Talking Ass wrote:I am wondering if you think that what you are expressing [which is what you choose to live] is at all similar to what is expressed in the quote below?
- "Can we reach an eschatological understanding of the resurrected Christ by inverting or reversing the ancient church's apprehension of the movement of resurrection and ascension? All too significantly the ancient church identified the movement of resurrection with the movement of ascension, thereby reaching its faith in Christ as the ascended and exalted Lord, the Christ of glory who is the celestial and monarchic Cosmocrator. From a consistently eschatological point of view, the Christ of glory can be seen to be a consequence of ancient Christianity's transforming the forward and downward movement of the Kingdom into the upward and backward movement of the ascension. But what if a radical faith were to transform the backward and upward movement of the ascension into the downward and forward movement of the Word's becoming flesh? Then faith could affirm that the resurrected Christ is not the Christ of glory---not the exalted and celestial Christ, not the monarchical Cosmocrator, not 'the man of heaven' [Paul], and not the primordial Logos or Word. Quite the contrary: the resurrected Christ remains and is yet more deeply the Christ of passion, the lowly and suffering Christ, the servant and the slave, 'the man of dust', the eschatological or final word."
---Thomas J.J. Altizer, The Descent Into Hell
By Jesus, that is horrible writing.
Myself, I find this pretty cool and interesting stuff. I recognize that in modern theology it is not in fact really new, but it does open up a way to give credence to that rather compelling idea: The only way out is through. In my own case, I have come to recognize that this idea has been [was] installed in me at a certain very critical point.
When Kierkegaard was very young, his father showed him pictures of various great men of historical times - Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, etc, all of them dressed in their finest pomp - and included in the collection was a picture of a near-naked Jesus suffering on the cross. His father pointed to the picture of Jesus and said, "He is the greatest of them of all."
This had a big impact on Kierkegaard, causing him to reflect deeply on how it is that a lowly man with no worldly status, persecuted and put to death by the society around him, could be the greatest man of all. Undergoing a tremendous inversion of that kind at such a young age changed his outlook on life completely and sowed the seeds for his adult faith in the Infinite.
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