Orthodoxy Scientifically Explained
This from Galsworthy's Forysyth Saga:
"Jolly looked at his father.
“Do you believe in God, Dad? I’ve never known.”
At so searching a question from one to whom it was impossible to make a light reply, Jolyon stood for a moment feeling his back tried by the digging.
“What do you mean by God?” he said; “there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There’s the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man—naturally one believes in That.”
“I see. That leaves out Christ, doesn’t it?”
Jolyon stared. Christ, the link between those two ideas! Out of the mouth of babes! Here was orthodoxy scientifically explained at last! The sublime poem of the Christ life was man’s attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after
all! Funny how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way!"
Wow! 'orthodoxy scientifically explained' indeed. Is any of the rest of it necessary?
2 comments:
I guess not... unless you don't need an explanation. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement - but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. It bothers me not in the slightest to believe in things which might be apparently contradictory; logic only gets one so far.
Julie, my dear, "believe in" means many things to many people. It may simply suggest an attitude, as you seem to have done here, or it may denote heartfelt convictions that guide a person's actions. And there are many other variations in what the words mean to various people.
The gospels make a great deal out of it, which led early church authorities, especially Constantine, to the emphatic implication of Jesus' often quoted statements about "belief" to mean that you must believe every statement that the "Church" makes of a theological nature, such as literal truth of every word of the Bible, inerrancy of the word, etc.
After a great deal of struggle numbers of people throughout the history of the Church gained a measure of freedom from these "mind forg'd manacles". Praise the Lord.
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