Die gesprekke wat die afgelope tyd op die blogosfeer woed, het my laat dink aan die gesprek wat Karen Armstrong met een van haar leermeesters gehad het, toe sy nog ‘n non was. Sy het ‘n kursus – Apologetiek – gedoen en moes ‘n opstel skryf oor die rasionele gronde om die opstanding te bely.
Die gespek het as volg verloop, nadat sy gekomplimenteer is oor die goeie werk wat sy ingehandig het (The Spiral Staircase, p. 32):
“But Mother,” I suddenly found myself saying, “it isn’t true, is it?”
Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. “No, Sister,” she said wearily, “it isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.”
This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict one another, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life.
Ek dink nie mens kan mense ophou vrae laat vra nie. Behalwe as jy hulle afsonder, straf as hulle dink en alle boeke verbrand. (Met laasgenoemde kan CUM-Boeke help. Behalwe vir die pienk boekies natuurlik.)
