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Pill Pod 154 - Christian Intellectuals at the End of History
🕑 Added 2024-01-27 21:18:51 +0000 UTCWhile no one is happy that history has ended, few are quite as whiny about it as Christian conservatives. We delved through a treasure trove of the Christian intellectual right—"The Imaginative Conservative"—to find out what they think history is for, and how to respond to it's having ended.
Comments
Qoheleth
oh, I got to the part where you already know this. haha
Qoheleth
The answer to the question about why Christianity has this weird deal where we are “just waiting for Jesus” requires just a tiny bit of background on critical scholarship. Critical scholars of the Bible and NT near universally agree that early Christian’s believed the world was ending in their lifetime. “Heaven” was the new world that would contain those who survived the judgement. However as time went on and the end did not occur, soon Christians had to start pushing it out further and further. Now it’s thousands of years later.
Alex B
Religions are evolving autopoetic systems that offer protection to their followers in particular contexts. Some of them work like a type of therapy (could this be a contributory cause to the age of enlightenment?) and maybe the people who are in them today arr some of those that need it the most
Dony Top5
This episode fits in well with my book club hitting the second book of Brothers Karamazov with the discussion of "Ecclesiastical Courts"😎
Plastic Pills
Thanks!
Ben Lawrence
His lectures came into my youtube feed at some point. I've always been interested in the wider context of church history since the typical evangelical narrative I heard from my community was Christ, Paul, skip about 1000 years of Catholic nonsense and then we get to Martin Luther. In one lecture Hamer talks about the kind of evolutionary branching of Christian schools even from the very beginning and gives context to why Paul's variant won out more or less over the other sects, and how alot of the reasons for that were historically contingent. I've never seen him on a podcast but idk if he's well known enough to be invited. He has a public contact page so you could shoot him an email https://www.centreplace.ca/contact
Plastic Pills
How did you guys hear about him? Does he do other podcasts?
secretasiandan
Came here to mention John hamer as well, would love to hear the discussion
Mike Ramer
I think one tradition within the Christian and Jewish is the tendency to interpret history as venue in which God rescues humanity from its inability to live in peace with the rest of “creation”. This is to say that God created others to join in the trinitarian “open friendship”, and God teaches humanity how to be about that life- not for the sake of ever going to heaven, but for a healthy / flourishing earth. God took the side of matter. But the twist is, this history already ended in the cross. Which is why St Paul called the cross the apocalypse. So I think there is some resonance with baudrillard, although obviously not the same.
john 7
Will there be Pearly Gates ?
Robert Sherrard
The summary between 1:00 and 1:50 was more convincing than the last three episodes 😭
Ben Lawrence
You guys should see if John Hamer from Centre Place could come on and discuss these issues. He's a pastor and historian in Toronto. He gives regular long form YouTube lectures on church history and theology. He might be able to provide some insight on how modern Evangelicals view history and historical theological concepts. Also Eric is correct imo. I think modern evangelicals typically just opportunistically use scripture to support conservative ideology. I don't believe they have a larger goal for society beyond their egoistic need to matter to larger historical narratives, and reinforcement of their historical narcissism.
Daniel Stoltzfus
Ex-evangelical (and ostensibly ex-amish lol) here to provide some commentary on christian ontology and theory of history. Within christian denominations there is disagreement on when we all get to heaven. Some people think it's directly after you die, some people think we all get there at once, and others believe we are held in a place named in the old testament called Abraham's Bosom until the second coming of christ. On theory of history, we are all basically here just to give glory to god and to be oppressed for giving said glory. A developmental theory of history could emerge based in the expanse of glory—more people giving more glory as progress—but this is ultimately futile because the anti-christ will eventually emerge, receive all the glory, and kick off the second coming of christ. Also, heaven is in the bible; it's just ideas of hell that come from Dante.
G. Harrison
*only jokes* if they want to live anachronistically, no Kindles or modern music or progress, just their ideal past, perhaps they should follow suit of the Amish.
