Chapter Two - Severity and flux
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Summary
Infinite humbling and grace, and then a struggling born of gratitude – this is Christianity.
(Kierkegaard 1851b, p. 434)Christianity … in its philosophical stance … takes the bull of impermanence [including time, body, and history] by the horns and shakes it into permanence.
(Smith 1970, p. 171)What, if anything, is the bearing of the flux, or impermanence, of this world on a commitment to the severe God of Jewish and Christian theism? This chapter contends that the bearing is positive rather than negative, given the redemptive character and aims of this mysterious God. It proposes that a distinctive agapē struggle involving humans and God is an elusive indicator of permanence in connection with this redemptive God. Philosophers of religion typically have neglected this important lesson, often as a result of looking for permanence in the wrong places. We shall identify the upshot of this lesson for the available evidence for God. This chapter offers a broad vision of such evidence on the basis of plausibility considerations, and this vision opens up some new prospects in the philosophy of religion, particularly in connection with divine severity and human evidence for God.
Flux in life
We all have various experiences as we read a sentence on a page, for instance, and we have various experiences prior to reading the sentence and after reading it. Many, if not all, of these experiences are transitory, but some of them are nonetheless salient, even strikingly salient, such as our hearing a screaming police siren or a roaring jet engine. My world of experience – like that of many other people, I suspect – seems to be largely in motion rather than static. This world of experience can become tiring and exhausting in all of its ongoing movement, and such movement can be confusing and even psychologically overwhelming for some people. Even so, change can be for the good; it need not be bad for humans.
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- The Severity of GodReligion and Philosophy Reconceived, pp. 54 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013