MADE BY MAN
Here's an excellent piece by a fellow named Remote Control:
For the Westerner who is theologically inclined (such as the 20th century German-American philosopher, Eric Voegelin, who, though he never in his adult life ever attended one church still considered himself a Christian and, on his deathbed, requested a reading of Psalms in German to soothe his transition from the Tension of Existence to the Beyond of the Tension), yet who has not hardened his theology with hypostatic symbolisms into doctrinaire doxa, rather allowing his tme ouverte the flexibility, or the "serious insouciance" (as one might render Plato's spoudaious paizen), to consider theology from the vantage of Goethe (also a Voegelin's-eye view) &151;“As a moralist I am a monotheist; as an artist I am a polytheist; as a naturalist I am a pantheist” $&151;the Demophany of Abraham Lincoln is also a spiritual event of Theophany as it has unfolded in history in the form of the ongoing revelation and noesis of the central problem of political science: Representation:
"...this nation, under God...[a] government of the people, by the people, and for the people..."
What all Muslims (and some Christians) cannot understand is that there is no direct pipeline to God by which to get specific instructions on a blueprint for political science and laws: at best (for the theologically inclined who are also mature enough to grasp the Caesar/God distinction) the necessity for an imperfect mediation of God's will through the human recipient who then becomes an imperfect conduit of that divine will renders all laws and all political science imperfect and human.
Anywhere on Earth and in history when a human being tells you that some particular law is "not man's law, but God's law", he is ipso facto contradicting himself, and you would be a fool to believe him: for you would have neglected to notice a crucial part of the communication: it was a human being who communicated this supposedly exclusively divine law to you! In the very act of a human being proclaiming that some law is absolutely divine and not human, the anthropomorphic nature of that law is unavoidably implied—and an obtusely unnoticed contradiction replaces the Paradox that has been botched.
The genius of the West, from the time of the pre-Socratics to the present, has been to intuit, and then analyze and unfold (often, throughout the ages between, particularly the Middle Ages, prayerfully) the paradox of the unavoidably human mediation of all things divine into the further implication first illuminated by Plato (and then brought to perilously reifiable clarity in the God-Man Jesus): Political science is a joint venture of God and Man, and not the exclusive province of the one or the other.
The obtuseness of Islam, on the other hand, is to insist that God's literal laws and OCD rules & regulations and whims came down lock, stock and barrel from on high without suffering any corrosion from the atmosphere of imperfection as meteorites must—indeed, as all things sublunar must—and that the agency and intelligence of human beings who receive this God's revelation have no role to play in its mediation and communication. In fact, for the Muslim mentality, to even hint that human mediation plays any role at all in the revelation of the truth from God is the highest sin. And thus, political science remains frozen for Islam in a time capsule, and can never reach the real Earth—the Earth that grows, changes, matures, develops, imperfectly in motion: the only motion there is, as the humans given dominion over it wend their way into the luminously unknown future. Muslims have spent all their centuries hacking away at anything that threatens to change, hacking away at what they fear the most: the imperfection and mystery through which we all have to nagivate, those of us seeking God, as well as those of us choosing not to seek God.
For the Westerner who is theologically inclined (such as the 20th century German-American philosopher, Eric Voegelin, who, though he never in his adult life ever attended one church still considered himself a Christian and, on his deathbed, requested a reading of Psalms in German to soothe his transition from the Tension of Existence to the Beyond of the Tension), yet who has not hardened his theology with hypostatic symbolisms into doctrinaire doxa, rather allowing his tme ouverte the flexibility, or the "serious insouciance" (as one might render Plato's spoudaious paizen), to consider theology from the vantage of Goethe (also a Voegelin's-eye view) &151;“As a moralist I am a monotheist; as an artist I am a polytheist; as a naturalist I am a pantheist” $&151;the Demophany of Abraham Lincoln is also a spiritual event of Theophany as it has unfolded in history in the form of the ongoing revelation and noesis of the central problem of political science: Representation:
"...this nation, under God...[a] government of the people, by the people, and for the people..."
What all Muslims (and some Christians) cannot understand is that there is no direct pipeline to God by which to get specific instructions on a blueprint for political science and laws: at best (for the theologically inclined who are also mature enough to grasp the Caesar/God distinction) the necessity for an imperfect mediation of God's will through the human recipient who then becomes an imperfect conduit of that divine will renders all laws and all political science imperfect and human.
Anywhere on Earth and in history when a human being tells you that some particular law is "not man's law, but God's law", he is ipso facto contradicting himself, and you would be a fool to believe him: for you would have neglected to notice a crucial part of the communication: it was a human being who communicated this supposedly exclusively divine law to you! In the very act of a human being proclaiming that some law is absolutely divine and not human, the anthropomorphic nature of that law is unavoidably implied—and an obtusely unnoticed contradiction replaces the Paradox that has been botched.
The genius of the West, from the time of the pre-Socratics to the present, has been to intuit, and then analyze and unfold (often, throughout the ages between, particularly the Middle Ages, prayerfully) the paradox of the unavoidably human mediation of all things divine into the further implication first illuminated by Plato (and then brought to perilously reifiable clarity in the God-Man Jesus): Political science is a joint venture of God and Man, and not the exclusive province of the one or the other.
The obtuseness of Islam, on the other hand, is to insist that God's literal laws and OCD rules & regulations and whims came down lock, stock and barrel from on high without suffering any corrosion from the atmosphere of imperfection as meteorites must—indeed, as all things sublunar must—and that the agency and intelligence of human beings who receive this God's revelation have no role to play in its mediation and communication. In fact, for the Muslim mentality, to even hint that human mediation plays any role at all in the revelation of the truth from God is the highest sin. And thus, political science remains frozen for Islam in a time capsule, and can never reach the real Earth—the Earth that grows, changes, matures, develops, imperfectly in motion: the only motion there is, as the humans given dominion over it wend their way into the luminously unknown future. Muslims have spent all their centuries hacking away at anything that threatens to change, hacking away at what they fear the most: the imperfection and mystery through which we all have to nagivate, those of us seeking God, as well as those of us choosing not to seek God.
posted by Gabriel Thy at 12:33 PM
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