Thomas Jefferson anchored the entire good of Christianity in the morals of Jesus. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ever striving for the universal to be found in nature, anchored it all in "moral sentiment." Both Jefferson and Emerson, though, thought the days of Christianity were numbered and soon to expire -- so the next chp in Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America's Imminent Secularization
How Emersonian is the Christian vision today? Where are you seeing the Emersonian vision in the Church today?
Emerson's problems were Church institutions, creeds, forms, churches, and buildings. Emerson saw their imminent demise in the anarchy of choices running rampant in his day, and he thought that what would remain would be a religion that was moral science and reasonable, but fashioned in the soul and spirit of each person. The religious work of churches, he thought, was being replaced by the social work of philanthropy.
Here's a potent statement: "How many people are there in Boston? Two hundred thousand. Then there are so many sects. I go for churches of one."
Emerson, who was a Unitarian minister for a few years but who became convinced Christian rituals, esp the Lord's Supper, were things that no longer spoke, was caught between Calvinism and Unitarianism. And his vision of transcendantalism was an "attempt to reenchant Unitarianism while still accepting many of its basic critiques of Christian orthodoxy."
Emerson distinguished spirituality (good) from religion (church); and he thought sermons were good if they converted life into truth (not truth into life). His contemporaries were Whitman and Thoreau.
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There's much of what you've written, Angie, that does not ring with accuracy and authenticity. I'll just mention one.
2.) There are many truths, but no one Truth.
Truth is living in integrity within one’s convictions, which is living truth.
If this is really correct, then if I have the conviction that it is right, I may kidnap, rape, and murder the cute blonde college girl up the street and leave her mutilated body on the bayou a few blocks from here, and I will have acted in integrity with my convictions ... but I will not have lived truth.
Yes, Angie, there is at least one truth that is always true, and it is: kidanp, rape, murder and mutilation is always wrong. And if that is true, then I had better study the world around me to find out if there is more to this one truth.
Tim (#10): without using a lot of "dot, dot, dots" what are you talking about? I'm Pentecostal so very interested in Azusa Street (the original). If you have some insight in regards to the New England group of Unitarians versus pentecostal revivalism, I am all ears.
Rick, I really appreciate what you have said, but as I said..truth is not "set in stone". When we speak of the Ten Commandments, they must be applied. If we apply the Commandments, they must be interpreted to situations, circumstances, etc. This is where ethics comes in and where people disagree as to what it means to "kill" for example. Our laws have been fine-tuned to explain what the nuances are and what they mean in certain situations. So, of course, I agree that there are certain behaviors that are never appropriate.
And, you must consider how I began my entry with "Christian faith". Faith is what I was talking about and how that is connected to truth...
Mike (16) sorry for the dot dot dots--its too long a story to tell in a short post -- but do read Fire From Heaven, at least the first chapter, when you get a chance. Not really a concord reference directly, tho--in nearby boston, the quiet revival as it's been sometimes called, is led by mostly Pentecostals, many of them from communities-of-color and immigrant commmunities... much like the first Asuza revival.
I spent some time after seminary and before starting as a pastor working with Black Pentecostal pastors and churches on economic development and AIDS and debt in the global South. One of them, Rev Gene Rivers (like i think Thoreau? is a harvard drop-out--and a sometimes fiery abolitionist) -- pastors a small church called Azusa Christian Community. Cox opens with the contrast between the chicago fire burning up the great hopes of turn of the century top-down transcendentalism and a contrasting story of the first Asuza revival fires -- and ends the book with a short episode from Asuza in Boston...
this is seriously abridged but gotta pray and run
blessings!
Rick in Texas: I may kidnap, rape, and murder the cute blonde college girl up the street and leave her mutilated body on the bayou a few blocks from here, and I will have acted in integrity with my convictions
Are those your convictions? Is that something you want to do?
I grow weary of this convoluted Jonathan Edwards business of pretending we're monsters so that we can pretend we need absolute moral certainty so that we can pretend we need God.
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