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Originally Posted by The Cobbler's Apprentice
No "therefore" intended. Just relevant.
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Just expanding now I'm getting my morning caffeine shot.
I was dipping into theologians such as John Hicks in my early twenties. I'm now 72. Back then he was suggesting that as far as our Faith Traditions are concerned they should be seen as each revolving around God, not Christianity. I took that on board. Ah, say the doctrinaire,
that is when the Cobbler began his long descent into the pit, to the wailing and gnashing of teeth. So be it. As I say, I took it on board and now it is second nature to my mind/heart to relate to our world in such a way.
Perhaps going off at a tangent - but my own woolly mind does not think so - Thomas Merton (yes, him again, and no, I will not "ditch" him or anyone else at the say so of anyone in this Forum) once spoke of "belief" and related it to a passage from the Church Father Irenaeus (A passage that my own understanding and experience associates with the Pure Land notion of "being made to become so (of itself) without/beyond the calculation of the devotee, where "no working is true working")
Irenaeus wrote:- "If you are the work of God wait patiently for the hand of your artist who makes all things at an opportune time........Give to Him a pure and supple heart and watch over the form which the artist shapes in you........lest, in hardness, you lose the traces of his fingers......"
Merton comments......
The reification of faith. Real meaning of the phrase we are saved by faith = we are saved by Christ, whom we encounter in faith. But constant disputation about faith has made Christians become obsessed with faith almost as an object, at least as an experience, a "thing" and in concentrating upon it they lose sight of Christ. Whereas faith without the encounter with Christ and without His presence is less than nothing. It is the deadest of dead works, an act elicited in a moral and existential void. To seek to believe that one believes, and arbitrarily to decree that one believes, and then to conclude that this gymnastic has been blessed by Christ - this is pathological Christianity. And a Christianity of works. One has this mental gymnastic in which to trust. One is safe, one possesses the psychic key to salvation"
The key as I see it is in the "encounter with Christ". We do not dictate when it has happened or when. Personally I have no idea as to whether Inter-faith is "viable". If others wish to dictate exactly what any "encounter" with Christ - or Tao, or Logos, or Word, or Allah, or Reality-as-is, or Amida, or Word - is, or must consist of according to their own belief, creed, dogma or particular interpretation of any book, holy or not, then all I can say is, "Get on wirh it, and may your God go with you."
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