passeth human knowing
Don't see it now, but a news article early this morning reported a recent study showing that during sleep, neurons (or something, it was too early, I can’t remember the words) shrink and allow fluid to wash between them, flushing the brain of toxins. The study proved that sleep is a downtime of housecleaning that is vital to the brain’s health. Having experienced hallucinations while driving when too sleepy, I can imagine toxins affecting the brain’s physical integrity and mental product. In that regard, while doing my early reading I kept dozing off, so went to bed in Joe’s room and got a three hour nap. Thus the late post.
In our Adult Sunday School class we are talking about the church’s three creeds. Last Sunday we had an overall introduction, then recited the Athanasian Creed, Creed of Saint Athanasius, together as a way of introducing it, with some discussion. Its Latin name Quinque vult after the first line “Whosoever will be saved” is easier to say. We may revisit it tomorrow morning to let folks see the structure -- first part Trinity, second part Christ, and a chance to recognize the anathemas.
Tomorrow the Apostles Creed, Baptismal Covenant, as the most ancient document, with some mystery about its origins. It’s my favorite, the one we should say Sundays instead of the Nicene, for two reasons, first because in it we not only recite our belief in the Trinity, we make a commitment together in community about how our belief will affect our lives.
Do the creeds state absolute truth? They don’t really purport to, do they, they’re just statements of our belief as Christians -- except that the anathemas in the Quinque vult smack of asserting that this is absolute truth and that whether it is or not you better believe it anyway or you are going to hell. How does that discourse go that opens with the question about absolute truth?
Is there absolute truth? Yes. Because No, there is no absolute truth, offered as the absolute truth, proves the premise Yes, there is absolute truth.
Who said that? Socrates? Plato? Thomas? Alfred E. Neuman? Arias? Larry, Moe & Curly? If I knew, I don’t.
Does it matter whether truth, absolute truth, is concept or substance? Is this a table? Is reality the shadows on the wall in the cave, or the beings that cast the shadows, or the light, or the fire? If I stay forever chained in the cave, what is reality? Is reality objective or subjective? Is my reality the same as yours? Is reality beyond human knowing?
When you get to 78 you can waste your Saturday morning with such nonsense.
Thomas Aquinas has three elements in his proof of the existence of God. One has to do with a sense of God being implanted in each of us. Thomas was 13th century. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) later wrote his treatises On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, asserting that there is within us a sense of the infinite, a preconscious feeling of God acting upon each human being. Is that true? Or is it simply the difference between humans and “lower animals” who cannot contemplate themselves. If I contemplate myself I wonder where I came from and how all this came to be. Does my contemplating “is there greater than I?” and deciding “yes, there is” evidence a sense of the infinite? Or did an implanted sense lead to my contemplation and realization?
What I like about Schleiermacher is not his “sense of the infinite” but his view that certain things, having in mind elements of the Nicene Creed, are beyond human knowing. Yet human beings lay these things upon us by fiat and require that we believe.
Let us stand and affirm our faith as we say We believe ...
Does believing make so? In adult Sunday school we’re studying the creeds. Come rattle your certitude.
TW+