What Christians Believe? Peter Kreeft - 5 Quest. - 1

What Christians Believe? Peter Kreeft – 5 Questions – 1
cinops be gone Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I am going to jump ahead to the questions at the end of this talk (side 2) given at the C.S. Lewis Summer Conference. These questions are appropriate for this past week of Pope Benedict’s visit to America.

1. Based on the assimilation of Christ is it important to be baptized and then receive communion or can I walk into the Church and receive communion?
The New Testament does not clearly answer that question. It does however command us to be baptized and it also commands us to receive the Lord’s Supper. So to find the answer to that question, you can do one of two things. If you are a Protestant, you go into the New Testament more deeply and secondarily you consult your Christian brethren and sister. If you are a Catholic you look at the New Testament and you see that Jesus established a Church with the authority to teach in his name and you ask where is that Church and what does the Church say?

3. Why has the Church been so fearful of the imagination?
The Church is fearful of the imagination today because she is not very good at it. She feels inferior. We have done a good job in competing with the world intellectually and morally. We have not done a good job in competing with the world in terms of beauty.

Our theology of heaven for example is very good. And our morality about the difference heaven should make for this life is very good and our morality about the difference heaven should make for this life is very good but our pictures are not moving pictures, as once they were in the Middle Ages.

Maybe it has something to do with Puritanism. I don’t know where the imagination was divorced from the rest of Christian life and of course we had to turn the clock back because it is keeping bad time.

But throughout history even in paganism, there was a suspicion of the imagination. Plato and Augustine spoke vociferously against the theatre not just because of its content but because of its form. Frankly, I don’t know whether they are right or not.

Obviously, I love Shakespeare. I love Beethoven and I dislike the Puritan suspicion of all the works of the imagination and even of the theatre as an institution. But on the other hand, it’s certainly not merely an accident that the theatre like lawyers has always had a bad reputation and the butt of jokes throughout history.
I suppose it’s like sex. It is something very beautiful and therefore very dangerous and corruptia optima passima (the corruption of the best things are the worst things). So if we see a very big bad thing like Hollywood, look for the very good thing that they are corrupting and do it better than they do, and boy will we have power?
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.