Paul to go forth and be a blessing to all the peoples.
In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter five, he
put it all very simply: “For anyone who is in Christ, there is
a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new
one is here. It is all God’s work. It was God who
reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave us the work
of handing on this reconciliation.” It was now Paul’s work
by suffering in love with Stephen and Jesus to reconcile all.
St. Paul’s four noble truths
I All sentient beings suffer including God in the God-man.
II So the problem of evil becomes the mystery of suffering
which should be embraced.
III For loving suffering not only builds character
but also in a reconciliation process saves others
with self denying sacrifice that loves them as more important
IV as St. Paul found along the nine-fold path
of his journey of reconciling love
(1) which began when he was touched by the loving face
of Stephen revealing the loving face of Jesus’ Mystical Body
(2) and along which he progressed for his beloved Thessalonians
by teaching them how agape is increasing love for the whole
human race
(3) and for his beloved Corinthians by teaching them that
agape is the love feast and the Lord’s Supper
(4) and again for his Corinthians by showing them how
agape is the suffering which consoles others
(5) and for his beloved Galatians by showing them how
agape is the freedom to serve one another
(6) and for the Romans by teaching them how
agape is the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ
(7) and for Philemon by teaching him how
agape loves the slave as a brother
(8) and for the Philippians whom he taught how
agape is the love that prepares us for greater glory
(9) and all the while pondering more deeply with the Romans
that what proves that God loves us is that Christ
died for us while we were still sinners. Having died
to make us righteous, is it likely that he would now
fail to save us from God’s anger? Now that we have
been reconciled, surely we may count on being saved.
The history of personhood
Shamanism can be defined as a group of techniques
by which the practitioners enter the ‘spirit world’,
purportedly attaining information that is used to help
and to heal members of their social group.
The shamans’ way of knowing depended on deliberately
altering their conscious state and/or heightening
their perception to contact spiritual entities
in ‘upper worlds’, ‘lower worlds’, and ‘middle earth’.
For the shaman the totality of inner and outer reality
was fundamentally an immense signal system,
and shamanic states of consciousness were the first steps
towards deciphering this signal system.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens was probably unique
among early humans in the ability to symbolize,
mythologize, and, eventually, to shamanize.
Although the term ‘shaman’ is of uncertain derivation,
it is often traced to the language of the Tungus
reindeer herders of Siberia where the word ‘shaman’
translates into “one who is excited, moved or raised”.
An alternative translation for the Tungus word is
“inner heat,” and an alternative etymology
is the Sanskrit word ‘saman’ or ‘song.’
Stanley Krippner1
For the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history the paradigm
of persons in relation was worked out in progressive stages.
But 500 years ago when modernity began with Luther, Calvin
and Henry VIII and then with Descartes, Hobbes and up to Hegel
the new paradigm of rugged individualism went through its stages.
Now with the postmodernists there is a return to persons
in relation with a communal emphasis as with the shamans.
The history of personhood in the West might be thought of
in its simplest form in the following three stages of three:
I Praeparatio Evangelica
1) with hunter-gatherer and agricultural shamans
2) with Greek vegetative, animal and rational souls
3) with Mosaic and Davidic tribal spirit
II Guiding definitions
1) with three persons in one God
2) with two natures in one person
3) with an individual substance of a rational nature
III Three traditions of agape and personhood
1)
