Back!

Sorry for the delay. And thank you Chris for getting back on the bloggin road again. I owe you a brew of your own choosing.

The Mockingbird has a good post up today on the "spiritual, but not religious" viewpoint, which he views as a misnomer: truly one who holds that viewpoint is religious, but not truly spiritual.

Roughly 2000 years ago, the Apostle Paul ran into a group of people who were similarly "spiritual," and had this to say to them: "Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god." What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you."

He ends with a the much-needed understanding that spiritual life is necessarily experience and shared within a cultural context, but rebuts the postmodern canard that context is all. Despite being influenced by and influencing culture-at-large, the tenets of faith of must point to an objectively grounded reality that supersedes the culture--otherwise it truly has no meaning to impact it. Thus:

I mean, all of us are, in one sense or another, pupils of Socrates. John Stewart Mill said humanity cannot be reminded often enough that there was once a man named Socrates, and that's right. But there are no temples built to Socrates. Nobody ever wrote the "B Minor Mass" in honor of Socrates, because he calls upon people to learn and therefore to be honest with themselves, but he does not call upon them to take up their cross and follow. And both he and Jesus died for what they believed. But Jesus died in the conscious commitment to the salvation of the world. And so wherever the message is preached and brought in whatever language it comes from, the language it comes to and the culture into which it penetrates must, at some stage of its maturation, learn to answer yet again the question: "Who do you say that I am?" Because the "you say" in that question is the culture in which we live. He's not asking, "Who does the fourth century say that I am?" when it was writing in Greek. That's important, because without that we wouldn't be where we are. But, at some point, you have to be who and what you are in the only culture in which you're ever going to live, the only century in which you're going to live and die, and, in that century, you have to answer with whatever linguistic and philosophical equipment you have, you have to answer the question: "Who do you say that I am?"

PS. I always approve of bloggers with bird-themed names!