What is Experienceable

At the end of the last post, I indicated that "I will try to show whether Jesus maintains that what he calls 'truth' can be known or not, and if so, how?  Of course, I am going to frame the matter in terms of the organic quality of 'roused, readied, reaped.'  I would like to see if 'organic' life can embrace 'live' questions."

There is first to be addressed the question of what, in a religious sense, can be made of the word "know."  Is "to know" more definitive than "to believe"?  I suggest that any difference between the two terms is crushed (or perhaps I should say "compacted") by my having thrown in the phrase "in a religious sense."  Religion is essentially experiential--or at least that seems to be the approach Jesus takes.

If religion is essentially experiential, then it can embrace both knowledge and belief.  I can know that the world is round, and I can believe in the veracity of the various methods of education to which I have been exposed, ratifying in numerous terms the "fact" that the world is round.  I live with the experience that the world is round, both in the repeated experiences of hearing that view shared, and in the conditioned responses I have to the surrounding land, sky, and weather that fall together into my engrained conception of the world as round.

None of this is shaken by my having learned that the earth is miles from being a perfect sphere, or by ingenious arguments of flat-earthers (though many such arguments might leave me speechless in an inability to respond.)  I "know" that the world is round, and I "believe" that the world is round, but all of that can be subsumed under the heading of my experiences.  The world that is round and spinning for eons in space (don't ask me how) is the world that I experience, and that conceptualized world is that in which my religion--such as it is--will have to occur.

That same kind of certainty of experience is what Jesus brings to his ministry.  We can argue forever about ostensible proofs of God's existence, but there does not seem to be any significant body of theological argument about the validity of Jesus' arguments for God's existence--Jesus just assumes God's existence.

Jesus assumes many things about his audience.  This may well prove very important when considering statements of his that are usually thought to be definitively theological--perhaps Jesus is just working with the available raw materials of the existing religious milieu.  This is especially important when Jesus flatly contradicts the existing religious milieu, including elements to which the churches even today remain wedded.  That is when the arguments of the theologians can be the most artful, and the most entertaining.