> [H]ere are some areas where I would find your (and Catharine's)
> views especially interesting:

> * Does Shortt believe that Jesus actually, physically, came back to
>   life?  He hints that he does, but then backs off a bit.  This is
>   important in the discussion, because without that particular element
>   of the Christ event, I think you wind up (pun intended) with a deist
>   construction:  "God" is simply the word for the fact that there is
>   something rather than nothing.  I think I am recalling my father's
>   conversations correctly when I remember that he observed that the
>   "truth" of Christianity absolutely depends upon the truth of the
>   physical resurrection.  Without that event -- something that is by
>   its terms contrary to the scientifically testable principles of the
>   universe in which we live -- what is the particular reason to
>   "believe" that Christianity (as distinct from other religious or
>   naturalist tradition) holds any particular explanatory power?

Interpreting your question about Shortt as a question about me, I'll
try to give _my_ answer.

Your quote of your father's position is certainly widely held.  I was
surprised years ago to find the following verse by ... I'll show the
verse first so you can try to guess its author:

   Make no mistake: if he rose at all
   it was as His body;
   if the cell’s dissolution did not reverse,
   the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
   the Church will fall.
 
But I think there's a useful, and reasonably well-frequented, stop on
the way from a focus on the resurrection of the body (His, and ours)
and all the debates that follow about predestination, election,
justification and salvation, to say nothing of limbo, purgatory and
hell, to a full-on deism.

Many Quakers say that it's the _life_ of Jesus that they put at the
heart of Christianity, and are happy to ignore Christ's resurrection
and the calculus of sin and redemption.  If they have anything to say
about the _theology_ of the crucifixion, its likely to be along the
lines of what mainstream theology calls, I believe, an _exemplar_
understanding of the crucifixion.  I've lost track of the place I
first encountered this, but in the form I got it, its central thesis
is that in his perfect non-violent acceptance of an unjust persecution
and death, he defeated the violence of its perpetrators.  The language
used, if I recall correctly, uses a metaphor based on electricity: by
his acceptance he earthed (grounded) their violence and thus
dissipated it, rendered it ineffective.  The ultimate example of
turning the other cheek, an unanswerable alternative to the escalating
effect of meeting violence with violence: "the revolutionary
foolishness of the ‘lamb’ who is defeating violence with love".

Whether such a position is "Christian" or not I leave to the
professional theologians.  I've certainly seen arguments that it
wasn't until Anselm in the 11th century that we get the
substitutionary sacrifice story (and indeed that it was for
propounding the exemplar view that Abelard got in trouble).  I'm
pretty sure that some of the Dominican friars we know are in this
camp.

What I _don't_ know is how to connect this perspective on Jesus as
Teacher with God as the ground of being...

On a related note, I've never felt that Christianity has any absolute
claim to priority, and accept that my self-identification as Christian
is mostly owed to the fact that it at least _was_ the default
religious context of the culture I grew up in.  Some Quakers are keen
to adopt what is locally described as Universalism, which gives equal
status to 'all' the 'great' religions as potential sources of
inspiration.  I'm afraid I'm somewhat cynical about this, in that such
people often also are likely to talk about their "spiritual journey",
which too often seems to mean that they aren't commited to much of
anything in particular, or at least not for very long.

Nonetheless the moral relativism issue is, as I think we've discussed
before, a very real vulnerability for any movement _at all_ away from
saying "mine is the one true faith and the rest are all just
_wrong_".  For my money MacIntyre comes closer than anyone else to
solving that problem (ref. _Whose Justice, Which Rationality_), but
it's a tricky argument he makes, and even he, I gather, at least
implicitly admitted as much by moving in to Merton's old monastery
towards the end of his life.

> Shortt does, it seems to me, also sometimes "put the rabbit into the
> hat."  For example, he asserts that there are "moral truths." 
> Really?  According to what or whom?  I happen to agree with his
> (essentially Thomistic) views on what is "good," but how does that
> make it "true?"  I think the jury is very much out on the question
> of whether humans "tend to the good," and I think it is equally
> plausible to think that the "moral truths" for humans are the result
> of how our brains have evolved, and no more evidence of a particular
> creator than the choice of wolves and dolphins to cooperate when
> hunting.

I tend to agree that Aquinas's story here is just assumed as obvious,
rather than argued.  I take that story to be roughly that the created
world is by definition good, because it is God's creation, and that
all there is in the world tends towards its own proper way of being.
'Bad' things happen in the natural world because different kinds of
beings' proper way of being conflict (consider the lion and the
antelope, or even clouds and plants).  (This is all Aristotle so far,
I believe).  It follows for Aquinas that (human) evil is always a
falling short, the result of either defect or mistaken understanding
of what one's own proper way of being is.  On this account because God
_is_ supreme unqualified Good, union with God is (again, by
definition, tautologously) humankind's ultimate proper way of being,
achieved only in this life by saints, but available to all after
death.

Insofar as that story is not self-evidently true to most contemporary
folk, including me, where we look for certainty about the good, the
moral, I guess I have two qualitatively different approaches to that.
One is intensely practical/personal, derived from what I see in the
lives of people I know.  The relevant Quaker saying, always used as an
introduction to our version of a eulogy, is: "The grace of God as
shown forth in the life of [the deceased]".  I'll pick this up in more
detail lower down.

The other is MacIntyre's appeal, referred to above, to a hypothetical
eventual convergence of persons of good will, wide experience and
great familiarity between them with all available strands of
philosophy and theology, resulting from an extended exercise in
classical dialectic.  Like I said, tricky...

> I have the same concern about some of his other distinctions,
> e.g. between "notes" and "music."  I do not find it at all hard to
> believe that visual and auditory responses to particular harmonies
> are entirely the product of natural selection. 

[Bother -- I meant to bring the book with me, not having gotten all
the way through it myself, but failed to do so, and haven't gotten to
whatever he has to say about notes vs. music.  As a fiddle player, I
do occasionally perplex myself by trying to explain the difference
between a tune and a melody (all country dance music consists of
tunes, but only a relatively small number of them are melodies:
_Scotland the Brave_, for one, I guess, _Kind Robin_ another (although
maybe that's only in Barbara Bousma's collection in a waltz medley, so
doesn't really count) -- a related question, but not quite the _same_
one.]

> * I don't doubt that Shortt is correct when he says, near the
>   beginning, that the reader cannot be persuaded into belief.  (I also
>   love the reference to Kierkegaard, though he does not mention the
>   Great Gray Goose.)  But you can see the quandary in which that
>   leaves someone like me:  if one can only understand Christianity by
>   "living it," how can one decide whether to choose to live that
>   life?  I have often said to both of you, I think, that it would be
>   wonderful [to] have faith -- I'm one of the people Hawking identified as
>   being "afraid of the dark" but couldn't turn that fear into belief. 
>   But while I have often found elements of religious belief and
>   practice to be interesting and even comforting (in the sense of
>   being part of a community), I have never been able to overcome my
>   view that, at its heart, Christianity is based upon belief in a
>   particular event that, in my firmly held view, simply did not occur.

Hmm.  I'm not sure I agree with him there, if only because I like to
think that I arrived where I am by a not wholly irrational path,
albeit a pretty convoluted one.

I'm not sure I can express this clearly, to say nothing of
compellingly, in less than a monograph, but I'll see what I can do.
It's all about grace.  [Note 1: What follows is something which I
think Catharine and I have found we pretty much agree on, despite
arriving at it via quite different routes.] [Note 2: However for me,
but I think _not_ for Catharine, nothing in what follows should be
taken to imply that what I'm talking about could not have arisen
"entirely [as] the product of natural selection" and/or its
sociological analogues.] [Note 3:  No, not social Darwinism...]

Both observation and introspection suggest a real qualitative
distinction between us humans and most if not all other species,
alongside, possible in part dependent on, but not the same as our
distinct status as language users.  Aristotle and Aquinas (and of
course many others) label this as a distinction between our animal
nature and our rational nature, where the latter is equated with,
shall we say, 'ensoulment'.  Ensoulment is where, for Aquinas, grace
comes in.  Rather in the same (unsatisfactory to you, as you've
already stated) way that with respect to the "something rather than
nothing" question 'God' seems to be just a name for the answer, so
'grace' is at minimum a name for (the Heideggerian version of) the
'how ought I to live me life' question, that is, 'how is it that we
are the kind of being whose being is an issue for itself'.

> I have notes on virtually every page, and I look forward to future
> discussion (perhaps over some excellent Port which I seem to have
> around).

> With thanks and love,Tom

ht

[The verse is the first stanza of _Seven Stanzas at Easter_ by John
 Updike, who was, apparently, raised a Lutheran]