ONE OF THE biggest follies and one of the greatest dishonesties of so-called enlightenment modernism is the denigration of the imagination, "that's only imaginary," "you're imagining that," "it's all in his, her, their,your imagination," is a general dismissal of whatever someone wants to dismiss. The dismissed, alleged to be "merely imaginary" entity can be understood to be contrasted with whatever the dismisser asserts is a solid and solidly real entity which they hold in their own (no doubt believed to be) superior mind which isn't dependent on the merely imaginary.
That is such an obvious lie that to point out that it is a lie will shock the self-imagined rationalist but it wouldn't be a surprise to some of the greatest heroes of modern, "rationalist," college-credentialed, "reality based" people. Einstein in his evaluation of his friend and colleague Eddington praised his work based on the fecundity of his imagination even as he criticized some of his conclusions on his alleged failure in critical thinking. I assumed he meant in Eddington's late attempt to come up with a "Fundamental Theory" of physical science, something which Einstein, himself, failed to do in his late work and which I doubt anyone will ever achieve because I don't think our imaginations can comprehend enough of even the physical world to allow someone to achieve such a thing. The much vaunted "theory of everything" that modern physicists and cosmologists, especially the atheist fundamentalists among those, is likely never to be more than the figment of some very specialized and cultivated imaginations with an unadmitted ideological goal which has nothing to do with physical science and everything to do with atheist-materialist fundamentalism.
That's not to say that what's imagined can't be a mistakenly held belief or view of things, which may be entirely innocuous but which may, also, be extremely dangerous or evil. Our imaginations are capacious enough for them to contain all of those things. Imagination is no more good or bad than life is, even "real life." Every weapon of mass or individual destruction wielded or threatened by a tyrant was the imagination of some scientist or other weaponeer harnessing their imagined view of material science.
History. dealing with a far, far broader range of realities than the physical sciences, is, generally, more honest about that, or at least it should be. Any work of history, dealing with a far broader and far more difficult to encompass reality than particle physicists have as their professional concentration, is merely fragmentary. There is no such thing as a comprehensive historical point of view, even those which encompass a very large body of evidence, documentary and physical, will be nothing like a comprehensive view of even any given day, never mind a year or decade or era. Despite the fact that before my involuntary recess I'd praised the ability of history to come up with some SOME facts of far more certain reliability and finality than even physics can in some cases, history as a study is never a completely comprehended view of its subject matter. And all of it, even that which rigorously deals with documentation and physical evidence, is permeated with and resides in and depends on human imagination.
There is no part of anything which we do which is not entirely dependent on the imagination of things and events, living organisms and human beings . . . Even our most basic sensory apprehension of our surroundings is dependent on and founded in images and scenarios in our imaginations, even the tiniest part of the outside universe is not recreated in our minds, what we have in there is not what is really out there, though it might be a good and reliable model of it and, in many cases, an honest one. Our imaginations might lead us to some success in navigating and living in the external universe but we are all as likely to imagine ourselves into trouble, for ourselves and other living beings, there are no People more apt to do that than those within the culture of modern "enlightenment" college-credentialed snobs, especially the affluent among them.
I re-read, yet again, The Real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson and was struck by both his deep appreciation for the benefits of historical method and the problems of it, especially the problems of academics who make assumptions about their historicism that are as careless as those of the most arrogant and clueless of physicist-cosmologists about the limits of their subject. The beginning of the honest practice of any historical method is to admit that it is inherently problematic and what it produces is not going to be the reproduction of reality. The best historian, the best biographer - when they have what can honestly be considered enough of the right kind of evidence to produce biography - does not reproduce an "historical" anyone. And there is not that kind of evidence much before the modern era to produce that kind of biographic treatment. Any claim that you can produce an, or, even more cluelessly, THE "historical Jesus," is a self-impeaching flight of dishonest imagination.
I am very tempted to go over that entire chapter of the book that deals most directly with that because the bad habits of thought he discusses in it are ubiquitous and there is definite bleed over into the general culture. He asks a very provocative question as to why "the Church" should consider the "historical Jesus" which is a product of the imaginations of some, very often quite ideologically motivated, academics more than the "Jesus of faith" which is who you find in the Scriptures.
Why should a modernist, reductionist "Jesus" of what was, honestly, a rather dodgy academic publicity stunt of announced ideological motivation, be considered to be superior to the Jesus of the Gospels? Johnson does something I've never really seen much as a self-criticism within that kind of effort, he pointedly criticizes the criteria used to come up with some of the most ubiquitous of claims of the historical-critical method such as those used to illegitimate some of the Pauline Letters, other Letters in the New Testament, the Book of Acts and which are used to slice, dice and trim the Gospels, canonical and apocryphal, into an ideologically acceptable form - which often renders them quite useless for any good purpose. I will admit that I, very far from a rigorous New Testament scholar have just accepted that current most common view of it without questioning. And I won't go into the non-scholarly side-show of those like the late John Spong except to point out that I never did take him seriously on such topics.
I really have to wonder at the motivations of why they want us to imagine Jesus in the many, conflicting, incompatible ways they want him to be thought of when it's clear that such Jesuses don't really come out in a place much better than that of the fundamentalist-televangelists who they announced themselves in opposition to.
Even a quarter of a century ago, after about what I noticed as a quarter of a century effort by the American media of presenting right-wing ideological "christianity" as Christianity, Luke Timothy Johnson was able to ask why the churches closest to the John Spong, Karen King, John Dominic Crossan, etc. imagination of Jesus were ever fading as the fundamentalists were gaining. I think it's because that kind of Jesus imagining effort comes out with a Jesus that doesn't work for what they claim they want him to do.
The Jesus of the Gospels asks us to do some of the hardest things imaginable, to sell all we have and give the money to the poor, to give all of our money to those who won't pay us back (absolutely fatal to capitalism and the investment portfolios of Christians, right to left), to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, to be without a beam in our eye before we criticize a speck in someone else's, to be without sin before we cast the first stone (absolutely fatal to those who favor capital punishment), to do to others what we'd have them do to us (this risks me getting on football at allegedly Christian institutions of learning), etc.
If that Jesus, the Jesus that the conservative Churches, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Orthodox (risking getting into the Patriarch of Moscow), the Jesus of the Catholic medieval monarchs and the Protestant Most Christian Princes, the Jesus of the old mainline denominations back when they tried clergy for heresy, etc. was unsuccessful in leading those who professed that belief into actually doing what Jesus would have done - AND NONE OF US EVER HAS DONE THAT - then the diluted, diminished, pruned and rationalized Jesus of the historical-critical movement, the Jesus made acceptable to "enlightenment rationalism" and scientism and materialism is going to be ever less of a force for doing that in the general population. If such a denatured Jesus might work among those for whom the cultural vestiges of the "real Jesus" of faith are mixed with a general culture of liberalish niceness, that's certainly something that diminishes over time. I can't recall which comedian it was I recently heard pointing out that the professed morality among the mocking dismissers of Jesus were actually derived from the Gospel but that's certainly true. I think it's as certainly true that within my lifetime the vestiges of that cultural heritage have been petering out like Nietzsche's imagination of the Shadow of the Buddha. Look at the "Buddhists" among the libertarian amoralist cyber-tycoon class for a parallel to that. And the ones that don't even make that much of an effort at putting up a false front over their Nietzchean march of acquisition and amoral decadence. I'll bet they all pretty much bought into the new atheist fad of the '00s. Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess were really big in that as they were in their other activities.
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