One reads blogs, I suppose, in the hope of garnering an occasional illuminating or useful fragment of information. Now I turn the matter on its head and ask readers (few as they may be!) to help in formulating an answer to the perduring question: “Whence commeth our vision of the meaning and destiny of life?”
Specifically, here is the question that has vexed me for a long time now: Do I find my vision of reality in the gospel stories of Jesus or in a general philosophical analysis of existence? Or, are they the same thing as Hegel held – religion being the pictorial form of philosophy’s rational truth? Does historical research into the words and works of Jesus (as the early members of the Jesus movement remembered them) supply us with an understanding of humans, history, nature, and God? Or do we need to undertake a philosophical analysis of existence to extrapolate an answer to these fundamental life-questions?
Some may wonder why I fix on these particular constituents of reality. Let me explain. During a long career of teaching religion, I would often sneak in my underlying understanding of what religion is – a view which has changed at little, but not much, over the decades. A typical instance occurs in my most recent book (2016) Disclosures: Symbols, Worlds, Selves:
"Religion is a human activity in which people participate committedly in an historical tradition that induces and expresses the existential selfhood or personal faith of the participants in virtue of the tradition’s symbolic communication of a worldview and set of values" (p. 7).
What is not explicitly stated here is the content of a worldview (or, as I alternatively, say “cosmology”). This means our experienced world. This entails humans, history, nature, and ultimacy. There is nothing else of existential significance. Tell me what your cosmology (lifeworld) is and I will know so much about your personal faith that the rest does not matter.
Back to the immediate task at hand for which I am asking help. I would welcome an exhaustive study of the New Testament to uncover Jesus’ articulated or tacit viewpoint to place along the existential explorations of Clifford Geertz, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann – for example – to see the points of congruence or diversion.
So:
To Reader A I would say: On the basis of your sustained reading of, and reflection on, the historical Jesus what is his understanding of history?
To Reader B, similarly: What is Jesus’ view of human beings as individuals and as society?
To Reader C: What is Jesus’ perception and evaluation of the natural world?
To Reader D: What is Jesus’ vision of God, of ultimacy?
Then we can lay this alongside the understandings, insights, and viewpoints from wheresoever we derive them (though I have in mind, as I intimated, those of a philosophical anthropology bent) and see what we want or need to appropriate to give our lives meaning, worth and direction.