Metaphorical Resurrection, yea, sure.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brandon-ambrosino/resurrection-as-metaphor-what-the-early-christians-meant-when-they-said-jesus-is-lord_b_2988438.html

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about the Christian concept of the resurrection. Does it matter, I asked, if Jesus' resurrection is interpreted metaphorically? My answer was that it matters a great deal, since "a Jesus whose physical body remains in the grave gives me no hope for a physically broken world."
A friend emailed me that I was reading the Gospels wrong, and that the resurrection was best interpreted metaphorically. To relegate the resurrection to a purely physical phenomenon was to read the Easter narrative in the most primitive way, at its lowest common denominator. The Resurrection narratives are given to each of us to interpret and enjoy in our own way -- literally or metaphorically.
The Easter stories, he reminded me, belong to all of us.
And yet before they belonged to us, they belonged to other people -- people who lived and thought and wrote within the first century. It seems to me, then, that if we are to truly understand what the gospel writers are trying to say, we need to contextualize them not first within our own world, but within theirs.

And it must be bodily because, after all, a dead Messiah -- no matter how spiritually alive he may be -- is still dead. He's especially dead if he's being experienced as a ghost. In the ancient Mediterranean world, a vision of a recently deceased loved one confirmed that he was dead... not that he was alive.
It's difficult to imagine the disciples saying, "God has warmed our hearts and caused us to experience the metaphorical presence of Jesus, and therefore we know that he's the Messiah!" Unless Jesus' postmortem appearances were experienced in a physical way, his disciples would have assumed that Rome had won again, and that Jesus, regardless of what they hoped, couldn't have been Lord.
For this reason, scholars of all persuasions are forced to seriously consider what happened between the event of Jesus' crucifixion and the event of his proclamation as Lord. As it turns out, the early Christians answer this question in their Easter stories. What convinced them that Jesus was the Messiah was that, unlike other people murdered by Rome, he didn't stay dead.

Chesterton on Blake

I just want to hang on to this link on G.K. Chesterton writing about William Blake.
There is a link in the link to a book which is only available on Kindle.

http://www.chesterton.org/discover-chesterton/chesterton-101/lecture-18/

I am finding that I am hugely interested in Chesterton, though I also think that he is sometimes very wrong.  Still, I feel like I want to read the entire corpus.

Christmas and Nazi poets / 2

It is the forth of Advent Sunday and tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so not much working on this, at the moment.  However, see a sample of the ideological Christmas song:

It goes like this:

Valley and hills are covered in snow,
and the nights are silent,
as we, at this time, at this time,
bow before the silence,
bow before the silence.

Somewhere deep in the forest,
a little spruce tree is green and hidden.
This makes our hearts glad,
just like the bright morning.

It's pretty terrible, isn't it.

I'm not into obscenities, but something comes to mind, excuse me.   This is so bad.

This one is from the Nazi Party Women's Magazine.  It goes like this:

It will happen:
a new light will rise.
Light must come again,
even after these dark days.
Let us not ask ourselves,
whether we will see it, too.
It will happen:
a new light will rise.


Just lovely.  Lovely.  Genial.

For the word "rise", they actually use "resurrection".  A new light will be "resurrected."
Wonderful.  Aren't we glad.

At the very top of the illustration we seem to have a rooster.  Perhaps because there will be eggs and then there will be chicks and they are like a "resurrection."  --  I don't know.  It's bizarre.

Thank God, we don't have to live under such people.

This is how it ended.  Christmas in the bunker.  My mother was a little girl like this, in the basement in Darmstadt.  The "genius" lead everything to ruin and by force. 

Christmas and what the Nazi poets tried to do to it / 1

There are several things which are coming together here.  Lately, I've been wondering about this mysticism which seems to come up everywhere on the internet, though not with any "real" people I know.  The whole scene is not familiar to me, but then if I attended a different "church" it might not be.

So we have mysticism and we have Christmas.  Now, I have noticed that at my grocery store, they have moved one step further away from Christmas by giving up Santa and red suits and red hats.  There are green hats now and everything "elves".  Somehow elves are green-ish.  In the public sphere, I've never much cared about real Christmas carols blaring through speakers as I'm shopping.  It was at the same time anachronistic and yet a preservation of some cultural heritage.  What I am fearing is that with the banning of anything approaching Christian Christmas we are losing the last set of songs we actually could sing together.  We have hardly any public spaces in this country, besides malls and schools and Walmart, too, now,-- hardly anybody sings, and if we tried to sing together we'd know nothing that we'd all know--the Christmas carols excepted.  We are fractured as a people and culture, the way our families are fractured nowadays.  It maybe some sort of freedom and individualism, but at huge cost to psychological well-being.  We then have to go to Yoga class, where we do some stretching -fine--but also where we sit together trying to think nothing--not to mention not sing anything, except, perhaps, "Om".

We used to be able, not very long ago, to sing Christmas carols together with gusto and joy, and I am new-ish to this country.  But it seems like the next generation won't know them at all.

Between mysticism, elves and disappearing cultural / religious goods of song, I am thinking why am I not writing something nice and Christmas-sy, myself, today, since were are nearly upon the season?  But instead of that I am thinking to link all that with my other concern and upcoming discussion of Poewe's "New Religions and the Nazis".  You see, because in the pre-war years we had something analogous happening.   And one does wonder:  what comes next?

As we could see from Brahms and Wagner and those who thought themselves avant-garde, creative and brilliant, the Judeo-Christian heritage had to go.  It had to be stamped out.  It was hated, distasteful old stuff.  Christianity would have to go perhaps because it was not Darwinian enough.  Eugenically speaking  the weak were coddled and the proletariat was oppressed.  (There is something add odds here. If the "genius", i.e. "leader", i.e. "Fuehrer" was to lead, what was wrong with the monarch?  And if the proletariat was stupid and weak, why encourage it.  Hm.  Something wrong with either their or my thinking. ...)  In any case, Christianity was too Jewish, and the whole thing was distasteful to the Romantic age and their experience of... whatever, whatever experience they were having, Christianity didn't fit properly.  In any case, Christ didn't fit, either because he was either too Jewish and inappropriate or crucifixion to ugly to those with refined taste, else Christianity was said to be to particularistic and against the Jews.  (Again, nothing hangs together here.  Is it me or is it them?).  That Wagner was anti-semitic can be seen by looking simply into his writing against Mendelssohn and other muscicians.  Mendelssohn was was a Lutheran of Jewish extraction.  Neither the Lutheranism, nor the Jewishness, nor the orthodoxy in the oratorios, etc. was acceptable to Wagner.  Likely the resurrection of J.S. Bach facilited by Mendelssohn did not please Wagner either.

At the same time as we have the rise of materialism and Darwinism  we also had this rise in mystical romanticism.  Somehow, all of it combined into one stream of anti-Christianity which facilitated the rise of National Socialism and the racial movement of German spirit and faith.

The German faith movement I want to get into later by looking at "New Religions and the Nazis".  For now lets just look at what Nazi ideologues and poets did to Christmas and its songs.

In my collection I possess several volumes of Christmas songs, which contain hundreds and hundreds of songs, most of which I know and can sing and play.  I am just contrasting this to the narrowing of the repertoire in the grocery store.


Here are two of my books.

1.

It was given to our family a long time by an American family from San Diego.  The family had billeted with us during a choir tour to Germany.  There are about 400 songs in it, and you can see the book is well used.    At the very end of the book are some ancient Latin songs, which are also hauntingly beautiful. 

2.  This is a book given to me by my brother, I think.  It is an astonishing collection of song through the ages and cultural epochs with explanations of the trends that can be discerned--a truly enlightened and illuminating edition.  

It is available at Amazon, here, we note,  for $22.00, truly an amazing value for this kind of book, which also contains wonderful illustrations.  It might be worth getting the book for yourself or a friend, if there is any German-language knowledge.  (This is another thing.  Who knows any German these days except native German speakers.  In North America hardly a soul bothers learning languages because they don't need to.  This may have to led to misunderstandings of many kinds over the years.  I am slightly side-tracked, but this issue may also have contributed to a very shallow understanding of the Nazi movement and war times.)

This is the contents page:

We see that under 6. and 7. we deal with the Youth-movement that merged into the Hitler-youth and the overhaul of Christmas by gutting it of Christian content and substituting a mythology of nature, stars, motherhood and German nation.  The Christmas tree is now the "Jultanne".  I myself remember singing a set of songs which are mostly about snow and walking in snow.  

--I think I will get my day going, at this point.-- We have made a introduction to the subject.  In the next post, I want to have a look at what this "Buch der Weihnachtslieder" can tell us about the Nazi-movement, its songs and its efforts to remove Christmas from Christmas. 

What's with this myth business? / 2

Dear Tolkien--looking over some other things about his life--seems to have drunk deeply from the mystics, which seems to put him for me into the category of great English professors and writers, who think they are great at philosophy or theology or both, in addition to fantasy writing, but truly have their limitations in those regards.  Their fictional side runs away with them.  It does not work in all spheres, gentlemen.  It's not that simple.  I would say, if they asked me.  Maybe it's no wonder that the movie industry has turned the books into action flicks that the Tolkien family is deeply satisfied with, as we hear this week in advance of the opening of the Hobbit.  Maybe the sophistry of this myth business isn't that workable.  Still, I wonder why it doesn't bother me, when Lewis says about the Narnia series, that the underlying premise is that just because there is one place, why should there not be another place.  He likened it to being a boy away a boarding school.  He slaves away far from the comforts of home and the freedom of summer holidays, the woods and field and shore and many adventures.  Such as there are summer holidays and there is slaving at boarding school, such there can be one place and another, and while you are in one, it is hard to imaging the other until you are there and then it all happens in reverse.  This works for me.  There is more than I can know or imagine.  That's alright.  But this myth talk is just double-speak to me.

I also want to quote some things from the German philosophers around that time, their looking for genius (Fuehrer) and mythology.  When I have time, but soon.  These will be from a book by Karla Poewe, "New Religions and the Nazis".  Some of this, seems to me to connect in cogent ways.

In the meantime, glancing at my favorite place to get irritated at, I see this outgrowth of the myth thinking.  This is the Christmas message--believe it or not.  What is it we are supposed to get out of it?  Are we allowed to say anything definite about it?  Did something actually happen?  What am I supposed to glean?

It is very difficult not to impute into the very unassuming original story all the grand assumptions of our time. We don’t know what happened. We can’t rely on the texts for historical accuracy. Our minds gather all the accretions built up over the centuries and assign the magnificent edifice of these traditions to whatever happened in the first century. We don’t know what happened.

But something happened. The borrowed mythologies and hopes combined together with an event that is hopelessly buried in our own mythologies and hopes. But something happened that changed the way we perceive reality and That-Which-We-Call-God.

What with this myth business?

The Supreme Fiction:  http://www.berfrois.com/2012/12/a-supreme-fiction-ronald-hendel/

Quotes:  opening and closing paragraphs

Wallace Stevens used to write about “the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment.” Some of his best poetry takes steps toward a supreme fiction, conjuring a sense of clarity through its oblique modernist verse. It occurred to me that Genesis is such a supreme fiction, or perhaps it is the supreme fiction in western culture, which begat many others. For thousands of years this book has been the mirror or lamp that reveals what reality consists of – regarding the nature of human existence, the cosmos and God. Or, to put it differently: the meaning of life, the universe and everything...
...Genesis has long exerted its revelatory force as a supreme fiction. Yet, it may seem anachronistic to call it that, since the recognition of its fictive quality is so much a characteristic of modernity. In pre-modern times – and still today among many – it was (and is) a supreme non-fiction. Perhaps the contrast of fiction versus non-fiction draws an illusory line. I prefer to describe Genesis as a work of magical realism. In any case, the life of Genesis persists, since it continues to live in our cultural and religious imagination. Our lives are still entwined in its life, whether we are believers or not...

Lewis and Tolkien on myths:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzBT39gx-TE

Myths are fiction, beautiful lies.  How can you believe a lie.  But Jack:  myths are not lies.  We have been duped into accepting the lie of materialism, the hideous claim that there is no supernatural order to the universe.  They have come up with a false myth.  They have made us believe that this is all there is.  The materialists have put us into a prison of false four walls.  Escaping from this prison is considered an act of treason.  Myths exist outside of the prison and allow us to escape it to see the beauty outside the walls.   Myths show us a fleeting glimpse of truth.  Creativity  is God's imageness in us.  We create stories because God is a story teller.  He tells his story with history.  --  All of history is a divine myth? -- We are all part of his story.  This very conversation is.  --  Christianity is the true myth.  The archetype. The evangelion.  The true joy.  Rejecting it leads to darkness or wrath.  Accepting it leads to joy. 

Jack is cute, very good looking. -- Tolkien, sorry, makes no sense to me.  It does not work for ME.  ARRRRR!!!!  I thought I liked Tolkien.

I am wondering if this is a kind of Roman Catholic talk, which is used to discounting scriptural revelation when push comes to shove.  Myth, myth, myth.  Keep your myth.  Pulling my hair out.  The supreme fiction and true myth, the archetype, to combat materialism.  Does this help someone?  Did this help C.S.Lewis?

Wagner, Brahms, Religion and Art

I just read on Wikipedia that Richard Wagner said this:

"When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain."

This brings to light to me some of the muddled thought of the 19th century.  

I've been struggling with Brahms' German Requiem, which falls into a similar time period as Wagner's life,  because I learned to love this piece and the text is scripture throughout except for a quote from the apocrypha. -- Yet, the Requiem contains no references to Christ, at all, except there are some words of his quoted.  When you wade through the forest of biblical quotes you find no Messiah in the piece. 

This made me sad and angry. -- But an "enlightened" acquaintance of mine said to me: "But Brahms was an artist."   

This made no sense to me in this context, but in speaking with mystics and reading this Wagner quote, I see now, how they see the world.  Because they have lost their faith, they can now work and play with the "symbols" to their heart's content and be the "profound" ones. At the heart of it all is a denial of a historical Christ, historical scriptures, of sin and redemption, death and resurrection.  In their place steps the imagination which becomes now the essence of spirituality, and myth which now becomes the essence of reality.   All the while it is religion which has become "aritificial." --Nifty. 

It comes to me now that "sterile" and "artificial" are words that can be wielded just in the same way as "shallow", "profane" and "imbecilic", against which I have railed previously.  It's a way to shout down your opponent, when you have no decent argument . They can be used in various ways, but they are also used in this fallacious and arrogant way.

Read and sang through a hymnal

Just now I read and sang through a hymnal from a different denomination.  It has a great big fiery picture in the front with the thinnest sliver of a cross off to the side. I'd say the cross is about one half millimeter wide.  You have to look for it to see it.

The songs are upbeat and cheery and from various traditions and styles.  I like them.  I can pick them up in a jiffy, singing and playing at the same time.  There are beautiful words, many of which I can agree with or live with about creation, mystery, solidarity, love and peace.

But I cannot find a thing about forgiveness of sins, or even sins, or Jesus dying on the cross for you.  It has been x-ed out.  Not there.  There are some words hinting at it under the title "Assurance" and "Communion".   There is a psalm of David that has "my mother's womb was blessed with me" instead of "in sin my mother conceived me."  Or as in the original Hebrew, as I read in a Pro-Life Bible the other day:  "in sin my mother went into heat for me."   Oh boy, have we sanitized it.  The Hebrews had no problem with sex and procreation and God's command, but yet, we are all born and conceived sinful.  There isn't one who isn't like that.  Sinful human being from conception.  However... this denomination's people only need some "assurance" of "love".  Yes, I want that, too.  But what is it really saying that we don't know as wishful thinking.  What is the pledge and promise?  And what is it we have done?  It has pretty much all been shoved under the carpet.

The word "Assurance" makes me stop.  Already, though a nice idea, we have weakened everything by not going with the strong word "Absolution". It is a Calvinist problem.  We absolve, not assure.

I have to go and tomorrow I need to return the hymnal.

Emergent Mysticism

I spend a good deal of time this morning, while doing housework, watching this lengthy but worthwhile video on my new favorite device, the I-Pad re: Emergent church. This phenomenon is not entirely new anymore, but the proponents of a universal mysticism are out and about on the net and I keep bumping into them everywhere. Either that, or I am drawn to this discussion / arguing like the moth to the flame. It's not that hard to spot the mystics, though they do cloak themselves in double-speak. After talking with them for a while, you are not allowed to quote the Bible or any established teacher of the church, nor is the cross the place for the forgiveness of your sins. It turns out that they are the "real" Christians because the are the modern, or post-modern, and especially loving kind of people, whereas everyone else is "medieval" or some other thing. I have spent many, many hours speaking with them but they want to silence anything that is "declarative." If you "declare" anything you are arrogant. So it goes. Some people say "Why speak with them?" -- Well, why not? Who is supposed to speak with them? When is something a complete waste of time? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UfLjAh-mWso#%21

Augustana Graeca / Mystics.

Once in a while I need this link below on the Augustana Graeca -- on-line and in person.

  http://www.angelfire.com/ny4/djw/lutherantheology.stuckwisch.html

 It is very interesting to read what happened between the Lutherans and their overture to the Orthodox in writing the Augustana Graeca.  (This can be googled further).  But this above link is an important entry by our friend Rev. Stuckwisch, which I refer to occasionally. For example, my husband and I have a dear Lutheran friend who was an Orthodox Priest before his wife left him.  (In Orthodoxy you cannot be a priest and remarried.)  He was so very surprised to hear of the Augustana Graeca for the first time so late in his life and career as an Orthodox and a Lutheran Christian.

Today, this is topical for me because someone countered me on a blog by saying that Luther tried to engage the Orthodox but that they would not have anything to do with an upstart.  However, the fact is that it was Melanchton who wrote this and that indeed some extensive discussions had occurred, at the time, which were, indeed, dropped by the Orthodox.

I am noticing that some Mystical/Buddhist/Universalist/ -- Word-deniers really, love to throw in Luther, Melanchton and Augustin to boot, in an unhistoric, untrue way.  They get away with this, because nowadays nobody knows anything about this stuff.  And when you correct them, they don't really care.  Facts don't actually matter when you are "experiencing" the divine.  They also don't like "lengthy" quotes, so really everyone is left in the dark, except for their own exceptional, deep, spiritual light, which, while it is only one way among many, somehow defining and restricting, anyhow.

It came to me this morning that when someone calls "The imitation of Christ" a mystical work and Christian, one should be very careful that we are actually dealing with Christ and not an "imitation" of him, i.e. the image we are creating for ourselves, that suits us, makes us feel something, etc.  Christ is a revelation of God.  "Hear HIM" said the voice of God.  If we are not dealing with his word we are dealing with an "imitation".