27 Feb '07 04:43>1 edit
Originally posted by jaywill[/b]Yes, your point is well-made. Scholem was not a scholar of comparative religion, and was likely responding to some personal-salvationist view (which also exists within Christianity), as opposed to what I would take as the more orthodox world-redemption view. That’s why I made my comment about these writers perhaps not understanding Christianity any more fully than most Christians seem to understand Judaism.
[b] In all its shapes and forms, Judaism has always adhered to a concept of redemption which sees it as a process that takes place publicly, on the stage of history and in the medium of the community; in short, which essentially takes place in the visible world, and cannot be thought of except as a phenomenon that appears in what is already visible. Christia ...[text shortened]... ss of obedience to the indwelling Christ.
I don't think your paragraph here is defensible.
Similarly—although this is strictly my personal view—I don’t entirely agree with Ariel’s statement about the divinity of messiah; but that is only because I am closer a more non-dualistic Hasidic/Kabbalistic view of the matter, which, to use those terms, would say that everything is pervaded with divinity and that all things are emanations/manifestations of ein sof. Ariel’s view may be the majority one, but the minority is not an insignificant one. I would simply say that messiah is not singularly divine.
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I wanted to revise my remarks about messianism in Judaism, because I’m not sure I put them quite accurately. I might say that Judaism is not specifically about “personal messianism,” in the sense that messiah must be a single particular person. Messiah may be person, or persons—or an archetype, which I think may be the most common view. Nevertheless, ideas of the redemption of the world as process and challenge, and concepts such as ha’olam ha’ba—most often translated as “the world to come,” although I prefer the Hasidic understanding of “the world that is always coming”—would seem to be elements of a messianic architecture of thought.
I just realized that I had probably put the point sloppily.
Now I’ll let you get back to the main focus of the thread... 🙂