@Eddie
Unitarians frequently see Jesus as a yogi of merit. From there… they could continue to become more interested in a divine background of such a yogi.
@jongarvey you are taking a very reduced view of nature, which is surprising given your book in press. Doesn’t “nature” include our human nature, including our culture and society and stories? Aren’t all these things part of creation too? Nature is not only the those things “out their”, but also those things that are here and part of us.
It is also surprising the reduction of “theology of nature” to “how God works in nature.” Theology of nature most certainly includes the fact that nature is actually creation, and is created by God. This is a true theology of nature, is it not? This metaphysics is what Paul is expounding, even if could not be constructed or epistemologically justified using only the tools of Greek though. It is in the proof of Jesus that this metaphysics of Creation is justified.
You are focusing a single quote, without context. I’m seeing a more comprehensive demonstration of the meaning fo that quote. Something of God can be known, and then he points to the places in their culture where these things have been displayed and articulated. He is affirming what is known about God already by them (showing that God is God of the Greeks), adding to this starting point a more complete theology of creation (God Created all things and is why their culture resonates with Him), and then epistemologically justifying this with the Resurrection (the proof), which is received with both curiosity and as foolishness.
In Acts 17, there is natural theology here, but it is not to justify belief in things that they know. Rather it is to justify Paul’s affirmation of their culture. He affirms of what they already know from nature, adds to it with a theology of nature they could not have found on their own, and then ends by epistemologically justifying this addition with the Resurrection. In this way, natural theology is what gives us confidence that we will find common ground in all cultures and people. It is not, however, a strong epistemology for convincing people of what they do not already know. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions that prove the rule.
Oh, I don’t deny this. In fact, I’ve affirmed it all along. That’s why I put in a qualifier each time, such as this one:
That is, you can’t believe in Jesus, as the Christian Church has always understood Jesus, without also believing in God. I don’t think this is a controversial statement, and indeed, if the average Christian in the pews saw this discussion, they would think we were a bunch of hair-splitting, heads-in-the-cloud academics, for even debating what is obviously true. Every churchgoing plumber, bus driver, dental assistant, and certified general accountant, without ever having taken a single course in theology, knows that you can’t believe in Jesus without believing in God,
Hmm - I seem to remember it was you, not me, who distinguished “nature” from “culture” in Acts 17:
And it was I who subsequently brought them back together under “nature”:
I don’t deny that for the Christian, the Resurrection makes sense of creation by (as Wright says in his Bampton lectures) centring the new, fulfilled creation on Christ, and thereby bringing the purpose and nature of the first creation into focus. It achieves what Epicurean philosophy, which some of the Athenians held, fails to achieve.
But I just don’t think that’s what Paul is doing in Acts 17. In fact, as the commentators say and you affirm, he’s got his audience on board (as philosophers they were comfortable with the idea that the reality was a supreme deity rather than the Greek pantheon) right up to the time he mentions the Resurrection, at which point the hearers are divided, most being embarrassed and even hostile at such an unphilosophical idea.
… but by most, not as proof. So far from being the proof that validates God as Creator, Christ is (as we might expect from experience) a skandalon, a stumbling-block, to their belief. Apart, of course, from those like Dionysius whom the Spirit touches.
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Sorry if I am being self-contradictory. I actually think I am having an epiphany of a sort. I think culture is part of nature, is it not? So is human nature too. Nature is not just those things out in the wilderness. It is also us.
Right?
Ho ho! You take me straight back to a sunny playtime at primary school, when I said exactly that to a kid called Neil hopkins, who laughed me to scorn! I can’t have been more than about nine or ten, because he left for another school around then. Wise beyond my years, or just watching too many early David Attenborough programmes on TV?
So, why would we place ourselves outside nature? My guess is that it’s largely because of Descartes, who radically isolated us from the world through the concept of res cognita. Nature becomes “it”(or “bit”?) rather than “thou”.
Of course, before then there was human exceptionalism, but the mediaeval view placed us somewhere along the “chain of being” above minerals> plants> man> angels> God. We had a special role, but within the created order of nature.
So I think we must avoid simply eliding all differences as some materialists do - making mankind no different in essence from bacteria, arguably less important to the world, and certainly more troublesome.
The Christian revelation makes us some kind of mediator or priest on behalf of creation to God - indeed more, in that we were called to bring the transformation of creation into the state where God is “all in all”, were it not that because of sin we ourselves needed a mediator in Christ.
So let’s run with the culture = nature idea. We surely don’t mean to say that nuclear war or genocide or climate change are simply something to be studied as an observation of how the ecology is changing - our humanity imposes “ought” on our culture.
But more positively, it means that we see mankind as a member of the ecological community, not necessarily an enemy, that our science ought to be a love-relationship with creation and not a torture session to gain its secrets (my anti-Baconianism showing there!), and no doubt many other things too. What lines were you thinking along?
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