Jesus Creed Admin: November 2009 Archives

We began last Thursday to look at Kevin Corcoran's book Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul where he develops a constitution view of human persons.  Professor  Corcoran is a philosopher teaching at Calvin College specializing in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion  - a philosopher who tries to connect philosophy with bible, theology, faith, and science. Reading this book is something of a new experience for me as I have taken one and only one philosophy course - some many years ago as a freshman in college. Formal philosophy is not, and never has been, high on my list for leisure reading. But this book is interesting.

Today's post will consider a few points from Chapters 1 and 2, the dualist and nothing-but materialist views of human persons. The key question is that introduced in the last post - what is the essence of a human person? What relationship does this essence have to our physical bodies?

Dualism is pretty clear - at least in the common view. Human persons consist of separable parts - body and soul. Corcoran introduces three varieties of dualism and discusses arguments for and against each.

The nothing-but materialist view is also relatively clear - metaphysical naturalism claims that there is nothing but the natural world and thus we must be defined by our bodies. We are not defined by the precise matter of composition, neither are we defined merely as animals - organisms. But we are defined by some natural feature of a living body.

This whole discussion leads to the significance of consciousness as we consider the essence of a human person - the capacity for consciousness.

Corcoran suggests that consciousness is a problem for nothing-but materialism, but no less so for dualism. Consciousness does not prove that we possess an immaterial soul.

This leads to the questions for discussion today.

Does the capacity for consciousness define the essence of a human person?

Is consciousness an argument for the existence of God? Is it something that cannot be explained by natural mechanism alone?

Over the next couple of weeks or so I would like to look at two books, not new but fairly recent, that think through some ideas on body and soul. The first is by Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul where he develops a constitution view of human persons.  Professor  Corcoran is a philosopher teaching at Calvin College specializing in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion  - a philosopher who tries to connect philosophy with bible, theology, faith, and science.

The second book is by Joel Green, now a professor of New Testament interpretation at Fuller Theological Seminary. His book  Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible looks at a biblical view of human nature and argues that a dualistic view of the human person  as material body and immaterial soul is inconsistent with both science and Scripture. Green is a biblical scholar who works to connect bible, theology, and faith with philosophy and science.

I, on the other hand, am a scientist who would like to connect science with philosophy, bible, theology, and faith. Join us it should be interesting.

To get this going let's start simple, with a little question.

What kind of things are we?

We are moving from an age of belief to an age of the Spirit. We are open to the Spirit and pray for the work and power of the Spirit. 

An Age of the Spirit doesn't mean laissez faire anything goes spirituality. Nor does it mean Charismatic Christianity with speaking in tongues, prayer languages, prophecy, and ecstatic worship (although it may include all of these - and will include these for some). But it does mean a step away from modern rationalist materialism and proposition centered faith. Even more importantly, it means breaking free of our view that body and soul, flesh and spirit are separate and separable entities - we need a fully embodied Christianity focused on God and on His work, His presence, and His mission; isn't this, after all, what true religion and for that matter biblical Christianity is?

Today I would like to put up an excerpt from Tom Wright - from a lecture that he gave at Calvin College in January of 2007 - on Space, Time, and Sacraments. (You can download both lectures and the q&a sessions from the link, his homily on Luke 24 is also well worth listening to.) The excerpt I would like to consider is 45 minutes into the second lecture, Sacraments and New Creation and runs about 4 minutes.

As you read (or listen to) the excerpt I would like to focus on the following question:

What is the significance of sacrament, particularly the Lord's Supper, in our worship and our faith? Do we need the sacramental life of the church as part of our mission to follow God and participate in His mission?

Today's post wraps up our brief series on Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. The last several chapters of the book, and in fact various passages throughout the book,  present some of Cox's thoughts on the future of faith - and more specifically his hopes for the future of the Christian faith. Today I would like to focus our discussion on the future.

Cox notes - as have many others - that the future of the church is moving out of the western world, into Latin America, Africa, and the East.  While churches stand empty in Europe, the faith is flourishing and growing elsewhere. Notably charismatic forms of the faith are growing fastest.

The bottom line seems to be that faith is relevant for life in many parts of the world and that the Christian faith in particular meets a very real need.  Faith simply is not relevant in much of the secular west. But in the global South ... liberation theology and the power of people in small house church groups play an enormous role.  Faith flourishes when it is not micromanaged from the top, but grows from the bottom through the power of the Spirit.

Lets look at a bit of what Cox has to say:

First, for centuries Christians have claimed that the Holy Spirit is just as divine as the other members of the Trinity. But in reality, the Spirit has most often been ignored or else feared as too unpredictable. It "blows where it will," as the Gospel of John (3:8) says, and is therefore too mercurial to contain. But some of the liveliest Christian movements in the world today are precisely the ones that celebrate this volatile expression of the divine. ... By far the fastest growth in Christianity, especially among the deprived and destitute, is occurring among people like the Pentecostals, who stress a direct experience of the Spirit. It is almost as though the Spirit, muted and muffled for centuries, is breaking its silence and staging a delayed "return of the repressed." (p. 9-10)

Are we entering an Age of the Spirit? And if so, is this a good thing?

The central portion of Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith lays out the New Perspective on The Church - which is no longer new. It is broad brush summarized as follows:

Jesus taught and enacted a kingdom vision.

His immediate followers were committed to this vision

Paul's disavowal of the necessity to submit to Jerusalem demonstrates that it was Spirit driven

At its core the movement was a rebellion against human, particularly Roman, empire in favor of what could be - Kingdom of God

The diversity of texts found at Nag Hammadi among others demonstrate that belief in the early church was not uniform

The Gospel of Thomas is as old and as faithful as any of the four in the NT

Luke in Luke-Acts was setting forth a Christian epic to compete with the Aeneid and other epics

This community (ekklesia = gathering with political undertones) became distorted into a hierarchical church emphasizing beliefs and authority

→ The distortion is apparent as early as the first epistle of Clement (ca. 92 AD)

→ The distortion develops through Tertullian and Origin and Cyprian 

→ The distortion crystallized with Roman favor and Constantine

The council at Nicaea, far from being a sober and Spirit led occasion marked the end of the beginning. The transition was complete.

Meanwhile the Christian bishops went on debating the fine points of theology, Now they argued over what homoousious really meant and the nature of Mary's relationship to God and Christ. They composed more creeds and excommunicated more people. After the fall of Rome in 476, the ensuing centuries toll a dismal story if the repeated failure of using creeds and excommunications to achieve any result, except for further rancor. (p. 108)

So here is a question to ponder:

Which parts of Cox's perspective on the Church ring true - and which parts don't? How would you tell the story?

Tuesday I began a series of posts looking at Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. Today I would like to look at Chapter 3 - Ships Already Launched. Cox begins this chapter by dismissing the idea that all...

Today I begin a series of posts looking at Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. We'll see how long it goes - at least a couple of weeks. Cox is the Hollis Professor of Divinity emeritus at...