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Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 9th, 2010, 7:53 pm
by postodave
Hi Nerd

Just wondering if you ever read Herman Dooyeweerds Roots of Western Culture which tackles this theme. A summary of some of his ideas can be found here Also interesting is Rodney Starkey's For the Glory of God. Lewis assumes that his negative attitude towards dissection is Christian but the historical evidence which Starkey brings shows that it was because of the influence of Christianity that this essentially pagan taboo was overcome and modern medicine was able to advance.

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 10th, 2010, 2:41 am
by rusmeister

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 10th, 2010, 3:06 pm
by cyranorox
Pagan influences and ideas? Not really. Christianity was intended and empowered to adopt and transform the world, not to reinvent the wheel. Christ did not propose a new receipe for bread when it became His body; we did not find out new times to have holidays or forget the shape of the year. We weren't supposed to. The worst of the Pagan ideas imho is penal substitutionary atonement, from German Pagan ideas of crime, rank and jurisprudence.

Moreover, with the exception of the example above, the adoptions and transformations were conscious, reasoned, and complete, ie, the Church fully transformed the being and identity of the thing adopted, as the bread is fully transformed. Christmas really 'is' a Christian holiday, with a pagan ancestry or substrate.

Lewis understood this. Plato could be adopted because Plato was part of the prepartio evangelici, as the Latins have it - the bread of human thought and wisdom.Lewis was by his own admission a converted Pagan, a most honorable thing to be, and among apostate Puritans, a species not endangered today. The Puritans, apostate or not, generally are unable to perceive the 'fit' of the best Pagan ideas to Christianity, as Lewis did. I myself find I am more at ease, more in harmony [though in disagreement] with Pagans than Frankish Puritans.

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 10th, 2010, 4:00 pm
by rusmeister
What she said.

I have to go offline for a while- wanted to give JRose's big and thoughtful post a worthy response - it'll have to wait a couple of weeks... My apologies!

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 10th, 2010, 10:56 pm
by postodave

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 14th, 2010, 8:25 pm
by cyranorox
Yes, I was referring to the trend of thought that includes Anselm and then Calvin. the 'realms of nature and Grace' is really Frankish, though perhaps an OC exanple could be found; cariti, grace, is not a thing, creation or 'item', but a quality: graciousness, loving-kindness. in Frankish thought it seems to be a substance but not a person; or a fluid but not a being; or Divine but not God himself; or a package that has a quantity;or even an object that you may trample, related to a stumbling block? - none of which makes any sense to me, and is probably not the intent but the inadvertency of the writers.

We do keep Advent, though I make no boast of what little fasting i do. We do keep the 12 days though the world does not. I used the image of Christmas as an obvious one, and I'm not sure why you think it trivial; what would be a more substantial one in your opinion?

as for "the old myth that the puritans tried to ban Christmas. " - cite your sources. Beyond a quibble on the meaning of banning, I seem to recall that Christmas celebrations were banned by Cromwell and more than one colonial government. Of course you can't ban the date - you can't ban the 4th of July- it's on the calendar - but if you ban fireworks, flags, bands, parades and picnics, not much is left.

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 24th, 2010, 8:19 pm
by postodave

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 27th, 2010, 2:21 pm
by rusmeister

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 27th, 2010, 7:18 pm
by postodave
Hi Rus
I don't think it works like that. Protestantism does carry forward a lot of medieval ideas. Luther rejects Aquinas but follows Occam. Calvin adapts Anselm. Dooyeweerd adopts the medieval concept of an aevum and so on. Maybe there is something which you feel is at the heart of medieval thinking both Eastern and Western which is missed out by modern thought and maybe you are right. But I don't think people reject this whatever it is necessarily out of ignorance or laziness and I don't think Protestantism was some kind of new version of Christianity that came up with ideas that had never been heard of before.

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 28th, 2010, 3:55 am
by rusmeister

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 28th, 2010, 10:46 pm
by postodave

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: June 30th, 2010, 8:30 pm
by cyranorox
P-Dave, re
"Where Anselm talks of God needing to preserve his honour Calvin and modern evangelicals follow Paul in talking of God's justice being satisfied. Calvin talks ...of Christ dying to appease God's wrath... "

From here, these are closely related and similarly different from OC; though we do use these metaphors, we don't build on them in the same ways, nor do we consider them the primary way of thinking about the Incarnation. They are not facts in the same sense that the clauses of the Creed are facts. God has no needs, no need to preserve his 'honor' , and no jeopardies; God cannot be, and cannot need to be, appeased. While we don't quite say these images are completely wrong, as images, we do say that Christ took on our nature to save us, and died to trample down death by death, and to enact in time the sacrifice made before the beginning of the world.

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: July 1st, 2010, 6:38 pm
by postodave

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: July 2nd, 2010, 3:22 pm
by cyranorox

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

PostPosted: July 3rd, 2010, 12:16 pm
by postodave