Julian

This sentence is so stunningly ignorant as to be completely bizarre. I can only conclude that I must have misunderstood it. Could you redo this sentence to clarify?

Julian

The Bishop

"All Human History over the last 2000 years has been dominated by this person's impact." Or "Western History has been dominated by this person's impact." I for one am reluctant to fall into the habit of regarding either of those as representing "really, ALL HUMAN HISTORY". But Jesus's impact is undeniable, real or not.

Brunner seems to start reasonably:But when he then says:Way to alienate your secular readers, dude!

Is Brunner a believer or not? I can't even tell. I think it's not unreasonable, if Jesus is remotely as described in the Gospels (given his influence on those immediately around him coupled with the enormous missionary power of the story on pagans) that "genius" is a pretty fair description. We are used to thinking of "geniuses" of arts and of science, but Jesus and Mohammed were evidently geniuses of religion. But we don't have to exhibit semi-religious hagiography of a personage just because we can admire how they changed the world.

Doug Shaver

After less than two hours?
I just this minute found your link to this thread and followed it here. I shall return.

No Robots

This is one of the things that I like most about Brunner: he goes beyond slagging the religious establishment, and goes after the secular academic establishment. Aren't you guys sick of academe and its political correctness, its radical egalitarianism coming from guys who make over 100K/year? A century ago, Brunner was writing about something that even today is barely on the agenda: the demise of our secular, academic priesthood.

No Robots

'Twas a jest. I feared the worst.

Julian

What are you talking about?!?! What typical academic makes 100K/year? What is a secular academic priesthood? None of this makes any sense...

Julian

Doug Shaver

Sorry. I frequently tend to be humor-impaired.

The Bishop

Ok, well, I didn't know he was from a century ago, seeing as I read the extract on constantinbrunner.com. When I said, "Way to alienate your secular readers, dude", I certainly wasn't referring to his criticism of contemporary critical scholarship, I was referring to him saying that Jesus was torn apart by the critics more than he had been on the Cross, which sounded, frankly, evangelically religious.

No Robots

You can start with these two books:

The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Bruce W. Wilshire.

The Closing of the American Mind (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Allan Bloom.

No Robots

I have found in a book by the Quaker scholar Rufus Jones a passage that in effect summarizes what Brunner is saying:

It looks as though there were two quite diverse types of man, though it would be truer to fact to say that the distinction is probably one of degree rather than one of type. There is, on the one hand, the person who has little or no interest in a Beyond. He responds to the world which his senses report to him and in large measure he confines himself to that world. He lives biologically and seems to care little about intrinsic values, and is for the most part unconscious or dimly conscious of transcendent Realities. This type of man, however, is not completely what the Gnostics called a hylic man, devoid of spiritual capacity and composed entirely of material stuff. His unconcern is due more to the influences of nurture and social pressure than to an original bent of mind. This unconcerned and seemingly "biological man" may some day be shaken awake, may set his feet on the way back to the Fatherland, and may become a genuine citizen of it.

The other type of man seems from the first to be more truly bien né, to have come "with trailing clouds of glory from God" and to be aware that he "belongs" to the Fatherland of the Spirit. He can never be content with biological existence. The walls of separation are for him thinner, and this type of person is more sensitive and more responsive to another Realm of Reality. But these mystics who are treated in this book always insist that there is "something of God" in every person, though it may be only "a spark," something that forms a junction with that higher Realm.

This gift of "correspondence" is as unique as is the genius of the poet or the musician or the artist. It is present, I believe in all normally endowed persons, but it rises to a very high level in persons who possess a peculiar gift of sensitivity for this deeper environment of the soul. Alexis Carrel in his Man the Unknown (or via: amazon.co.uk) [online here - mod ] considers mysticism to be, rightly I think, among the fundamental human activities.

The flowering of mysticism: The Friends of God in the fourteenth century by Rufus Matthew Jones. New York: Macmillan, 1940: p. 7-8.