BruceJ said:
Thanks for the reply, Nate. Agreed, we do like to categorize thing--and sometimes to the detriment of the community of interest. But not always. It's a natural tool for learning/comprehending by association. The association could be good or bad, but it's still a tool. It can indeed be the lazy way to make a quick decision as to whether to continue with the subject, that's true. However, I'm not sure it's so negative, especially WRT your example. If you say you're a Christian, you've already tagged yourself. The probing questions can simply be a non-lazy method of ascertaining what you mean by the tag, which is often misapplied. For example, I had a friend many years ago who once opined, "I think everyone is Christian in their own way." Finding out what a person really means by identifying him/herself as a Christian can be important to the future of a relationship--or even just an ensuing conversation--and asking what church/denomination a person attends/claims is just peeling back the first layer of the onion. No snap judgment should be made on the answer to the question, but it's a start. It at least has the potential of pointing the questioner toward a creedal position. Your string of examples of what the person might "really mean" lessens in importance as you travel down the list, but the first ones are kind of important. I'm not sure I'd group them all on an equal plane.
Laughs- I am prone to painting myself into a corner, then having to paint my way out.
You're right. I agree that we need to have definitions and distinctions. I'm rather against blurring the meaning of words, or people have no idea where they stand. And it is important to know who people are as well as who we are and where we stand.
In the context I meant this was that people tend to judge quickly based on little information. And this is true throughout the world. They used to call it "snap judgments".
But ponder this. Jesus allowed the disciples space, and they followed him for quite some time before he said, "And who do you say that I am?"
He didn't expect them to know simply because he said, "I am the Messiah!" Rather, if Jesus wants to give people the space to figure out who he is, then it is actually wise to allow space for that to happen.
So, when John the Baptist, who quotes from Isaiah about winnowing forks and threshing floors and the Lion of Judah, he winds up stumbling because things stopped going according to plan. He expected the Messiah to come in judgment. - and so after declaring, "This is he..." He winds up in prison and sends his disciples to ask, "Are you he...or should we look for another."
And so Jesus tells John's disciples to go back and tell John "what you saw" the lame walk, the blind see...etc.
In life we tend to like certain scriptures and views of God, and human nature also tends to avoid those that don't fit our own worldview. John expected judgment, and instead he sees Mercy. He, like most of his followers, who were Zealots, like Peter, wanted the Lion of Judah to come in and take Israel out of the hands of foriegners.
John was the voice crying in the Wilderness that Isaiah described, "...he will prepare the way of the Lord." But John himself failed to recall other scriptures in Isaiah about a light shining in the darkness, and the sacrificial Lamb (Isaiah 52-53), and about the healing deliverer Messiah.
What Jesus was doing was actually saying to John through these disciples was, "Look at the rest of Isaiah, and you will realize that this is also a function of the Messiah". (Paraphrasing the context)
Still, my origional point was that it's best if we're slow to judge, and quicker to listen, and not make up our minds based on superficial things. But in the balance, there is a place for making distinctions like you say.
). So to say this is historical fiction may imply that the whole story is made up (aka "fictional"), which is not true. Hence the term "creative non-fiction", because the basis for the story and many of the prime characters are real, but other fictional elements are added to fill in the story.