The Shape and Place of Doctrine in Today's World
A religion is a way of life. The more religious one considers oneself, the more that one has made a commitment to become closer to God, and to declare oneself a member of a specific community. Today's churches are the result of centuries of development. Bastions of tradition, most creeds hearken back to an earlier day. Their ways and general beliefs were largely fixed in another time and place, one that was often quite different from the world in which we now live. Christianity is only one of many world religions whose origin goes back to Ancient Times. Indeed, there are faiths still practiced today the origins of which pre-date Christianity by some considerable period of time. The earliest Hindu Scriptures were being recited even as the Pharaohs of Egypt thought themselves the greatest rulers in the world. Judaism, the faith that is most directly ancestral to Christianity, traces its history back nearly as far. Ancient Egypt was the setting of many a Biblical episode. Other forms of worship go far back. Zoroastrianism extended its influence over much of the Middle East and the Roman Empire. Mithraism is a direct descendant, and Manichaeanism and Gnosticism were both affected to a greater or lesser extent. The home
The New Testament itself provides a criterion for judging its own unity. The question we must ask is not whether these books all say the same thing, but whether they all bear witness to the same Jesus and through him to the many splendoured wisdom of the one God.... the second Moses, the son of Man, the friend of sinners, the incarnate logos, the firstborn of all creation, the Apostle and High Priest of our calling, the Chief Shepherd, and the Lamb opening the scroll are the same person in whom the one God has achieved and is achieving his mighty work.... It is part of the wisdom of God--utterly in keeping with the grace which uses the weak things to confound the things that are strong-that Christ is known to us only through the testimony of his witnesses; and because these witnesses were fallible human beings, conscious of their own limitations, we need to see Christ through many eyes if we are to see him at all. 9 Belief in the Logos is predicated on another and more profound assumption - that in order for something to exist it must have a creator, and furthermore, that Creator must possess an intelligence. More difficult still for one of a non-Christian heritage would be the association of the Logos with the specific Person of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Central to Lutheran Doctrine is the notion that the assumption of a human form by the Son was an inevitable facet of Creation - in order for the Universe to be what it is, God had to have been born in the flesh as His Own Son. This is certainly a difficult concept to grasp, and one which, by no means, necessarily follows from Holy Writ. Conscience, in short, demands that our minds and hearts attend to their built-in hunger for the true and the good. It prods them along in their search for it--and then insists they embrace what they believe they have found. Conscience, of course, is neither omniscient nor infallible. Regardless, it must be obeyed if we are to keep our integrity. After all, conscience takes the truth, as we understand it, and applies it to concrete circumstances to judge what is good. To refuse to follow its judgment (even when it turns out to have been mistaken) is to consciously reject what we believe to be true and turn our back on what we believe to be good, which violates our nature, if nothing else. 4 ... Has been to open up a new range of historiographical questions, questions that lay aside presuppositions about the assumed cognitive superiority of scientific knowledge, or the triumph of western scientific rationality over other thought forms, or the victory of scientists over theologians in the struggle for cultural authority. 1 Science, every bit as much as theology, rests upon faith. Science must appeal to some foundational assumptions regarding the nature of reality and our apprehension of it, assumptions which themselves cannot be proved within the scope of scientific reasoning. In its own disguised fashion, science is religious, mythical. "The activity of knowing, "writes Langdon Gilkey, "points beyond itself to a ground of ultimacy which its own forms of discourse cannot usefully thematize, and for which religious symbolization is alone adequate." Scientific reasoning depends upon the deeply held conviction--the passion of the scientist--that the world is rational and knowable and that truth is worth pursuing. "This is not 'faith' in the strictly religious and certainly not in the Christian sense," Gilkey observes, "But it is a commitment in the sense that it is a personal act of acceptance and affirmation of an ultimate in one's life." 7
Some common words found in the essay are:
Swedenborg Visions, Buddhism Taoism, Word God, Lutheran Creed, Christ Christ, Writ Bible, Lutheran Doctrine, Shepherd Lamb, Langdon Gilkey, God Creation, jesus christ, absolute truth, lutheran church, martin luther, lutheran doctrine, son god, holy writ, vision jesus christ, logos word, vision jesus, individual personality, evangelical lutheran church, roman catholic church, lutheran church america,
Approximate Word count = 4444
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page double spaced)
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