Sacred texts... their revelation and challenge!

I was reviewing this interfaith discussion board and sharing board and noticed that sacred texts was "untenanted"... No posts...


For me this is an important topic.... How do we in our various religious traditions come about accepting a text as "sacred". There must be a variety depending of our approaches.

For me as a Baha'i any text that was written by a Messenger of God or as we Baha'is call Them.. Manifestation of God would be a sacred text.

Of course in the ancient world writing was not universal.. and so there were verbal traditions where the teachings of the Prophet or Messenger were passed down over the years or sometimes centuries... and in the passing you often have variable cultural inflections and sometimes whole different translations that you can find in a sacred text..

You also have in the life of a Messenger of God what are termed revelations.. so the text can be a product of revelation and there are descriptions of states of revelation. To quote an article on the subject from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Every great religion acknowledges revelation in the wide sense that its followers are dependent on the privileged insights of its founder or of the original group or individuals with which the faith began. These profound insights into the ultimate meaning of life and the universe, which have been handed down in religious traditions, are arrived at, it is believed, not so much through logical inference as through sudden, unexpected illuminations that invade and transform the human spirit."

revelation | religion

But having the revelation as an experience is only the beginning it seems to me ... You also have the issue of peoples' response to it... there's where the "fun" begins ... if you'll pardon my description...

Consider the following:

The [very] prophets, who are the pearls of the Ocean of Unity and the recipients of Divine Revelation, have [ever] been the objects of men's aversion and caviling; much more these servants. Even as He saith: 'Every nation schemed against their apostle to catch him. And they contended with falsehood therewith to refute the truth.'* So likewise He saith, 'There came not unto them any apostle but they mocked at him.'* Consider the appearance of the Seal of the Prophets, the King of the Elect (the soul of the worlds be His sacrifice); after the dawning of the Sun of Truth from the horizon of the Hijaz what wrongs befell that Manifestation of the Might of the Lord of Glory at the hands of the people of error! So heedless were men that they were wont to consider the vexation of that Holy One as one of the greatest of good works and as the means of approaching God Most High.

~ Abdu'l-Baha, A Traveller's Narrative, p. 73

So if we can share some of these issues about sacred texts and how they came to be regarded as such and what or how these texts can still "speak" to us... it would seem to be worthy of our time and effort!

The first question might be, does God speak words? What does it mean when we say the Bible is the Word of God? A good place to start, Abraham/Moses. How does God communicate His will to man? If Moses was the recipient of a mystical experience, God's self revelation, how does Moses communicate this revelation to the rest of men? To make public the revelation received in a personal mystical encounter. In the first place this revelation must be made known in a way that is proportionate to man's way of being, it must be incarnated, think culture. It begins by making use of what they know, use of public institutions/customs, the way man deals with man. Men dealt with men by making pacts, deals, treaties etc. When God made a covenant with Abraham, it copied the norm for 'cutting a pact/covenant' common to man way of being.


One could make the same case for belief in the Resurrection based on the collective mystical experience of Pentecost and the communication of that experience by the Apostles that followed.

Goddess_Ashtara said:

I come to view something as "sacred" when I have subjectively determined that it carries profound spiritual-religious value to me.

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Thanks for posting Ashtara... If I may address you with that name... "Profound spiritual-religious value" sounds to me like a good place to start!

pcarl said:

The first question might be, does God speak words? What does it mean when we say the Bible is the Word of God? A good place to start, Abraham/Moses. How does God communicate His will to man? If Moses was the recipient of a mystical experience, God's self revelation, how does Moses communicate this revelation to the rest of men? To make public the revelation received in a personal mystical encounter.

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Good place to start Carl! Thanks for the input... It occurred to me to ask you how similar are the words "image of God" and "God speaks words"... I know for me "image of God" may have a symbolic meaning as well as the words "God speaks words". Maybe it could be that in that mystical experience say in Moses the words come through in Hebrew because that was the language of Moses. Well anyway I pose it to you... Thanks again for your post Carl!

arthra said:

Maybe it could be that in that mystical experience say in Moses the words come through in Hebrew because that was the language of Moses.

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I think what Moses enjoyed through a personal mystical experience was intuitive knowledge of God, a 'divine pathos' of the prophets. I don't believe actual words were spoken in any language although Moses would have communicated in Hebrew.
As for the 'image of God', are you asking of how we understand that we are created in God's image, or the image of God we have formed?


" if we claim to fully understand God, what we claim would not be God." Augustine

pcarl said:

I think what Moses enjoyed through a personal mystical experience was intuitive knowledge of God, a 'divine pathos' of the prophets. I don't believe actual words were spoken in any language although Moses would have communicated in Hebrew.
As for the 'image of God', are you asking of how we understand that we are created in God's image, or the image of God we have formed?


" if we claim to fully understand God, what we claim would not be God." Augustine

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Thanks for your post Carl! ... Excellent response and your description of Moses having "....a personal mystical experience was intuitive knowledge of God, a 'divine pathos' of the prophets. I don't believe actual words were spoken in any language although Moses would have communicated in Hebrew" seems to me to be quite cogent!

Maybe the words "image of God" could refer to a kind of reflection of God in us... our heart ... that we can to a degree reflect God's attributes.

Some refer to Hebrews 1:3

• God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds. 3 His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance

I'm not meaning to imply we have the Station of "His Son" but there might be a somewhat similar capacity in us to reflect some of the attributes of God.
..

arthra said:

His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance

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Another way to put it, Jesus is God's love made visible.
There has been a long theological debate over the question , does God suffer in the midst of human suffering? Is passion one of His attributes? If it is not can we conceive of Him as a God of love? Is He involved? One model is the God of Scripture, the other model of the cold and unmoved deity of Greek philosophy. Something like the horror of Auschwitz begs the question , 'Where is God'?, especially if our image is formed from Scripture.

Yes Carl..

I agree the love of God for us is a significant point. There's a teaching as I recall about that I'll share here with you... God loves us.. in our creation and many other ways it can be visible..through sending Messiah or Prophet...

We can return our love for God through love following His teachings and worship..

Thus love is flowing from God to man and back from man to God...

also the love can flow from man to man.. and from man to the creature, etc.

arthra said:

God loves us

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More than loving, God IS love,1Jn, 4:8 and 16. Agape, a purely other-directed love, a love that seeks no response and demands no return, a love centered totally on the beloved. God's self gift.

arthra said:

Thus love is flowing from God to man and back from man to God...
also the love can flow from man to man

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This is the relational love within the Trinity, flowing to us through grace.

Thanks for your post Carl!

I myself do not like the term sacred, especially if it is going to be used to derermine the importance or unimportance of something associated with God.
The writings were designed to be used as a catylist for the purpose of connecting with our inner being.
If a Hindu text works better for one and a christian or Muslim text works well for others etc., then it makes little difference if some scholar deems them sacred, the worthiness is determined by there ability to connect people with God.

allfoak said:

I myself do not like the term sacred, especially if it is going to be used to derermine the importance or unimportance of something associated with God.

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They are referred to as sacred because they are believed to be God inspired and apart from the profane.

Since God/Gods/Goddesses are human imagination, sacredness is because of wisdom contained. But different people will have different measures of wisdom. so, what one considers sacred will differ.

I feel some kind of sacredness feeling on any text which is very old. Like from millenia ago.

A simple administrative babylonic issue about a tree that invaded a neighbourds garden, but written in cuneiform rocks in an unthinkable distant time, to me feels as quite sacred.
Is it crazy? I wouldn't go that far, I think the ancientness of sacred texts play a great deal in many traditions of how "sacred" they feel.

arthra said:

How do we in our various religious traditions come about accepting a text as "sacred".

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There are some clearly who deem texts to be sacred if they are deemed to be the word of God or some other deity.

I prefer to take a slightly different interpretation and define a "sacred" text as one which presents TRUTH, whether literally or cryptically or in some kind of code. By truth I mean in terms of matters of life, existence, the understanding of who and what we are and any truth associated with the divine, eternal life and so on.

If we limit ourselves and our thinking to say that the texts and tomes of mainstream religions are the sacred ones, then we do ourselves an injustice for there are imo hundreds of sacred texts of the sages and philosophers which help us understand who and what we are and how we may live a long and healthy life. In fact there are secrets highlighted in those hundreds of works that are also mentioned in mainstream tomes like the Bible and Bhagavad Gita albeit cryptically or in code.

In the end, what many of us search for, is not the Creator or the existence of any given deity, but rather we search simply for the truth. Whatever it turns out to be, we just want the truth. We don't want to be lied to any more, or mislead, or steered down dead ends or caught up in social conditioning amongst groups of people who themselves are already caught in social conditioning. All we want is the truth. The truth of who we are, what makes us what we are, how we might live healthily, how we might live eternally and whether anything we do in life actually has any lasting significance at all.

Any work, script, tome, treatise or book that provides such truth is imo sacred.

There is no such thing as a sacred text.
There are many things that have been written down by people over the eons which are of great value - but none of them are "sacred" in the sense that most religionists would like to believe.

I enjoy the preservation of old documents just as much as the next guy - but only because originals can't be replaced - not because magic invisible people wrote or guided the hands of the writers...

In Judaism, Moses prophecied that the entire nation would experience a direct revelation of G-d. The entire nation did experience Divine revelation when G-d spoke the first two commandments to us. Since the whole nation experienced that Moses was indeed communicating with G-d his position as prophet remains stronger than all later prophets, who likewise can't contradict anything he said.

Since Moses' prophethood was established to the nation, the Pentateuch was likewise accepted by the nation as sacred. Later prophets who recorded their prophecy - after establishing their prophethood - were selected for cannon based on the relevancy or importance of their prophecies to later generations.

Tumah said:

In Judaism, Moses prophecied that the entire nation would experience a direct revelation of G-d. The entire nation did experience Divine revelation when G-d spoke the first two commandments to us.

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In what way did the entire nation directly experience divine revelation? I don't remember any records of God's voice booming out of the sky to 1000s of people. What you are really saying here is that the nations were communicated to by Moses, a man.

The Bible is a heavily edited, heavily censored and carefully crafted set of collective works put together by a self-appointed bunch of men for the purpose of establishing power and control. Every human has the right to see the truth, to view and assess every original document, every script, scroll, treatise and piece of prose that has been written concerning the time of Christ and the time before Christ. No group of self-appointed men should be able to censor that data and present it to the populous the way they want it to be presented.

God doesn't need a man to do his works. If he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, then he can do anything. The idea that a man was needed to write down "stuff" and that a group of men was later needed to sift through lots of "stuff" and pull out specific bits to form the Bible is rather a nonsense imo.

It's time the human race was given the truth. It is time the secrets that are recorded in these works cryptically and in actual code, were made known to the ordinary man and woman and that they are set free from the social and religious conditioning that they have been shackled with.

PilgrimOfLight said:

In what way did the entire nation directly experience divine revelation? I don't remember any records of God's voice booming out of the sky to 1000s of people. What you are really saying here is that the nations were communicated to by Moses, a man.

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Deut. 4:12.
Also the four elements that precede revelation (wind, tumult, fire and voice - see Eze. 1 and 1 Kings 19) are present in Ex. 19.

The Bible is a heavily edited, heavily censored and carefully crafted set of collective works put together by a self-appointed bunch of men for the purpose of establishing power and control. Every human has the right to see the truth, to view and assess every original document, every script, scroll, treatise and piece of prose that has been written concerning the time of Christ and the time before Christ. No group of self-appointed men should be able to censor that data and present it to the populous the way they want it to be presented.

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That's one possibility.

God doesn't need a man to do his works. If he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, then he can do anything. The idea that a man was needed to write down "stuff" and that a group of men was later needed to sift through lots of "stuff" and pull out specific bits to form the Bible is rather a nonsense imo.

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Assuming the former.

It's time the human race was given the truth. It is time the secrets that are recorded in these works cryptically and in actual code, were made known to the ordinary man and woman and that they are set free from the social and religious conditioning that they have been shackled with.

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Wurt?