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Originally posted by Elok
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While I haven't thought or read enough about Eden to make an intelligent (or interesting) comment, I would like to ask: if Free Will---->Sin as you've suggested here, what will stop us from falling again in the age to come? I don't think our free will is going to go away. That would make us subhuman, and if anything lead to greater estrangement from God by taking away from us one of the few things we have in common with Him. The beauty of free will, IMO, is that it A. gives us the power to give to God and B. gives us something to offer to God--our wills themselves.
I gathered. What do you mean by "post-modern," though? When I think of Postmodernism I think of the silly people I had to read in college who thought every long, skinny object in a story was a penis symbol, but who otherwise denied the meaningful existence of objective truth. That doesn't seem to be what you're going for here.
The idea being Postmodern Christianity is that this type of "manualization" is destructive and a move towards a more subjective, for lack of a better word, or pre-modern faith was reached for. The Bible was seen again as a story of relevation, divinely inspired and truth, but not history book true, but true in a deeper sense (if that makes any sense). There was an attempt to reclaim the mystery of God and religious experiences with God rather than base it on reason and the Bible itself. The idea that the Holy Spirit had been marginalized by modernism was claimed. Interestingly enough, this is where the postmoderns found the Orthodox Church (and had some impact that some evangelicals looking for a more mysterous God are drawn there).
That was somewhat rambling, but a good resource is "A New Kind of Christian" by Brian McLaren.
I take the tearing of the veil to represent an end to the estrangement between God and man. The veil was not the entrance to the temple, but to the Holiest of Holies, where a priest could only go once a year to offer propitiation. Christ, as the new High Priest, achieved the definitive offering which made the old sacrifice obsolete. In other words, he did not end temples, he simply opened them.
When you talk about creating Eden, it sounds to me like you're suggesting an attempt to reform human society. Is that what you mean? Because, while I consider that a worthy goal, and well-intentioned, it's beyond the scope of Xianity IMO and risks contaminating the Church with any number of social ills.
Yes and no. What you're talking about does exist in the form of oikonomia ("house law" or as I think of it "house rules," the same Greek roots as the word "economy," we just don't anglicize it because we love Greek, also possibly to differentiate). Oikonomia is the custom that gives parish priests general license to bend the rules where necessary to fit the circumstances on the ground. For example, a priest might loosen the fasting requirements for a parishioner with awkward dietary requirements. Also, local churches do have different customs which are broadly tolerated; in the U.S., the advent fast can be ignored altogether on Thanksgiving, because the church wishes to encourage a public holiday centered on God. So we eat all the turkey we want. The Russian, Greek and Antiochian churches have distinct liturgical customs, and nobody really minds. And so on.
However, a lot of the looseness is due to the fact that the Orthodox Church is currently fragmented and disorganized, or simply from the fact that she changes very, very, very slowly. The last pan-Orthodox council that was officially binding for everyone happened in...oh, when was it, 781? Anyway, the seventh ecumenical council. What with Byzantium being overrun by Turks, then Russia being overrun by Communists, things got a little messy, and for the past thousand years or so we've been running things by informal understandings, local councils, and sundry impromptu arrangements. There's a lot of mess left to clean up now, and certainly a clear, canonical statement on contraception would be welcome. The #1 priority, in America, is just to unify the church. There are something like thirteen distinct church hierarchies here, planted by various immigrants, and it's plainly uncanonical. But that's probably of little interest to you.
However, a lot of the looseness is due to the fact that the Orthodox Church is currently fragmented and disorganized, or simply from the fact that she changes very, very, very slowly. The last pan-Orthodox council that was officially binding for everyone happened in...oh, when was it, 781? Anyway, the seventh ecumenical council. What with Byzantium being overrun by Turks, then Russia being overrun by Communists, things got a little messy, and for the past thousand years or so we've been running things by informal understandings, local councils, and sundry impromptu arrangements. There's a lot of mess left to clean up now, and certainly a clear, canonical statement on contraception would be welcome. The #1 priority, in America, is just to unify the church. There are something like thirteen distinct church hierarchies here, planted by various immigrants, and it's plainly uncanonical. But that's probably of little interest to you.
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