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Life Arts    H3'ed 5/10/15

Get Ready to Debate the Pope's Encyclical About the Environment

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TEXT (4): THE PROLOGUE OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN (1:-14)

Basically, except for a few words in Aramaic, the four canonical gospels and the other texts in the New Testament were written in Koine Greek, which was still the lingua franca in the first century in the Roman Empire. Critical biblical scholars claim that the authors of the four canonical gospels are anonymous to us, that the specific places in the Roman Empire where the four gospels were written and the exact dates of their composition are unknown, but that the Gospel According to John was the last of the four canonical gospels to be written.

The prologue of the Gospel According to John imagines a new story of creation, based on meditating on the two accounts of creation in Genesis quoted above and on Philo's passage quoted above):

"In the beginning was the Word [Greek, Logos], and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

"There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

"He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

"And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father's only son, full of grace and truth" (John 1:1-14; NRSV).

John 1:11 ("He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him") is fairly mild compared to the sharp invective against the Jews in other passages in the Gospel According to John. Tragically, the sharp anti-Jew invective that Christian Jews used to express their enmity against their fellow Jews who did not jump on the bandwagon for the alleged Messiah reverberated down the Christian centuries until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church officially abrogated anti-Semitism. For a history of the church's sordid anti-Semitism, see James Carroll's book CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS: A HISTORY (2001).

Even though the prologue to the Gospel According to John sounds as sweeping in its cosmological scope as the story of the seven days of creation in Genesis does, the Roman Catholic Church to this day does not have an official up-to-date cosmology based on evolutionary theory, as noted.

Now, you could argue that the anonymous author of the prologue was the precursor of the big bang theory. After all, if God did speak on the first day, God would have spoken the word/Word, presumably making the big bang.

In any event, the anonymous author of the prologue and the anonymous author of the story of the seven days of creation in Genesis were kindred spirits, even though they lived centuries apart from one another.

In subsequent centuries, the personified Word (in Greek "logos") in the prologue of the Gospel According to John emerges in Christian theological imagery as the Second Person (also known as the Son) in the supposed divine trinity (consisting of the supposed Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). However, as odd as it may sound, the doctrine of the divine trinity posits communion consciousness between and among the three supposed divine persons.

Because the Hebrew Bible's monotheistic deity is imagined as a sky God in the heavens above the world, Christians follow suit and envision the supposed divine trinity as being somewhere in the heavens above the earth, except that the Holy Spirit is oftentimes imagined to be a messenger -- and at times, the supposed resurrected Messiah (also known as the Logos and as the Second Person of the supposed divine trinity) has reportedly made appearances occasionally to selected individuals. However, in the Christian tradition of thought, the supposed triune God is imagined to be both transcendent and immanent. But God's immanence means that Christians (and non-Christians?), in theory, at times, can experience the triune God in their own psyches -- in profound mystical experiences.

As odd as it may sound, communion consciousness is also posited among the three parts of the human psyche discussed in Plato's dialogues known as the REPUBLIC and the PHAEDRUS. The three parts of the human psyche are (1) the reasoning part (logos), (2) the desiring part, and (3) the spirited part (thumos or thymos). But the communion consciousness involving those three parts of the human psyche does not necessarily involve profound mystical experiences. To be sure, profound mystical experiences involve those three parts of the human psyche. But we normally can commune with those three parts of the human psyche in ordinary experiences, not just in extraordinary profound mystical experiences.

So do the three supposed persons in the Christian doctrine of the divine trinity represent the three parts of the human psyche discussed in Plato's dialogues? After all, one part of the human psyche is referred to as logos, and capitalized Logos is the name of the personification of one of the three personifications in the supposed divine trinity.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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