Weekly Mass Discussion Thread #32

@Kongvann pin please

Acts 3:13-15

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his Servant Jesus, whom you delivered up, and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had determined to release him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and killed the Prince of life, whom God raised from the dead, to which we are witnesses.

Psalms 4:2

You sons of men, how long shall my glory be turned into dishonor? Will you love vanity, and seek after falsehood? Selah.

1 John 2:1-5

My little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin. If anyone sins, we have a Counselor{Greek Parakleton: Counselor, Helper, Intercessor, Advocate, and Comfortor.} with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. And he is the atoning sacrifice{"atoning sacrifice" is from the Greek "hilasmos," an appeasing, propitiating, or the means of appeasement or propitiation-- the sacrifice that turns away God's wrath because of our sin.} for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world. This is how we know that we know him: if we keep his commandments. One who says, "I know him," and doesn't keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth isn't in him. But whoever keeps his word, God's love has most assuredly been perfected in him. This is how we know that we are in him:

Luke 24:32

They said one to another, "Weren't our hearts burning within us, while he spoke to us along the way, and while he opened the Scriptures to us?"

Luke 24:35-48

They related the things that happened along the way, and how he was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread. As they said these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, "Peace be to you." But they were terrified and filled with fear, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. He said to them, "Why are you troubled? Why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is truly me. Touch me and see, for a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones, as you see that I have." When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While they still didn't believe for joy, and wondered, he said to them, "Do you have anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. He took them, and ate in front of them. He said to them, "This is what I told you, while I was still with you, that all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms, concerning me must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds, that they might understand the Scriptures. He said to them, "Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.

Stop this nonsense

Judaism was a moving target in the time of Jesus. It was changing and diversifying, principally because for three centuries Jews had been caught up in a dialogue with Greek culture and thought. It would have been very surprising if the first Christians had not continued and broadened that conversation with the Greeks, as they struggled to interpret what they knew of their Messiah. In their efforts to make sense of the puzzle, they told themselves many more stories than those which crystallized into the Christian canon. At the end of the second century, another bishop who identified himself as ‘Catholic', Irenaeus (d. 202), based in Lyon, far to the west in the Mediterranean, scornfully catalogued a miscellaneous heap of these efforts and labelled them as a single hairesis (‘a choice to claim knowledge'), with adherents whom he called gnostikoi .In reality, as Irenaeus would have well known, there was never a single gnostic movement: just a variety of Christian choices about the adaptation of Greek ways of thought to a Jewish problem, which happened to be different from the choices eventually made by the nascent Catholic Church, whose development in the second century was consciously in reaction to these other possible Christian identities.

In the struggles between Catholic and gnostic Christianity, the opposing themes of silence and noise were the subject of a major tug of war. In favour of silence for Catholics was a twofold consideration: first, silence played a significant part in Jesus's own thinking about himself. Equally important was the fact that it had become a more prominent theme in Graeco-Roman philosophy and culture, without any prompting from Christians. Raoul Mortley, encapsulating the process in the title of his classic study From Word to Silence, has observed how in texts from the Hellenistic period (fourth to first centuries BCE), the word , silence, is noticeably more frequently used than in the previous age of Classical Greek philosophy, and it is increasingly used systematically in reference to conceptions of God and divinity. Thus that one word exemplified Mortley's theme that ‘[t]he progress of Greek thought is from logos to sige'. Greeks and those who thought like them increasingly found wanting the rationalism of logos which had characterized the systematic thought of the great classical Greek Philosopher Aristotle and explorations behind logos proliferated.

In early Greek philosophy a preoccupation with the importance of silence had been a minority pastime, confined to admirers of Pythagoras: it was a corollary of the way that Pythagoreans placed the abstractions of geometry and numbers at the centre of their interpretation of reality. From the third century BCE, Plato's discussion of the ‘One' and of ‘Being' in his Parmenides increasingly seized the imagination of Hellenistic society and took centre stage in both philosophy and discussions of the sacred. God was to be encountered beyond words, indeed by stripping divinity of layers of description or attribution of characteristics. The process has been called ‘negative theology', a term which has frequently been treated as a Christian invention. On the contrary: negative theology was well established in the Hellenistic world before Christians gingerly came to consider whether it might help them in their perplexities. Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenized Jew deeply committed to exploring the meanings of Logos in relation to the God of Israel, had been wary of negative theology and any attempt to escape from the rationality of language, but many Christians, even those who cherished Philo's notion of Logos through its redeployment in John's Gospel, were much less inhibited. None were more enthusiastic in grasping at these possibilities than those with knowledge: the gnostikoi .

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Mmmmm I'd love to pour grape soda down that butt