I have decided to get back to posting lectures, sermons, interviews on a more regular basis. This is one given by Walter Brueggemann which I listened to recently while doing some otherwise boring chore. I've listened to it several more times. While listening the first couple of times, I was impressed with the expansive interpretation that Brueggemann gave to what is implied in those troublesome, often exclusively interpreted texts where Jesus said no one came to God except through him, and which have been abused so often to say that no one but a small circle of believers were eternally damned. His association of Jesus as conceived of as The Logos in John with Wisdom in Proverbs Chapter 8 and the association of Jesus with the justice and mercy and compassion that Wisdom created as fundamental attributes of the universe and that THAT is what we have to conform ourselves and our lives to or there will be disaster is the first time I've ever felt entirely comfortable with the idea. NOT that Brueggemann's interpretation is more comfortable or easy or untroubling than the tradition that interprets that as being baptized and claiming that you're a Christian. It's not easier, it's to throw yourself against the machine of the powerful, the rich, governments, societies that oppose those, "the world of power" which Brueggemann says, so well, "is dedicated to phoniness". By the time he gets to the part about Jesus saying "it's all mine" and that he will give it all to us, Brueggemann associates that distribution with conformity to justice, compassion, generosity.
Particularly worth noticing is what he says about the folly of that American, modernist virtue "self sufficiency" and how destructive and stupid that ultimately is.
Here's the talk, I'll probably transcribe parts of it to discuss some ideas in it later, when I'm not feeling so exhausted.
P.S.
It happened that just the other day I listened to another lecture session that was much longer, William Lane Craig on "God and the Platonic Host" which got into the concept of The Logos and much more, in which Craig talked at length about his years long philosophical study of the nature of abstract objects and the aseity of God, which is extremely interesting and pretty convincing on an intellectual level but, much as I appreciated what Craig was saying I didn't find nearly as useful.
Both of these did leave me more convinced than ever that materialism, scientism and atheism are symptoms of intellectual vacuity and the dumbing down of intellectualism. I have some profound disagreements with William Lane Craig about specific things but he is intellectually heads and shoulders above the atheist competition in the realm of ideas. To a large extent that could be the result of most of his debate opponents being trained in some narrow aspect of the sciences and so-called sciences, relieved of any in depth knowledge of even the areas of philosophy that deal with logical argument. As I pointed out not long ago, when he has an argument with another philosopher I've found the atheist was far less prone to arrogantly make an ass of himself, maybe unknown to his own audience but obvious to anyone who has read much philosophy or dealt in rigorous self-criticism of thier own thinking. I specifically wouldn't include someone like Daniel Dennett or John Shook in that category, I think that Shook in particular is someone who should never have been given an undergraduate degree in philosophy, nevermind a PhD. I have to confess that I've come to be skeptical of anyone who has a philosophy degree from the University of Buffalo.
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