tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16086974211870434792012-01-24T09:51:27.007-06:00this blog develops the idea that a theory of man in history can be worked out around the theme that man's self expression in culture and society is motivated by the desire to find meaning in man's existence. i proceed by summarizing seminal works that provide insights into the dynamics of this process, with the view that the culmination of this exploration was reached with god's self revelation in jesus. i'll hopefully also explore the developments that followed this event.mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.comBlogger521100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-8121531208601011412012-01-17T17:40:00.003-06:002012-01-24T09:51:27.079-06:00

Back in November and early December of 2011, Crisis Magazine ran two articles that address the issue of change in Church teaching.  The first, Catholics and “Usury”: A Tragic History, by Jeffrey Tucker, addresses an issue that, at first glance, appears to be largely of historical interest--although the history of that problematic issue ran on for well over a millenium.  Usury, of course, is a

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-49754185484891334372011-12-18T20:11:00.002-06:002011-12-18T20:14:57.795-06:00

Recapitulation This project began with an examination of the "archaic ontology" described in the works of Mircea Eliade--the ontology of the man of "archaic" or traditional cultures.  It is our thesis that the basis outlook of the archaic ontology served as the basis for most later developments in the intellectual history of mankind, and that only by coming to an understanding of archaic

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-63068272632097390362011-09-07T11:48:00.004-05:002011-09-09T10:17:27.643-05:00

G. K. Chesterton's magnum opus, The Everlasting Man, amounts to a theory of man in history from a Christian apologetic perspective.  The overarching theme is that what could be called the "methodology" of the Christian revelation--God's self revelation in Jesus rather than in a book--is remarkably "in tune with" human nature as we see it in history.  While it would be unwise to seek a complete

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-21097025629069745202011-08-23T20:15:00.004-05:002011-08-23T22:47:44.372-05:00

I'm in the process of constructing a PDF document containing most of these posts to date.  I'm also editing the documents to varying degrees--some very little, some to a greater extent.  The PDF document is somewhat differently ordered.  While it remains basically in historical order, there have been a few changes.  So far I've completed work up to Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The 1988

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-12341832903733065292011-07-28T11:46:00.007-05:002011-09-01T10:31:19.694-05:00

Both Etienne Gilson, in his classic study The Unity of Philosophical Experience (UPE, 1937), and Benedict XVI in his 2006 address at the University of Regensburg (Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization)--previously discussed in Benedict at Regensburg--have found it useful in discussing the crisis of the West to compare the Western crisis to the earlier crisis of Islamic thought.  As we

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-45524267328046938722011-05-13T13:56:00.003-05:002011-09-01T09:38:24.169-05:00

David Knowles begins his chapter on St. Augustine in The Evolution of Medieval Thought by noting Augustine's almost overwhelming influence not only on Medieval thought but on all Western Christendom. In fact, Knowles' judgment could, and should, be extended to Western thought as a whole in many important respects: St Augustine, it would be generally agreed, has had a greater influence upon the

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-77293853921603968232011-04-30T22:23:00.023-05:002011-08-25T09:42:55.677-05:00

Over two years ago we concluded Messy Revelation by stating:The old models of exegesis--coded messages that are uncovered and interpreted by exegetes using grammar, allegory, typology, etc.,--are attempts to house train God, to make his self revelation in Jesus conform to a pattern that is comfortable for men. But is it reasonable that we should expect this of God? Enns' answer, if I may extend

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-41202933234596923762011-04-18T19:19:00.007-05:002011-08-24T09:12:47.633-05:00

What follows is the text of an email I sent some years ago.  Since it constitutes in many respects the outline of a theory of revelation it seemed appropriate to post a lightly edited version of it. Sometimes I recommend books more for the ideas and issues that they raise than for the actual solutions that they offer. With regard to Eliade, I see his importance as due to his formulation of what

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-13825197173183759692011-04-18T12:57:00.007-05:002011-08-31T21:23:20.464-05:00

J. N. D. Kelly resumes his discussion of original sin in Chapter XIII of Early Christian Doctrines, “Fallen Man and God's Grace.” Having dealt with the earlier Fathers, up to the 3rd Century, he now turns to the later Fathers. He once again contrasts the relative optimism of the Greek Fathers with the decidedly pessimistic Western view of man, especially the Augustinian tradition that was

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-35317290062703732152011-04-01T21:38:00.006-05:002011-08-31T11:16:13.645-05:00

We have seen (in Paul and the Yetzer Ha-Ra) that in Second Temple Judaism—the period during which the Genesis Adam and Eve narrative was written—there was no sense that this narrative had to do with a “Fall” of man based on an “Original Sin.” Rather, the narrative was intended to express the experience of the human condition in all its frailty and imperfection. The Judaic concept of the origin

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-39158397361634767752011-03-29T12:25:00.005-05:002011-08-31T09:52:35.439-05:00

W. D. Davies devotes Chapter 2 (“The Old Enemy: The Flesh And Sin,” 17-35) of his classic Paul and Rabbinic Judaism to an examination of the role in Pauline thought of the rabbinic doctrine of good and bad “tendencies” (Heb. yetzer) in human nature. (We should note that Davies uses the term “rabbinic” in a somewhat anachronistic sense since, at the time of Paul, Judaism was still in the Second

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-723773730311906872011-02-22T19:38:00.005-06:002011-08-30T20:27:16.923-05:00

Chapter Nine, “The Church and the Kingdom of God,” in Charles Norris Cochrane's classic study, Christianity and Classical Culture, contains a discussion of issues that hold great interest for us and that we have already touched upon.. Cochrane begins by observing that, for the fourth century Church, the vision of the Kingdom was of “a society regenerated by the acceptance of Christian truth.” (

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-44802010210193448392011-01-21T17:53:00.007-06:002011-08-30T20:04:59.150-05:00

The Christian embrace of monotheism and creation ex nihilo was not an entirely straightforward development. While the overall direction was clear enough from the start, there were indications that the end was not a foregone conclusion. For example, Origen, whom Gilson credits in his monumental History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages with the clearest presentation of creation ex nihilo,

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-50195152596753462582011-01-13T16:50:00.003-06:002011-08-30T09:21:52.075-05:00

Our position is that creation ex nihilo is a fundamental insight into the structure of reality, one that is essentially unique to Israelite religion and which did not develop until relatively late—shortly before the time of Jesus. Further, creation ex nihilo—as opposed to the traditional portrayal of origins as a shaping of preexisting matter by a god or gods—became absolutely fundamental to

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-39665078079858679442011-01-01T12:33:00.009-06:002011-08-28T14:06:26.609-05:00

We have followed Mark Smith's study of the development of monotheism in Israelite religion and have seen that monotheism eventually developed under the pressure of historical challenges to the continued survival of Israelite political entities. In the face of the overwhelming might of the Mesopotamian and, later, Hellenistic World Empires, Israelite thinkers engaged in a type of ideological

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-1017241820795388652010-08-04T21:47:00.010-05:002011-08-22T09:05:46.869-05:00

While Frank Moore Cross' account of the transition from archaic ontology is more theoretically complete, including a fuller account of the relationship between the theogonic and the cosmogonic gods and myths, in Myth and Reality (1963) Mircea Eliade offers his own analysis of this important issue in his characteristically compressed style.  Eliade's focus is on the process of demythicization and

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-65279344125461018302010-08-04T12:50:00.005-05:002011-08-21T19:08:17.904-05:00

Demythicization—a term that Mircea Eliade uses—was a movement that gained significant cultural momentum in Greece. Eliade uses this term to refer primarily to the the intellectual reaction against the literary myths concerning the gesta of the cosmogonic gods, the young gods. Whereas the cultic devotions of popular Greek religion dated to time immemorial, an intellectual elite began to view

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-73268711371747138282010-06-12T21:21:00.013-05:002011-08-20T10:05:55.421-05:00

Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic We have previously had occasion to note the distinction that Cross draws between two types of creation myths: theogony and cosmogony. Cross first addressed this distinction in his classic Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (CMHE, 1968). Cosmogonic myths are those that deal with the establishment of the world order, and the cosmogonic gods are those that feature in

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-5815284378245970132010-03-12T22:19:00.007-06:002011-08-19T11:19:14.879-05:00

Death has always presented a challenge to man's understanding. Most cultures have had some notion, however vague, of a continuing life of the human person after physical death. This question takes on greater urgency, however, when viewed from the perspective of justice. As we have seen, archaic man seeks to live a life that conforms to the laws of the universe. Since all beings are seen to

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-70640988248438740492009-11-12T14:42:00.013-06:002011-08-18T20:10:44.123-05:00

We are now reaching the end of Mark S. Smith's The Memoir's of God, but Smith adds a “postscript” - Biblical Memory between Religion, Theology and History - in which he attempts to address some of the issues that he has inevitably raised in the course of the book but has not yet discussed. Smith's concerns center around the nature of revelation. Biblical Narrative and Systematic Theology Smith

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-14347293718345189632009-11-10T12:54:00.012-06:002011-08-18T14:36:29.218-05:00

Chapter Four of Mark Smith's The Memoirs of God, “The Formation of Israel's Concepts of God: Collective Memory and Amnesia in the Bible,” is dense and difficult. Smith is attempting to deal with the issue of historicity in the Israelite scriptures: What are we biblical scholars dealing with in the Bible, what or who are we as we deal with it, and what means can we deploy to plumb the

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-75948800895658711672009-10-26T09:08:00.006-05:002010-06-25T16:32:13.071-05:00

In his thoughtful NYT article today, Benedict's Gambit, Ross Douthat offers his take on the Vatican's issuance of an Apostolic Constitution that represents an unusual effort at targeted proselytism, remarkable both for its concessions to potential converts — married priests, a self-contained institutional structure, an Anglican rite — and for its indifference to the wishes of the Church of

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-10599390429371203492009-10-23T10:24:00.005-05:002010-06-25T16:27:55.368-05:00

Within the space of just three days several prominent conservative commentators have drawn attention to the peculiar mental state of liberals. Are they on to something important? I believe so. Lets start with Richard Fernandez' Buy One Take Ten. Fernandez begins by observing that "When a society has been told for years it can have something for nothing the damage is not just physical, but

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-51563938817701720162009-09-04T10:00:00.006-05:002010-06-25T10:57:03.740-05:00

The 9/2/09 issue of the Wall Street Journal, in its Notable and Quotable feature, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574387002761694162.html calls attention to an important article that Roman Catholic Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, published in his diocesan newspaper on the subject of health care and health care reform. The article is important for two reasons

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-3390162889600352232009-08-24T21:47:00.010-05:002011-08-18T11:29:39.609-05:00

In Chapter Three of The Memoirs of God, "Biblical Monotheism and the Structures of Divinity," Mark Smith attempts to explain the development of monotheism in Israel, a process which we have touched upon repeatedly in this examination of Israelite religion. As Smith observes in his introductory remarks, a major difficulty in dealing with this aspect of Israelite religion is that "monotheism was a

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-59034206669600568732009-07-13T21:54:00.008-05:002011-08-16T16:40:31.085-05:00

Challenges To Israel During The Biblical Period Pre-Monarchic Challenges We have seen that the early origins of Israel developed peacefully, involving a migration of farming populations from relatively nearby regions to the lightly populated highlands of Canaan. The infusion of tribal elements from the south (Midian) with their strong influence on religion and certain social structures was

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-43758005866434220792009-06-15T22:11:00.008-05:002011-08-16T11:15:36.177-05:00

We are now at a point from which we can attempt a synthesis of these disparate reflections on the Religion of Israel. I will do so by working through Mark S. Smith's The Memoirs of God over as many as four separate posts. I have argued that the essence of what Christianity has termed 'revelation' in the pre-Christian past is the development of Israelite religion toward a true monotheism

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-66402872379916923182009-06-11T18:36:00.005-05:002010-06-24T20:45:02.125-05:00

Natural Law Not Going Out of Style, Says Commission So said the Vatican's official newspaper, Osservatore Romano. You can follow the link for the whole article at Zenit. Here's a selection: The experts note in this regard that natural law affirms "persons and human communities are capable, in the light of reason, of recognizing the fundamental orientations of a moral act in conformity with the

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-86051027288306274722009-06-11T12:19:00.008-05:002011-08-16T10:03:24.640-05:00

In previous posts I've made several references to Frank Moore Cross' classic study Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (CMHE), published in 1973 and now in its ninth edition. Cross, professor emeritus in Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages, was a student of William Foxwell Albright who in many ways pioneered the comparative study of Canaanite and Israelite religion. (William Dever, whose

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-1224995805982947362009-06-02T13:20:00.011-05:002011-08-24T19:04:36.626-05:00

N. T. Wright has a somewhat popularized book, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture, which is directly relevant to some of the posts here--especially the post devoted to C. H. Dodd's classic work: According to the Scriptures. (Frustratingly, Wright's book has no index and does not cite Dodd's work, but I find it impossible to believe that

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-8138576501932225172009-05-21T21:29:00.013-05:002011-08-15T14:09:51.414-05:00

In the previous section we went over William Dever's synthesis regarding the origins of Israel, which Dever sees as largely, although not entirely, an indigenous development of Canaanite culture, while at the same time being a reaction or protest against the same Canaanite culture from which it developed. Dever, in common with virtually all archaeologists, is willing to flatly assert that a

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-60984055469983296992009-05-12T21:38:00.012-05:002011-08-15T12:40:42.975-05:00

Dever's Synthesis on the Origins of Israel At this point it may be well to revisit Dever's attempt at an explanation of the origins of what he terms "proto-Israel," Israel as it developed from Canaanite culture at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age (Iron I). As we saw, Dever reviewed (Who Where) the archaeological data and came to the conclusion (with essentially all other

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-42919399916543455462009-05-07T14:03:00.012-05:002011-08-14T22:13:41.022-05:00

As we have seen, historical and archaeological study confirms that Israel, while a new development in the history of Canaan, had indigenous origins within Canaan. This is not to suggest, as we will later see, that these indigenous origins were exclusive, that no elements within Israel came from outside Canaan, but it is clear that the dominant cultural factors that gave birth to Israel were

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-62828371908745971842009-05-05T10:23:00.011-05:002011-08-14T21:41:28.788-05:00

To this point we have, with related digressions, been discussing 1) Eliade's theory of archaic ontology, 2) the development of human thought through history based on archaic ontology and 3) reactions to perceived inadequacies in archaic ontology. This study has not been, of course, exhaustive and has focused on models largely provided by Christopher Dawson in his Progress and Religion. For

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-91488102340776244002009-04-12T13:53:00.004-05:002010-06-23T09:47:17.574-05:00

This year I continued a pattern I've fallen into in previous Holy Weeks. I arrived at church as much as a half hour early for Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil and used the time to read chapters from N. T. Wright's little book of Lenten homilies, Following Jesus--Biblical Reflections on Discipleship. What follows is taken from chapter 5, The Servant King: Mark. ...Mark's Gospel

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-27589378407631565552009-03-30T10:26:00.011-05:002010-06-23T09:46:04.233-05:00

David P. Goldman, a self described "writer in New York" who also writes as Spengler, writes today at the neoconservative journal First Things, Benedict XVI and the State of Israel. (Relevant excerpts are appended to this post.) As usual, Goldman attempts to convince Catholics that Church acceptance of the State of Israel is a matter of fundamental theology, but he can only do so by fudging

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-66054640224801499442009-03-10T12:25:00.010-05:002011-08-24T11:20:20.340-05:00

I recently reread C. H. Dodd's According to the Scriptures: The Substructure of New Testament Theology. The book, a 1952 version of lectures that Dodd delivered at the Princeton Theological Seminary, is Dodd's classic examination of the idea of "fulfillment" in early Christian thought. Specifically, Dodd sought to understand the use that Christians made of the Old Testament scriptures in

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-23025182763781420322009-02-02T11:41:00.008-06:002011-08-14T21:42:12.461-05:00

This morning Spengler's column--Who are the 'extraordinary' Muslims?--made two points of interest to me. The first is one that's been on my mind lately: “My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives,” United States President Barack Obama told an Arabic

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-72248077327999490472008-12-29T13:47:00.013-06:002011-08-23T19:26:19.016-05:00

In 1988, then Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, came to New York to deliver the Erasmus Lecture. The title of his lecture was Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, which reflected his long running concern with the state of modern Biblical exegesis. In the lecture he set forth his critique of the current state of affairs--which he attributed to the

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-16574548836886785142008-12-13T15:40:00.015-06:002010-06-26T19:09:50.028-05:00

"Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 [2006] address in Regensburg, Germany." So wrote internet gadfly Spengler, only a week after Benedict's address, in Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and Eternal Life. Robert Reilly, writing at about the same

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-12927138346757596192008-11-16T20:19:00.018-06:002011-11-29T20:20:01.024-06:00

The 11/14/08 issue of the Wall Street Journal featured an article of more than passing interest by David Gibson: A New Counter-Reformation Starts at the Vatican. Gibson has been observing the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican and sees hopeful signs of an initiative that could become a New Counter-Reformation: For most of October, more than 200 Catholic bishops, along with sundry theologians and

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-27341915159755687682008-10-25T11:24:00.013-05:002010-06-26T19:15:29.892-05:00

In Messy Revelation I opened a discussion on the need for a renewed and deepened understanding of "revelation." Here I will provide documentation that illustrates that the perceived need for such a deepened understanding is recognized on many levels within the Church. First it may be useful to quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church in this regard. My emphasis is provided in combined bold/

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-29506024363884922052008-10-01T12:12:00.011-05:002011-08-13T10:39:17.882-05:00

Christopher Dawson begins Chapter VI of Progress and Religion by noting “a cultural change of the most profound significance” that swept the civilized world in the first millennium B.C., a change of thought rather than of material culture that was felt across the middle part of the world, from Greece through the Middle East, Iran, India and all the way to China. Dawson associates this change

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-49357622355568511722008-09-27T21:23:00.011-05:002011-08-24T10:24:13.587-05:00

In the May/June 2006 issue of Christianity Today, Susan Wise Bauer wrote a review of Peter Enns' Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. It is revealingly titled: "Messy Revelation: Why Paul would have flunked hermeneutics." Bauer begins her review by recounting that, while reading Sumerian poetry, she came across this passage from "a 4,000-year-old epic

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-18338538259183755192008-09-22T17:07:00.012-05:002011-08-24T10:38:16.078-05:00

The October issue of First Things contains a review of Joseph Fitzmyer's new book, The One Who Is To Come. The review is by Gary Anderson, a professor of Old Testament at Notre Dame. As summarized by Anderson, the problem that Fitzmyer addresses is this: The problem is one of historical anachronism: What beliefs can we determine that people held, before the birth of Jesus, about the coming

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-12041035908930149372008-09-07T13:25:00.010-05:002011-08-09T16:28:24.725-05:00

In “Misfortune and History” (from The Myth of the Eternal Return) Mircea Eliade deals at considerable length with “Hebrew” thought. This is, to my mind, perhaps the least satisfactory section of The Myth of the Eternal Return, due in part to its reliance on scholarship that has now been pretty definitively superseded but also due to faulty analysis. Eliade characterizes as "Hebrew" what is now

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-23698813616107101802008-04-04T17:06:00.014-05:002011-08-09T13:44:25.406-05:00

Christopher Dawson's Progress and Religion is a remarkable book. Written in 1929 when Dawson was not yet 40 it is, in effect, Dawson's attempt at an overall theory of history. While in many ways it addresses scholarship that is now dated, especially with regard to the origin of "religion," it also has much in common with the later work of Mircea Eliade--in fact, in some respects Dawson goes

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-35495197708867642562008-03-08T12:26:00.009-06:002011-08-08T18:43:31.283-05:00

In the final chapter of The Myth of the Eternal Return Eliade contrasts what he terms "traditional man" (the man of archaic culture) with "historical man (modern man)." Eliade maintains that traditional man had a negative attitude toward history and sought to "abolish" history through various means, primarily through the philosophy or ontology of archetypes by which historical events were

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-89758283026007714522008-03-05T11:58:00.009-06:002011-08-05T10:58:02.557-05:00

In Chapter 3 of The Myth of the Eternal Return Mircea Eliade addresses the means that enable archaic man to endure the “normality of suffering” in historical existence, against which archaic man is largely powerless. Briefly, if it is the divine or heavenly archetypes that are truly real, or that confer reality upon the individual, then we would expect archaic man to seek meaning in suffering by

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-83895287943143046152007-12-11T17:14:00.007-06:002010-06-26T19:20:42.646-05:00

In Chapter Two of Cosmos and History, The Regeneration of Time, Eliade attempts to apply his insights to the very common symbols revolving around periodicity in archaic man's life: what he sees as archaic man's desire to abolish history by renewing time and creation at the New Year and other events that are assimilated to his cosmogony. Eliade begins by noting that everywhere archaic man

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-22831062803064239742007-11-07T11:12:00.006-06:002011-08-04T08:38:31.563-05:00

Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986) made his first attempt at a systematic exposition of his views on the problem of meaning in history in his short book The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (the original French edition, published in 1949, had the subtitle Archetypes and Repitition). Significantly, in the brief Foreword Eliade stated: "Had we not feared to be overambitious, we should have

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1608697421187043479.post-31386463185890254952007-10-29T17:22:00.001-05:002008-10-01T12:35:50.942-05:00

Mircea Eliade based his theory of man in history on the claim that "archaic man" - by which he means man within "traditional" societies - has a characteristic ontology or theory of what it means for realities within his world to be "real." To be real, according to this ontology, is to be an earthly expression of a divine or heavenly archetype. Only by sharing in or being an expression of this

mark wauckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08247066866195200890noreply@blogger.com0