My problem with the personal relationship with Jesus thing is that it is not mentioned at all in the Bible. If anything, there is more emphasis on a communal relationship with Jesus. Paul calls the church the temple of the Lord where “you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Eph. 2:21). Again, Paul prays that “you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19), which he already said resides in the local body (1:23). This is why God gave us spiritual gifts (Eph. 4:11-12), so that the body of Christ would be built up, made mature, and become unified where the “fullness of Christ” would radiate (Eph. 4:12-13).
Once I felt I had lost my relationship with God. A kind pastor advised me to stay active in the church. I find if I stay active in the church my faith is strong. If I slip away from church, I struggle.
It’s certainly possible. I came to faith and lived three-four years in isolation from other Christians before finally attending a church regularly and being baptized roughly two years after that. And almost getting baptized and confirmed in the wrong order (this was also due to the same cause that isolated me originally). Sometimes I joke that I can’t do anything right, even getting born (again) bass ackwards.
Isn't it? Paul had an experience of the Risen Christ outside the body of Christ. Just off the top of my head...
The deal of it is, Paul himself does not put much emphasis on this experience, other than saying Jesus appeared to him, the least of the Apostles. He never says one has to have a personal relationship with Christ other than through the community of believers.
If you want to get down to it, Paul's experience was in relation to the community of believers. He was charged with destroying a group of them when he experienced the revealation of Christ. He was told to go to Damascus where a disciple would meet him. He learned through the community of believers while in Damascus, and he goes about setting up new communities and corresponding with established communities throughout the rest of his life.
Geoffrey Hill, the poet, Anglican in his later life, was once I gather asked if he wrote poems about religious experience. He replied along the lines that he wrote poems about not having religious experience, which he thought was the more common situation.
"Personal relationship" is such problematic language, of to-me-unknown origin. Really, it seems like another filter in the churchianity sheep-goat sorter.
Many people I know see it as @KarlLB described it up the thread aways:
It's not like you can pop down the pub for a couple of pints with God, meet up for a walk over the mountains or have a two way conversation.
That is model not possible for me, and I refuse to feel guilty because of it. I don't see that reflected in any of the New Testament texts, except in the case of Paul, and his letters don't reflect an expectation that other believers would have such an experience.
I think the idea is that God has personhood, rather than being a force or a system. With personhood, God is able to love, empathize, care, exercise awareness, suffer, incarnate.
A problem with ‘personal relationship’ is that it has some connotations of a romantic relationship which, pace the Song of Songs, is a metaphor that many don’t find comfortable.
The original point, I think, is that it is a relationship between persons, and not e.g. between a person and some kind of force, nor a relationship between a group and a person absent some kind of individual commitment from each individual member of the group.
Isn't it? Paul had an experience of the Risen Christ outside the body of Christ. Just off the top of my head...
The deal of it is, Paul himself does not put much emphasis on this experience, other than saying Jesus appeared to him, the least of the Apostles. He never says one has to have a personal relationship with Christ other than through the community of believers.
If you want to get down to it, Paul's experience was in relation to the community of believers. He was charged with destroying a group of them when he experienced the revealation of Christ. He was told to go to Damascus where a disciple would meet him. He learned through the community of believers while in Damascus, and he goes about setting up new communities and corresponding with established communities throughout the rest of his life.
The letters are not directed at individuals (certainly if you take the titles). They are to churches. Individuals are mentioned but they are not to individuals. That means the letters will have more of general feel.
Sorry to double post but I need to qualify what I wrote. Yes letter are written to Timothy and Titus etc, I did have time to add of the letters. Even those that sing a person’s name have more of a general tone.
"Personal relationship" is such problematic language, of to-me-unknown origin. Really, it seems like another filter in the churchianity sheep-goat sorter.
Many people I know see it as @KarlLB described it up the thread aways:
It's not like you can pop down the pub for a couple of pints with God, meet up for a walk over the mountains or have a two way conversation.
That is model not possible for me, and I refuse to feel guilty because of it. I don't see that reflected in any of the New Testament texts, except in the case of Paul, and his letters don't reflect an expectation that other believers would have such an experience.
I think the idea is that God has personhood, rather than being a force or a system. With personhood, God is able to love, empathize, care, exercise awareness, suffer, incarnate.
This also opens up all of the negative possibilities of personhood, which are equally evident at best. It’s a huge problem.
Sorry to double post but I need to qualify what I wrote. Yes letter are written to Timothy and Titus etc, I did have time to add of the letters. Even those that sing a person’s name have more of a general tone.
My dyslexia is really playing up today. Let me summarise
Most of the letters are to churches and even those that are not have a more general feel to them. That means that they are not concerned much with personal salvation but common subjects
Geoffrey Hill, the poet, Anglican in his later life, was once I gather asked if he wrote poems about religious experience. He replied along the lines that he wrote poems about not having religious experience, which he thought was the more common situation.
This struck me because I have been inspired by Geoffrey Hill's bleak demanding poetry for years and IME he stands in a great English poetic tradition of exploring doubt, the sense of lack and the yearning for faith found in poets like George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins or TS Eliot. The loss of faith or agony of doubt makes for great poetry at times.
When we talk about religious love poetry in an allegorical sense, though, we're also drawing on intense and passionate, ecstatic, joyful, even erotic, descriptions of a personal loving relationship with God that isn't sentimental or cliched but moves between immanent and transcendent through metaphor, as in Donne, (Batter my heart, three-person'd God). This too, is right there in the English religious poetic traditions along with the famous reticence, scepticism, understatement and doubt.
To the OP, I have no idea beyond if I believe, I know I do. In my last great loop of cognitive dissonance I realised that I've never believed. I always knew. Fallaciously.
Geoffrey Hill, the poet, Anglican in his later life, was once I gather asked if he wrote poems about religious experience. He replied along the lines that he wrote poems about not having religious experience, which he thought was the more common situation.
This struck me because I have been inspired by Geoffrey Hill's bleak demanding poetry for years and IME he stands in a great English poetic tradition of exploring doubt, the sense of lack and the yearning for faith found in poets like George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins or TS Eliot. The loss of faith or agony of doubt makes for great poetry at times.
When we talk about religious love poetry in an allegorical sense, though, we're also drawing on intense and passionate, ecstatic, joyful, even erotic, descriptions of a personal loving relationship with God that isn't sentimental or cliched but moves between immanent and transcendent through metaphor, as in Donne, (Batter my heart, three-person'd God). This too, is right there in the English religious poetic traditions along with the famous reticence, scepticism, understatement and doubt.
FWIW, none other than the late, great Christopher Hitchens shared on many occasions how important the poetry of George Herbert and John Donne was to him.
@The_Riv Christopher Hitchens was a conundrum himself and fond of ambiguity, subtlety and nuance. Except when he wasn't, and kept his views uncompromising and plain -- reading here on the Ship I often think of his epistemological razor which states that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence". Atheist friends have been a purifying and bracing influence in my thinking because they point out my own Christian hypocrisies and evasions; I hope I do the same for them when it comes to certain platitudes of New Atheism.
When he died, Hitchens was reading the Catholic author GK Chesterton (not my first choice for deathbed comfort!) and throughout his life Hitchens engaged in polemics about the truths revealed in Christian art, fiction and poetry while deploring the fallacies of religious narrowness and fanaticism. He was enthralled with the tensions between the sacred and the profane in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, loved the insights and existential dilemmas of Pascal, Simone Weil and TS Eliot. Because so many believers and unbelievers move in a philistine airless bubble, it's easy to forget how much common ground there is.
I'm not sure about that, @Martin54. There are plenty of thinkers who are happily godless and feel no need of religious belief, or who are relieved to have stopped going to church and don't give 'the God delusion' another thought. Though that might be easier for those who are scientists in a secular environment rather than those who study or teach art or poetry because the question of why and how mystics, poets and creative writers needed to believe in the transcendent might keep coming up. And then there's 'yearning' as nostalgia from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algea (pain), the homesickness for a lost landscape of childhood, home, or a country we may never have known except in dreams.
I'm not sure about that, @Martin54. There are plenty of thinkers who are happily godless and feel no need of religious belief, or who are relieved to have stopped going to church and don't give 'the God delusion' another thought. Though that might be easier for those who are scientists in a secular environment rather than those who study or teach art or poetry because the question of why and how mystics, poets and creative writers needed to believe in the transcendent might keep coming up. And then there's 'yearning' as nostalgia from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algea (pain), the homesickness for a lost landscape of childhood, home, or a country we may never have known except in dreams.
I've always loved that etymology @MaryLouise. I imagine yearning is a random distribution, and that plenty of materialist scientists yearn. I certainly yearn from loss of Love. So perhaps materialists who've never had religion don't yearn as much? Though I doubt it?
@MaryLouise, thank you for that. Reading, watching, and listening to Christopher Hitches has helped put language to a lot of my thoughts and feelings, as well as open up other pathways for me to explore. Admittedly, for a while I was quite taken with the work of “The New Atheists” Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris & Dennett. I hope I’ve settled down a good bit, now, but their work has been galvanizing, and really reinvigorated my thought life. The deconstruction of one’s faith life can be a difficult, lonely journey, and having voices like theirs in one’s head can help a lot.
@MaryLouise, thank you for that. Reading, watching, and listening to Christopher Hitches has helped put language to a lot of my thoughts and feelings, as well as open up other pathways for me to explore. Admittedly, for a while I was quite taken with the work of “The New Atheists” Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris & Dennett. I hope I’ve settled down a good bit, now, but their work has been galvanizing, and really reinvigorated my thought life. The deconstruction of one’s faith life can be a difficult, lonely journey, and having voices like theirs in one’s head can help a lot.
I run a poetry group. There are convinced atheists in there as well as people of faith and one very evangelical 'born again Christian' who is wonderfully unselfconscious and unfiltered - if very naive.
I'm also interested to see what happens when anything mystical or vatic comes up. There's a medical scientist in the group who can be quite scathingly New Atheist at times and who can get hot under the collar when anything 'spiritual' comes up even in the broadest sense.
Their idea of the transcendent seems to come from hill-walking. Which is fair enough but not the whole story I'm sure.
@MaryLouise, thank you for that. Reading, watching, and listening to Christopher Hitches has helped put language to a lot of my thoughts and feelings, as well as open up other pathways for me to explore. Admittedly, for a while I was quite taken with the work of “The New Atheists” Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris & Dennett. I hope I’ve settled down a good bit, now, but their work has been galvanizing, and really reinvigorated my thought life. The deconstruction of one’s faith life can be a difficult, lonely journey, and having voices like theirs in one’s head can help a lot.
In reconstruction I take it? How so?
No, in deconstruction. Their work brought a sense of re-order to the chaotic aspects of a major pillar in one's life crumbling to the ground. They provided basic confirmations, and offered a structure and sequence for the arguments against apologetics, and for reapproaching a variety of ideas without the lens of religion.
@MaryLouise, thank you for that. Reading, watching, and listening to Christopher Hitches has helped put language to a lot of my thoughts and feelings, as well as open up other pathways for me to explore. Admittedly, for a while I was quite taken with the work of “The New Atheists” Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris & Dennett. I hope I’ve settled down a good bit, now, but their work has been galvanizing, and really reinvigorated my thought life. The deconstruction of one’s faith life can be a difficult, lonely journey, and having voices like theirs in one’s head can help a lot.
In reconstruction I take it? How so?
No, in deconstruction. Their work brought a sense of re-order to the chaotic aspects of a major pillar in one's life crumbling to the ground. They provided basic confirmations, and offered a structure and sequence for the arguments against apologetics, and for reapproaching a variety of ideas without the lens of religion.
Ah, I saw the deconstruction, which is all I have. I saw the mirage of reconstruction in the ambiguity of my understanding. So, like me, you have no reconstruction? Apart from a humanist, Rogerian one?
I think there is a difference between faith and church. People can be involved with things a church does beyond the strictly Christian. Food Banks, helping hands etc. Also many other halves of those who have faith will help in practical terms with the church.
If we are all made in the image of God we will reflect that somehow even if we have no faith.
To answer the OP question, it is as you have seen complicated. It is meant to be a mystery in a sense. We have to trust which hard.
Trust but verify @Hugal. Given up asking, waiting, for verification. The question is complicated according to disposition, it's not a real one for me, syntactic without being semantic, so it's not complicated except in the irreconcilable assumptions in its construction, but it's asked and answered as if it were real.
Re: the personal vs communal relationship thing: I agree that it’s both/and, but I also have a feeling (open to debate) that in a modern, secularized society where:
a. many former functions of religion are now performed by science, medicine, psychology, the state (in terms of welfare and education), secular charities, political movements, and the wellness/fitness/self-help economy
b. people’s connections to their non-nuclear families, neighborhoods and hometowns, childhood acquaintances, local community social organizations, local politics, and, after the pandemic, workplaces and local stores and restaurants have all deteriorated
c. people live in their own online information and social media bubbles
d. authority figures and experts are seen as elitist and corrupt
e. people are increasingly lonely. Both close friendship outside the nuclear family (for those who even live in a nuclear family, who are increasingly more affluent and educated), friendly acquaintances around town, and random small talk with say, a shop clerk, are rarer and rarer.
f. all human endeavor and the choice of where to be at any given time, unless it is with a partner/spouse, children, or parents (maybe), or at work, is seen as elective.
…with all these phenomena, Christianity and the experience of faith is de facto an individualistic exercise even for people in churches whose theology emphasizes being in community and communion with others. Even if Christians are active in in-person prayer groups, local church charitable outreach, or other ministries, the civilization we live in makes it very difficult for them to think and act as anything other than individuals, especially with God.
Recent immigrants with strong community ties to each other might be an exception, but their grandchildren are likely to experience religion in the same, atomized, way as the mainstream population.
Re: Dawkins and Hitchens - I’m no expert on either, but it does seem that both of them, in terms of their generation, their class, and their education, were brought up in an environment where Christian language, Christian stories, Christian or Catholic authors (like Chesterton or Waugh, as conflicted as some of their faith might have been) were part of the tapestry of life and society, and even after rejecting the epistemology of religion they still felt comfortable and comforted engaging with Christian thought and imagery. I am not sure if this is going to apply to new generations of nonreligious thinkers and activists, especially ones from very different class, cultural, and educational backgrounds.
I don't think anyone is saying that faith and church attendance are synonymous.
But it is a communal expression of faith. As we have been mentioning and a chance for those who don’t believe to see communal faith in action. Not that is the reason they do Food Bank etc, it is a consequence.
As to the mystery. Well God in many ways is a mystery. Our faith must have that in it.
I don't think anyone is saying that faith and church attendance are synonymous.
But it is a communal expression of faith. As we have been mentioning and a chance for those who don’t believe to see communal faith in action. Not that is the reason they do Food Bank etc, it is a consequence.
As to the mystery. Well God in many ways is a mystery. Our faith must have that in it.
I have communal faith that people are worth it. Nothing to do with religion.
What mystery? There are infinite real ones of of course. But God isn't one of them. He's a synthetic mystery from irreconcilable arbitrary religious propositions.
@MaryLouise, thank you for that. Reading, watching, and listening to Christopher Hitches has helped put language to a lot of my thoughts and feelings, as well as open up other pathways for me to explore. Admittedly, for a while I was quite taken with the work of “The New Atheists” Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris & Dennett. I hope I’ve settled down a good bit, now, but their work has been galvanizing, and really reinvigorated my thought life. The deconstruction of one’s faith life can be a difficult, lonely journey, and having voices like theirs in one’s head can help a lot.
In reconstruction I take it? How so?
No, in deconstruction. Their work brought a sense of re-order to the chaotic aspects of a major pillar in one's life crumbling to the ground. They provided basic confirmations, and offered a structure and sequence for the arguments against apologetics, and for reapproaching a variety of ideas without the lens of religion.
Ah, I saw the deconstruction, which is all I have. I saw the mirage of reconstruction in the ambiguity of my understanding. So, like me, you have no reconstruction? Apart from a humanist, Rogerian one?
Do you desire reconstruction?
If so, what would it be like, do you think?
@MaryLouise, thank you for that. Reading, watching, and listening to Christopher Hitches has helped put language to a lot of my thoughts and feelings, as well as open up other pathways for me to explore. Admittedly, for a while I was quite taken with the work of “The New Atheists” Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris & Dennett. I hope I’ve settled down a good bit, now, but their work has been galvanizing, and really reinvigorated my thought life. The deconstruction of one’s faith life can be a difficult, lonely journey, and having voices like theirs in one’s head can help a lot.
In reconstruction I take it? How so?
No, in deconstruction. Their work brought a sense of re-order to the chaotic aspects of a major pillar in one's life crumbling to the ground. They provided basic confirmations, and offered a structure and sequence for the arguments against apologetics, and for reapproaching a variety of ideas without the lens of religion.
Ah, I saw the deconstruction, which is all I have. I saw the mirage of reconstruction in the ambiguity of my understanding. So, like me, you have no reconstruction? Apart from a humanist, Rogerian one?
Do you desire reconstruction?
If so, what would it be like, do you think?
I can have no religion based reconstruction, without an instance of the fingerpost. So, too late in life, I want to have Rogerian reconstruction. To be kind. As Jesus was toweringly in his time. In which I'm found severely wanting, including here.
Although being here, knowing you in particular, before I planked myself, I did acknowledge that there are easily kinder (and smarter) people who believe in him religiously as they must.
@Martin54 reconstruction as you describe it, sounds like a characteristic which one exercises rather than something that one experiences (or believes), that is, the excercise of kindness, rather than merely the receiving of it. Although I suspect that genuine natural (or properly-evidenced unnatural) kindness would not be unwelcome. Maybe the matter belief for you is that kindness exists, can exist at all and that you can exercise it, that you do.
So-called "kinder" or "smarter" people have no un/natural advantage over you in relation to belief or religion. We, too, live with our pasts and our present failures -- unkindnesses of all kinds. Even the concept of grace and forgiveness don't wipe them from our memories, no matter what we believe our current relationship to them to be.
I thought these Rogerian characteristics sounded like something most of us would want under any circumstances:
1. A growing openness to experience: they move away from defensiveness and have no need for subception (a perceptual defense that involves unconsciously applying strategies to prevent a troubling stimulus from entering consciousness).
2. An increasingly existential lifestyle: living each moment fully, not distorting the moment to fit personality or self-concept but allowing personality and self-concept to emanate from the experience. This results in excitement, daring, adaptability, tolerance, spontaneity, and lack of rigidity, and suggests a foundation of trust. "To open one's spirit to what is going on now, and discover in that present process whatever structure it appears to have" (Rogers 1961).[25]
3. Increasing organismic trust: they trust their own judgment and ability to choose behavior appropriate for each moment. They do not rely on existing codes and social norms but trust that as they are open to experiences they will be able to trust their own sense of right and wrong.
4. Freedom of choice: not being shackled by the restrictions that influence an incongruent individual, they are able to make a wider range of choices more fluently. They believe they play a role in determining their own behavior and so feel responsible for it.
5. Creativity: it follows that they will feel freer to be creative. They will also be more creative in the way they adapt to their circumstances without feeling a need to conform.
6. Reliability and constructiveness: they can be trusted to act constructively. An individual who is open to all their needs will be able to maintain a balance between them. Even aggressive needs will be matched and balanced by intrinsic goodness in congruent individuals.
7. A rich full life: Rogers describes the life of the fully functioning individual as rich, full and exciting, and suggests that they experience joy and pain, love and heartbreak, fear and courage more intensely.
Re: Dawkins and Hitchens - I’m no expert on either, but it does seem that both of them, in terms of their generation, their class, and their education, were brought up in an environment where Christian language, Christian stories, Christian or Catholic authors (like Chesterton or Waugh, as conflicted as some of their faith might have been) were part of the tapestry of life and society, and even after rejecting the epistemology of religion they still felt comfortable and comforted engaging with Christian thought and imagery. I am not sure if this is going to apply to new generations of nonreligious thinkers and activists, especially ones from very different class, cultural, and educational backgrounds.
Certainly as society becomes less and less Christian, people will know fewer and fewer of the references in older works that look back to the Bible or the early Church. Even my parents, who were born in 41 and 43, had almost no knowledge of Things Biblical. My dad wasn't even aware that the phrase "In the beginning" was in the Bible, let alone the first 3 words. They were "nones" before "nones" were a thing. This will only grow.
Welcome back Martin54! I note your belief, "people are worth it". Says it all ....
But I bet you don't know why you believe this.... rationality (whatever that is) doesn't come in to it. '
Blesssings to all in this debate.
Welcome back Martin54! I note your belief, "people are worth it". Says it all ....
But I bet you don't know why you believe this.... rationality (whatever that is) doesn't come in to it. '
Blesssings to all in this debate.
: ) thank you very much @RockyRoger. I know that I believe it because I'm a eusocial intentional monkey, a product of four billion years of evolving complexity. It suits me, it pleases me, for entirely self-interested reasons from my genes on up, like rat empathy behind courage and kindness. And the rational outcome at the species level will be rational - fair - social justice - fairness.
I think English is poorer than French in having only one word for 'knowing'. There are two in French: 'connaitre' and 'savoir'.
As I was trying to indicate clumsily on another topic, God cannot be known in the 'savoir' sense (nor, I would add, can people) but can be known in the connaitre sense. That is, through a personal relationship.
...
The problem is that this experience of "knowing God in a personal relationship" just doesn't happen for some people. For one thing "personal relationship" means different things to different people. It's not like you can pop down the pub for a couple of pints with God, meet up for a walk over the mountains or have a two way conversation. So what is meant by the phrase? I'm not personally all that sure.
In itself, the concept of "personal relationship" does not require the other party to be a person. Or to have personhood.
People are quite capable of having what they describe and perceive and experience as a "personal relationship" with imaginary friends, AI chatbots, anthropomorphic robots and more. That third-party observers tend to describe these things as *not* being relationships because of the nature of the other party and the (un)reality of any reciprocity doesn't make a lot of difference. Human imagination is capable of filling in a lot of the gaps, although there are wide variations in this ability.
Personally, I wouldn't describe an individual's whatever-it-is with God as being a personal relationship (partly because of the question of moral agency and theodicy). But I don't think it greatly matters if people do understand and experience it that way - it's not as if it's prescribed or forbidden. It's the assumption or insistence that a "personal relationship with God" is or isn't what Christianity is all about that seems more problematic.
Welcome back Martin54! I note your belief, "people are worth it". Says it all ....
But I bet you don't know why you believe this.... rationality (whatever that is) doesn't come in to it. '
Blesssings to all in this debate.
: ) thank you very much @RockyRoger. I know that I believe it because I'm a eusocial intentional monkey, a product of four billion years of evolving complexity. It suits me, it pleases me, for entirely self-interested reasons from my genes on up, like rat empathy behind courage and kindness. And the rational outcome at the species level will be rational - fair - social justice - fairness.
What do you know why I believe this?
And bless you and all here too.
What reconstruction, then, is needed. Don't you already have it?
Comments
Once I felt I had lost my relationship with God. A kind pastor advised me to stay active in the church. I find if I stay active in the church my faith is strong. If I slip away from church, I struggle.
The deal of it is, Paul himself does not put much emphasis on this experience, other than saying Jesus appeared to him, the least of the Apostles. He never says one has to have a personal relationship with Christ other than through the community of believers.
If you want to get down to it, Paul's experience was in relation to the community of believers. He was charged with destroying a group of them when he experienced the revealation of Christ. He was told to go to Damascus where a disciple would meet him. He learned through the community of believers while in Damascus, and he goes about setting up new communities and corresponding with established communities throughout the rest of his life.
It's one of these both/and things.
Many people I know see it as @KarlLB described it up the thread aways:
That is model not possible for me, and I refuse to feel guilty because of it. I don't see that reflected in any of the New Testament texts, except in the case of Paul, and his letters don't reflect an expectation that other believers would have such an experience.
I think the idea is that God has personhood, rather than being a force or a system. With personhood, God is able to love, empathize, care, exercise awareness, suffer, incarnate.
I completely concur with @Kendel that God has 'personhood' rather than 'being a force or system.'
The original point, I think, is that it is a relationship between persons, and not e.g. between a person and some kind of force, nor a relationship between a group and a person absent some kind of individual commitment from each individual member of the group.
The letters are not directed at individuals (certainly if you take the titles). They are to churches. Individuals are mentioned but they are not to individuals. That means the letters will have more of general feel.
This also opens up all of the negative possibilities of personhood, which are equally evident at best. It’s a huge problem.
My dyslexia is really playing up today. Let me summarise
Most of the letters are to churches and even those that are not have a more general feel to them. That means that they are not concerned much with personal salvation but common subjects
This struck me because I have been inspired by Geoffrey Hill's bleak demanding poetry for years and IME he stands in a great English poetic tradition of exploring doubt, the sense of lack and the yearning for faith found in poets like George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins or TS Eliot. The loss of faith or agony of doubt makes for great poetry at times.
When we talk about religious love poetry in an allegorical sense, though, we're also drawing on intense and passionate, ecstatic, joyful, even erotic, descriptions of a personal loving relationship with God that isn't sentimental or cliched but moves between immanent and transcendent through metaphor, as in Donne, (Batter my heart, three-person'd God). This too, is right there in the English religious poetic traditions along with the famous reticence, scepticism, understatement and doubt.
It would have been less so when he was writing of course.
I have a funny anecdote about Hill which shows his wry humour and less intimidating side.
FWIW, none other than the late, great Christopher Hitchens shared on many occasions how important the poetry of George Herbert and John Donne was to him.
When he died, Hitchens was reading the Catholic author GK Chesterton (not my first choice for deathbed comfort!) and throughout his life Hitchens engaged in polemics about the truths revealed in Christian art, fiction and poetry while deploring the fallacies of religious narrowness and fanaticism. He was enthralled with the tensions between the sacred and the profane in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, loved the insights and existential dilemmas of Pascal, Simone Weil and TS Eliot. Because so many believers and unbelievers move in a philistine airless bubble, it's easy to forget how much common ground there is.
I'm not sure about that, @Martin54. There are plenty of thinkers who are happily godless and feel no need of religious belief, or who are relieved to have stopped going to church and don't give 'the God delusion' another thought. Though that might be easier for those who are scientists in a secular environment rather than those who study or teach art or poetry because the question of why and how mystics, poets and creative writers needed to believe in the transcendent might keep coming up. And then there's 'yearning' as nostalgia from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algea (pain), the homesickness for a lost landscape of childhood, home, or a country we may never have known except in dreams.
I've always loved that etymology @MaryLouise. I imagine yearning is a random distribution, and that plenty of materialist scientists yearn. I certainly yearn from loss of Love. So perhaps materialists who've never had religion don't yearn as much? Though I doubt it?
In reconstruction I take it? How so?
I'm also interested to see what happens when anything mystical or vatic comes up. There's a medical scientist in the group who can be quite scathingly New Atheist at times and who can get hot under the collar when anything 'spiritual' comes up even in the broadest sense.
Their idea of the transcendent seems to come from hill-walking. Which is fair enough but not the whole story I'm sure.
Tangent over.
No, in deconstruction. Their work brought a sense of re-order to the chaotic aspects of a major pillar in one's life crumbling to the ground. They provided basic confirmations, and offered a structure and sequence for the arguments against apologetics, and for reapproaching a variety of ideas without the lens of religion.
Ah, I saw the deconstruction, which is all I have. I saw the mirage of reconstruction in the ambiguity of my understanding. So, like me, you have no reconstruction? Apart from a humanist, Rogerian one?
If we are all made in the image of God we will reflect that somehow even if we have no faith.
To answer the OP question, it is as you have seen complicated. It is meant to be a mystery in a sense. We have to trust which hard.
What means it to be a mystery?
a. many former functions of religion are now performed by science, medicine, psychology, the state (in terms of welfare and education), secular charities, political movements, and the wellness/fitness/self-help economy
b. people’s connections to their non-nuclear families, neighborhoods and hometowns, childhood acquaintances, local community social organizations, local politics, and, after the pandemic, workplaces and local stores and restaurants have all deteriorated
c. people live in their own online information and social media bubbles
d. authority figures and experts are seen as elitist and corrupt
e. people are increasingly lonely. Both close friendship outside the nuclear family (for those who even live in a nuclear family, who are increasingly more affluent and educated), friendly acquaintances around town, and random small talk with say, a shop clerk, are rarer and rarer.
f. all human endeavor and the choice of where to be at any given time, unless it is with a partner/spouse, children, or parents (maybe), or at work, is seen as elective.
…with all these phenomena, Christianity and the experience of faith is de facto an individualistic exercise even for people in churches whose theology emphasizes being in community and communion with others. Even if Christians are active in in-person prayer groups, local church charitable outreach, or other ministries, the civilization we live in makes it very difficult for them to think and act as anything other than individuals, especially with God.
Recent immigrants with strong community ties to each other might be an exception, but their grandchildren are likely to experience religion in the same, atomized, way as the mainstream population.
I can't say I've noticed that friendly interactions with shopkeepers and the like are 'rarer and rarer.'
They aren't rare here.
But it is a communal expression of faith. As we have been mentioning and a chance for those who don’t believe to see communal faith in action. Not that is the reason they do Food Bank etc, it is a consequence.
As to the mystery. Well God in many ways is a mystery. Our faith must have that in it.
I have communal faith that people are worth it. Nothing to do with religion.
What mystery? There are infinite real ones of of course. But God isn't one of them. He's a synthetic mystery from irreconcilable arbitrary religious propositions.
Do you desire reconstruction?
If so, what would it be like, do you think?
I can have no religion based reconstruction, without an instance of the fingerpost. So, too late in life, I want to have Rogerian reconstruction. To be kind. As Jesus was toweringly in his time. In which I'm found severely wanting, including here.
Although being here, knowing you in particular, before I planked myself, I did acknowledge that there are easily kinder (and smarter) people who believe in him religiously as they must.
@Martin54 reconstruction as you describe it, sounds like a characteristic which one exercises rather than something that one experiences (or believes), that is, the excercise of kindness, rather than merely the receiving of it. Although I suspect that genuine natural (or properly-evidenced unnatural) kindness would not be unwelcome. Maybe the matter belief for you is that kindness exists, can exist at all and that you can exercise it, that you do.
So-called "kinder" or "smarter" people have no un/natural advantage over you in relation to belief or religion. We, too, live with our pasts and our present failures -- unkindnesses of all kinds. Even the concept of grace and forgiveness don't wipe them from our memories, no matter what we believe our current relationship to them to be.
I thought these Rogerian characteristics sounded like something most of us would want under any circumstances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers#Fully_functioning_person
Whatver one believes one believes or not.
Certainly as society becomes less and less Christian, people will know fewer and fewer of the references in older works that look back to the Bible or the early Church. Even my parents, who were born in 41 and 43, had almost no knowledge of Things Biblical. My dad wasn't even aware that the phrase "In the beginning" was in the Bible, let alone the first 3 words. They were "nones" before "nones" were a thing. This will only grow.
But I bet you don't know why you believe this.... rationality (whatever that is) doesn't come in to it. '
Blesssings to all in this debate.
: ) thank you very much @RockyRoger. I know that I believe it because I'm a eusocial intentional monkey, a product of four billion years of evolving complexity. It suits me, it pleases me, for entirely self-interested reasons from my genes on up, like rat empathy behind courage and kindness. And the rational outcome at the species level will be rational - fair - social justice - fairness.
What do you know why I believe this?
And bless you and all here too.
People are quite capable of having what they describe and perceive and experience as a "personal relationship" with imaginary friends, AI chatbots, anthropomorphic robots and more. That third-party observers tend to describe these things as *not* being relationships because of the nature of the other party and the (un)reality of any reciprocity doesn't make a lot of difference. Human imagination is capable of filling in a lot of the gaps, although there are wide variations in this ability.
Personally, I wouldn't describe an individual's whatever-it-is with God as being a personal relationship (partly because of the question of moral agency and theodicy). But I don't think it greatly matters if people do understand and experience it that way - it's not as if it's prescribed or forbidden. It's the assumption or insistence that a "personal relationship with God" is or isn't what Christianity is all about that seems more problematic.
What reconstruction, then, is needed. Don't you already have it?