At the Guardian today, I’ve got a short bit about secular, mainly Continental philosophers who, in recent years, have turned to theology:
[Slavoj Zizek] is one of several leading thinkers in recent years who, though coming out of a deeply secular and often-Marxist bent, have made a turn toward theology. In 1997, Alain Badiou published a study of the apostle Paul, whom he took as an exemplar of his own influential philosophy of the “event”. Three years later, Giorgio Agamben responded in Italian with The Time That Remains, a painstaking exegesis of the first ten words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The purpose of both was not a more enlightened piety, but an inquiry into the texture of revolution. Paul is significant to them because he ushered in, and in the process described, a genuinely transformational social movement.
Comments
2 responses to “Theology for Atheists”
spiritual yes…………………….an inner transformation……………………….and in doing so effecting an outer. in 1cor13 paul says that anything without love is nothing and gains nothing.
all the law of the new covenant is summed up in the 2nd commandment. this means 2 things. (1) the only law that exists under the new covenant is that which embraces loving one’s neighbor……(2) only that which comes against christ concerning the law is that which comes against the 2nd commandment.
the three commandments of love are the core of the new covenant.
love god …………………god first loved us. in receiving that love we love god back with that same love, as well as ourselves and ore neighbor.
love self and neighbor………….our neighbor being everyone else. and we are to love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves.
love one another as i have loved you…………christ says that we are called to god love in the same way that christ loved…………………….we are to god love ourselves and our neighbor. it is not our love but by grace thru faith it is his love thru us.
as believers, we are totally dependent on christ thru us.
“i am the vine you are the branches . you can do nothing without me.”
christ said you will recognize what is of me by the fruit of the spirt that is in that around you.
the fruit of the spirit….love joy , peace………………………….
in christ it is a spirit thing not a works thing but instead thru the spirit(god love being spirit) ……………..works.
so apart from that which is of the 2nd commandment concerning the law “everything is permissable but not everything is constructive.
and now christ lives in each believer to lead each believer directly
socially directed indicates an action directed to an outer image, an outer goal.
one cannot say because i feed the poor i love the poor, or because i clothe the poor i love god.
a believer would say that because i love the poor i wil feed them, because i love god i wll clothe them.
Alan Johnson in Dissent skewers Zizek as a crypto-totalitarian, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1986