Thursday, April 07, 2016

The Ultimate Reality: Jesus Christ, and Therefore, The Epistemic Trump.


All authentic indicators point to Jesus Christ - God Man - as the ontological center of all that is.  Therefore, Christ is the Epistemic Trump and only key to authentic Knowledge.

1) Joseph Ratzinger: " Psalm 18... It begins like this: “In aeternum, Domine, verbum tuum constitutum est in caelo... firmasti terram, et permanet”. This refers to the solidity of the Word. It is solid, it is the true reality on which we must base our life. Let us remember the words of Jesus who continues the words of this Psalm: “Sky and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away”. Humanly speaking, the word, my human word, is almost nothing in reality, but a breath. As soon as it is pronounced, it disappears. It seems like nothing. But already the human word has incredible force. It is words that create history, it is words that form thoughts, the thoughts that create the word. It is the word that forms history, reality.

      "Even more, the Word of God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We must change our notion that matter, solid things, things we can touch, is the most solid, the most certain reality. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord speaks to us about the two possible foundations for building the house of one’s life: sand and rock. He who builds on sand only builds on visible and tangible things, on success, on career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all this one day will vanish. We can see this now with the fall of two large banks: this money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the true realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order. Who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is he who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the foundation of all things. Realist is he who builds his life on this foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to build life" (Keynote Address, Synod on the Word of God, October 6, 2008).



2) Robert Barron (commenting on Col. 1, 15)“In this Jesus, all things have come to be; he is the prototype of all finite existence, even of those great powers that transcend the world and govern human affiars. If we re tempted to understand his influence as only a thing of the past, we are corrected: 'in him all things hold together' v. 17).  Jesus is not only the one in whom things were created but also the one in whom they presently exist and through whom they inhere in one another. And if we are inclined to view the future as a dimension of creation untouched by Christ, we are set straight: ‘Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’(v. 20). Individuals, societies, cultures, animals, plants, planets and the stars – all will be drawn into an eschatological harmony through him. Mind you, Jesus is not merely the symbol of an intelligibility, coherence, and reconciliation  that can exist apart from him; rather, he is the active and indispensable means by which these realities come to be. This Jesus, in short, is the all-embracing, all-including, all reconciling Lord of whatever is to be found in the dimensions of time and space;" "The Priority of Christ" Brazos (2007) 134-135. 

3) Romano Guardini: "The person of Jesus is unprecedented and therefore measurable by no already existing norm. Christian recognition consists of realizing that all things really began with Jesus Christ; that he is his own norm - and therefore ours - for he is Truth.
   Christ's effect upon the world can be compared with nothing in its history save its own creation: 'In the beginning God created heaven, and earth.' What takes place in Christ is of the same order  as the original act of creation, though on a still higher level. For the beginning of the new creation is as far superior to the love which created the stars, plants, animals and men. That is what the words mean: 'I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and what will I but that it be kindled"' (Luke 12, 49). It is the fire of new becoming; not only 'truth' or 'love,' but the incandescence of new creation" ["The Lord" Henry Regnery (1954) 306-307]

Barron's Conclusion: “Now what follows from these breathtaking descriptions is a centrally important epistemic claim: that Jesus cannot be measured by a criterion outside of himself or viewed from a perspective higher than himself.”[1] BloggerThat is, you cannot apply a metaphysic of “being” taken “from below” – i.e. from the experience of the created world [except the created human person going out of himself]. And this because there cannot be any created things without the Creator. The Being of God and the being of things have two totally different meanings save that they are (or can be). Barron writes: “He cannot be understood as one object among many or surveyed blandly by a disinterested observer. If such perspectives were possible, then he would not be the all-grounding Word or the criterion than which no more final can be thought. If we sought to know him in this way, we would not only come to incorrect conclusions but also involve ourselves in a sort of operational contradiction. To be consistent with these accounts, we must say that Jesus determines not only what there is to be known (since he is the organizing principle of finite being) but also how we are to know what is to known (since the mind itself is a creature, made and determined through him).
                “A Christ-illumined mind in search of Christ-determined forms seems to be the epistemology implicit in Colossians and the Johannine prologue. Further, as Bruce Marshall has argued, this primacy implies that the narratives concerning Jesus must, for Christians, be an epistemic trump, that is to say, an articulation of reality that must hold sway over and against all rival articulations, be they scientific, psychological, sociological, philosophical, or religious. To hold to Colossians and the prologue to John is to have a clear negative criterion concerning all claims to ultimate truth: whatever runs contrary to the basic claims entailed in the narratives concerning Jesus must certainly be false.”[2]




[1]Ibid 135.
[2]Ibid

And now, Richard Rohr: 


Dying and Living in Christ
Thursday, April 7, 2016
Paul uses the phrase en Christo, in Christ, around seventy times. He's trying to describe this larger life in which we are participating. He speaks of belonging to Christ, of being possessed by Christ, captured by Christ, apprehended by Christ. He says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). Paul speaks of being clothed by Christ. He tells us to put on Christ. He says he suffers with Christ, he's crucified with Christ, he dies with Christ, he's buried with Christ. He's raised up with Christ, he lives with Christ, and Paul says he's making up in his body the afflictions which still must be undergone by Christ.
Paul writes, "All belongs to you, you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God" (see 1 Corinthians 3:21-23). He's grasping at mystical language for describing how we participate in this reality that is larger than our individual lives. Being "in Christ" will eventually lead us to join in the universal pattern of death and resurrection that Christ went through. This is the universal initiation experience, the transformative experience that all human beings go through whereby we come to know what's real. We must go into the death of the small self in order to discover the Big Self, the True Self. At the mystical level, all the world religions say this.
In contemplation we're consciously choosing to let go of our identification with our mind and our identification with our life situation or our false self so that we can fall into the One True Life, which is bigger than each of us, which is moving into a different body, a different state, a different consciousness that Christians call Christ consciousness. For Paul it is his participation in Christ which gives him the courage to walk through each state: passion, death, and resurrection--all of which are brought to focus in the life of Jesus. Most people were told to love Jesus without being invited to love Christ. "The Christ" is the Big Picture of God's enfleshment in all of creation since the beginning of time (Colossians 1:15-20); Jesus is the distilled, personal enfleshment that brings this primal "anointing" of the material world to one concrete loving and loveable moment.

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