Its implications for the self-understanding of the church and its ministry are important, though somewhat less clear. How oblivious I was to gender issues: I'm not just referring to the male language of the book.
The Structure of Christian Existence by John B. Cobb, Jr
Introduction
The process of developing new structures of existence shares this balance of continuity and discontinuity, but must be described differently. Chapter twelve introduces but does not discuss the important issue of the emergence of new ways of existence in the centuries since the rise of Christian existence.
The Psyche
34;Conscious experience" is often limited to the type of awareness we have of the environment when we are awake and sober. The relative importance of the relationship to the body and the relationship to past dominant occasions varies.
Primitive Existence
Aspects of the external world seem to register on it, as in the receptive consciousness of man. In the case of the higher animals this service requires a considerable activity on his part, both conscious and.
Civilized Existence
Instead, I intend to address only one question of what is involved in the emergence of rational consciousness. Insofar as this rise of reflective consciousness occurred, it necessarily increased the role of the forms given in receptive consciousness and, consequently, their influence on the reflective.
Axial Existence
When it takes place in the unconscious, the rational activities of the reflective consciousness are incorporated into the whole life of the psyche only in terms of mythical meanings. The place of the seat of existence in the reflective consciousness does not guarantee control over everything that takes place within that consciousness. The Jungians interpret much of the myths as expressing this shift from the seat of existence to reflective.
My thesis is that during the Axial period there was a shift in the seat of existence towards reflective consciousness in the influential segments of the community. But as long as the seat of existence was in the unconscious, the relation between the conscious element of one experience and those of others was mediated through the unconscious. With the rationalization of reflective consciousness and the shift of the seat of being to rational consciousness, a new element appeared, namely the conscious mastery of symbolization and thus of action.
Yet in the case of the first two, for our purposes, these varieties can be neglected.
Buddhist Existence
Far earlier than in the West, many of the most important possible answers to this question were formulated with deep sophistication and insight. In the Sankhya view, the monads of life were differentiated more radically from the world of things. The difference was understood to mean that there could be none really ontological. contamination or involvement of the monads of life in the material sphere.
The difference between these two views was that for the Jains the inclusion of monads of life in the world was real, while for the Sankhya it was an illusion. In the West, the identification of the self with the seat of existence has been practically unquestioned until recently, although many of the connotations of the Indian Atman have been confusingly associated with it. Buddhism did not deny the reality of the environment. world, but believed that the world given in ordinary reflective consciousness was the product of man's conceptions, hopes, fears, and desires.
Although this did not result in a return to the dominance of the unconscious, it did prevent the entry of a new seat of existence into consciousness upon possible further development.
Homeric Existence
Here, as everywhere, we must anticipate the gradual development of a new and not a sudden phenomenon. Thus, from the point of view of rational consciousness, it distorts the sensuously given world. With the aesthetic projection of the gods, the Greeks subordinated mythical meanings to rational consciousness.
But the exclusion of unconscious symbolization from consciousness has not destroyed the power of the unconscious. Both the sensitivity to visual form and the glorification of man are also evident in the Greek temple. The dimensions of the Greek temple did not inspire awe and a sense of mystery.
The aesthetic projection of the gods made possible, in turn, an even greater freedom in the aesthetic distancing of the real environment.
Socratic Existence
I have defined axial existence in terms of the movement of the seat of the soul to its reflective consciousness and its dominance over the unconscious. But the emergence of reflective consciousness as the seat of human existence did not necessarily involve an awareness by the soul of itself. Socrates' identification of himself with his reason was one of the fateful events of history.
Instead, within the soul itself, a deep divide was introduced between reason and all other elements of the soul. Again, this was not merely an opinion about the soul, but a structuring of the elements in the soul that determined the roles they could play in ongoing psychic life. In terms of the structure of existence he embodied, Socrates is not only incomparable, but incomparable.
Other factors in the life of the soul and body are objectified from this point of view as other and alien.
Prophetic Existence
The relationship between Yahweh and Israel was commonly understood in terms of the category of the covenant. The Hebrew understanding of Yahweh was thorough. anthropomorphic, much like the Homeric understanding of the Greek gods. Moreover, this understanding of the great "I" who was the only God allowed a new understanding of the relationship between God and the world.
With the Hebrews, the whole content of the taboo system was identified with the requirement of God embodied in the covenant. The goal of the community was to achieve justice, which meant. accordance with the will of God. But by the seventh century, the collective personality of the people gave way to the individual.
This meant that man could no longer understand himself exclusively as part of a community.
Christian Existence
The central and decisive fact of Jesus' appearance was the renewal of the sense of the present immediacy of God. In principle, some prophetic statements indicate a complete ethnoization of the understanding of God's will. Instead, a system of taboos was adopted into the understanding of God's will.
Jesus' renewal of the prophetic consciousness of God in the context of a fully responsible personality broke through the boundaries of the old law. For Jesus, belief in the nearness of the Kingdom was a function of the experiential knowledge of the immediacy of God. The primitive Christian believer's relationship with the Spirit was much more intimate than that.
Perhaps all its meanings reflect usages that are independent of man's prophetic understanding.
Love
Thus, a huge difference appeared between love for another and love for oneself. But in this context, the question of the right balance of caring for oneself and caring for one's neighbor was not raised. A man must seek the good of his neighbor for his neighbor's sake, just as he sought his own good for his own sake.
But then the love sought was no longer under the control of the will. It is not useful at this level to ask whether this spontaneous love of another constitutes altruism as opposed to self-interest. Furthermore, the transcendence of the soul over the self meant that man was not simply bound by the primacy of self-esteem.
The possibility of its appearance lies in the liberation from the disease of preoccupation with oneself, so the previous attitude of another towards oneself cannot be important.
The Question of Finality
The difference between them is a function of the different structures of existence in which they are found. Likewise, the superiority of the axial over the preaxial cannot be understood in psychological terms. The claim of the end of spiritual existence implies that such further development has not occurred or is not expected.
The basis of this claim can first be shown by comparing the two structures of existence. The incorporation of Socratic reason into Christianity introduced an element that also contained the possibility of destroying spiritual existence. In the case of personal and Socratic existence, consciousness, selfhood and soul power to.
Perhaps the structure of spiritual existence is already being replaced among us by other structures to which the sense of the.
Appendix: Gnosticism
Gnosticism is understood here as the movement in the later Hellenistic world that sought salvation from the entire cosmos, which in principle is considered a foreign and evil power. That is to say, it reflects the shift of the seat of existence to consciousness and the consequent objectification of the mythical products of the unconscious. In Israel the prophetic man attempted a moral order of all life in response to his.
The flowering and transformation of Greek culture in Socrates continued the dominance of the sense of order, but increased the implicit tension. From one point of view it was not a great step from the Stoic hostility to the irrational to the Gnostic condemnation of the world as a whole. It is because of the close parallel with Christian existence, especially in the understanding of selfhood, that it is not possible to omit this brief discussion of Gnosticism from this book.
Yet we find that "spiritual existences" independently of Christianity were also the self-definition of the Gnostic.
