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Jorge Garcia wrote:
Erick and I have "epistemological distance".... Erick came in with interpretations of the Bible to counter my statements with specific references from the Bible.
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Erick Mead wrote:
"Shinto can be accepted in every particular where it does not conflict with revealed truth. If anyone thinks the concept of kami is necessarily offensive to revealed truth, then they have not properly understood the concept of kami. "Thrones, powers, dominions ...?"
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It is no more impermissible nor unfaithful to observe or venerate the kamidana in accordance with Shinto ritual in a genuine spirit of faith as to the "uniting to one another in love" that occurs in the proper Aikido practice than it was for St. Paul to point out and venerate the statue of the "unknown God" for the benefit of the Athenians and in accordance with their own traditions."
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... honest interpreters of all traditions would agree, ... They might interpret it like Erick but they never would have said that the NT writers would have accepted a Shinto cosmology. ... His statements demanded a public response ... |
Actually, they only suggested an intensely private response -- the public part is merely bowing and clapping -- from which people will, inevitably, infer what they will, interior reality notwithstanding.
The point being whether is there an interior understanding of the external act that is honest to traditional observation and meaning in Aikido practice by bowing and clapping (i.e.-- not falsely pretended, which is spiritually dangerous in its own right) but also genuine with regard belief in a revealed faith, such as Christianity.
One does not have to establish that the Fathers of the Church would have accepted "Shinto cosmology." There is a worthy intention in the act of bowing and clapping toward the kamidana in which both the Christian and non-Christian may genuinely share and be in harmony with one another. Jorge seeks distinction, difference -- signs of external contradiction. Those tend to lead, ultimately, to a sense of external disharmony that does not exist in proper perspective. It is not the things outside us that that cause spiritual problems, it tis those within us. On this, I believe, both East and West may whole-heartedly agree.
We look, too often, for the signs of contradiction outside of us, merely to confirm a point of comfort in our interior state. We ought to look within -- where the bad things really come from, and which truth truly contradicts. If we let the interior be disturbed, by acknowledging the truth of the chaos within requiring balance, we may be moved toward both interior and exterior harmony instead.
Fudoshin.
The problem is larger than the dichotomies we use to define it. "Good" and "evil" (as men consider them, pace Job), violence and non-violence, belief and unbelief, harmony and disharmony -- it is the left leg that turns us toward the right, and vice versa. We are bilaterally symmetrical beings -- inside and outside.
The Christian understanding of this resolution is to convert the whole, not to sever the two. In doctrinal terms, the latter tendency leads to Manichaeism, an irretrievable duality. Aikido shares in this aspect of solving the problem in wholeness, joining of opposites into harmonious union that does not thereby destroy their distinctiveness. We may rightfully and genuinely do honor in the dojo to this spirit and its proponent, O Sensei, regardless of our professed religion.
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Jorge Garcia wrote:
In my defense, how to properly interpret the Bible, "hermeneutics", is a course I have taught at many levels for many years.
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"Hemeneutics" is an offense I have occasionally been accused of in this forum. Also guilty, I am afraid.