Nietzche has bequeathed Christian thought a most beautiful gift....this first eruption of the post-modern, which arrived appropriately as a rediscovery of pagan ontology and aesthetics, reminds theology that against the God declared in Christ, Dionysus and Apollo stand as allies, guarding an enclosed world of chaos and order against the anarchic prodigality of his love... And so theology is reminded that it has another tale. One in which the being of the creation is an essential peace, hospitable to all true difference, refecting the infinite peace of God's triune life in its beauty and diversity
DB Hart. Beauty of the infinite 127
Hart argues that both traditional metaphysics and rejections of metaphysics assume an essentialy chaotic and violent cosmos. One attempts to control the chaos through totalising schemes, eliminating difference. The other advises us to embrace the chaos and fragmentation. But christian theology simply doesn't assume this fundamental violence
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Never mind that Christianity in the form of the "catholic" church is an inherently totalitarian organization, which would if allowed to do and unimpeded take over the entire world.
This is signaled by its claim to be the ONLY source of truth in the world, or the one true faith, way and revelation.
Such a statement necessarily implies that ALL other Faith Traditions and their various cultural expressions are INHERENTLY false and full of "relativistic errors, and that they thus HAVE to be "converted" to the one true way.
Islam of course also specializes in this power seeking conceit--and tactic on the world stage. Even more so in fact.
Nietzsche was just reflecting on something that had ALREADY HAPPENED to the consciousness of Western man (male and female).
The fact that The Divine Light and the even the possibility of a Truly Divine Life had been emptied from the cultural land or mind scape of the West.
For instance NO ILLUMINATED Saints have appeared in the West since the Renaissance.
On the then obvious fact that it was impossible to find The Divine Reality within the then Christian churches. It is of course even worse now in 2010---totally impossible even.
The Renaissance was the collapse of the "God"-civilization that preceded it--the civilization based on ENTIRELY MYTHOLOGIZED presumptions about The Divine Reality. The Renaissance destroyed that earlier form of civilization. With the Renaissance, "God"-myth-based civilization was replaced with human-based civilization, or gross level ego-civilization only. That ego-civilization came to its essential end in the twentieth century.
This ego-civilization idealized the gross level ego, and it inevitably ended with a world of godless egos destroying one another.
At another that gross ego-civilization was just an extension of the drive to total power and control at the root of the entire Western cultural project, including its religion, which, like all religions, was just an extension of the collective power seeking tribal ego.
The Renaissance just removed the the various "God" conceits that justified that totalizing drive.
anonymous, I think DB Hart would agree with much of your historical assesment of the chuch. Though he would disagree that every claim to truth is essentialy an act of violence or power play. Doubtless many are, but if christians were true to their own narrative, which has at it's centre God suffering for his enemies, their claims to truth shouldn't be violent.
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