![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Fun With Theology: Rahner and Swedenborg
It's 9:18pm, and it's almost my bedtime, but I just came home from a great class session, and am too fired up to go to sleep just yet.
In stark contrast to my current experience with my Swedenborgian class, my "Christian Anthropology" class is three hours of lively lecture and discussion led by a Catholic priest/theologian who is both highly intelligent and possessed of a great sense of humor, even where his own faith is concerned. I'm not just intellectual stimulated by this class, I have FUN.
Tonight's discussion was about Karl Rahner's theology of grace, followed by a discussion of original sin (it's not what most people think -- not where Rahner is concerned, anyway). It would have been a highly enjoyable session anyway, but it turns out that Rahner is very Swedenborgian in his thought. Like Swedenborg, he believes that our day-to-day choices shape who we are. After death, God does not judge us. We choose heaven or hell based on who our choices have made us and where we are going to be most comfortable.
Also like Swedenborg, Rahner believes that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus introduce a special kind of salvic grace to the world and human existence -- but a person does not have to believe anything about Jesus, or even know about him, in order to participate in that salvation. An individual can be open to the work of the Divine Spirit, and choose to act in the world with compassion, justice, truth, etc., and form a self who naturally becomes closer and closer to God. "Correct doctrine" can help this process, but there will not be a doctrinal quiz given at the pearly gates.
Catholicism is the last place I expected to find this kind of liberal (to my way of thinking) theology -- but I've had to revise some of my biases about Catholicism since starting this class. Like any other religious community, it has a range of beliefs. I've been pleasantly surprised -- and a bit humbled by my own broad-brushed negative judgement of the denomination. There is still a *lot* that I disagree with, but there's more there I can relate to and learn from than I had expected.
What's funny is that my professor has never heard of Swedenborg, so I'm a bit of an enigma to him. I'm looking forward to presenting him with an introductory volume of Swedenborgian theology.
In stark contrast to my current experience with my Swedenborgian class, my "Christian Anthropology" class is three hours of lively lecture and discussion led by a Catholic priest/theologian who is both highly intelligent and possessed of a great sense of humor, even where his own faith is concerned. I'm not just intellectual stimulated by this class, I have FUN.
Tonight's discussion was about Karl Rahner's theology of grace, followed by a discussion of original sin (it's not what most people think -- not where Rahner is concerned, anyway). It would have been a highly enjoyable session anyway, but it turns out that Rahner is very Swedenborgian in his thought. Like Swedenborg, he believes that our day-to-day choices shape who we are. After death, God does not judge us. We choose heaven or hell based on who our choices have made us and where we are going to be most comfortable.
Also like Swedenborg, Rahner believes that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus introduce a special kind of salvic grace to the world and human existence -- but a person does not have to believe anything about Jesus, or even know about him, in order to participate in that salvation. An individual can be open to the work of the Divine Spirit, and choose to act in the world with compassion, justice, truth, etc., and form a self who naturally becomes closer and closer to God. "Correct doctrine" can help this process, but there will not be a doctrinal quiz given at the pearly gates.
Catholicism is the last place I expected to find this kind of liberal (to my way of thinking) theology -- but I've had to revise some of my biases about Catholicism since starting this class. Like any other religious community, it has a range of beliefs. I've been pleasantly surprised -- and a bit humbled by my own broad-brushed negative judgement of the denomination. There is still a *lot* that I disagree with, but there's more there I can relate to and learn from than I had expected.
What's funny is that my professor has never heard of Swedenborg, so I'm a bit of an enigma to him. I'm looking forward to presenting him with an introductory volume of Swedenborgian theology.
Catholicism
name is Ryan Daniel Mulderig. This has given me a little bit of an
insiders view of the faith I left behind. One of the things that has
always struck me about the religion is that while it will produce some
marvelous thinkers with very intriguing ideas, most of it is either
ignored or suppressed by the hierarchy. They also suffer under the weight
of history. Being a 1500+ year old organization means that you are
going to have made a lot of mistakes in the past. It would be nice if
the church would learn from them, but it does not seem too, repeating
some of them over and over again. Its relation to Judaism comes to
mind. Of all places, the onion caught some of my thinking in this
article: http://www.theonion.com/3942/top_story.html (http://www.theonion.com/3942/top_story.html).
Re: Catholicism
My point was that prior to the last month or so, that's *all* that I saw of the Catholic church. I'm seeing another side of it in some of the theologians we've been reading, not to mention in my professor and many of my classmates (I'm in an ecumenical program hosted by a Catholic university). Simply coming from the Catholic tradition is not grounds for automatic dismissal.
Re: Catholicism
However, that being said, there have been interesting thinkers in the Catholic tradition, if only because for a long time it was the only game in western Europe. I have also met some profoundly spiritual people in the tradition. One of the most interesting with a man by the name of Hua Tran. I met him in my Tae Kwon Do class. He had come to Georgia Tech from Notre Dame to get a masters in Aerospace Engineering. Needless to say, he was a rather bright gentleman. We would have long and winding discussion on the nature of life with and without faith. When he finished Tech he entered the seminary, and unfortunately, I lost track of him at that point. He never did quite understand how I could handle the hassle of like without faith to rely on, and I never could find a way to articulate to him how that option worked.
viz9qdkw
(Anonymous) 2016-12-30 05:25 pm (UTC)(link)qs4xzaq1
(Anonymous) 2016-12-20 11:14 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
i recommend she who is by elizabeth johnson and in memory of her by elisabeth schussler-fiorenza if you haven't read them yet. they're both pretty hardcore academic theology, but very very good. (i had thought s-f was protestant, but read something recently that suggested she's catholic, so i'm confused now. but she's pretty foundational in any case.)
no subject
It's actually a fairly severe failure of imagination to believe that an institution as large and as old as the Catholic Church would have a homogenous culture -- even if that's the impression it likes to give to the world.
wvwjv3tn
(Anonymous) 2017-01-01 05:00 am (UTC)(link)m3k0luxs
(Anonymous) 2017-01-26 02:47 pm (UTC)(link)