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Docta Ignorantia XIV Name and Form What has name has form. This is the reality behind the sequestering of the Name in Hebraism/Judaism: not the worry about profanation, so much, but rather, the horror of idolatry. When a name is uttered, the form is present. There is no name without form. What is without form is also without name. At this point, there is no religious denomination. Here is the spiritual ether Bonhoeffer glimpsed as religionless Christianity. The question of the canon is not a question of what. It is a question of who. Not what is canonical, but, who makes the canon. Jim Sanders wanted to make a canon for years. But he does not have the spiritual grandeur to do it. That canon is a live issue is right, and I am glad to see it taken so. That it is connected to the creeds is also right, and I am glad to see this. But who is going to ask the question and make the decisions? If they lack spiritual grandeur and telos to do this very job, and if the kairos is not there for it -- which it is not, incidentally -- then whoever is talking is just blowing hot air and worse. For example, Jim Sanders. The canon we have is sufficient to the need. As our composition professor used to say, when you have learned to compose as well as Brahms did -- Brahms was then such a fuddy-duddy -- then, perhaps, you will have ability to compose in another [modern] manner. We can practice the canon we have, recognizing who did it and where it is in error. It is ignorant and benighted to bring in the off-track documents because these shared the same literary base as the on-track, so-called canonical documents do. The question is who, not what. What needs to be done is to clean up, to excise from what we have, not to add to it. Clean and collate, not append. The desire to append arises from a motivation which is not impartial, not free from the desire for self-aggrandizement. For example, Jim Sanders. There is kairos and telos for clean and collate. There is neither for append. Talk of append is idle, listless, infecund.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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