Fundamentalism Attacked as Pharisaism - by a Methodist Pharisee

1) HGL's F.B. writings : Fundamentalism Attacked as Pharisaism - by a Methodist Pharisee, 2) Bergoglio misuses "Fundamentalism" too ....

JAU status linking to ...

Mercy Not Sacrifice
The Blog of Morgan Guyton
namely
Why English majors make lousy fundamentalists
March 3, 2014
http://morganguyton.us/2014/03/03/why-english-majors-make-lousy-fundamentalists/

[My answer in detail to that blog post, under JAU's status, using the format to simulate a dialogue between Morgan Guyton and me, while in fact I am responding to his supporter JAU. Since he is a Catholic - if you call Modernists Catholics - I did not grasp the blog post he was linking to was Progressive Protestant, and I answered as if answering a Catholic.]

Morgan Guyton

1) Unsubtle communication is bad writing

The measure of how good a writer you are is the degree to which you are able to communicate with subtlety. If I know how a sentence is going to end before I’ve gotten there, then it’s a crappy, uncreative sentence. To be unsubtle and completely straightforward is to be a bad writer.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

No.

The fire was red it flaming spread - it is as straightforward as you get. Tolkien is not a bad writer, despite fashions among English teachers.

Plus, if subtlety is what he wants, how about the first word barasheet referring to the Son (bar) of God (a=aleph) consuming [himself] (shin) with his hands (yod) on the Cross (tau)?

The real subtlety is not making a straightforward reading not work, but to make it work perfectly at a straightforward level - and to add something important. Which is on any reading (either Church Father or reading like that) what God has done with Genesis 1 and 2 if Christianity is true.

Morgan Guyton

What can we speculate about the community that Luke is writing for that differs from the community Matthew is writing for?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Since Luke is writing for Christians of Gentile origin, he leaves out Eloi, Eloi, Lema Sabachthani. Meaning that Sts Matthew and Marc wrote, or possibly the second listened to one writing and speaking to a community with some Jewish background.

Leaves precisely every fact of the Gospels as a fact and therefore leaves the fundamentalist totally fundamentalist (unless he is a Zionist who cannot take implications of that Psalm).

On same line St John who uses the words "he said to the Jews, 'woe ye, for... ' ... " where the other three say "he said, 'woe ye Pharisees and Sadducees, for ...' ..." - St John leaves out the specification of groups within the Jewry of Jesus' time, since he is writing when "Jew" had already resumed the groups hostile to our Lord in the popular meaning of the word. Or even juridical meaning, by some Sanhedrin decision.

Morgan Guyton

To make Genesis 1 literal isn’t just a problem for me because of its contradiction of modern science. It’s a problem because there are so many cool things that the firmament, the waters above, and waters below could stand for metaphorically if they don’t have to be literal scientific facts (take a look at what Augustine does with them in his books 11-13 of his Confessions).

Hans-Georg Lundahl

There is a very cool thing you can do if it is scientific fact too. Is "water" always H2O, or did Moses call also H2 "water"? Is the Hydrogen in the stars that were created on day four from a kind of electrolysis separating Oxygen from Hydrogen on day two?

But really, the guy makes me fear the quality of English majors is very much deteriorating.

There are metaphors in the Bible that no Fundie ever misses. Goats and Sheep on Judgement day do not refer to literal cattle.

A writer whose metaphors are taken as metaphors and whose literal writing is taken as literal is a good writer. A writer whose metaphors are for millennia taken as literal plain sense when in reality not meant so at all is a bungler.

Now St Augustine was perhaps not personally a fan of literalist readings, but as we can see from De Genesi ad Litteram already book 1, already when talking of Heaven and of Firmament, he had to come to terms with them, they were part and unmissable such of the Christian tradition.

If ever a man having written a book for the Coming Home series writes about certain problems he had with the Catholic Church and if that man should ever be a Church Father (not probable there is enough time left for that to happen often) it is a basic rule of understanding the Church Fathers that his specific problems and provisory solutions to it with Catholic Faith are not the same thing as his settled opinion as a Catholic about what the topic really means.

John Henry Cardinal Newman was even told that his book about his conversion while converting was NOT being theologically corrected, because of the apologetic value of "oh, there is where he came from". So that book is not a good way to know what he finally thought about how much evidence there was early on for this or that doctrine.

And similarily with Confessiones. His solution in itself is probably not bad (I will have to read up on books 11 - 13), but the problem should not be generalised. For one thing it was a problem on his "Coming Home" journey and for another thing he would never have even had that problem if the Catholic Tradition available to him in that moment had made it clear beyond doubt that nothing need be taken literally, or very little.

Morgan Guyton

In the New Testament, there are three major controversies that become important analogies for me in Biblical interpretation: Jesus’ Sabbath healing, the circumcision of the Gentiles, and eating ceremonially unclean foods. For fundamentalist Bible readers, these controversies are isolated incidents that have no bearing on how the church should handle analogous problems today. But an English major like me is going to draw an analogy between how these three issues were handled by Jesus and Paul and how the church should handle issues today including today’s controversy of all controversies, which I’m sure I don’t have to name.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

All three controversies are controversies about LAW. The great difference between Fundies and us is BELIEF ABOUT FACT.

When it comes to controversies surrounding it, sometimes about Canon Law, I think it is more often the Anti-Fundie Brigade that takes the position of the Pharisees.

"Has your bishop authorised you to believe the first eleven chapters of Genesis literally?"

Well, no Pope or Council of the past ever required me to not believe them literally.

"Kent Hovind is a heretic, you are being syncretistic with heresy!"

And you with openly totally infidel Jews like Stephen Jay Gould in that case.

And a few more, but those are the chief accusations I have come across, the accusation of disobedience to the Church Teaching, and the accusation of collusion with heresy.

Oh, the accusation that is no moral one, but about the quality of my reading skills has btw been answered in more than one detail above.

Morgan Guyton

In reading the Bible, I instinctively look for elements that might be analogies.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

So do fundies. And Jesus' words when not dealing with halachot to be applied in the day, but with haggada, stories to be either believed or used just as stories, always took a side as if they were also to be believed.

Morgan Guyton

He was ready to murder his son Isaac, because a voice in his head that said it was God told him to do so.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

It was in fact God who told him to not murder but sacrifice his son. It may come to this English major as news, those guys not being very literate about Christian literature from Church Fathers including St Augustine (except their favourite quote mining), but Theologians have indeed asked the question of how Abraham was justified before. Their conclusion is not, as would the Anti-Fundie-Brigade, that he weren't, but that he would not have been unless he had - quite correctly so - believed God was capable of resurrecting Isaac.

All of the story is a very good metaphor for what God did through Jesus Christ. But it was preserved by people not yet knowing that up to the time when Christ came, or rather not yet knowing it in perfect detail. It is still preserved by people who are not even Christians, the religious community which is called Slaves of the Church, but whose service consists in the one fact of believing the Prophecies while not yet believing the Fulfilments. Both these people to this day and the precursors of us rather than of them believed Abraham had actually done this. Literally. And they were not mistaken.

Morgan Guyton

"the fact that the Greek word for church, ekklesia, is the word used in the Septuagint for Hebrew religious gatherings and the word used in pagan society for public political assemblies doesn’t make its meaning reducible to “religious gathering” for me. When I see ekklesia, I see a compound noun combining ek (out) and klesia (calling). So ekklesia to me will always be about God’s calling us out of the world and into a new reality instead of being merely a “religious gathering,” because I see the word with a poet’s eyes."

Hans-Georg Lundahl

There is a core meaning. PEOPLE. In Pagan society ekklesia ton Athenaion meant Athenian people in assembly. Among Hebrews ekklesia Israel meant Israelite people assembled. For instance when signing the convenant at Sinai. This is prime evidence against the Protestant view.

The fact that Church and Christendom are distinct go back to the distinction between Daniel and - in his better days - Nebuchadnessar. But not to the meaning of EKKLESIA as such.

Morgan Guyton

"I see the Old Testament quiver in a similar way when God strikes Uzzah dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6."

Hans-Georg Lundahl

No, OT does not rebel against its author. Uzzah deserved death. And people insulting the Blessed Virgin Mary - Ark of the New Covenant - is not better than Uzzah's act.

Morgan Guyton

"I happen to think that he’s a real trickster just like Jesus is when he refuses to answer any question in a straightforward way."

Hans-Georg Lundahl

He answers questions very straightforwardly when coming from Disciples. As to his answers to Pharisees, He was tricking the real tricksters.

Hans-Georg Lundahl looks further on blog and comes back

I mentioned having been accused of siding with heretics when it comes to Hovind.

Well, JAU, the writer you link to is a Methodist heretic. His bland obedience to his teachers when he was an English major is as bland as his obedience to his pastors in Bible College.

His previous blog post was "two commands that no Christian will obey" and the second one was Deuteronomy 5:11-12 and has to do with differences between OT justice and NT justice. Therefore also with OT punishments as being bloody in a corporeal way. But his first pick was Proverbs 31:6-7, and he states, quite correctly, that one can cite this for buying unfortunate men, including homeless such, a bottle of wine. What shocks me is his Puritan and very Un-Chestertonian conviction that obeying this implication would be a very Un-Christian thing.

He is part of a Puritan system endorsing Pharisaic hypocrisy when it comes to giving beggars money.

JAU

Well, I suppose I should give some response to fourteen posts. -- It seems to me that Methodists are among the most sensible of Protestant sects; and without common sense, theology is non-sense.

HGL

The good part of Methodism is that they are not Calvinists. As far as freewill is concerned. They are still sacramentarians and still lack Apostolic Succession. On top of that it is not just any Methodist but a Protestant one.

[I suppose one could call St Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort or St Francis of Sales a "Catholic Methodist", but that is not what I meant. I meant this Methodist was a Modernist one and used "Methodists" as normally for a usually Protestant sect.]

JAU

Of course, they are sacramentarians -- their tradition came through Anglicanism. which has no Sacrament. So, without looking outside of their tradition, they were right as far as that. Does their take on how to understand scripture differ from that of the Early Church, or did they rediscover something essential?

HGL

The Early Church understood the Old Testament exactly as St Thomas Aquinas or Pope Leo XIII did - with a few more waverings into extremes of "letter alone" or "only spiritual sense" that have been eliminated. Or had been, until new towters of "only spiritual senses" were accusing the take of Popes Leo XIII and St Pius X, of Theologians like St Augustine (who was also a bishop) or of Sts Jerome and Thomas Aquinas (who were priests) of being identical to the "letter alone" take.

JAU

So, for you, Scripture cannot be read as other forms of literature are?

HGL

I suppose by "other forms of literature" you mean "other forms of story-telling literature". I also presume that by "other forms of story telling literature" you mean Tolkien or Dostoevski rather than Titus Livy or than Tacitus and Sueton, whose narratives are meant as a statement about continuous facts in chronological order.

Try another strawman + ad hominem, they are getting entertaining.

Appendix

TriThemia

where did my comments go ?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

There are three of them above mine, and one of JAU between first and second of them.

Oh, Tri Themia, did you want them included in my blogpost?

Earliest comments before I jumped in:

ES

I like this blog am going to save it.

TriThemia

I think Orwell made it clear why "english majors" stop thinking

JAU

Because they can't calculate 1984?

TriThemia

duckspeak is not english

duckspeak majors quack truth=fundamentalism

Own comment

I think I spotted a reference to Duck Dynasty, and I do not agree. Nor do I find it a rational argument for the things said in the blogpost by Morgan Guyton. Which discussion is what I extracted from the comments below that status of JAU. I posted them there to give JAu a chance to answer, as seen above I was right, he did.