田立克 -《基督教思想史》讀書小組

ubiquitous

第五段
Within this realm of one world, a world history and monarchy created by Rome, we have Greek thought. This is the Hellenistic period of Greek thought. We distinguish: the classical Greek period, which goes up to the death of Aristotle, from the Hellenistic period which starts after him, ~ - which the Stoics, Epicureans, Neo-Pythagoreans, Skeptics, and Neo-Platonists begin. This Hellenistic period is the immediate source of much Christian thought. It is not so much classical Greek thinking. It became this later in the 4th century. But it is more Hellenistic thinking, which influenced early Christianity.
在罗马创造的世界历史，君王制度和单一世界的范畴里，我们有希腊的思想。这一段时期，我们分为：到亚里斯多德逝世为止的传统希腊时期，和之后斯多葛学派(Stoics)，伊壁鸠鲁学说(Epicureans)，新毕达哥拉斯哲学(Neo-Pythagoreans)，怀疑论(Skeptics)和新柏拉图学派(Neo-Platonists)纷起的希腊文化时期。
Here again I want to distinguish the negative and the positive elements in Greek thought in the period of the kairos, the period of the ancient world coming to an end. The negative side is what we would call Skepticism. Skepticism, not only in the Skeptic school but also in the other schools of Greek philosophy, is the end of the tremendous and admirable attempt of Greek philosophy to build a world of meaning on the basis of an interpretation of reality in objective or rational terms. Greek philosophy had undercut the ancient mythological and ritual traditions. In the period of the Sophists and Socrates, it became obvious that these traditions were not valid any more. Sophism is the revolution of the subjective mind against the old traditions. But now life must go on. The meaning of life in all realms - politics, law, art, social relations, knowledge, religion - has not been probed. This the Greek philosophers tried to do. They were not people who were sitting behind their desks writing philosophical books. If they were nothing but philosophers of philosophy, we would have forgotten their names long ago. But they were people who took upon themselves the task of creating a spiritual world by objectively observing reality as it was given to them, interpreting it in terms of analytic and synthetic reason.
这些希腊思想对早期世界完结时，那时机来到的期间有正面和负面的因素。负面的称作怀疑论。怀疑论，不但是在怀疑论学派，也在希腊哲学其他派别，是希腊哲学在客观和理性的情况下解释事实的基础上建立有意义的一个世界，极大和绝妙尝试的终点。希腊文化削弱了古时神话和宗教礼仪的传统。在诡辩学者(Sophists)和苏格拉底的时代，这些传统很明显的没有任何效果了。诡辩哲学是主观观念对旧有传统的改革。生命在全部领域的还没被探索的意义是希腊哲学家尝试要做的。他们不是坐在椅子上写书的人。如果他们什么都不是，而只是单纯哲学的哲学家，他们的名字早被遗忘了。但他们是毅然承受这个任务，如同习惯一样，客观的观察来创造一个精神世界，并以解析和综合的道理解释。

ubiquitous

Epochē
in Greek philosophy, “suspension of judgment,” a principle originally espoused by nondogmatic philosophical Skeptics of the ancient Greek Academy who, viewing the problem of knowledge as insoluble, proposed that, when controversy arises, an attitude of noninvolvement should be adopted in order to gain peace of mind for daily living.
The term has been employed in the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology, who saw it as a technique, more fundamental than that of abstraction and the examination of essences that serves to highlight consciousness itself. The philosopher should practice a sort of Cartesian doubt, methodic and tentative, in regard to all commonsensical beliefs; he should put them, and indeed all things of the natural-empirical world, in “brackets,” subjecting them to a transcendental suspension of conviction—to epochē. Without ceasing to believe in them, he should put his belief out of action in order to focus upon the sheer appearances of houses, trees, and men, which then become tantamount to the existence of his awareness of them. Thus, consciousness itself is immune from the epochē that dissolves its objects. The epochē has done its work, however, as soon as consciousness has been made manifest to his inner perception, for only then can consciousness be subjected to the same generalizing abstraction and examination of essence that had been applied to its objects. Thus, a pure phenomenology is produced that supplements the ontologies (theories of being) for special areas and explains how their objects appear or are given.

ubiquitous

The history of epistemology
Contemporary philosophy
Contemporary philosophy begins in the late 19th and early 20th century. Much of what sets contemporary philosophy off from modern philosophy is its explicit criticism of the modern tradition and sometimes its apparent indifference to it. There are two basic strains of contemporary philosophy: Continental philosophy, which designates the philosophical style of western European philosophers, and Anglo-American, or analytic, philosophy, which includes the work of many European philosophers who immigrated to Britain, the United States, and Australia shortly before World War II.
Continental philosophy
In epistemology, Continental philosophers during the first quarter of the 20th century were preoccupied with the problem of overcoming the apparent gap between the knower and the known. If a human being has access only to his own ideas of the world and not the world itself, how can there be knowledge at all?
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) thought that the standard epistemological theories had become intrusive because philosophers were attending to repairing or complicating them rather than focusing on the phenomena of knowledge as humans experience them. To emphasize this reorientation of thinking, he adopted the slogan, “To the things themselves.” Philosophers needed to recover the sense of what is given in experience itself, and this could only be accomplished through a careful description of phenomena. Thus, Husserl called his philosophy “phenomenology,” which was to begin as a purely descriptive science and only later to ascend to a theoretical, or “transcendental,” science.
Husserl thought that the philosophies of Descartes and Kant presupposed a gap between the aspiring knower and what is known and that the experience of the external world was thus dubious and had to be proven. These presuppositions violated Husserl's belief that philosophy, as the most fundamental science, should be free of presuppositions. Thus, he held that it is illegitimate to assume there to be any problem of knowledge or of the external world prior to an investigation of the matter without any presuppositions. Husserl's device to cut through the Gordian knot of such assumptions was to introduce an “epochē.” In other words, he would bracket or refuse to consider traditional philosophical problems until after the phenomenological description had been completed.
The epochē was just one of a series of so-called transcendental reductions that Husserl proposed in order to ensure that he was not presupposing anything. One of these reductions supposedly gave one access to “the transcendental ego,” or “pure consciousness.” Although one might expect phenomenology then to describe the experience or contents of this ego, Husserl instead aimed at “eidetic reduction,” that is, the discovery of the essences of various sorts of ideas, such as redness, surface, or relation. All of these moves were part of Husserl's desire to discover the one, perfect methodology for philosophy in order to ensure absolute certainty.
Because Husserl's transcendental ego seems very much like the Cartesian mind that thinks of a world but does not have either direct access to or certainty of it, Husserl tried in Cartesianische Meditationen (1931; “Cartesian Meditations”) to overcome the apparent gap, the very thing he had set out either to destroy or bypass. Because the transcendental ego seems to be the only genuinely existent consciousness, Husserl also tried to overcome the problem of solipsism.
Many of Husserl's followers, including his most famous student, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), recognized that something had gone radically wrong with the original direction of phenomenology. According to Heidegger's diagnosis, the root of the problem was Husserl's assumption that there is an “Archimedean point” for human knowledge, to use Husserl's own phrase; but, there is no ego detached from the world and filled with ideas or representations, according to Heidegger. In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger returned to the original formulation of the phenomenological project as a return to the things themselves. Thus, all the transcendental reductions are abandoned. What he claimed to discover is that human beings are inherently world-bound. The world does not need to be derived; it is presupposed by human experience. In their prereflective experience, humans inhabit a sociocultural environment, in which the primordial kind of cognition is practical and communal, not theoretical or individual (“egoistic”). Human beings interact with the things of their everyday world (Lebenswelt) as a workman interacts with his tools; they hardly ever approach the world as a philosopher or scientist would. The theoretical knowledge of a philosopher is a derivative and specialized form of cognition, and the major mistake of epistemology from Descartes to Kant to Husserl was to take philosophical knowledge as the paradigm for all knowledge.
Heidegger's insistence that a human being is something that inhabits a world notwithstanding, he marked out human reality as ontologically special. He called this reality Dasein, the being, apart from all others, which is present to the world. Thus, like the transcendental ego, a cognitive being takes pride of place in Heidegger's philosophy.

In France the principal phenomenological proponent of the mid-century was Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). But he rejected Husserl's bracketing of the world, that is, his mistake in not recognizing that human experience of the world is primary, a view capsulized in Merleau-Ponty's phrase “the primacy of perception.” He furthermore held that dualistic analyses of knowledge, such as the Cartesian mind–body dualism, are inadequate. In fact, no conceptualization of the world can be complete in his view. Because human cognitive experience requires a body and the body a position in space, human experience is necessarily perspectival and thus incomplete. Although humans experience material beings as multidimensional objects, part of the object always exceeds the cognitive grasp of the person just because of his limited perspective. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty develops these ideas (along with a detailed attack on the sense-datum theory, discussed below).
The epistemological views of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) share some features with Merleau-Ponty's. Both reject Husserl's transcendental reductions and both think of human reality as being-in-the-world. But Sartre's views have Cartesian elements that were anathema to Merleau-Ponty. Sartre distinguished between two basic kinds of being. Being-in-itself (en soi) is the inert and determinate world of nonhuman existence. Over and against it is being-for-itself (pour soi), which is the pure consciousness that defines human reality.
Later Continental philosophers attacked the entire philosophical tradition from Descartes to the 20th century for its explicit or implicit dualisms. Being/nonbeing, mind/body, knower/known, ego/world, being-in-itself/being-for-itself are all variations on a way of philosophizing that the philosophers of the last third of the 20th century have tried to undermine. The structuralist Michel Foucault (1926–84) wrote extensive historical studies, most notably The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969),in order to demonstrate that all concepts are historically conditioned and that many of the most important ones serve the political function of controlling people rather than any purely cognitive purpose. Jacques Derrida has claimed that all dualisms are value-laden but indefensible. His technique of “deconstruction” attempts to show that every philosophical dichotomy is incoherent, because whatever can be said about one term of the dichotomy can also be said of the other.
Dissatisfaction with the Cartesian philosophical tradition can also be found in the United States. The American pragmatist John Dewey (1859–1952) directly challenged the idea that knowledge is primarily theoretical; experience, he argued, consists of an interaction between a living being and his environment. Knowledge is not a fixed staring at something but a process of acting and being acted upon. Richard Rorty has done much to reconcile Continental and Anglo-American philosophy. He has argued that Dewey, Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century, specifically because of their attacks on the epistemological tradition of modern philosophy.

ubiquitous

Nature and significance
Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of religion
Subjectivity in the study of religion
There are, however, doubts about how far there can be neutrality and objectivity in the study of religion. Is it possible indeed to understand a faith without holding it? If it is not possible, then cross-religious comparisons would mostly break down, for normally it is not possible to be inside more than one religion. But it is necessary to be clear about what objectivity and subjectivity in religion means. Religion can be said to be subjective in at least two senses. First, the practice of religion involves inner experiences and sentiments, such as feelings of God guiding the life of the devotee. Here religion involves subjectivity in the sense of individual experience. Religion may also be thought to be subjective because the criteria by which its truth is decided are obscure and hard to come by, so that there is no obvious “objective” test in the way in which there is for a large range of empirical claims in the physical world. As to the first sense, one of the challenges to the student of religion is the problem of evoking its inner, individual side, which is not observable in any straightforward way. In considering a religion, however, the scholar is not only concerned with individual responses but also with communal ones. In any case, very often he is confronted only with texts describing beliefs and stories, so that he needs to infer the inner sentiments that these both evoke and express. The adherent of a faith is no doubt authoritative as to his own experience, but he is not necessarily so in regard to the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which he participates. Thus, the matter of coming to understand the inner side of a religion involves a dialectic between participant observation and dialogical (interpersonal) relationship with the adherents of the other faith. Consequently, the study of religion has strong similarities to, and indeed overlaps with, anthropology. General agreement upon scholarly methods, however, does not exist, partly because different scholars have come to the study of religion from different disciplines and points of view—such as history, theology, philosophy of religion, and sociology.
The other sense of the subjectivity of religion is properly a matter for philosophy of religion and theology (Christian and otherwise). The study of religion can roughly be divided between descriptive and historical inquiries, on the one hand, and normative inquiries, on the other. The latter primarily concern the truth of religious claims, the acceptability of religious values, and other such normative aspects; the former, only indirectly involved with the normative elements of religion, are primarily concerned with its history, structure, and similar descriptive elements. The distinction, however, is not an absolute one, for, as has been noted, descriptions of religion may sometimes incorporate theories about religion that imply something about the truth or other normative aspects of some or all religions. Conversely, theological claims may imply something about the history of a religion. The dominant sense in which one speaks nowadays of the study of religion is the descriptive sense.
Neutrality in the study of religion
The attempt to be descriptive about religious beliefs and practices, without judging them to be valuable or otherwise, is often considered to involve epochē—that is, the suspension of belief and the “bracketing” of the phenomena under investigation. The idea of epochē is borrowed from the philosophy of the German thinker Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the father of Phenomenology, and the procedure is regarded as central to the phenomenology of religion.
In this context the term phenomenology refers first to the attempt to describe religious phenomena in a way that brings out the beliefs and attitudes of the adherents of the religion under investigation, but without either endorsing or rejecting these beliefs and attitudes. Thus, the bracketing means forgetting about one's own beliefs that might endorse or conflict with what is being investigated. Second, phenomenology of religion refers to the attempt to devise a typology of religious phenomena—to classify religious activities, beliefs, and institutions.
To some extent the emphasis on neutral description arises in modern times as a reaction against “committed” accounts of religion, which were for long the norm and still exist where religion is treated from a theological point of view. The Christian theologian, for example, may see a particular historical process as providential or as providing significance for Christian living. This is a legitimate perspective from the standpoint of faith. But the historical process itself has to be investigated in the first instance “scientifically”—that is, by considering the evidence, using the techniques of historical enquiry and other scientific methods. Conflict sometimes arises because the committed point of view is likely to begin from a more conservative stance—i.e., to accept at face value the scriptural accounts of events—whereas the “secular” historian may be more skeptical, especially of records of miraculous events. The study of religion may thus come to have a reflexive effect on religion itself, such as the manner in which modern Christian theology has been profoundly affected by the whole question of the historicity of the New Testament.
The reflexive effect of the study of religion on religion itself may in practice make it more difficult for the student of religion to adopt the detachment implied by bracketing. Scholars generally agree, however, that the pursuit of objectivity is desirable, provided this does not involve sacrificing a sense of the inner aspect of religion. Thus, the stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion.
The study of religion may thus be characterized as concerned with man's religious behaviour in relation to the transcendent, to God or the gods, and whatever else is regarded as sacred or holy, and as a study that attempts to be faithful both to the outer and inner facts. Its present-day concern is predominantly descriptive and explanatory and hence embraces such various disciplines as history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology. Traditionally, however, the study has been more oriented toward truth claims in religion—these being properly the concern of theology and philosophy of religion. Needless to say, there are different sorts of theology, related to the different religious traditions, such as Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist. But insofar as the theologian expresses and articulates a tradition, he belongs to it and thus is part of the subject matter studied by the student of religion.

PeterTan

原帖由 ubiquitous 于 5-11-2007 12:48 PM 发表
Epochē
in Greek philosophy, “suspension of judgment,” a principle originally espoused by nondogmatic philosophical Skeptics of the ancient Greek Academy who, viewing the problem of knowledge ...

你想如何讨论Epochē ， 这字呢？ 有什么疑问吗？

ubiquitous

不是很明白，suspension of judgement 里的suspension是延迟，中止还是其他意思？judgement翻译作判断或意见应该是由分别的吧？

ubiquitous

这一段为什么这么说呢？
It is not, as some theologians want to believe - contrary to Paul - -that the revelation from Christ fell like a stone from heaven: here it is, and now you must take it or leave it - But there is a universal revelatory power going through all history and preparing that which is considered by Christianity to be the ultimate revelation.

ubiquitous

昨天想到了个问题：就是政教方面。若不以基督教为例，任何一个宗教，我想以宗教治国，以宗教教导孩子是正确的吗？或许以基督徒的角度来说，基督教的教导是正确的，但是若以局外人的身份看，这是否起沉锚作用，影响一个人的判断呢？

ethos

謝謝您﹐已修改了筆誤。

EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE EPHESIANS.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom41.iv.ii.html

這個網址有相當豐富的電子書(初期教父著作等等)

ubiquitous

谢谢了，我已经下载了
愿主祝福

ethos

原帖由 kevinpss 于 4-11-2007 01:32 PM 发表


我在收集一些的资料有关田力克的文献,
暂时得到的资料是田力克不是神学家,但乃是宗教哲学家.
这点我相信在以后的讨论会有很大的帮助.

這主要看評論者對神學範疇的定義。

我本身對宗教哲学非常有興趣。主要是宗哲是從宣教及護教角度看來是重要的利器之一。近代出了兩位基督徒宗哲大師﹐Alvin Plantinga 及 Richard Swinburne。他們的著作對學術界有舉足輕重的影響。不久前(2004)﹐一位著名的無神論哲學家﹐Antony Flew 更因他們的部份影響及科技的發展﹐終于公佈他放棄無神論立場改成自然神論立場。在學界裡面這是轟動的事情﹐Antony Flew 跟現今一些新無神論學者﹐如Richard Dawkins等等的境界是不同的。前者是非常哲學理性的﹐他以往攻擊的都是神學裡的精華核心思想(如基督復活等等﹐跟神學家Gary Habermas 有非常精彩的討論)﹐影響深遠﹔後者比較是用大量修辭的通俗作品﹐攻擊的目標大部份是一些牧師們﹐傳道們有心無心的脆弱論證﹐論述。由於後者是暢銷書作者﹐對現在讀著群有莫大的影響。(例﹕Dawkins 的 The God Delusion 等等)﹐但我懷疑他的影響只能持續直到大部份基督徒醒悟為止(原來我們的信仰有那么多深入的神學傳統及當代的神學精華討論﹐我們該精進了)。但主流基督群體何時醒悟還是未知數。

對大馬而言﹐唐牧師是很好的啟蒙者﹐他為我們這代人鋪了路。啟蒙者象一盞燈﹐目的並不是要永遠我們死守這盞燈﹐高舉這盞燈。乃是要我們發現另外一個更大的光源。如果您已得了啟蒙﹐那么是時候跟唐牧師說謝謝跟再見了。

根據我讀的不多的宗教哲学的書籍﹐田力克許多著作所論述的範圍都不是純宗哲的。如這本<<基督教思想史>>﹐如果硬硬將他歸類于宗教哲学家﹐實在有點兒勉強。

再說﹐德國人對神學的見解比較寬松。基本上每個基督徒都是神學人。可以參考 Wolfhart Pannenberg 的 " Theologie und Philosophie“。華人教會對哲學與神學的關係有太大的誤解了﹐下回再談吧。

ethos

{ 在我讲的整堂课里，所引用的抽象的教义、难懂得希腊观念，重点都不在于谈论这些观念，而是这些观念是否足够代表着当时教会的生活思想、虔诚度、生与死的挣扎。对外时，怎样应对外邦人与犹太人的世界，对内时，如何应对教会里分裂的各种势力。

因此，我的结论是：神学教义要给予崇高的敬意，神学教义有它非常可取之处。但不要将它当做一系列不可质疑，必要遵守的”教条“，这是违反教条当初成立的精神，也违反了基督信仰的精神。}

對田立克的這兩段有很深的感觸。

一些發生在華人教會的摩擦其實也源于對整體基督教教條/教義的缺乏認識(歷史發展﹐之中的精神與意義等等)。如您之前提到﹐許多華人教會拘泥于從教條產生出來的形式﹐而不是教條的精義本身。更糟的是﹐一些堂會的部份教條與整體的基督教教條有差異但卻被堂會視為有一樣的權威性。這部份的教條多數與群體的歷史背景文化有關聯。

教條是很重要的。它給予基督徒信仰一個能承載生命的奠基指導。它也賦予我們一個讀聖經的堅固背景神學架構。它象馬路上的指示牌﹐引導我們走正確的方向。同時﹐基督徒更有聖靈加力及教導(教我們辨認指示牌﹐改正指示牌及認識指示牌指涉的目標/對象/正確道路)。當然﹐我們需要領悟到聖靈隨己意帶領不同年代的基督群體多領悟一些指示牌及方向。

教條裡蘊藏不少抽象的概念。如果有基督徒願意深入討論教條﹐或者真誠地指出他們認為教條裡的可能錯誤(例﹕堂會教條)﹐我們應該給予肯定﹐而不是視他們為挑戰真理。我也不排除有部份人是為了挑戰而挑戰的。畢竟精于抽象思想的基督徒自古以來都屬于少數。如果無情打壓這班人﹐的確也违反教条当初成立的精神，也违反了基督信仰的精神。宗教改革是其中一個慘痛的歷史教訓﹐大夥兒經歷了不必要(不是必然的)的兄弟相殘。可惜﹐如今歷史還是不斷重演﹐雖然沒有流血﹐規模小了﹐但情況也挺慘烈的。

我的建議是﹕
1)所有基督徒應該熟悉基督教教條﹐為信仰打下基礎﹐並活出教條的精義。
2)所有基督徒應該認可(不是都參與)討論基督教教條的重要性﹐鼓勵定時的討論(將一些可能混雜在裡頭過時的堂會教條篩出去。)
3)所有基督徒若許可(能力﹐時間等等)應該積極了解基督教教條所蘊藏的神學資源﹐但不能以神學知識分階級。(許多時不是明文﹐明言但卻無形的分類了) 當然也忌去了另一個極端﹐以活出多少教條(通常是遵守形式)分階級。

PeterTan

原帖由 ubiquitous 于 7-11-2007 09:54 AM 发表
不是很明白，suspension of judgement 里的suspension是延迟，中止还是其他意思？judgement翻译作判断或意见应该是由分别的吧？

这里说到： Epochē ， suspension of judgement 是延迟做判断或论断的意思。
当两个不同理念有冲突时， 最好不要去论断，那么我们的思绪就能有平安。


Epochē 的观念也可用在因着目前缺乏一些证据与知识， 因此， 权宜之计就是从长计议， 不要太快下定论。 直等到时机成熟时， 当我们有更多的知识与证据时， 才来判断。

kamwah

各位大爷～

你们能讨论下这主题吗？

琐罗斯德教是基督教的另一个异教来源?
http://chinese3.cari.com.my/myforum/viewthread.php?tid=943505

PeterTan

原帖由 ubiquitous 于 7-11-2007 09:56 AM 发表
这一段为什么这么说呢？
It is not, as some theologians want to believe - contrary to Paul - -that the revelation from Christ fell like a stone from heaven: here it is, and now you must take it or ...

田力克让我们看到， 主耶稣基督在我们人类历史中出现， 并不是偶然的. 盲目的(fell like a stone from heaven)， 而是神预先准备好的。 换一句话说， 是神预定的时机。

我们现在事后孔明，回顾人类哲学的发展史，就可看到神的智慧，神怎样掌握着人类的历史。

早期的人类迷信大自然的神明， 一直到希腊学者打破了这迷信， 欧洲出现了诸子百家的情况。 其实不只欧洲， 我们现在知道， 公元前四百年内， 也是中国的孔子、孟子、庄子，诸子百家诞生的时期， 也是印度的释迦摩尼诞生的时候。 就在全人类大约七千年文明历史中(的四百年内)，从迷信转向理性思考， 寻找人生的意义之时， 主耶稣基督诞生了。

[ 本帖最后由 PeterTan 于 8-11-2007 12:06 AM 编辑 ]

kamwah

原帖由 PeterTan 于 8-11-2007 12:03 AM 发表


田力克让我们看到， 主耶稣基督在我们人类历史中出现， 并不是偶然的. 盲目的(fell like a stone from heaven)， 而是神预先准备好的。 换一句话说， 是神预定的时机。

我们现在事后孔明，回顾人类哲学的 ...

好象很有道理也。。。

不过为何回教那么迟才来？

我觉得其那位吩咐穆圣的天使并非正派的。。。

PeterTan

原帖由 ubiquitous 于 7-11-2007 10:01 AM 发表
昨天想到了个问题：就是政教方面。若不以基督教为例，任何一个宗教，我想以宗教治国，以宗教教导孩子是正确的吗？或许以基督徒的角度来说，基督教的教导是正确的，但是若以局外人的身份看，这是否起沉锚作用，影 ...

田力克有说到 宗教是文化思想的精髓。

基督徒对宗教的定义是什么？ 是信仰？ 是律法教条？ 还是指导或塑造我们如何生活、思想行为的准则或原则？

当基督信仰只剩下冷冰冰的教条规律时， 那是不适合用来治理国家与教育孩子的。

根据圣经，新约的律法本来是叫我们得到真自由。 有些现在的基督徒信主越信就越多约束，越不自由。 这个不可以做， 那个不可以吃， 要守这个、做那个才属灵等等。 这些都是违背圣经的精神的。

这就是田力克， 在结论中所强调的。
Ethos 也为当今教会的问题做了很好的分析，与提出建议。

ubiquitous

根据回教的记载，那个天使是Gabriel。

ubiquitous

可惜现在多时轮于后者，冷冰冰的。所以现在才有这么多人对教会反感。
另一点我想带出的是，如果一个人在基督教教育下成长，他们很多会缺乏了像非信徒背景的思考：像他们很少会思考上帝是否存在，monistic和pluralistic 等的问题。而且很多对他们而言，这样的思考是有罪的。

ethos

在基督教人文學會的克兄給予了很精闢的見解﹐或許對您有幫助。

SHC's Clement:
______________________________________________________________________________________

從方法上看，Tillich 說，《新約》從周圍宗教（克萊門特按：以及自身宗教場景）中接受一些範疇，並在「耶穌是基督」的觀點上改變 了它們的形式。這裏總有兩個過程：接受和改變。舊有概念經過轉變了，獲得了新義，才運用於耶穌。

但這裡也恆常出現著一個悖論（paradox）：任何一個觀念都既是恰當的，也有不恰當不充分之處－－不論是「彌賽亞」、「人子」、「 大衛之子」、「上帝之子」、「主」（kyrios），還是「邏各斯」（logis），都有其局 限。

於是「新約的偉大之處，在於：它能夠使用宗教史中所提出的語言、概念、象徵，但同時又保存其所解釋的耶穌形象。新約偉大的精神力量足以把哲學概念納入基督教，吸取了這些概念的異教含義和猶太教含義，但沒有失去基督教基本的真實性，即耶穌是基督這個事件，這些概念均用於解釋這個事件。」

______________________________________________________________________________________