The Weight of Proximity (Part 1)

(I've been having a discussion with an acquaintance that will make a good introduction to my next blog entry. I've edited it a bit.)

There is no such thing as objective truth. To say there is, is an ontological statement and ends any discussion pretty quickly. (To say there isn't is a non-sequitur, but if you keep reading, you can see why we must start there.)

To communicate, debate, compromise, agree, etc, we have to presume some things - that we are sentient beings, that we understand English, that we have sufficient background in the subject for the dialog to be meaningful and help each other form fuller opinions, etc.

Everything that we can possibly know, we know through discernment (inspection[1]) and/or the discernment of others (teachers).

The history of the Christian faith has these layers, which are more or less chronological:

1. Judaism, the palette upon which everything else is painted (and which itself has layers, another story)
2. The man Jesus
3. The cultural melting pot in which Jesus lived, taught and died
4. Those who learned from Jesus (Apostles)
5. Those who learned from the Apostles (Apostolic Fathers)
6. Those who learned from the Apostolic Fathers (later Church Fathers)
7. The Church and it's traditions
8. The New Testament
9. You and me

The New Testament comes nearly last, not because it's unimportant, but because it came nearly last.

Most of what we believe about Jesus and the things we do because we believe in Jesus predate the New Testament by many years.

You simply can't hold up a bible and say "if it's in here, I believe it, and if it's not, I don't." Our present Bible didn't come first and it didn't capture everything there is to know about what it means to be a Christian. It was, indeed, often a response to what the early church was already doing.

All that makes a good preface to tomorrow's blog post.

[2013-03-05]

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[1]
To discern "by inspection" means to observe (sometimes without much preparation) and describe; this was a favorite phrase of one of my linguistic profs, Prof Lockwood, then at Michigan State University and a prominent figure in Cognitive Stratificational Linguistics. I'm afraid I was not a good linguist and left the MA program near the end before completing my dissertation. I am still a fan of Cognitive Stratificational Linguistics and believe it offers more insight than Transformational Generative, ie, the Chomskyan variety, which puts me if a very small minority. (Funny how much that happens.)

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