Interesting panel on Nicene Creed in BBC podcast. If you scroll down through "related" items you'll find more. It was particularly interesting to me, because one of the panel is Martin Palmer, who wrote the book I am now reading on 7th C. Taoist Christianity in China, The Jesus Sutras. He is a Chinese scholar, who translated them back into Modern English. (Holy Spirit is Pure Wind.)
To a friend who still might remember the hope that F. D. Maurice rekindled among American Anglicans in the 1960s: This is a selection from an essay that I will be posting on my blog, “Evolution, Tennyson, and Maurice.” Its argument is that Tennyson in 1849 is well aware of evolutionary theory and is seeking by means of Maurice’s theology to call for a science language that is not inherently amoral. Tennyson after examining his grief at the loss of his close friend in the context of a world described by science, which he does not dismiss, but wants to engage in a dialogue. He offers this challenge in canto 128 of “Memoriam” addressed to science, or better to its self-appointed spoke’s men,
ReplyDeleteIf all your office had to do
With old results that look like new;
If this were all your mission here,
To draw, to sheathe a useless sword,
To fool the crowd with glorious lies,
To cleave a creed in sects and cries,
To change the bearing of a word,
To shift an arbitrary power,
To cramp the student at his deak,
To make old bareness picturesque
And tuft with grass a feudal tower;
Why then my scorn might well descend
On you and yours. I see in part
That all, as in some piece of art,
Is toil cöoperant to an end.
I have put two section in red, because it completes the circle. Maurice’s primary claim in his theological work The Kingdom of Christ is that Christianity is creedal, not doctrinal which inevitable states the negative, what is not true, who is not in. This makes the church sectarian, something as old as Arius whose program was halted by the Nicene Creed. Maurice’s primary claim in his Christian Socialism was that core human value was “cooperation.” In Maurices understand these two elements govern a process which ends in God. One can see that Maurice, who was Tennyson’s Godfather is well represented in Tennyson’s thought.