Constantin Brunner

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
Barrett Pashak
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Constantin Brunner

Post by Barrett Pashak »

I would like to bring to the attention of this forum the work of Constantin Brunner. Theorist, critic, and philosopher, Brunner (1862-1937) was a German Jew who wrote extensively on a vast number of subjects. His book Our Christ portrays Christ as the supreme examplar of the principle of genius.

Links:

http://www.constantinbrunner.com: The official site of the International Constantin Brunner Institute
http://constantinbrunner.info: My site dedicated to Brunner
MKFaizi

Post by MKFaizi »

What if I think Jesus Christ stinks? What if anyone thinks Jesus Christ stinks?

Does Jesus care if anyone thinks he stinks?

I am sick and tired of having Jesus shoved down my throat. I reckon Jesus could even be tired of being shoved down throats.

Kind of like Van Gogh. Give the motherfucker a break, for God's sake.

I shudder to think of the millions of dollars made off Jesus and Vincent.

The millions in greeting cards and coffee mugs alone must be astounding.

Fuck Jesus.

Faizi
Kevin Solway
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Re: Constantin Brunner

Post by Kevin Solway »

"How are we to understand Christ, how can we envisage him, this man of Truth, stolen by the men of superstition?" Constantin Brunner

I think it looks interesting. I'll have a browse of your site.
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

I find him a bit dull. He's a bit too earnest and obvious. Loves the sound of his own voice. Lacks irony.

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Barrett Pashak
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

MKFaizi wrote:What if I think Jesus Christ stinks? What if anyone thinks Jesus Christ stinks?

Does Jesus care if anyone thinks he stinks?

I am sick and tired of having Jesus shoved down my throat. I reckon Jesus could even be tired of being shoved down throats.

Kind of like Van Gogh. Give the motherfucker a break, for God's sake.

I shudder to think of the millions of dollars made off Jesus and Vincent.

The millions in greeting cards and coffee mugs alone must be astounding.

Fuck Jesus.

Faizi
I hear ya. It's funny. I went to the annual conference of the Brunner Institute at The Hague a year ago where I met a woman (now deceased) who was the last person still living to have met Brunner. She told me how when she was interned by the Japanese in the East Indies they allowed her to keep one book, and she chose Brunner's Die Lehre, teaching it to her fellow internees through the war. She also told me how she still went to senior citizens centers and taught art appreciation, concentrating particularly on Van Gogh. I expressed some dismissiveness about Van Gogh, chiefly because of his current celebrity status. She explained how Van Gogh was important because of his attention to common people. The lesson here is that there are many ways of distorting genius, and one of the best is to give it the "celebrity treatment". Surely it is important for those who are truely philosophical to cut away the veneer that often covers genius, and expose it in its full, savage glory.
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

DavidQuinn000 wrote:I find him a bit dull. He's a bit too earnest and obvious. Loves the sound of his own voice. Lacks irony.

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It seems obvious after having read Brunner to class Christ as the great genius of prophetic Judaism, but it never occurred to me before hand, and I have not found any other work that so defines him.

It is Brunner's doctrine of the spiritual elite and the multitude that sets him apart from all other theorists. Brunner posits as the fundamental operating principle of the human sciences that there exist two species of humans: those who are "spiritual" and those who are superstitious. From this premise, Brunner investigates a wide variety of social phenemena, and with it resolves a number of hitherto intractable problems, including the question of the nature of Christ.
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Christ, as in Jesus the person? Or Christ, as in Ultimate Reality?

What was his conclusion about the nature of Christ?

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Barrett Pashak
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

DavidQuinn000 wrote:Christ, as in Jesus the person? Or Christ, as in Ultimate Reality?

What was his conclusion about the nature of Christ?

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The former, Christ as in Jesus the person. Brunner, like Spinoza, uses Christ rather than Jesus.

Brunner's conclusion is that Christ is the greatest exemplar of the mystical/prophetic stream of Judaism. I cannot recommend his book Our Christ highly enough. The original German title translates literally as Our Christ: The Essence of Genius. I have posted on Amazon the foreword to the English translation (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 8&v=glance)
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Post by Blair »

DavidQuinn000 wrote:I find him a bit dull. He's a bit too earnest and obvious. Loves the sound of his own voice. Lacks irony. -
Barrett Pashak seems to be cut from the same cloth.

Earnest and obvious dupes are everywhere, sadly.
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Post by LooF »

he stopped them

belief is to be despised of


he purposefully did it

how pitiful


and how sad i become of it!
Barrett Pashak
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

prince wrote:
DavidQuinn000 wrote:I find him a bit dull. He's a bit too earnest and obvious. Loves the sound of his own voice. Lacks irony. -
Barrett Pashak seems to be cut from the same cloth.

Earnest and obvious dupes are everywhere, sadly.
Yeah, Brunner and I hold to a dumb-ass philosophy that basically boils down to this:
prince wrote:I think the "herd" mentality sees it as taboo to question the essence of basic behaviours and cultural formations. It stems from pride in racial heritage, the hubris of inherited cultures as being somehow the best way, and also a sense of humility about it all, the idea that "my" ancestors did it this way, so it is the best/only way. there is no capacity to imagine drastic alternatives, the mind would reject the idea outright as a spit in the face of my "blood" and background etc, all these kind of things which humans are unfortunately so prone to. Just look at how people view their friends as "amazing people" and so on, there is no objectivity involved, it's just an emotional attachment to what is in their sphere of existence. (viewtopic.php?p=8713&highlight=#8713)
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Barrett wrote:
Brunner's conclusion is that Christ is the greatest exemplar of the mystical/prophetic stream of Judaism. I cannot recommend his book Our Christ highly enough. The original German title translates literally as Our Christ: The Essence of Genius. I have posted on Amazon the foreword to the English translation
Can you post a passage or two from this book which goes to the heart of what he thinks about Jesus?

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Barrett Pashak
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

DavidQuinn000 wrote:Can you post a passage or two from this book which goes to the heart of what he thinks about Jesus?
Brunner's work is an interconnected whole which makes it difficult to isolate "typical" or "definitive" elements. All the same, this should give an idea of the radical re-envisioning of Christ that Brunner presents:
Christ knew no God and thus no dogma. Whoever goes through the Gospels will not find in these superstitious testimonies a single place in which Christ supports a dogmatic interest of any kind whatsoever. This would have been utterly impossible for Christ! One can say that he does not understand it, and that Christ's appearance really had no sense at all then and that no one knew which sense to follow--but is Christ dismissed with such words? And who wants to understand Christ, then? It is as true as Christ that it would have been impossible for him even to teach a single dogma or anything otherwise fixed; for he was Spirit and spoke only to the Spirit. He was the perfect mystical-spiritual prophet and must not be made into the reformer of the Jewish religion. A reformer can be a man as great as Luther, but even Luther is still small, bound by the Jewish religion and by his own time--has Protestantism not already almost given up everything Lutheran again? But every word of Christ's, of the eternal man of the Spirit, still exists; for no word is religious, he teaches no dogma…. Christ teaches nothing dogmatic; show us but a single dogmatic element in him. He has no interest either in the old dogma or in a new one; he has nothing but complete unconcern for dogma and the most "genial" lack of consideration for all religious ideas and terminology. Indeed, he never actually speaks of God, but only of himself, of his relationship with the Father. This relationship with the Father constitutes the entire content of his preaching; the modification of man through this relationship is, for example, the whole content of the Sermon on the Mount. He speaks of God only in so far as he attributes everything predicated of God to himself; he calls himself the Son of God, equal to God; he calls himself the Holy Spirit and forgives sins and, as we have just been reminded, demands belief in his word as God. He puts himself in the place of God and speaks otherwise only in cases in which he must, as it were, constrain his heart and speak according to the frame of mind of his hearers. (Brunner, Our Christ, p. 217-8)
Brunner is here emphasizing that Christ in no wise believed in the anthropomorphic God of superstition, that indeed Christ avoided using the word "God", preferring the word "Father". According to Brunner, Christ's term "Father" designates the wholly abstract principle of absolute unity. It corresponds to Moses' Jahve, which is an indefinite form of the verb "to be"; and to Spinoza's God, natura naturans. The overall impact of Brunner's Christology is to show that Christ was not at all subject to the superstitions of his times, but is rather one of the very few individuals completely free of all superstition. Much of the rest of Brunner's work is devoted to showing how the superstitious mob continually struggles to make the pure insight of the genius fit its own distorted understanding.
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Brunner

Post by Kevin Solway »

The above passage by Brunner is not bad, but the bit where he says "He was the perfect mystical-spiritual prophet" is problematic to say the least, and reeks a little of the dogma he wants to overturn.

How can we, or Brunner, know that Jesus was in fact "perfect"? Firstly, we would need to have much accurate information about Jesus's life and teachings, and it would need to cover all aspects of his life. And secondly, we would need to be near perfect ourselves to be able to make a valid judgement of the data.

I think it is likely that Brunner is claiming Jesus is perfect because that is what Christians already believe, and so he doesn't upset them too much. In other words, he seems to be using a kind of flattery to win converts.

It might be justified to suggest that Jesus may have had a perfect understanding of God/Reality/the Infinite, but that's not nearly the same as being "the perfect mystical-spiritual prophet".
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Re: Brunner

Post by Barrett Pashak »

ksolway wrote:The above passage by Brunner is not bad, but the bit where he says "He was the perfect mystical-spiritual prophet" is problematic to say the least, and reeks a little of the dogma he wants to overturn.

How can we, or Brunner, know that Jesus was in fact "perfect"? Firstly, we would need to have much accurate information about Jesus's life and teachings, and it would need to cover all aspects of his life. And secondly, we would need to be near perfect ourselves to be able to make a valid judgement of the data.

I think it is likely that Brunner is claiming Jesus is perfect because that is what Christians already believe, and so he doesn't upset them too much. In other words, he seems to be using a kind of flattery to win converts.

It might be justified to suggest that Jesus may have had a perfect understanding of God/Reality/the Infinite, but that's not nearly the same as being "the perfect mystical-spiritual prophet".

Brunner uses the word perfect in the same sense as Spinoza: "By reality and perfection I understand the same thing." (Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. 2, Def. VI)

Thus the words of Christ are for both Brunner and Spinoza the most complete expression of reality:
We may be able quite to comprehend that God can communicate immediately with man, for without the intervention of bodily means He communicates to our minds His essence; still, a man who can by pure intuition comprehend ideas which are neither contained in nor deducible from the foundations of our natural knowledge, must necessarily possess a mind far superior to those of his fellow men, nor do I believe that any have been so endowed save Christ. To Him the ordinances of God leading men to salvation were revealed directly without words or visions, so that God manifested Himself to the Apostles through the mind of Christ as He formerly did to Moses through the supernatural voice. In this sense the voice of Christ, like the voice which Moses heard, may be called the voice of God, and it may be said that the wisdom of God (,i.e. wisdom more than human) took upon itself in Christ human nature, and that Christ was the way of salvation. I must at this juncture declare that those doctrines which certain churches put forward concerning Christ, I neither affirm nor deny, for I freely confess that I do not understand them. What I have just stated I gather from Scripture, where I never read that God appeared to Christ, or spoke to Christ, but that God was revealed to the Apostles through Christ; that Christ was the Way of Life, and that the old law was given through an angel, and not immediately by God; whence it follows that if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend (i.e. by means of their two bodies) Christ communed with God mind to mind. (Spinoza, TTP, Pt 1, Chap. 1)
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Post by David Quinn »

Barret quoted Brunner:
Christ knew no God and thus no dogma. Whoever goes through the Gospels will not find in these superstitious testimonies a single place in which Christ supports a dogmatic interest of any kind whatsoever. This would have been utterly impossible for Christ! One can say that he does not understand it, and that Christ's appearance really had no sense at all then and that no one knew which sense to follow--but is Christ dismissed with such words? And who wants to understand Christ, then? It is as true as Christ that it would have been impossible for him even to teach a single dogma or anything otherwise fixed; for he was Spirit and spoke only to the Spirit. He was the perfect mystical-spiritual prophet and must not be made into the reformer of the Jewish religion.
I agree with Kevin that Brunner sounds very much like an ordinary theologian and, in doing do, he tacitly supports the basic Christian mythology he's supposed to be against. He undermines his own discourse with his fawning use of the word "Christ" and his worshipful attitude towards the Gospels.

Moreover, he's so ponderous, it's embarrassing. There is no real liveliness or freedom in his manner which would indicate that he is a genuine man of spirit. He's like a dull orator sending everyone to sleep with his long-winded pontifications from the pulpit.

Christ teaches nothing dogmatic; show us but a single dogmatic element in him.
I don't know about that. After all, Jesus is very dogmatic about the need to give up all of one's attachments and serve truth alone.

For example:
Those who want to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for me will find it. Matthew 16: 24

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. Luke 14: 26

What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight. Luke 16: 15

No one can be a slave to two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot be a slave to both God and Money. Luke 16:13

The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. Luke 20: 34

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5: 48
Taken from The Horror of Jesus

He speaks of God only in so far as he attributes everything predicated of God to himself; he calls himself the Son of God, equal to God; he calls himself the Holy Spirit and forgives sins and, as we have just been reminded, demands belief in his word as God. He puts himself in the place of God and speaks otherwise only in cases in which he must, as it were, constrain his heart and speak according to the frame of mind of his hearers.
All he seems to be doing is exchanging the worship of the Christian God with the exclusive worship of Christ - in other words, he is merely replacing God with Christ. Nothing else seems to have changed. The same submissive Christian mentality remains.

No, I don't like Brunner at all.

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Barrett Pashak
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

DavidQuinn000 wrote:No, I don't like Brunner at all.
Well, as the Man once said, "And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words: going forth out of that house or city shake off the dust from your feet." (Mt 10:14)

Thanks for your time and attention, already more than the entire academic establish has bothered to give.
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Post by David Quinn »

What do you think of Soren Kierkegaard?

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Re: Brunner

Post by Kevin Solway »

Barrett Pashak wrote:Brunner uses the word perfect in the same sense as Spinoza: "By reality and perfection I understand the same thing." (Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. 2, Def. VI)
Using that meaning, everyone is perfect, since everyone is reality.
Thus the words of Christ are for both Brunner and Spinoza the most complete expression of reality
His words can only be "the most complete expression of reality" until someone else comes along with a better expression.

The Buddha, for example, may have had a much better expression of reality, though he existed 500 years earlier.

A certain teaching may perfectly communicate the nature of Reality to some people, but that in itself doesn't make the teacher "the perfect mystical-spiritual prophet".

Brunner says, "Nor do I believe that any have been so endowed save Christ." In that case I think it is possible that he either hasn't studied any of the Hindu or Buddhist sages, or that he doesn't fully understand their teachings.

It seems to me that he is making unnecessary judgement calls concerning things about which he has necessarily limited knowledge.
Thanks for your time and attention, already more than the entire academic establish has bothered to give.
That's the beauty of the Internet: you can learn of people and ideas you would never normally hear of.
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

DavidQuinn000 wrote:What do you think of Soren Kierkegaard?
There is much to admire in the thought of the Kierkegaard. However, there is no leap across the void, for there is no void. Being is the one and all. It is ironic how completely orthodox religion has come to rest on the frail shoulders of the little Danish doubter. Kierkegaard helps dying superstitions cloak themselves in rationalization.
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Re: Brunner

Post by Barrett Pashak »

ksolway wrote:
Barrett Pashak wrote:Brunner uses the word perfect in the same sense as Spinoza: "By reality and perfection I understand the same thing." (Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. 2, Def. VI)
Using that meaning, everyone is perfect, since everyone is reality.
The thought of most people is distorted reality, and what is thought incorrectly is lived incorrectly. I strongly suggest that you spend some time reading Spinoza.
The Buddha, for example, may have had a much better expression of reality, though he existed 500 years earlier.
Brunner provides an extensive comparison of Christ and Buddha, some of which I have put online (http://constantinbrunner.info/sbise/1/200503150938.htm, search for the phrase "legend of Buddha").
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Re: Brunner

Post by Kevin Solway »

Brunner provides an extensive comparison of Christ and Buddha
Ok, Brunner says:

"The legend of Buddha is beautiful and profound, but Christ and his story are true."

:-) Very funny.
around Buddha, by contrast, everything has an Indian rigidity and lifelessness.
I would only say it has an Indianness. The style of Indian philosophy is stillness and eternity, whereas the Western style emphasises action and change. I think both approaches are valid. They are two sides of the same coin.

With regard to the Buddha, it is important to remember that we are reading stories about a man who lived 1500 years ago, and they are stories which weren't written for hundreds of years after Buddha died. So we can't hope for a terribly accurate portrayal of how the Buddha was as a human being in his everyday life. It's not like we have him captured on reality tv in real time, picking his nose and all.

Then Brunner says:

"his disciples are categories, they do not touch one another, they do not share relationships, they stand like tree-trunks, speak like automatons, and none of them reveals the least trace of individual character"

If you read some of these Buddhist teachings, written by some of the Buddha's followers, you will see that they are exploding with truth, life, individuality, character, freedom, etc. Also, not mentioned on that page, is the Zen Master Hakuin, who is one of the very best.

Brunner says, "Buddha comes to us as a system of teachings of textbook conventionality." But this is not really true. Look at Zen Buddhism, or Tibetan Tantra, or even the Dhammapada. These are no mere textbooks.

Even the countless and seemingly dry repetitions of books like "The large sutra on the perfection of wisdom" are actually 100% mystical when you understand them.

One of the reasons for all the categories and repetitions are that for hundreds of years all the teachings only survived orally, and had to be formulated in a way that was easy to remember. The Indians have a naturally logical bent, which led to this form or recording teachings.

Still, many of the Buddha's teachings are in the form of parables and other fanciful stories, just like the teachings of Jesus. For example, "The Gospel of the Buddha", which has been compiled in the fashion of the Christian gospels.

Brunner: "As we have said, then, tradition gives us no real portrayal of the character of Buddha: the least disciple of Christ is characterized more individually than Buddha."

But since we know so little of what the Buddha was really like in his daily life, it isn't possible to make such sweeping judgements as Brunner has done.

The disciples of Jesus are indeed portrayed in a very human fashion compared to the Buddha - so "human" in fact, that, in my view, they do not appear at all wise - unlike Jesus himself, who comes across as both human and wise.

Brunner is looking for a role model he can relate to, and finds he can relate more to Jesus, as he is portrayed, than the Buddha, as he is portrayed.
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Post by David Quinn »

In other words, his love affair with "Christ" is blinding him to the wisdom of other sages. Isn't that what all Christians do?

I still can't distinguish him from an ordinary Christian. Can you, Kevin? Have you come across anything in his work that seperates him from ordinary Christianity? I personally can't read his work, it's so insufferably dull.

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Barrett wrote:
DQ: What do you think of Soren Kierkegaard?

BP: There is much to admire in the thought of the Kierkegaard. However, there is no leap across the void, for there is no void. Being is the one and all.
Being may be one and all, but the void that Kierkegaard talks about is the chasm between the spiritual life and the worldly life. He talks about the suffering and sacrifice which is needed to cross that chasm. The fact that God is everything doesn't make this chasm disappear.

This is why Jesus constantly exhorted everyone to leave everything behind and make every effort to enter that narrow gate (into Heaven):
Those who want to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for me will find it. Matthew 16: 24

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. Luke 14: 26
What do you make of these sorts of statements by Jesus, Barrett? They do go to the heart of his teachings.

It is ironic how completely orthodox religion has come to rest on the frail shoulders of the little Danish doubter. Kierkegaard helps dying superstitions cloak themselves in rationalization.
I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I can see, Christianity ignores Kierkegaard almost completely. Most Christians I meet have never heard of him, and most theologians don't really know what to do with him.

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Re: Brunner

Post by Barrett Pashak »

ksolway wrote: Brunner is looking for a role model he can relate to, and finds he can relate more to Jesus, as he is portrayed, than the Buddha, as he is portrayed.
There's a lot going on here. Remember that we are dealing here with just some of Brunner's references to Buddha, those that are part of an attack on the claim that Christ never really lived, that he is a myth. This is an appendix to the main work, in which Buddha is discussed in a wider context. Don't forget to also look further down the appendix to footnote 5, found with the phrase "greater than Buddha".

Additionally, one of Brunner's most devoted disciples, Walter Bernard, wrote an article called "Zen Buddhism and the Western Mind" (Views, Spring 1963, 34-39) in which he argues that the impulses which drive Westerners to Buddhism can be better satisfied through the insights of Spinoza and Brunner.
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Post by Barrett Pashak »

DavidQuinn000 wrote: In other words, his love affair with "Christ" is blinding him to the wisdom of other sages. Isn't that what all Christians do?
He establishes a hierarchy, and he does indeed count Buddha among the great geniuses.
Being may be one and all, but the void that Kierkegaard talks about is the chasm between the spiritual life and the worldly life. He talks about the suffering and sacrifice which is needed to cross that chasm. The fact that God is everything doesn't make this chasm disappear.

This is why Jesus constantly exhorted everyone to leave everything behind and make every effort to enter that narrow gate (into Heaven):
Those who want to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for me will find it. Matthew 16: 24

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. Luke 14: 26
What do you make of these sorts of statements by Jesus, Barrett? They do go to the heart of his teachings.
I love these sayings. They do indeed go to the heart of his teachings. They are about making a commitment to adhere to spiritual life, which means accepting that the things of practical life (money, family) are relative. There is no void here. There is only Truth, and Truth perverted; the call is to choose. It's much like Plato's parable of the cave. The difference is that where Plato likens the Truth to the sun, Christ says "I am the Truth". This is the fiery, absolutizing mysticism that Brunner recognizes as the summit of genius.

As far as I can see, Christianity ignores Kierkegaard almost completely. Most Christians I meet have never heard of him, and most theologians don't really know what to do with him.
I have been fortunate in having close contact with some very young, very bright and very committed Christians. All of them root their faith in Kierkegaard. Their elders might not realize to what extent the future of their institutions rests on Kierkgaard's confession of doubt.
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