A New Search for Ultimate Reality

Marie Schickel Rottschaefer is the facilitator.

Its goal is to give a brief overview of developments that have relevance for us in the early 21st century, particularly in seeking solutions for pressing people and planet problems.

NCRcafe New Search Discussion Number Five February 9, 2007

Greetings again, confreres. Those who are here at the table for the first time and want to understand the continuity of the discussion can go to the top of this post and click Spirituality and Culture. The previous listings should open up. The last post was sent Jan. 23, 2007. The Discussions date back to Oct. 27, 2006.

This post was submitted several days ago but was accidentally deleted by NCRcafe staff due to a misunderstanding in communication. A technology fluke jumbled my Discussion Number Five for 2/9/07. I asked the staff to remove it. Shortly thereafter, the correct discussion appeared. But apparently staff thought I wanted both correct and incorrect copies removed. Therefore both disappeared. Here is the original and correct version.

To continue with Sheehan’s article. What had happened between Jesus’ death and the emergence of Christian faith that Sheehan said was the first event dated in Christian history? The Gospels, interestingly, offer no direct access to what believers call Jesus’ resurrection. There is no text that describes it and no one claims to have witnessed it. Instead, we must rely on the claims of his first disciples that they had some kind of revelatory experiences (“appearances”) that convinced them that Jesus was alive. Almost all New Testament exegetes agree that Peter experienced the first such “appearance.” Sheehan says that Kung agrees with the scholarly opinion that the appearance was in Galilee, not Jerusalem, and was totally unrelated to later stories that Jesus had left his tomb three days after he died. In fact, the first written testimony to faith in Jesus’ resurrection was twenty-five years after his death and makes no mention of an empty tomb. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, written about 55 CE, says that Jesus “was raised” and showed himself to his followers (in whatever way).

But some forty years after Jesus died, the empty tomb story made its first literary appearance in the Gospel of Mark. Yet even there it was not presented as proof that Jesus had physically left his tomb. For further clarification, Edward Schillebeeckx, one of the consensus group mentioned earlier, with whom Kung agrees, says that even if Jesus’ body could not be found after he died, that fact “had a merely negative effect: it did not lead to triumphant hope in resurrection, but to confusion and sorrow.” Peter and the other disciples came to believe that Jesus was in heaven before they even knew that there was an empty tomb. Only later when they went to Jerusalem from Galilee did they construct the empty tomb story as a medium for the faith that had arisen independently of it.

Sheehan goes on to describe the evolution of the resurrection faith. By the final two decades of the first century, more than likely to reinforce the notion of Easter, elaborate apocalyptic imagery came to influence Gospel descriptions of Jesus’ fate. Circa 85 CE, Luke’s Gospel asserts that the risen Lord is capable of a natural capacity i.e. dining on fish. And a still later Gospel, John’s, at the turn of the century, Jesus invites Doubting Thomas to put his fingers into Jesus’ wounds to prove the physicality of his resurrection. The problem with this development is that the stories about Jesus’ appearances after his death cannot be harmonized with one another, as to the places, times or the persons present. Sheehan’s wit again prevails. He gives the example of Luke having no qualms about saying that Jesus ascended definitively into heaven both on Easter Sunday and then again about forty days later; proof, according to the village atheist, that the Gospels are frauds, and evidence, according to the fundamentalist believer, that God’s ways are surely mysterious.

New Testament exegetes reason that the authors of the Gospels used these imaginative and symbolic apocalyptic expressions (apocalyptic used in this sense as the scriptural description of the end of the world) not to describe historical events but rather to affirm their belief that Jesus was somehow alive with God and would someday reappear. But later generations took the images as literal fact, thus providing iconographic material for centuries of artists and serious puzzles for centuries of Christians who were unfamiliar with apocalyptic literary genres. (For example, how could Jesus’ resurrected body metabolize fish?)

Given what Kung and the liberal consensus tell us about the resurrection of Jesus, what more does Christianity have to tell us? Very little it would seem. Without any “proofs” such as an empty tomb or physical appearances, all one is left with is the belief (Kung equates this to “hope”) that somehow Jesus went to heaven, with or without his physical body.

Kung’s book turns into a powerful encouragement to hope that Jesus is somehow with God and therefore that life has an ultimate meaning. If you follow the God of Judaism, Kung writes, you believe that in his loving omnipotence he will not let your life wear away into nothingness. Sheehan continues with Kung’s book. If you believe that the same God gave Jesus eternal life, then you have a concrete guarantee that your hope will be fulfilled. Liberate yourself from the Platonic idea that your soul alone will survive. Yet, forget about taking literally the idea of the resurrection of the body. Believe that if there is a God, he will save you in whatever way.

Kung acknowledges that there are no proofs that eternal life is a reality; but neither can it be proven that it is not a reality. A lack of proof, he claims, does not necessarily mean that hope in immortality is irrational. So Kung moves the question of immortality from what can be rationally proven to what is “existentially meaningful.” (i.e. the shaping of an individual’s self-chosen mode of existence and moral stance in relation to the rest of the world.). Sheehan quotes Kung: “One can hold that there is eternal life only in an act of trust, founded, of course, on reality: a trust justified in the face of reason and therefore perfectly reasonable.” According to Sheehan, Kung uses “justified “ in a soft sense; hope in immortality, he says, “does not have cogent proofs at its disposal, but it does have attractive motives.” One of those motives, he asserts, is the desire for an ultimate meaning to life, and it can lead (but he doesn’t say how) to a “reasonably justified decision” to acknowledge that eternal life is an available reality. According to Sheehan, Kung offers a reconstruction of Pascal’s wager.

I (rottsch) deleted a brief explanation of Pascal’s Wager for the sake of brevity. But for an interesting discussion, please Google, type in Pascal’s Wager and go to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Finish article 2/28/07
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“Tips to Avoid the Tipping Point”

I would like to have a brief, additional feature called “Tips to Avoid the Tipping Point.” This post, “New Search,” is about seeking solutions for pressing people and planet problems. So I want to emphasize the planet problems along with the people problems.

In a recent speech to a standing-room-only audience at the New York University School of Law, Gore declared, "We are moving closer to several 'tipping points' that could -- within as little as 10 years -- make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization." (Click Google and type Al Gore and tipping point.)

I will begin “Tips” by talking about a defining moment in world history and a dominant symbol of the twenty-first century. In the City of Light, Paris, France, the Eiffel Tower’s 20,000 flashing lights will go dark for five minutes February 1, 2007, Thursday evening, hours before scientists and officials unveil a long awaited report on global warming.
Ahead of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, pressure is increasing on U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon to convene an emergency summit of world leaders aimed at breaking the deadlock over cutting greenhouse gases. The Oregonian Wednesday, January 31, 2007.

This “wink out” of five minutes from the tower is a poignant symbol to remind us that the wise use of planetary resources is our imperative or indeed we face the inevitable fate of an ultimate dark age that would make the previous ones (the European historical period from about C.E. 476 to 1000 and the Greek historical period of three or four centuries from about 1100 B.C.E.) pale by comparison! In fact after writing this Dark Ages comment, I read in today’s The Sunday Oregonian Feb. 4, 2007 in the opinion section the following as the top editorial. “It’s a crisis, but global warming can be stopped,” by James Lovelock. Here are some comments from his editorial, taken from his book The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity.
“Today humanity faces its greatest trial. The acceleration of climate change under way will sweep away the environment we’ve adapted to.
What is unusual about the coming crisis is that we caused it, and nothing so severe has happened in 55 million years, since the hot period at the start of the Eocene. (The Eocene epoch is a major division of the geologic time scale. The start of the Eocene is marked by the emergence of the first modern mammals.)
Why have we been so slow, especially in the United States, to see the peril? What stops us from realizing that GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND DEADLY AND MIGHT ALREADY HAVE MOVED OUTSIDE OUR AND THE EARTH’S CONTROL?”(my capitalization)
Lovelock goes on about both problems and solutions. He says that we will have to do much more “TO AVOID A NEW DARK AGE LATER IN THIS CENTURY. “ (my capitalization) Beyond this, one thing that I would like to emphasize is the following. He says that E.O. Wilson reminds us that we are still tribal carnivores. Our genes are programmed to see other living things mainly as something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than about anything else – we will even give our lives for it or kill other humans for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of a much larger entity, the living Earth. But because we are tribal animals, the tribe does not act in unison until a real and present danger is perceived. This has not yet happened. So we go our separate ways. What is at risk is civilization.”
Lovelock says. “I ask that we put aside our fears and our obsession with personal and tribal rights, and be brave enough to see that the real threat comes from the harm we ourselves do to the living Earth, of which we are a part and which is indeed our home.”
Fin.