ARIZONA – 2017

January 1 — 

Lovely evening, beginning with mass at St. Michael’s, where I connected with Peter Medine. Then dinner at one of my favorites: Los Mariscos de Chihuahua. Now, Chihuahua is landlocked, so where do the mariscos come from?  Well, the story is that somewhere (probably Nogales) there is a grocery store called Chihuahua, and right next door a little fish restaurant. The restaurant was simply called Los Mariscos, and everybody just added the name of its bigger neighbor to identify it. It is now a successful local chain here in Tucson. They have a fabulous sauce called culichi, a green cheese sauce. It is quite mild but there must be some pepper in it, because it has a little bit of tang. Tonight, their homemade salsa was a lovely golden color! I thought it might have something to do with holiday festivities, but my waiter assured me that it was only because the tomatoes weren’t very red!

There is a spectacular display in the sky tonight: the crescent of the waxing new Moon is conjoined with an unbelievably-bright Venus. Positively Islamic!

January 10 — 

I ran across a really interesting book called the Jesus Sutras, by Martin Palmer. He seems to be a respectable scholar and authority on both China and Christian history. He is well acquainted with Eastern Orthodoxy and its art. The gist is that Christians came across the silk Road to China sometime in the seventh century will, maybe even before. He found an 80 foot pagoda, which locals believe to have been built by “monks from the West.” A Japanese archaeologist had called it Da Qi, meaning “Monastery of the Westerners." Palmer hypothesizes a kind of Taoist Christianity.

This is fascinating for many reasons. The monks in question would have been Syrian or Chaldean Christians, probably Nestorians. They would have recognized Jesus as a Supreme Teacher, with a unique relationship to God, but their idea of Incarnation differed from Mediterranean orthodoxy, both Eastern and Western. From the Council of Ephesus (ad431) their notion was regarded as heretical: that Jesus had two natures (human and divine) expressed by two personæ, joined only by unity of will. It will be interesting to see how this Christology may have facilitated a Taoist/Christian/Buddhist synthesis.

Meanwhile, the development of Greek and Latin Christianity agreed upon the two natures expressed by one Person, both divine and human. [Council of Chalcedon, ad451.] Could it be that the Nestorian view permitted them to regard Jesus as a Sage — perhaps the greatest, but still one among many. In that case, their good news might be more intelligible, in Chinese culture, than the Chalcedonian orthodoxy. This may have some relevance to our own time. It raises the question of the Work of Christ, what English speakers call the doctrine of the Atonement.

What did Jesus accomplish for us? It will be interesting to see what the Taoist Christians thought. And how does this all relate to the Pauline epistles, and the Mystery of the Cross? The Chinese context might have developed  in a way different from the Roman/hellenistic context.