by Lioba » July 12th, 2008, 9:20 pm
Thank you Tuke to bring us back to the real thing - reason and religion. Luther spoke about theology , not about apes and dinosaurs.
Maybe it can be interesting to discuss the relation between our approach to religion and the way we generally approach life, how the differnt cultures perceive the world and set things in relation to each other.
As we know, the catholic church adopted the hellenistic tradition developing from it scholasticisme. The probably best and clearest representative of it is St. Thomas Aquinas and from his teachings Thomisme evolved and is until today the official teaching of the Catholic Church.[Their was a concurrent Johannes Scotus, who was a bit more on the mystcal side and from him the School of Scotisme developed.They had a strong influence on the order of St. Franziskus] Where the Thomists strictly say that is always possible to bring together knowledge and creed through reason, the Scotists say, that some aspects of the world or Gods acting might not be explained by reason and the believer only can solve the problem by accepting the contradiction and still by an act of your will long to approach God because Love leads him so. This is called Voluntarisme, a word that is sometimes misunderstood nowadays.
Ben, I hope Igot it right- if not, please correct me.
Luther believed that scholasticisme had generally a too big influence on theology, that the whole apparatus had become bigger than the thing itself
and that theologians should first and before all take their answers directly from the scriptures-but then as I said before he would come into a dilemma , because he must have methods for exegesis and he had to relay on the well approved methods of sober and logical reasoning.
He would not refuse logic itself. The point he made concerning child-baptisme was1. that the child doesn´t need to grasp faith by reasoning- it receives the word and the sacrament -that´s crucial 2. that groups arose who tried to interprete scripture by reasoning on a rather low level the "it-stands-to-reason-stuff" that just falls short of any real grasping of the things.This reason stands again creed, it reduces faith to common sense and as it by its reduced means has no approach to the depths of christian truth.
But I can say that in some way Luther is seen especially by those who know him very well as a person who is on the one side very mediavel , -Germany at that time was rather behind the general development-clearly not on the height of the mediterranian world who was already opening to renaissance, but on the other side a person pre-formulating astonishingly modern ideas "Freiheit eines Christenmenschen" was a shock to the mediavel world.
In some way Protestantisme jumped from Middle Ages forward leaving out enaissance a great deal.
This is not perfect, I just tried my best.
Last edited by
Lioba on July 12th, 2008, 9:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Iustitia est ad alterum.