Theological Notebook: The NYT Tells Us Another Artifact Threatens To Destroy Christianity. Again.

[novak]

itihasa drew my attention to a New York Times article with her blurb: A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. The

Comments

[friede]

Your proposed books are always a zillion times more interesting than mine...

[novak]

Well, it's fun - and easy - to think up a cheeky title. Still, I do think it would be kind of interesting, as well as backhandedly apologetical, to look at this phenomenon: Age after Age, this movement or that philosophy confidently proclaims that it has put the final nail into Christianity's coffin, and yet Christianity goes on, usually absorbing anything useful that the philosophy or movement produced, and in time, usually being the chief institution for the preservation of the history or [what it judges "useful"] legacy of that movement. (Think of the Church as champion of Reason today and aspects of the Enlightenment, which contemporary philosophy has abandoned it.) From the Roman genocidal policies to Manichaeanism, to hostile humanism in the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, to Marxism, Freudianism, the legacies of Feuerbach and Nietzsche and that obscurantism of today, it kind of adds up to an interesting phenomenon in its own right.

And I've just copyrighted the above thesis. All rights reserved. Michael Anthony

[friede]

I do agree. You've got the makings of such an interestin' public intellectual persona...

[novak]

Oi. Have I ever footdragged on that possibility! (Both trying to tame any such ambitions and of course being curious about them....)