No Robots

Gamera, your position typifies Kantianism:

Aren't most of the people around us little Kants, disposing at their fingertips of religion, skepticism and of evolutionism; and making out of these three ingredients a convenient seasoning for their ever-changing opinions?--Brunner, Spinoza contra Kant

Gamera

You seem to be confusing three separeate issues:

1. Did Paul think there was an historical Jesus?

2. Was there in fact an historical Jesus?

3. Does Christianity (i.e., the gospel) depend on an historical Jesus.

Regarding 1, I think we agree. Paul thought there was an historical Jesus.

Regarding 2, again I think we agree. I think there is evidence of an historical Jesus, and if I understand you correctly, so do you.

Regarding 3, we disagree. I'm a Christian, and although I think there was an historical Jesus, that particular conclusion isn't a necessary condition of my faith.

I must say I find it somewhat humorous to have an atheist try to convince me, a Christian, about the conditions of faith.

Gamera

I think it typifies Foucault's more closer, and although I have read Kant, I doubt you have read Foucault.

But this quote of his from the Archeology of Knowledge might help:

"Discourse is not life. Its time is not your time . . . And although with all you have said you may have killed God, do not imagine that with all you are saying you can create a man who will live longer than he."

No Robots

But that's because, as I said above you are not so much a Christian as a Kantian, that is, a scholastic purveyor of common prejudice and superstition. As such, you seek to preserve a place for a Personal God, for Personal Liberty and for Personal Immortality. To do so, you must constantly juggle Religion, Skepticism and Evolutionism. You are attracted to Christ, you cannot ignore him, but you remain unaware that his life and teaching are completely antagonistic to your very nature; for, with Christ there is no Personal God, nor Personal Liberty nor Personal Immortality. When this is pointed out to you, all you can say is that there is some unknown Gospel behind the Gospel that does guarantee these things.

No Robots

A strange assertion, either as assumption or slur.

Here is the complete quote from Foucault (the portion you elided is bolded):

From what I can see, Foucault is arguing my side rather than yours. First, he acknowledges that God is dead, thus validating atheism. Second, he criticizes the attempt to put man in God's place, the evolutionist anthropotheism that is trying to take the place of religion. Third, he denies the salvific value of discourse, asserting that language has only practical value. Foucault is a skeptic and a critic. That he is equally so with regard to both religion and evolutionism is very much to his credit.

Yet Foucault lacks the essential quality that would transform his negative critique into a positive science. What he lacks is a criterion of discrimination that would allow us to assess the validity of the thought content of individuals. While we have a general science of logic to permit us to assess the validity of the sequence of thoughts, we do not possess a similar science for evaluating the content of thought. It is this that Brunner provides with his doctrine of the espritals and the common folk (die Geistigen und das Volk):

We are constantly facing human beings who belong to two different kinds of inwardness and whose thoughts are materially as far apart as positive reality is apart from nothingness. Their specific difference and their antagonism have become so evident that I have been able to elaborate the Doctrine of the Espritals and the Common Folk. And instead of saying Espritals and the Common Folk, I could also say—and in so doing our byword "Spinoza or Kant" would be placed at the very focus of its meaning and its importance—it would be exactly the same if instead of Espritals and Common Folk, I would say: Spinozists and Kantians!

Gamera

Hey, I did pretty good from memory. And of course the whole impact of faith is that it cannot reconcile one with death. If it could, it would not be faith.

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No, Foucault is arguing my side or rather Paul's: that discouse is all we have by way of meaning.

Now that meaning may be falsely transcendental when it claims to represent totalized truth; but it is meaning nontheless. And query whether Paul's radical view of the gospel as salvation is even about truth. My argument would be, being a narrative, it is not. Rather it is about the meaning of ones existence, and that never happens except through discourse.

That's the conundrum Foucault is addressing in the AoK.

Gamera

Well again, I find it somewhat humorous to have a atheist and an apparent anti-Kantian, tell me, a Christian and a post-modernist, the conditions of my faith. It just isn't adding up.

As a Christian, I have no interest in personal immortality (hence the Foucauld quote) and I don't think Christianity at its outset did (hence the complete vagueness about the so-called afterlife in Christian scriptures).

Nor are Jesus's teachings really pertinent. You have confused (as you keep doing) the "sayings' of Jesus with the gospel. The gospel is a narrative, and has no theology or truth statements. That's the radical nature of Christianity which you cannot discern because you keep seeing Christianity through the eyes of historical Christianity and the overlay of theological discourse. But of course neither Jesus nor Paul engaged in theology. It hadn't been invented yet.

This is the beauty of the thing. You are acting out Foucault's quote without even realizing it, attributing to discourse about Christianity a unifying truth that has nothing to do with the texts in questions.

Chris Weimer

Why isn't it relevant?

gurugeorge

Because it's a comparative minority (I'd put it at "some ancient and a few moderns" btw).

Chris Weimer

So what? :huh: