I thnk you cab take the analogy of parent too far.
The fact is that the principles behind Christianity are not unique and reallyy should not be needed spelling out.
What I am more concerned about is the insistance that those principles can only be found in Christians. In truth, there are many who proffess Christianity but fail to live by its (God’s) principles, and the converse is true. There are many who live by those principles but who are neither Christian or in any way theistic.
But they are still shunned or condemned for not being Christian.
I don’t think its an analogy - more like the other way around. People sometimes have children for all sorts of selfish reasons. But the purest and best example of what parenting should be is found in God, for in that case there is no selfish reason. It is all about God who is everything, has everything, and needs nothing – so it is only about giving of that abundance to others.
There is also, of course, a considerable difference in difficulty and responsibility. For human parents the ability is simply given to them without knowing how it works or what it means. God started from scratch, having to figure it all out, and I very much think creating the universe was a necessary part of it. We come with all the machinery to start a child very much different from ourselves with a womb in which it can grow until it is ready to live in our world together with us.
While that was my starting point. I knew for a fact that God wasn’t required for morality because I built my own morality at the age of 13 from the principles in psychology. Furthermore I reject the notion that morality is a uniquely human thing – instead I think it is implicit in any community organism.
It certainly isn’t supported by the Bible either. Romans 2 makes that clear.
This is a problem in any community dominated by a single philosophy or worldview.
A methodology of deriving an ethical decision from Nature is illustrated by St Paul in Romans 1:26-27. Here he accuses both women and men of exchanging natural functioning for unnnatural, and it is clear from this case that both “natural” and “unnatural” have ethical value. The irony here is that our modern understanding of Nature has differed from Paul’s understanding of Nature. So when we adopt the same methodology, we end up with opposite conclusions.
In summary, there are three things which appear to be determined by Nature in human beings: sexual orientation, sexual structure, and sexual identity.
In regard to sexual orientation, approximately 2% of a human population appear to be exclusively homosexual in orientation, 18% bi-sexual, and 80% exclusively heterosexual. While the determination of sexual orientation appears to have continuity with the animal kingdom, its determination as natural is not determined by that continuity, but by its occurrence in humans.
Sexual structure in humans is also determined by Nature. When a child is born we might expect it to be called out, “It’s a boy! It’a a girl!”. But sometimes it is not so clear. Children can be born with confused genitalia and obviously, they have no say in it.
Sexual identity also appears to be biologically determined. The problems occur when someone with the sexual structure of one human gender appears to have a discordant sense of sexual identity. This can be very tricky. So let’s not get caught up arguing about the third case so much that it blinds us to understanding the situation of the previous two.
With regard to ethical choices we make in the light of Nature, we are not thinking about birdnests, but about what Nature determines for humans.
It can be seen from even Scripture, that Sola Scriptura does not hold up, as illustrated by Romans 1. Sola Scripture may have been the war cry of Martin Luther, but it becomes obvious that Luther’s doctrine was simply setting his interpretation of Scripture against the Roman Patriarchy’s interpretation of Scripture.
In retrospect, Luther was simply a child of his time. His emphasis on salvation by grace through faith was and is certainly true, but it does not cover the fullness of the Christian Faith. Even in those Scriptures, the apostle reached out to Nature. Furthermore, the Christian Faith does not replace one form of legalism with another form of legalism, but relies on the Holy Spirit to lead us into new insights in the light of science. Unfortunately, this moves us into another situation of difficulty.
Christian ethics proceed from the Cross, not nature.
That’s the interesting thing about Paul’s use of πρωτότοκος (pro-TOH-toh-kos) in Colossians: with the philosophical meaning, it tells us that everything that exists was shaped by Christ’s essence/character, but we are left being able to look at and examine anything in Creation yet be unable to have much of a clue about how any of it shows anything about His character.
I am reminded of a comment I made in a course I took at a (university accredited) Christian study center when the topic was theology from above versus theology from below: theology from below generates more questions than content (except for a frequent “Wow”).
A bunch of us in grad school had that as a banner on our walls.
A couple of professors put Eccles. 12:12b on the head of the course syllabi without comment.
I think Paul is a little too obsessed with judgement, or at least what amounts to fina judgement… It produces the attitude prevalent here about the imediacy of correct behaviour… jesus made it clear that being a Christian for 10 years or 10 seconds makes n difference, so we cannot prempt God’s judgement to the here and now. e all change with age,and the average age of congregations is over 60. DIsmissing the world in the here and now would seem be jumping the gun.
Of course Romans 2 echoes Christ’s warning about casting any soert of judement. Of course that makes witnessing a nd the Great Commision pproblematic.
What Nature might tell us is that we are all humans, no matter what is our sexual orientation, disabilities, health or whatever. From a theological viewpoint, this supports the interpretation that we should respect all humans equally, regardless of their talents, profession, ethnic background, sexual orientation, or other personal features.
The value and the acts of humans are not the same; we should recognize and respect the value of an individual even when we do not agree with his/her acts. I admit that I do not know why the biblical scriptures do not accept homosexual acts but I do note that both in the OT (Leviticus, if I remember correctly) and in a letter of Paul (Romans) there is a very clear rejection and condemnation of such acts (but note that the scriptures do not condemn people who have homosexual orientation, only homosexual acts!). Perhaps it had something to do with the focus of sexuality: the focus seemed to be on reproduction and the orderly structure of societies - homosexual pairs do not produce offspring without a third wheel. When the common good of the society is in conflict with individual freedom (‘my way’) and strive towards personal happiness, the biblical scriptures speak for the common good of the tribe and society. In that sense, biblical scriptures are not a product or supporter of modern western societies where individualism and the freedom to strive towards personal satisfaction play central roles.
This is an issue that can provoke strong feelings and strong words. Therefore, it is perhaps not wise to start a discussion about what is right and what is wrong regarding homosexual orientation. I just wanted to make general comments that are not dependent on our opinion about homosexual orientation or whether the Torah and Paul were correct when they condemned this kind of acts. For these reasons, I will not comment any attempts to claim that homosexual acts are either wrong or right. I could discuss about it in a church context or personal discussions but not on this forum.
I think you got it; this makes sense out of a lot of his posts – they show a set of simplistic concepts that frequently fail to match what he’s addressing or what others have actually written.
I agree – I only skimmed, but I couldn’t find what Richard was saying; indeed it seems to slant the other direction.
One summary of the book I remember said the message is “Life is pointless, so one may as well obey God” – not terribly exciting.
Logic would say the closer to the source, the less deviation.
Exactly – the more direct experience with the “unfiltered” Incarnate Word, the more reliable.
But you make that into a strawman that replaces what people have actually said.
So? Just because others read scripture badly is no reason to back away from it.
It takes some serious stupidity and/or ignorance to find male chauvinism or “might is right” in the scriptures, and the only message about freedom is that it is a good thing – don’t forget this verse:
“Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof”
which is on a certain bell in Philadelphia.
So you disagree with St. Augustine?
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
And this item from Revelation:
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
And this was almost always due to trying to make the scriptures speak or fit a prevailing worldview, as people do to all literature because we aren’t usually aware that we even have a worldview.
Why is that a problem? That is the context God chose for the Incarnation. I assume He did not flub the preparations, so that “Jewish thought” is the proper context for the New Testament writings. This is why every Christian should devote effort to becoming familiar with how second-Temple Judaism viewed things (it’s part of the “historical” aspect of the historical-grammatical method).
Jesus and the Apostles being Jews was not an accident. It is not something that can just be tossed aside and denigrated at will – that is antisemitism, a disease long rampant in the world and enjoying a huge resurgence at present. Given that second-Temple Judaism is the worldview into which the Word became enfleshed, logically it should be our desire to think in the same way,
That’s a bit redundant.
That’s essentially saying that you set yourself above scripture, since the “view” of the Apostles is the view of scripture that scripture presents.
Rather than rebel against the message, it behooves us to learn from it. Your approach reduces scripture to a source for confirming your own biases and notions.
No one can serve two masters: you either take as Master the Christ with whom the scriptures present us, or you don’t. You either take the view of scripture or you set your own above it.
The rabbis I knew in grad school would have a good laugh over that (it’s the sort of thing that one of them would have responded to by saying the speaker had maybe have been imbibing too much schnapps [which he insisted was a Jewish word stolen by the Germans] or perhaps too little).
I’d really like to know where you get your ideas about Judaism – too many sound like stuff peeled from an Aryan Nation screed.
Guessing at what this incomplete sentence means . . . . This again requires setting humans on a status as equal with God, as though human values are just as valid as those of the Creator. As both Jesus and Paul told us, if we reject forgiveness then we are still in our sins – a phrase that is opposite to being “in God” or “in the light” or “in Christ”.
But what if that dictator is correct? That’s the issue you ignore by demoting God to the status of a human: the message may just be true!
I have yet to see it do so – every time the failure has been in the understanding of the one making the claim (usually in failing to understand what sola scriptura was intended to mean).
LOL
Th failure is that of not seeing that the first clause is drawn from scripture. You’re setting a warped view of scripture – i.e. a strawman – against another limited view of scripture.
Yep – all too clear to anyone who has read Plutarch, Plotinus and other Greek thinkers of the time. Every early heresy came from pushing Greek thought into Christianity.
I wish I could remember the author . . . . There was at least one second-Temple Jewish writer whose thought was very similar to what Luther did in his Bondage of the Will, putting moral choices on a compass where east was good and west was evil and arguing that the human will could never (except in extreme individuals such as Enoch and Elijah [taken as Messianic types]) point east. There was discussion of whether any eastward aim was possible, e.g. northeast or southeast, but in general human moral will pointed westward to one degree or another. Two things were seen as remedies: first, the Law, which was discussed as a hedge or wall that would prevent any serious westward aim; and Messiah, who would give new hearts which would trend eastward.
I don’t recall any who were as dark about the matter as was Luther in Bondage of the Will, where the Reformer depicted the human will that could be guided by only one of two riders: the Devil (man’s “natural state”) or the Word [I’m reminded of one evening over German beer and beef tenderloin where an Oxford-educated professor mused about this, proposing that Luther was wrong and humans could throw off the devil . . . yet opining that this would be of little benefit since the ‘old horse’ still needed the Word to find its way from the arid desolation into green pastures.] – but then I wasn’t doing Jewish studies so there could be some out there.
A TA from India (advanced calculus) suggested that people who see everything in just back or white have a phase-space issue: their “moral mathematics” collapse all functions onto the x-axis only. He then proceeded to illustrate that there are situation where only that vector component is important . . . mathematically, of course.
It must be kept in mind that the connotation of the word “slave” was different back then, specially in Jewish context where a slave was essentially to be treated as a member of the family – and in both Jewish and Roman contexts where faithful slaves were often granted sonship and adoption into the family (cf. Ephesians 1).
Another trip down memory lane: some Jews at the time understood the promise of “a prophet like Moses” to mean Messiah, and since Messiah by definition would be greater than Moses then Messiah-prophet would teach as much higher than Moses as Moses above the Gentiles. They used the emphasis of the written Prophets on principles as an arrow pointing the way. I remember a fellow student exclaiming, “These guys really got it!” when we read some of this stuff.
The principles are absolutely unique!
No other religion or system can rise above the Golden Rule; only Christianity has the center of the matter, the Incarnation and Cross. Others reason from self-interest to a form of altruism; Christianity starts at the Cross, denying self-interest:
No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."
(emphasis added)
No – Rome invoked councils above scripture. Luther’s move was back to the position of the early Fathers who held that scripture was the final authority.
It should be noted that in invoking sola scriptura the position of Luther and the other Wittenburg Reformers was that anything useful and anything from antiquity that did not contradict scripture should be retained, and indeed only such changes as would add edification ought to be made. It was even held among the Wittenberg group that the Holy Spirit speaks through the Fathers and other great teachers given to the church – something that has to be reckoned with in order to understand what sola scriptura was intended to mean.
When read as nuda scriptura, it definitely doesn’t hold up just from one passage: Jesus promised the Apostles that the Spirit would lead into all truth – so scripture was never meant to be the sole source! And the idea that the NT writings are the fulfillment of that promise and it no longer holds leads to the strange position that the Spirit no longer guides the church.
But when read in the way explicated above, it fits just fine: the apostle tells us to test the spirits, and in Acts we are shown how: search the scriptures!
I once wrote a lengthy essay showing that the understanding of salvation by grace through faith does not conflict with the teachings of the Orthodox (or Oriental Orthodox) when it is understood in contrast to what Rome was putting forth at the time – i.e. as a statement within that particular milieu. I should search and see if I can dig that up and send it to an Orthodox theologian to see what they might say!
Legalism: the #2 reason that university students (when I was one) rejected Christianity.
As my first college biology professor noted in a homily one day, all of life boils down to judgment calls.
Only if you’re reading in English and shallowly.
The trouble is that there are four different Greek verbs that get rendered as “judge” in most translations. Christ (and Paul) warns against one of these and somewhat against a second, but Paul admonishes us to engage in the others! One could often be rendered as “analyze” or “assess”, and we are supposed to engage in that sort of judgment; another should be rendered “condemn” or “pass sentence on”, and we are told not to do that (I like these two because the best rendition uses the same first consonant as the Greek – makes them easy to remember).
In practical terms, the one we are warned against comes down to “form a judgment and treat the other person negatively on that basis”, while the other is more “consider what you know, conclude the truth, and hold that truth up for consideration (by one’s self but sometimes for the other as well)”. I don’t think the real import of the second hit me until a psychiatrist I was seeing (for depression), who was an atheist, quoted Paul one day as pointing to a major part of the core of mental health: judge/assess one’s self accurately/truthfully and accept/embrace that – that fits with Jesus’ “Woe to you” statements; He points out failings and consequences (though Jesus’ statements are suggestive: He only judges them for things they [should] know better about).
So in a way it comes down to “Love the sinner, hate the sin” – sadly quoted more often than done.
That Romans 1 passage is often misunderstood by taking it out of the historical context: Paul describes not some generic judgment but rather a situation the Roman Christians were able to see around them. Without going into great length, the “exchanging” of sexual activities points to a trend that started in the legions where men dominated other men sexually to degrade the other (e.g. prisoners of war) and thus “prove” just how masculine they really were. This had begun spreading to the general populace by the first century so it was no longer just soldiers but Romans who wanted to show they were “real men” who used slaves or male temple prostitutes this way (it makes for disgusting reading, but there are writings where a soldier argues to an associate that he must do this to be a true Roman). So it was heterosexual men who doubled in their activities, and there is evidence that many came to enjoy the dominance that it became their preferred sexual activity (something that became somewhat common under certain emperors).
Read from the point of view of an ancient Hebrew or early Christian, that is shockingly obvious.
Taken together with the other 99%, that verse expresses the overall message.
Don’t forget, the Israelites only got kings because they rejected Yahweh as being king over them. The trend of things in historical context was towards greater freedom.
Only in your warped view.
Only you react to the proclamation of the Gospel by saying it makes God cruel. Everyone else seems able to grasp that warning the passengers of a sinking ship or the inhabitants of a burning building that they need to get to safety, and that parents bringing up children to recognize and so not incur consequences is love, not dictatorship – and even that dictatorship, when it is actually doing good, can be welcome.
No, I’m not – you have clearly stated more than once that you have the option to ignore scripture when it doesn’t fit your opinion, specifically with regards to Paul and anything “Jewish”. Your stated position is that you get to set aside clear scripture in favor of your more general views gathered from elsewhere.
Um, what? Did Adam cease to exist? Did the Flood bring an end to sin?
What human philosophy are you imposing on the scriptures this time???
Because… the majority of Christianity DOES replace one form of legalism with another and it is still salvation by works (and many are pretty legalistic in the old fashion way as well). It has simply become a legalism of dogma and salvation by works of the mind (much like Gnosticism frankly). I don’t think that is what it should do, of course.
If Noah was still “infected” then he was no differet to anyone else and should have been killed. It would make the whole thing a charade. Either God killed all the evil sinners or He didn;t. If He did then Adam’s inehted sin dies with them, if He didn;t then His killingwas a sham and He was litteraly showing favouritism. WHichever. Scripture loses.
Becasue if the Flood was not a propper reboot, or second chance then the commentary is wrong, Scrioture would be false.
Wheich ever wqy, Original Sin must die at the Flood for Sripture to be true.
It is a false doctrine anyway so the whole thing is just pointless.
