"I can see nothing in mainstream Christian doctrine that leads me to conclude other than I have above."
If by 'mainstream Christianity' you mean post-Reformationist thought, then I would agree with you. However, this is an entirely inappropriate definition for 'mainstream Christianity' -- given that it accounts for a minority of extant Christians and a minority of Christian history. It is probably reasonable to call this 'mainstream American Christianity.'
"Karl Barth argues precisely that text is the origin of meaning"
Of course fundamentalist theologians argue this. That's precisely the error I was alluding to, and precisely what causes them to endorse the erroneous and offensive beliefs in question.
"the authors of the Old Testament believed that the Lord punished disobedience on a national scale."
Sure. But this seems like a non sequitur if we're considering people who are advocates of the New Covenant rather than the Old.
"scholars like Crossan and Pagels, among others, have demonstrated, to my mind quite convincingly, that Christianity moved away from that radical belief"
Pagels is in error on this account. She reads the early Christians in a post-Reformationist context which is entirely inappropriate to them. The divergance of symbolic and fundamentalist Christian lines did occur, but it occurred a millenium after the disputes of early Orthodoxy and Gnosticism (and the symbolic tradition has remained Christian). The Gnostic-Christian disputes were over entirely different matters.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-08-19 05:19 pm (UTC)If by 'mainstream Christianity' you mean post-Reformationist thought, then I would agree with you. However, this is an entirely inappropriate definition for 'mainstream Christianity' -- given that it accounts for a minority of extant Christians and a minority of Christian history. It is probably reasonable to call this 'mainstream American Christianity.'
"Karl Barth argues precisely that text is the origin of meaning"
Of course fundamentalist theologians argue this. That's precisely the error I was alluding to, and precisely what causes them to endorse the erroneous and offensive beliefs in question.
"the authors of the Old Testament believed that the Lord punished disobedience on a national scale."
Sure. But this seems like a non sequitur if we're considering people who are advocates of the New Covenant rather than the Old.
"scholars like Crossan and Pagels, among others, have demonstrated, to my mind quite convincingly, that Christianity moved away from that radical belief"
Pagels is in error on this account. She reads the early Christians in a post-Reformationist context which is entirely inappropriate to them. The divergance of symbolic and fundamentalist Christian lines did occur, but it occurred a millenium after the disputes of early Orthodoxy and Gnosticism (and the symbolic tradition has remained Christian). The Gnostic-Christian disputes were over entirely different matters.