Indescribable Christ?

Ryan Bonneville · 06 Feb 2009, 14:56 · from 2009-February.txt.gz

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From: ryan.bonneville at gmail.com (Ryan Bonneville)
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 09:56:11 -0500
Subject: (urth) Indescribable Christ?
Message-ID: <83ce1d850902060656o34198d61l6e3feb62060f7b44 at mail.gmail.com>

>No doubt Stanislaus meant that Christ's divine nature is in this sense
>unknowable.  As Jeff observes, part of the point of Christianity is
>that Christ is not simply divine, but possesses two natures. Christ's
>human nature, in and of itself, is as describable as any other human
>nature.

It's also a pretty sloppy way to do literary analysis.  Christ's divinity is
attributed to Him and explicated by means of a textual analysis.  There is
no reason at all that we could not perform a comparison with Severian.


> In fact, saying that God exists, is good, wise, powerful
> etc is in a sense untrue - all those words do not describe God
> correctly.

This is nutty.  I'm not really interested in getting into a theology debate
- we've had enough of that lately - but if we take this to be true, then
talking about God simply makes no sense at all.  We're doing literary
analysis here; ruling out of bounds a discussion based on the ineffability
of one of the points of comparison probably means we need to change the
point of comparison.


We are comparing Severian to two beings/a being whose nature we grasp
primarily through a text.  There is nothing the least bit problematic about
that.
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