On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:
> This is nuts, yes, but in the Year of Our Lord 2000, aside from the
> fact that we're calling it the Year of Our Lord, there are
> institutions that teach and people who believe that God was made Man,
> was crucified, died, and was buried, and rose again on the Third Day
> to redeem us of the sin of our primal ancestors, whose stain we are
> all born with, except the Virgin Mother of our Lord Himself. Don't let
> the extraordinarily bizarre eclipse the routinely bizarre. Doug
Bizarre as it may be, Doug, there are some of us who hold in the year 2000 CE that the answer to the question, Why is there anything instead of nothing? -- an answer of course we don't know but call God -- is involved with our lives through the announcement of the presence of the reign of God by Jesus, who was "was crucified, died, and was buried, and rose again on the third day " (as you accurately recall the creed -- you could probably still do it in Latin) -- the "first-born from the dead." The resurrection of the body (the central Christian assertion -- foolishness to the rational and a stumbling-block to the religious) means that we can take the meaning of our lives not just only the structures of the present world but from the life of the world to come. As Christians said from early on, God became human so that humanity might become God -- building, so to speak, the new society in the shell of the old. It's probably as bizarre to trust that some day I will be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and be a critical critic after dinner." (And even if some make it to that pure land, what of all those who've been lost in the meantime? The basic Christian self-definition is found in the oldest extant Christian document: those who have hope.)
Dominus tecum, C. G. Estabrook