Does anyone want to finally hear a serious —i.e. a deeply and rigorously informed— conversation about belief and disbelief of the Bible for us, which is to say our world of Modernity and Postmodernity? And what is even meant by those terms “Modernity” and “Postmodernity”?
In this discussion I provide a brief but nonetheless rigorous introduction to a subject which very many people are discussing but do not seem to even adequately understand in terms of all the philosophy from which it stems. I mean everything encompassed in:
— The transformation of truth itself as a concept of the human mind and its relation to the world around us, exemplified most in what is even meant by “Modern science” with respect to mathematics and “history” and, especially, their relationship to each other.
— The transformation of interpreting the Bible in light of the “Modern science” of mathematics and “history.” In other words, the rise of the so-called “higher Biblical criticism” of science and “mythology” and, in particular, how the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Renaissance is so important in any serious discussion of the topic for Christianity, Paganism, and Atheism in Modernity — especially in its relation to that other new thing called “Aesthetics” as a defining feature of what is called “epistemology,” along with the significance of Shakespeare in “Aesthetics” (!)
— The discovery of “culture,” “volk,” “Zeitgeist,” “humanity” — specifically, their discovery as political concepts and, especially, their inherent dependence upon “relativism” (when not explicit “nihilism”) in what gets specifically referred to as man’s ability to “create his own world,” long before Nietzsche (!)
— The crucial importance of understanding what exactly “Romanticism” is for understanding the transformation of Biblical interpretation in Modernity, particularly as Biblical interpretation shifts radically towards emphasizing “mythology” as a category of knowledge in “Aesthetics.”
— The rise of the Modern research university and the fate of “the liberal arts” in the traditional understanding of the university prior to the demands of “technology” in education attendant upon “Modern science.”