Sells, relda,
Yes, I was naive in my understanding of apocalypse. I used to object to the use of the popular meaning of ‘logical’ in serious debates, and now I made the same mistake. Though there is apparently a difference between ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘eschatologist’, ‘eschatologist vision‘ and ‘eschatologist hope‘, makes more sense to me.

<<I have a problem with the two books in that it confirms that our knowledge is fragmented. >>

If you read a book on physics and another book on chemistry - and they do not contradict each other where physical chemistry is concerned - you do not get a fragmented knowledge. Neither do I think that if one accepts the two books as two Revelations - one with an accent on the past (scripture, tradition) the other on the future (ever deeper understanding of creation, through scientific investigations) - one is a lesser Christian than the one who wants one of the books be just an Appendix to the only one book he/she can understand. (Atheists do the same thing, they only swap the two books.)

“all knowledge of both heavenly and earthly things is an indissoluble unit”
What does here ‘indissoluble‘ mean?

<<Altizer ... says that we have inherited a compromise God from the collision of the Hebrew and Greek concepts>>

The same here. Two perspectives on the same thing, especially if they complement each other, usually enrich our knowledge. There are many philosophical or theological schools that integrate the two, showing that the Greek heritage, so important for modern science, enriched our understanding of Yahweh; take for example Aquinas and his successors, disciples or critics.

Peter, do you accept relda’s observation that you share common ground with existentialists? Existentialism can be seen as the 20th “continental“ complement to British analytic philosophy, is “pre-postmodern“ in its language, which makes it more accessible to me. For instance, neither Neitzsche nor Sartre etc. claimed to be Christian, neither Bultmann nor Marcel etc. claimed to be atheist: they all avoided the label “Christian atheist”, probably because they saw it, like I do, as a ‘contradictio in se’. (ctd)

(ctd) <<"..it is Newton more than any other thinker who has given us an infinite space that is simultaneously the body of the universe and the body of God..">>

This makes Newton sound like a pantheist, although as far as I know this is widely disputed. He rejected the trinitarian doctrine which is not disputed. I am not sufficiently qualified to judge these things, but what I know is that Newton tried to reconcile what he could read in the two Books mentioned above, the same as Barbour, Polkinghorne, Peacocke et al do it today. Of course, the latter have read many more Chapters in the Book of Nature than Newton; they also did not have a need to criticise or reject e.g. the trinitarian doctrine.

<<When a contemporary Christian confesses the death of God he is giving witness to the fact that the Christian tradition is no longer meaningful to him, that the Word is not present in its traditional form, and that God has died in the history in which he lives' (Alitzer)>>.

I think e.g. Malcolm Muggeridge said the same thing (The End of Christendom, 1980) without having to express this as the death of God, with its not only cultural but also metaphysical implications, irritating and confusing, intentionally or not, for the “ordinary Christian“.

<<(The church) is weaker and more mindless than ever before. In all major denominations, fights are going on because fundamentalism is so extraordinarily powerful today. Fundamentalism is in ultimate conflict with the modern world.>>

Alitzer is certainly not the only one who realises that the established churches are in a deep crisis. However, I believe that an escape to neither a “Christian atheism” nor evangelical fundamentalism is a solution. Neither for an individual nor a community. Whatever the solution, I do not think it can bypass the achievements (epistemological not technological!) of contemporary science by proclaiming a collision between the Hebrew God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Greek God of philosophers and scientists.

Sells,
I think you are too dismissive of Newton. There appears little doubt Newton arrived at many of his views through a strict biblical literalism, deriving from the Puritan tradition that had driven England to civil war. This literalism, incidentally, is not to be confused with the Christian fundamentalist movement of the early to mid 1900's (evolved from a reaction to the 18th. Century enlightenment thinking). It needs to be understood however, Newton's thinking was framed within a time where he had the psychological necessity of reconciling his scientific achievement with his pre-existing religious dogma.
Newton was also an alchemist, where alchemy was not only about the 'magic' of transmuting metals into gold but ultimately about matter itself and how God governed it. It’s fair to say that alchemy was the scientific theory of matter at that time. We need to look at 'science' in its real context.

Perhaps Newton's greatest intellectual but quite understandable blunder was he devoted as much time to investigations into eschatology or the divine timetable for the End of Days — the prophesied arrival of the Day of Judgment — as he did to his research in mathematics and physics. Paradoxically, this is also the inspiration that drove him.

Newton, no less than his frankly materialist or Deist successors, was well aware that the cosmological picture flowing from his own achievement left little room for an interventionist God, the miracle-working being whose constant attention is necessary to the steady functioning of the universe. An examination of Newton's religious writings (displayed in Israel’s National Library in Jerusalem)show he sensed that his own brilliant ideas constituted an argument for the deus absconditus (where philosophy can no longer be used as a theological starting point). This a conceptual innovation that was soon to become a standard item of skeptical Enlightenment thought.

cont'd..

Cont'd..
Interestingly enough, ardent atheist Richard Dawkins has also seen through the so called 'Fundamentalism' of Newton, 'December 25th is also the birth of Issac Newton, who revolutionized how we looked at the world through his laws of gravity. In so doing, he set us free from the shackles of religious dogma and allowed us to think for ourselves.'- R.D. (from New Statesman, 2008). It is important the reaction to Fundamentalism, however, does not now become scientifically dogmatic.

George,
I'm also interested in the ‘contradictio in se’ as given in Sell's "Christian atheism' - maybe he can shed a little light on how he reconciles the obvious, if not blatant illogicality.

Altizer certainly isn't the only one responding to a deeply divided Church - an organisation basically mute to many. Undoubtedly we often find a coherence in finding out 'what is not' where an escape to neither a “Christian atheism” nor evangelical fundamentalism is a solution'. Saying 'what is not', however, offers no solution. As irritating as someone like Alitzer is to 'conventional' Christians I find he express a coherence of thought where he describes us reaching a 'truly new communal space' arrived at not through a man-made revolution but through the 'power of an ancient or primordial praxis'. In other words there is a continuing movement within history outside of our own making.

George and Relda.
I do not like the term Christian atheism, certainly when it is applied to me. I do believe in God and attend church to worship Him. The point that I have been trying to make is that the God that the atheists do not believe in is also the God that I do not believe in because that God is defined in terms of immaterial or supernatural conscious being. Thus the concept of God is tied to Aristotelian understandings of being, substantia in the Latin. I think this is unbiblical in that the story of God constitutes a continuous narrative from the call of Abraham to the fulfilment of all things that presents him as being “in” the events. The Christian God is a God who lives in verbs, God creates, calls, divides, promises. Likewise in the liturgy God is present in the act of preaching and in the celebration of the sacraments. Christian worship is about the presence of God and he is present in action. This was the great discovery of Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian fathers and it was the crucial distinction that was not transmitted to the West by Boethius. Thus the doctrine of the Trinity, as expressed in the West had no hope of continuing without all kinds of logical problems that eventually led to its virtual demise. More on Newton later.

In earlier OLO posts I have attempted to simply describe my early experiences as a child growing up in the bush, playing, observing, wondering and being with my mates. These experiences aroused great curiosity about life that could be beautiful and chaotic, ancient and new, peaceful and cruel in the extreme as well as forever changing and evolving. It is not surprising with such a down to earth reality that I came to believe that the universe is infinite, unbounded and of an unbroken wholeness ....... never created and far from anthropocentric. i.e. a wholely world rather than some holy type needing an invented teddy father figure along with concocted religious role models and a priest class.

Over something like forty years since, along with all manner of reading and investigative experience, next to nothing has altered this personal, formative view of the universe and our place in it. It seems for some people there is this will to not allow ourselves to be deceived which also translates to the will not to deceive.

Take this situation. Aristotle said ... "That there never was a time when there was not motion, and never will be a time when there will not be motion", which I found understandable. However, later he (and probably pressured to,) changed and adopted this idea that an infinite regress is impossible. Why is the question.

To this day we see lies built on lies because of this now obsolete assumption of finite universal causality where people prefer not to need the real world when they can have an inexorable and schemingly designed fake one ....... and throw in a teddy as a perpetual broadcaster too? As two examples .... AGW and the big bang fictions.