Christian Middle Way, The: The case against Christian belief but for Christian faith - Softcover

Ellis, Robert M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785357565 ISBN 13: 9781785357565

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

The Middle Way is the practical principle of avoiding both positive and negative absolutes, so as to develop provisional beliefs accessible to experience. Although inspired initially by the Buddha’s Middle Way, in Middle Way Philosophy Robert M. Ellis has developed it as a critical universalism: a way of separating the helpful from the unhelpful elements of any tradition. In this book, the Middle Way is applied to the Christian tradition in order to argue for a meaningful and positive interpretation of it, without the absolute beliefs that many assume to be essential to Christianity. Faith as an embodied, provisional confidence is distinguished from dogmatic belief. Recent developments in embodied meaning, brain lateralization from neuroscience, Jungian archetypes and the Jungian model of psychological integration are drawn on to support an account of how Christian faith is not only possible without ‘belief’ in God or Christ, but indeed puts us in a better position to access inspiration, moral purpose, responsibility and the basis of peace.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Robert M. Ellis is a graduate in Theology and Oriental Studies from Cambridge University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and is the founder of the Middle Way Society.

Robert M. Ellis is a graduate in Theology and Oriental Studies from Cambridge University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and is the founder of the Middle Way Society.

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The Christian Middle Way

The case against Christian Belief but for Christian faith

By Robert M. Ellis

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Robert M. Ellis
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-756-5

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
1. Introduction, 
2. Faith without belief, 
a. Belief and meaning, 
b. Faith and religious experience, 
c. God as archetype, 
d. Brain lateralisation and God, 
e. Human responsibility, 
3. Respecting God, 
a. The infinity argument, 
b. Holiness and awe, 
c. The prohibition of idolatry, 
d. The delusions of revelation, 
4. God, humans and creation, 
a. Three types of creation, 
b. The creation of human beings, 
c. The Fall, 
d. The Tree of Life, 
5. Jesus: Integrated teacher?, 
a. The dualistic contradictions of the Old Testament, 
b. Jesus finds the Middle Way, 
c. Jesus teaches the Middle Way, 
d. Was Jesus an absolutist? Authority and fulfilled prophecy, 
e. Was Jesus an absolutist? The miracles, 
f. Was Jesus an absolutist? His predictions, 
6. Christ the Middle Way, 
a. Christ the mediator, 
b. Annunciation and incarnation, 
c. Crucifixion and provisionality, 
d. Atonement, grace and salvation, 
e. Resurrection and hope, 
f. Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, 
7. Christian agnosticism, 
a. The courageous faith of uncertainty, 
b. The mystical tradition, 
c. Universality and other religions, 
d. Forks in the path: Christian divisions, 
e. Science and Christianity, 
f. Meeting atheism, 
g. Responding to feminism, 
8. Christian practice, 
a. Worship, 
b. Middle Way practices and psychology, 
c. The eucharist, 
d. Confession, 
e. Rites of passage, 
9. Christian ethics and politics, 
a. The contradictions of revelatory ethics, 
b. Ethics in the Spirit, 
c. Principial forms of ethics, 
d. Consequentialist forms of ethics, 
e. Virtue ethics, 
f. Christian political values, 
10. Conclusion, 
Notes and References, 
Endnotes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Despite a Christian family background, I have never managed to be a Christian in the way defined by most churches. I am not a 'believer', and could recite no creed without a sense of hypocrisy and conflict. But after many years of engagement with other traditions – Buddhist, philosophical and psychological – it has become increasingly clear to me that 'belief' is not what Christianity is most importantly about. It is quite possible to drink deeply of what Christianity has to offer, indeed to be 'Christian' in all the ways that matter – morally, spiritually and intellectually – without 'believing' such absolute propositions as that God exists, or that Jesus is the Son of God, or that Jesus saves believers from sin. Indeed, I will go further. Such beliefs have no positive practical effects on the lives of Christians, beyond being shortcuts to group conformity which may also have many negative effects. That is the conclusion of an argument that will be unpacked as this book progresses.

But this book is not merely about the disavowal of Christian 'belief'. It is also about something much more positive: the value of the meaning and faith that people find in their experience of the Christian tradition. Later I will go into the question of exactly what I mean by terms like 'meaning' and 'faith', but for the moment let us just mark them out as the bearers of all that is good in Christianity. It is God, or Christ, who inspires Christians to campaigns of justice and acts of love: not because they have committed themselves to abstract propositions about God, but because they experience the inspiration of God, who fills them with positivity and confidence. Belief is in no way necessary to inspiration and faith. In the meantime, the 'belief in' God and his revelations tends to inspire only inner repression, narrow partisan defensiveness, and even holy war.

For myself, I am at least culturally Christian, and I find the symbols and insights of Christianity much more deeply etched into my psyche than those of any other religion, despite an early rejection of my Christian heritage and about twenty years of engagement with Buddhism. Recently I found this reinforced for me by the words of Jung's Red Book:

You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is delusion. Christ is the way. You can certainly run away, but then you are no longer on the way.

What I take Jung to mean by this is that Christ, as an archetype, fulfils a certain function in the psyche, and for those who are culturally Christian, that function is not easily fulfilled in any other way. 'The way' for each individual leads from their starting point to their destination, and if one denies the full conditioning effect of one's starting point, one's way may be lost.

I have dedicated this book to my late father (a Baptist minister) – not because I would expect him to necessarily agree with everything in it, but because he provided me with an early experiential sense of the potential value of Christianity which I am only now beginning to recognise has sustained me throughout my life. My father observed the Christian conventions: but it was always clear, when you asked him about what was most valuable to him, that in his experience God is love. Love is an experience, not a belief.

I have returned to the re-engagement with Christianity marked by this book after the development of a practical philosophy that I believe to be applicable in the context of any tradition: Middle Way Philosophy. Despite its name, Middle Way Philosophy only owes some aspects of its inspiration to the Buddhist tradition, and is not dependent on that tradition. Instead, it understands the Middle Way universally, as a principle of human navigation. Given our embodied nature and our uncertainty, we can have no justification for choosing absolute beliefs that lie beyond that experience. However, what is distinctive about the Middle Way approach is the equal recognition that we have no justification for denying absolute beliefs. This creates a radical agnostic alternative that also steers us well clear of relativism, postmodernism, atheism or any other positions that are widely interpreted as being based (explicitly or implicitly) on such denials. If we don't know, we need to follow through the implications of not knowing even-handedly.

Agnosticism has been very unfairly treated by a popular tradition – both religious and atheist – that has failed to understand its potential. There is nothing wishy-washy, indecisive or necessarily vague about the agnosticism I will be recommending in this book. Indeed, it takes considerable resolve to avoid the magnetic pull of absolute affirmation or denial, together with the social institutions that entrench that duality. These opposed social institutions could most obviously be the institutions of the church versus secular humanist movements, but might just as easily be illustrated by the entrenched opposed sides arguing about abortion, or about whether Islam is or is not an intrinsic threat to liberal democracy. Nor is agnosticism only about God: wherever there are absolute beliefs on either side (for example, about freewill and determinism, mind and body, or any kind of absolute categorisation or boundary) agnosticism offers a challenge, in the form of a brave flag of peaceful...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785357565
• ISBN 13: 9781785357565
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar