name "Israel" for those who hold their creed and follow the ways that they identify as the "ways of Israel," and the "Sadducees" are heretics who are beyond the pale and outside the name Israel.”

As Boyarin further explains,

"Jewish sectarianism as a form of decentralized pluralism by default had been replaced by the binary of Jewish orthodox and Jewish heretics: the latter comprising those who are Jews and say the wrong things and may therefore no longer be called “Israel”.'

Read his paper HERE.

Shaye Cohen states that, “this rabbinic ideology is reflected in Justin’s discussion of the Jewish sects: there are Jews, i.e., the “orthodox” and there are sects, among them the Pharisees, who scarcely deserve the name Jew”.

Cohen notes that, “All of the persistent sectarians” of “‘Pharisees,’ ‘Sadducees,’ and ‘Christians’ ... were cursed in the birkhat haminim”.

Recall Paul’s instruction to the church of Rome that, “they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Rom 9.6)

Indeed, in the earliest moments of the Gospel nar- rative, John the Baptist makes the Abrahamic claim to those gathered at the Jordan River that, “God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Mt. 3.9).

Peter Richardson in Israel in the Apostolic Church suggests that John’s cleansing of sins in the Jordan was a “proselyte baptism which has for its presupposition that all Jews have forfeited their right to be Israelites, have become as Gentiles, and there- fore have to be readmitted”. 

In his letter to the Magnesians, St Ignatius writes, “For if even unto this day we live after the manner of Judaism, we avow that we have not received grace: for the divine prophets lived after Christ Jesus”. (Ign. Magn. 8:2).

In the same epistle, the bishop of Antioch puts it another way: “For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity, wherein every tongue believed and was gathered together unto God” (Ign. Magn. 10:3).

For Ignatius, it was the contemporaneous expression of Judaism that was out of step with the Israelite faith of the prophets, not Christians who represented the fulfillment and realization of their prophecies.

Indeed, contrast to modern Rabbinic Jewish notions, one never needed to be ethnically Jewish, HERE Stephen de Young writes,

“Importantly, when this people left Egypt, it included an ethnically mixed group of Egyptians and other Semitic migrants (Ex 12:38). This group is not mentioned again in the Torah as a distinct class because these families are integrated into the nation and people of Israel and become some of its founding members.

Of all of the generation which came out of Egypt, only two men, Joshua and Caleb, entered into and took possession of the promised land (Numbers 13:26-14:24).

All the rest, including Moses himself, died in the wilderness as a result of Caleb is, however, the son of Jephunneh, and Jephunneh is repeatedly identified as being a Kenizzite (Num 32:12; Josh 14:6, 14).

The Kenizzites were a Canaanite people who already lived in Canaan at the time that Abraham had arrived there (Gen 15:19).

Caleb and his family were among the many Semitic migrants to Egypt during this period, and yet through his faithfulness to Yahweh and his participation in the events from Passover to Pentecost, he became a part of the tribe of Judah, even one of its chief men, and an inheritor of the promises to Abraham (Josh 14:13-14; 21:43-45).

These Gentiles are not naturalized citizens or converts to the religion of Judaism, rather they, like Caleb, are part of one of the tribes of Israel, children of Abraham, and inheritors of all of those promises.

The phrases “the church replaces Israel” or “the church is a new Israel” are therefore nonsensical once the terms in which the scriptures speak is understood. The church is Israel. Specifically, the church is the assembly of Israel, God’s people, to offer worship, praise, and sacrifice to their God. It is not that God’s people are no longer an ethnic or national entity, it is rather that God’s people and inheritance were never an ethnic entity, and only ever so briefly a national one.

This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Hosea, after Yahweh had declared Israel to be ‘not my people’ that Israel would be restored when a people which did not yet exist would be called his people while at the same time those who had been rejected were declared to be his people once again (Hos 1:10; 2:23; Rom 9:25-26).

God created a people for himself and called it Israel. This group was not a nation or an ethnicity. It was a group formed by participation in the Passover and the giving of the covenant (Pentecost). God knew that most of this group would be unfaithful, but he bore with them for a time and then scattered the unfaithful among the nations. Then when he regathered and reconstitutes Israel, he did it from the nations into which those tribes had been dispersed.

So Israel and God’s people are synonymous terms. This means that the assembly (church) today is identical to the assembly of Israel in the Old Testament. We are all, in the church, Israelites, though we are not all Judeans (Jews). But Judah/Judea was never all of Israel. It was the part from which the king (I.e. Messiah) came.”

                                                         

Many Christians think Paul expects a restoration of Jews in the distant future, and some have seen the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of Romans 9–11.

This is wrong.

As Peter Leithart, a protestant scholar, says : “The prophets of the Hebrew Bible testified that a time would come when judgment would come upon Israel after their return from exile. At this point, much of Israel would be cut off, but a remnant would be purified and preserved by the fire of judgment.

This remnant would become the basis for a new Israel, into which the nations would stream.

It is St. Paul’s understanding in the uncontroversially Pauline Epistle to the Romans that this had taken place in the coming of Christ (Rom. 11:1–24), an understanding also found in St. John’s Gospel. The Church is a new people of God, a renewed Israel, made up of the faithful remnant of Israel of the Old Covenant into which Gentiles who have come to Christ have been grafted. Those returning from the nations replace the tribes scattered to the nations so that in the end all Israel will be saved."

It’s odd to see modern evangelicals disagree with Paul and the Bible :

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, *heirs according to the promise*.”

Romans 9:6, 7 confirm this: "Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham just because they are descendants."

In John 8:39 the Jews defend themselves against Jesus' criticisms by saying, "'Abraham is our father.' Jesus said to them, 'If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did.'"

Jesus shows us that they are not Abraham's children, even though they are Jews.

Finally, we must ask how the modern state of Israel is related to Abraham or the Israelite religion. Is Israel a nation given by God, and for God ? No, Israel is one of the least religious nations on earth. Only 30% of Israelis say they are religious, THIS survey finds

If it’s all about genetics, then the Palestinians are just as likely to be related to the ancient Israelites as modern Jews, and in some cases, more so, as has been acknowledged by Jewish historians, including two of the founders of the modern state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Zvi. “Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham," says Harry Ostrer, M.D., Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine HERE, and he’s right.