The Outsider

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 16 Dec 2010, 20:09 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:09:52 -0800
Subject: (urth) The Outsider
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimTMkRogjDAnsm4pQi72M42e71CciOYqzhYGhX5 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTimTMkRogjDAnsm4pQi72M42e71CciOYqzhYGhX5 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTinxtfEYh4_Hy8xKTrqRCkXC7EJuu-bq3FLtgA6J at mail.gmail.com>

Like Witz, I agree with ... well, _most_ of what you say. Here're my
points of difference.

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Andrew Mason
<andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> This could be explained in various ways:
> that Jesus is actually present within that universe.
> that there is an analogue of Jesus, who is merely a prophet.
> that the stories have somehow been transmitted from another universe.
> But I don't think the first is ruled out.

I do. The idea of multiple Incarnations is not only "not strictly
Orthodox Christianity," it is abhorrent to the idea that Jesus died
once _for all_. "All" is a big word, which I mostly try to avoid, but
it's unambiguously present in Scripture.

> It's the basis of the Narnia series, and Lewis is generally seen as
> pretty orthodox.

Actually, a number of fundamentalists have condemned the Narnia books
on precisely this ground. I think that's throwing the baby out with
the bathwater; the Narnia books are good stories, and even have a lot
to recommend them theologically. But the idea that Aslan's death in
tLtW&tW is analogous to Christ's salvific death on Earth has to be
taken with a whole salt lick.

> I don't see anything to make me say 'This is a
> universe without Christ' - though at the time the events take place,
> it's certainly a universe where Christ is not _known_.

That's actually another theological problem. Scripture has the Church
enduring to the end of days.

> Now, it is certainly true that a link is drawn between the Outsider
> and Dionysus. But I don't see that as negating the connection with the
> Christian God, but as suggesting a connection between the Christian
> God and Dionysus - a connection which others (Lewis and Soyinka, at
> least) have drawn, and which, therefore, can't be ruled out.

Oddly enough I don't have a problem with this...

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net