🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger to bring June to a close, anticipating the hot summer rabbits of July
In the days of the Arnold and Isaac Seminars on Belief that have animated my Ramona St. condo in recent months — Isaac’s a deeply pious fundamentalist Fijian Christian and I’m an amiable non-believer, with an excellent early life in mainstream, socially progressive American Lutheran and Episcopal churches — every so often we hit a note that resonates deeply for both of us. In my 6/24 posting “Jesus pyjamas, and a sweatshirt”, we discovered that we both found the parable of the lost sheep (told in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke) particularly moving.
A bit before this, I astounded Isaac by being able to (still) reel off great chunks of the Nicene Creed from memory, but broke up at one point in an excess of emotion over two words. And discovered that Isaac thought those two words were in fact the point of the creed, a distillation of transcendent faith in unseen marvels. Underlined in the extract below (there are variations in the text, so this might not be exactly as you remember it; and remember that this is a translation into English):
… who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man;
he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;
from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead;
… we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
I am firmly on the side of glory; glory comes with sounding trumpets, angels of transcendent beauty and power, and supernatural bright light shining all around. That’s imagination, and poetry. But, but, …
The Nicene Creed. From NOAD:
Nicene Creed: a formal statement of Christian belief that is widely used in Christian liturgies, based on that adopted at the first Council of Nicaea in 325.
Nicaea: an ancient city in Asia Minor, on the site of modern Iznik in Turkey. Two ecumenical councils of the early Christian Church were held here in 325 and 787.
Difficult beliefs. We see in the Creeds of Christianity statements of beliefs that Christians are to adhere to, rather than practices, traditions, goals, ideals, or conceptualizations; indeed, we see mostly an inventory of what I think of as difficult beliefs, especially those that an outsider might legitimately view as utterly beyond ordinary experience — as supernatural, magical, or miraculous. Notably, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and (for Jesus and those who believe in Jesus) the ascension into heaven and eternal life.
Since I consciously — indeed, enthusiastically — chose a life immersed in otherness of all kinds, especially through my teaching and research, I have been repeatedly called upon to explain Christianity to people who know almost nothing about it but find themselves dipped into contexts where it’s pretty much in the air and the water, so they can use my help. I have always found this grindingly hard to do well, especially when it comes to the difficult beliefs.
Now, I dabble cross-culturally a lot, so I’m also sometimes asked to give some account of Judaism and of Islam, and sometimes of Hinduism (I did wrote a PhD dissertation about, in some sense of about, Sanskrit, after all). But the task of explaining resurrection is a great deal more daunting than, say, explaining how there came to be Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
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