Notes from the Webcast February 25, 2014 (1)
(First 30 min. Josefina Fernandez.
Please continue on Gretchen Tucker notes for the second part of the webcast)
Much later, we put Christ as (privatized) a private ownership and control.
This much-devolved notion of salvation is totally individualistic.
Paul is not an individualistic thinker. He is a cosmic mystical thinker. If you do not have this frame you will misinterpret what he says.
Paul keys phrase by which you can tell that he is talking about this mystical template by which all reality is explained is “In Christ “ .
Paul is a Greek speaking Jew who come from outside Israel . He is from Tarso (Turkey). He did not grow up on the Jewish ghetto so he does not have a ghetto mentality. He is a cosmopolitan person so he decided that his message belongs to all people. When the Jewish people took him in arrest he told them that he was a roman citizen so he had to be judge by roman tribunal.
He wrote most of his letters in Greek and that was the language of the elite at that time. He knew some Hebrew and Aramaic but was not his primary languages.
Paul gives shape and structure to Jesus message.
Jesus is the great proclaimer of the mystery. Jesus did not found the church, as we know it. He was just proclaiming the mysteries at higher level and Paul try to bring them to a practical pastoral level where they can happen. We know now that Paul’s communities in Corinth, Philippians, Ephesus, were not more than 40 to 45 people.
In these pagan communities that were decadent, Paul’s wanted to create small living schools. When these groups started having problems he wrote to them moralistic letters so they did no came a part and be discredit by bad behaviors these groups of people were very important for the transmission of the message and Jesus will not be trusted. When we read his letters, we think that he is talking at a moralistic level.
His letters in general were not moralistic. His concern is you to the picture of the Christ Mystery: God identification with history and humanity at its lowest most humiliating suffering level and that is what Paul’s means with Folly of the Cross or the Mystery of the Cross . So he creates the mystical foundation for Christianity. The other place we found this is in John Gospel. And it is a Mystery. It is not something that you achieve by performance; it is something that you are already participating in it and you do not know it. And that is true today. This is what is going on. This is what is happening. This Christ consciousness, this Trinitarian flows of life and love that we all are already flowing in. His job was to tell you that this is already the truth. It is not a new truth. It has been always been truth but we are a living in a time that we can talk about it. We can give words. We can give significance.
Another idea presented in Paul that we are unable to develop in this short lecture is the that he takes the Jesus notion of the reign of God, the kingdom of God, the big picture and he really politicized
Please continue on Gretchen Tucker notes for the second part of the webcast)
Josefina Fernandez