S prazdnikom! Zavtra budet mezhdunarodnii zhenskii den'!
(Happy Holidays! Tomorrow is International Women's Day! Big holiday here in Russia. But very expensive if you happen to be male.)
I have a very good friend in the States who is a passionately committed Christian, church historian and theologian (started out Catholic, then was in a Russian Orthdox seminary, is now considering becoming a priest in the Church of the East, the so-called Nestorians). He's also a socialist. Part of his whole quest in moving through various demoninations has been trying to find a church that hasn't, in his view, been so thoroughly coopted by assimilation into secular power structures that it became nothing but a ruling-class ideology and betrayal of the Gospel.
Among contemporary Christian theologians who to a greater or lesser extent deny the existence of damnation should be mentioned the Roman Catholic Hans Balthazar, who famously argued that it is quite possible that Hell may be completely empty.
I'm no theologian and wouldn't want to be one, nor a Christian for that matter, but I've always been impressed by the lefty Christian stuff. I also have a soft spot for antpas ministries at endtimesnetwork.com. Those guys are a bit whacky, but they're certainly not hypocrites. They had a great piece excoriating wealthy Christians as being nothing other than bald-faced liars and whores (rich man, camel, eye of needle, etc.).
Chris Doss The Russia Journal
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 08:51:18 -0600 From: Jeffrey Fisher <jfisher at igc.org> Subject: Re: Nietzsche and the Nazis
On Thursday, March 7, 2002, at 08:14 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
> Wow. I got called a "dweeb." First time that's happened since I got off
> the
> junior high schoolyard. Maybe if I confuse Avicenna and Averroes, I will
> become a doofus.
easy, chris . . . if you look again you might notice that i was actually calling myself a dweeb for bothering to suggest the correction. it was an apparently unsuccessful attempt at self-deprecatory humor in an effort to distract people from the fact that whether or not origen is the best example is probably only of importance to me, the dweeb.
>
> I don't recollect anything said about medieval theology.
well, origen is not technically medieval, but close enough. see
paragraph above.
>
> Anyway, I agree with the point that religion-inspired "horrors" can't be
> logically derived from belief in personal immortality.
indeed. a divinity professor i knew in grad school, and for whom i taught, had a few favorite lines that he would trot out once for pretty much every class, as far as i could tell. one of these was, "you can prove anything you want from the bible; two thousand years of church history have proven that." in case you're wondering, he was an anglican priest.
i wonder if one might say something analogous about nietzsche, given some of what we've just been reading, but being less acquainted with nietzsche than i am with (ancient and) medieval theology, and less than i should be, i'll defer.
j
>
> I tend to think in any case that many secular leftists -- myself
> occasionally included -- have a kneejerk negative reaction to religion
> and
> nonrational ideas in general that borders on the silly. The proper
> attitude
> to such things is not "pernicious irrationalism" but "how the hell do I
> know
> if it's true or not?" in my very humble opinion.
>
> Chris Doss
> The Russia Journal