My friend Mark expands on his religious thoughts of earlier today:
Paul wasn't a relativist. As he makes clear in Romans, even though he doesn't have all the modern scholarship on man's approach to reality (function of myth, etc.) he's fully aware of all the good that comes out of the Israelite tradition. He knows full well all the evil embodied in the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, he says, before god, all mankind are sinners and are in the same boat, Jew and gentile alike. To attempt to pin your badge to your ethnicity or your myth of chosen-ness, even to a superior culture, and to miss that sub specie aeternitatis aspect, is to fall into self worship and blindness to the humanity of others and thus to betray your own humanity.
Further, Paul could see the analogy of all cultural expression and of human thought as well–his discourse in the Athenian market, the Areopagus, showed that he could see the good in Greek culture, too. No cultural expression can capture infinite meaning–our approach to the mystery of being is by way of analogy and can only be approximate. Conceptual constructs of reality–ideology–cannot do justice to reality. None of that means we're blind to evil, simply that we have to make our judgments with the realization that perfection is not achievable on earth.
The Roman Empire wasn't eternal, nor can an eternal Israel be established on earth–the Zionist attempt at that (whether secular or religious) is built on false foundations that sow the seeds of ultimate tragedy, measured especially in harm to Jewish humanity. Zionism is not alone in this respect: attempts to freeze history in a moment (even as a step in conceptual process/construct) are characteristically modern errors of which there are many examples. The church too erred in tying its ecclesiology (practice of church) to the Renaissance princely model, the forerunner of the modern nation state, and failing to see the drawbacks.
And when I write, "measured especially in harm to Jewish humanity" I mean Plato's classic dilemma–is it worse to commit injustice or to suffer injustice? The Zionist answer–a very human answer–is that it's worse to suffer injustice. There's obviously a lot that could be said about this, but ultimately committing injustice harms/diminishes one's own humanity.
The Roman Empire wasn't eternal, nor can an eternal Israel be established on earth–the Zionist attempt at that (whether secular or religious) is built on false foundations that sow the seeds of ultimate tragedy, measured especially in harm to Jewish humanity. Zionism is not alone in this respect: attempts to freeze history in a moment (even as a step in conceptual process/construct) are characteristically modern errors of which there are many examples. The church too erred in tying its ecclesiology (practice of church) to the Renaissance princely model, the forerunner of the modern nation state, and failing to see the drawbacks.
And when I write, "measured especially in harm to Jewish humanity" I mean Plato's classic dilemma–is it worse to commit injustice or to suffer injustice? The Zionist answer–a very human answer–is that it's worse to suffer injustice. There's obviously a lot that could be said about this, but ultimately committing injustice harms/diminishes one's own humanity.
