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Dr IAN ELMER… |
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CLICK HERE FOR INDEX TO THIS SERIES ON ST PAUL  Dr Ian Elmer begins hts commentary today with the provocative statement "all religions are, in some sense, human inventions" and proceeds to discuss some of the commonalities between different religions before seeking to draw out the uniqueness of Christianity... All religions are, in some sense, human inventions… I have always felt that the divine ground of being, call him/her/it God, Godde, the Prime Mover, the Force, or the Great Bird of the Universe, has no need of our rituals, prayers and other faith-practices. We are the ones who need faith, myth and ritual to bring meaning into our lives. We are the ones who invent religion and design schools of prayer and worship to centre or focus our lives on the ultimate reality that we believe underpins all human existence. The world's cultures offer us a smorgasbord of human aspirations for meaning and hope as expressed in a multiplicity of religious practices. Accordingly, many people today argue that all religions are basically the same. All devotees worship the one divine reality.
Three men, an elephant and a dark room… By way of analogy, one might appeal to the old proverbial story of the "three men and the elephant in a dark room". It goes like this: "One of the men runs into a leg and claims it's a tree. Another grabs the trunk and proclaims it's a snake. While the third man gets hit with the tail and says it is a rope. All the men are describing the same thing but just have different experiences". This analogy has been used to explain the plurality of religions as different interpretations of the one, ultimate reality. With that scenario in mind, we might observe that both Paul and the Apostles (especially Peter and Jesus' brother James) claimed to have had Christophanies — apparitions, even revelations, from the risen Christ; but they each interpreted their experience of encounter with the divine differently. Paul's experience led him to "convert" to the Hellenists' Law-free mission, while the experience of Peter and James led them to remain Law-observant Jews and even oppose the Law-free mission (Donaldson, 1997). Perhaps numinous experiences do not impart actual messages. Does God speak directly to the recipient of such an experience, or does the recipient "interpret" the experience according to his or her own presuppositions and assumption? At the time of his conversion, Paul was persecuting the Hellenists, so his numinous experience on the road to Damascus led him to believe that God wanted him to change his ways and convert to the Hellenists Law-free movement. Peter and James knew Jesus to be Law-observant so they interpreted their Christophanies as confirmation of what they were already doing. Having said that, however, I am sure that both Paul and the Apostles would be the first to take issue with the modern idea that all religions are the same; or that all religious devotees are equally in possession of the "truth" or "reality" – by which I mean the correct understanding of what constitutes both the "sacred" and the "profane", as well as how the two are related. Eastern religions, like Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism, are becoming increasingly popular in the West, and devotion to these ancient cultic practices is rapidly displacing former Christian devotions. But there are very clear differences between Christianity and these faiths; one cannot simply "mix and match". The Christian reliance on Revelation… Our claim as Christians rests, not on experience per se, but on the notion of revelation — that the Divine has chosen to communicate with we mere humans. It is only through this self-revelation and self-communication that God imparts knowledge concerning the nature of divine "being" and opens the lines of communication between the Divine and the Human.
The process of knowing ultimate reality is a far more complex one than merely encountering an elephant in the dark. God, the divine realm, the Force, or the Great Mother — whatever we might like to term the alleged "other" — is not, by definition, subject to sense perception or scientific investigation. The uniqueness of Christianity lies in the fact that the devotee relies solely on faith — faith in the body of revelation contained partially in the Bible, but fully and infallibly in the "interpretive" community of which the Biblical texts are an expression. The template for the "elephant" had already been "revealed" to the community long before those famous three men ever entered that darkened room. Paul's numinous encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus did not shed light into a darkened room, but merely brought fresh perspective on what Paul already knew and believed.  CLICK HERE FOR INDEX TO THIS SERIES ON ST PAUL Bibliography and Further Reading:
What are your thoughts on this commentary? ©2008 Ian Elmer |
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Dr Ian Elmer is a lecturer in New Testament at ACU National (formally Australian Catholic University). He is also a member of the Centre for Early Christian Studies, and was recently admitted into ACBA (Australian Catholic Biblical Association). His research specialities are Paul and First-Century Christianity. He is the author of published articles in the Australian Ejournal of Theology and in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church (a publication of the Centre for Early Christian Studies). He doctoral thesis was entitled Paul, Jerusalem and the Judaisers: The Galatian Crisis in its Broader Historical Context.
How economic inequality harms societies... We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust. Richard Wilkinson, is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, and cofounder of The Equality Trust, a nonprofit that aims to reduce income inequality by educating and engaging the public while supporting political commitment to address the problem. 16m55s [String on the Catholica Forum where the general issue of wealth inequality and this documentary was first discussed 25Jan12] | [WATCH THE VIDEO]
Doco 035: 25Jan12
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