Introduction To Christianity

by J.R. Foster

“I believe in you, Jesus of Nazareth, as the meaning (logos) of the world and of my life.”

“Do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. . .? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit.

This unified text was adopted in the city of Rome in the ninth century. From about the fifth century, possibly as early as the fourth, we come across the legend of the apostolic origin of this text.

Something absolutely central becomes visible here, namely, that faith has to do, and must have to do, with forgiving; that it aims at leading man to recognize that he is a being that can only find himself in the reception and transmission of forgiveness, a being that needs forgiveness even in his best and purest moments.

this Creed does represent at all decisive points an accurate echo of the ancient Church’s faith, which for its part is, in its kernel, the true echo of the New Testament message.

“Faith comes from what is heard”, says St. Paul (Rom 10: 17).

it is characteristic of faith that it comes from hearing, that it is the reception of something that I have not thought out, so that in the last analysis thinking in the context of faith is always a thinking over of something previously heard and received.

Faith cannot and should not be a mere product of reflection.

because faith is not something thought up by me but something that comes to me from outside, its word cannot be treated and exchanged as I please; it is always foreordained, always ahead of my thinking.

Faith, on the other hand, is first of all a call to community, to unity of mind through the unity of the word.

less and less a means for our common being to make contact in the logos,

A symbolum is something that points to its complementary other half and thus creates mutual recognition and unity. It is

Faith demands unity and calls for the fellow believer; it is by nature related to a Church.

He had understood that Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a way.

If Platonism provides an idea of the truth, Christian belief offers truth as a way, and only by becoming a way has it become man’s truth. Truth as mere perception, as mere idea, remains bereft of force; it only becomes man’s truth as a way that makes a claim upon him, that he can and must tread.

We ought to find God, he thought, not, so to speak, in our moments of need and failure, but amid the fullness of earthly life; only in this way could it be shown that God is not an escape, constructed by necessity, which becomes more and more superfluous as the limits of our powers expand.

The question that human existence not only poses but itself is, the inconclusiveness inherent in it, the bounds it comes up against and that yet yearn for the unbounded (more or less in the sense of Nietzsche’s assertion that all pleasure yearns for eternity yet experiences itself as a moment), this simultaneity of being limited and of yearning for the unbounded and open has always prevented man from resting in himself, made him sense that he is not self-sufficient

Indeed, the most influential form of atheism, namely Marxism, asserts in the strictest form this unity of being in all that is by declaring all being to be matter;

starts from the assumption that the absolute is consciousness, which knows man and can speak to him,

the three main forms of polytheism are the worship of bread, the worship of love, and the idolization of power.

it signifies the courage to entrust oneself to the power that governs the whole world without grasping the divine in one’s hands.

it says no, and must say no, to the absoluteness of political power and to the worship of the might of the mighty in general

We are also coming to understand more and more clearly that the apparent liberation of love and its conversion into a matter of impulse mean the delivery of man to the autonomous powers of sex and Eros, to whose merciless slavery he falls victim just when he is under the illusion that he has freed himself. When he eludes God, the gods put out their hands to grasp him; he can only be liberated by allowing himself to be liberated and by ceasing to try to rely on himself.

God is the God of the Promise.

he is regarded as the God of hope in the future, in a direction that is irreversible.

in the Greek Bible it no longer occurs at all but is simply replaced by the word “Lord”.

“I am” is as much as to say “I am here”, “I am here for you”;

The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever” (Is 40:6-8).

The concept tries to perceive the nature of the thing as it is in itself. The name, on the other hand, does not ask after the nature of the thing as it exists independently of me; it is concerned to make the thing nameable, that is, “invocable”, to establish a relation

I do not have God until I no longer have any god of my own but only trust the God who is just as much the next man’s God as mine, because we both belong to him.

The choice thus made meant opting for the logos as against any kind of myth; it meant the definitive demythologization of the world and of religion.

“Christ called himself truth, not custom.”

“Fire. ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob’, not ‘of the philosophers and scholars’.”

He is not the unfeeling geometry of the universe, neutral justice standing above things undisturbed by a heart and its emotions; he has a heart; he stands there like a person who loves, with all the capriciousness of someone who loves.

To him who as spirit upholds and encompasses the universe, a spirit, a man’s heart with its ability to love, is greater than all the milky ways in the universe.

The philosophical God is pure thought: he is based on the notion that thought and thought alone is divine. The God of faith, as thought, is also love. His image is based on the conviction that to love is divine.

faith means deciding for the view that thought and meaning do not just form a chance by-product of being; that, on the contrary, all being is a product of thought and, indeed, in its innermost structure is itself thought.

This surely means that all our thinking is, indeed, only a rethinking of what in reality has already been thought out beforehand.

in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself.

For Christianity, the explanation of reality as a whole is not an all-embracing consciousness or one single materiality; on the contrary, at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, by thinking, creates freedoms, thus making freedom the structural form of all being.

therefore faith is the option in favor of the primacy of the particular over the universal.

Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the

smallest—that is divine.

then it follows automatically that the supreme factor in the world is not cosmic necessity but freedom.

As the arena of love it is also the playground of freedom and also incurs the risk of evil. It accepts the mystery of darkness for the sake of the greater light constituted by freedom and love.

the smallest thing that can love is one of the biggest things; the particular is more than the universal; the person, the unique and unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest thing.

From this vantage point Karl Marx merely continued resolutely this line of thinking by asserting that if meaning does not precede man, then it lies in the future, which man himself must bring about by his own struggles.

faith consists of a

series of contradictions held together by grace.

This kind of objectivity is quite simply denied to man. He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer.