Holy Fool
My alleged "tiresome error" is a misunderstanding on P Blosser's part; the paragraph you quote contains many erroneous accounts of what I actually say in the piece he is replying to. Have you even bothered to check?
I do NOT subscribe to a dichotomy of noumenon and phenomenon -- my entire account of Christology is based on the claim that John 1.14 names the phenomenon of the incarnation which is itself the reality, which we do NOT go behind to some noumenon (Johannine nonduality, Jn 14.9). And it is a travesty to suggest that I propagate the following absurdities: such blithe sophomorisms as "Your opinions about religion are true for you, and mine are true for me," based on the uncritical assumption that opinions about religion, because they pertain to the realm of personal "values" and not to the realm of empirically varifiable "facts," cannot be objectively right or wrong.
It seems to me that you yourself, who are unable even to spell my name accurately, show a remarkable blitheness toward truth and error.
Well, well, Father. Getting our Irish up a bit late in the evening, are we? Or is it early for you in Japan. As to the name, my apologies for carelessness. As you know doubt have seen by now, I've corrected my error.Has it occured to you to correct yours?
You rant about the indignity of my agreeing with the Papist. Perhaps you need to make a clearer case as to how your rather curious interpretation of Chalcedon does not ultimately demonstrate the flawed premise that the Papists notes.
After all, this does not deny the Papists' case:
If we see `the Word became flesh' as a statement of the same order as `God is Spirit' or `God is light', namely, as a resume of Christian experience, conveying a contemplative insight which one can appropriate only by a continual opening of the mind, then we can go beyond efforts to pin the event down to objective ontological privileges enjoyed by Jesus. Rather than a once-for-all ontological conjunction, somewhat magically and fetishistically located at the moment of Christ's conception, can we not think of incarnation as the transformation of this human life, in all its extensions, into manifestation of God, just as in the Eucharist, the meal-event is `transubstantiated' into a communion in the paschal mystery, so that its basic reality or `substance' now has no independent existence alongside what it has become?Sure you can--if you ignore the mystery of Mary's virginal conception, Jesus words to Mary and Joseph when they found him in the Temple after he'd been missing for four days and any number of references to Christ in the prophets and in Paul. For someone that claims to value scripture as the basis for understanding revelation, you sure discount a lot of it!
Your insight of looking to see the balance of Jesus as God and Man as a human life transformed through the Word of God and the encounter between humanity and God through Christ as the "milieu" in which this occurs distorts Revelation as presented in the integrity of scripture. It's utilitarian structure renders the historical Jesus as one with the Christ of Faith more through function than through identity. Thus, you end any possibility of people having a living encounter with Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh.
The Second Vatican Council addressed your legitimate concern that Christ's humanity could be underemphasized in favor of his divinity:
"He who is the 'image of the invisible God' (Col 1:15), is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that is was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his Incarnation, he, the son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Born of the Virgi
Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things except sin"Your re-formulation of an infallible council's doctrine is unnecessary and counter-productive. Whether you realize it or not, you advocate the scientism-above-all fallacy that continues the Enlightenment's complication of Martin Luther's tragic mistake--the divorce of Reason and Faith. As such, you're prescription is more gnostic than Catholic. The Papist had you right from the beginning.
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