Your conscience, or that of others? Point remains, I’m guessing that you would deny the validity of allowing the ancient Israelites to have an equal opportunity to voice their conscience in relaying what is good and what isn’t? Point is, the fact that we’re even having this conversation means that, at some level, you think your conscience more reliable, more correct, or more trustworthy that theirs, no?
Jesus was rejecting the scribes heavy hands on the words of the prophets. Isn’t this enough proof that the OT is filled with error? And shouldn’t this give us license to question the manmade doctrines created since He was here?
This is a great question. It reminds me of the struggle of after-generations dealing with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I understand the reasoning, but it seems much like holocaust, with indiscriminate killing of children and women, as well as male civilians (similar to the Berlin and London bombings). It seems to me more like the worst sort of terrorism; though I know that folks of my grandparents’ generation viewed it otherwise in many cases.
In a very real sense, war and killing of any kind (and maybe that’s why Greg Boyd is a pacifist Anabaptist, citing Jesus’ example) seems far out of proportion to what actually is in people’s hearts.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.
Or,
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
It reminds me that for every choice, there is at least a likely excuse for the other person’s actions. However, in these cases, it throws me more and more back to God through Christ–who alone know our reasons and ignorance. It’s less, it appears to me, related to a black and white choices.
What really stands out to me as objectionable would not be so much that the Hebrews did what they did; but that God would enforce the killing of all those who were innocent–so that it was clear that it wasn’t just collateral damage, but intentional.
We look to God to be the ultimate righteousness in our gray world. The accounts in Joshua and Numbers, for example, seem more to mirror the savagery and boastfulness of the surrounding kingdoms of the time.
Thanks.
Yes. And to add a detail, without taking away at all from the general horror, the bomb on Nagasaki wiped out decimated the centre of Christianity in Japan:
Kind of makes Christianity a tough sell when this is not only how we treat our enemies, it’s how we treat our own.
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Post-Pentecost Christians have access to the mind of Christ through the Holy Spirit, so I would say that our consciences should be more trustworthy. We are sanctified in a way the righteous of the Old Testament were not.
Seems to me we have a moral responsibility to trust our own conscience. Anything else leaves you open to the condemnation leveled in post WW II Nuremberg at those who claimed they’d only done their duty. Also, if our moral judgement is so shaky, how will we ever choose whose judgement is better than our own?
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I have never heard this type of claim before. How is this substantiated?
It’s New Testament teaching that the Holy Spirit sanctifies believers by transforming them to be like Christ. John 14:15-18. Philippians 2:5-8. Galatians 5:22-23. 2 Corinthians 3:18. The specific reference to having the mind of Christ is in 1 Corinthians 2:16.
Dear Christie,
That is a real stretch of Philippians 2:5-8 to say you know the mind of Jesus. I find it interesting that so many claim the knowledge of the holy spirit but deny the recorded words of the spirit of truth. (John 14:15-18)
“Have access to the mind of” is different than “know the mind of.” It is basic Christian teaching that the Holy Spirit unites the believer to God through Christ. That is the basis of a huge amount of theology, including how the atonement works. The believers of the Old Testament were not filled with the Holy Spirit in the same way that believers today, post-atonement, post-Pentecost, are filled with the Holy Spirit. Unlike you and I, Daniel and I share basic Trinitarian theology and interpretations of basic Christian doctrines, so I can argue with him on that basis. You get your ideas from all sorts of sources other than the Bible or orthodox Christian doctrines, so I don’t have enough common ground to have much of a conversation.
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Dear Christie,
I am only asking because, like at Pentecost, I have listened to one filled with the holy spirit for hundreds of hours and discussed the teachings with many, as the early Christians did. And yes, it is very different than the trinitarian doctrine.
Best Wishes, Shawn
What a coincidence! I also have listened to one filled with the holy spirit for hundreds of hours and discussed the teachings with many, as the early Christians did. And that is at least in large part what led me to embrace the Trinitarian doctrine as I have!
Dear Daniel,
Can you point me to the recordings/writings?
Best Wishes, Shawn
Don’t want to speak for Daniel, but I suspect he, like I, have spent hundreds of hours in church listening to an anointed speaker and have discussed the teachings with the members of the church, along with having lunch of course. And yet I have never had anyone speak against the Trinitarian doctrine. Perhaps the people in our church are filled with a different spirit than yours?
Shawn, I think you are a nice person who generally wants the best for other people. But it’s kind of obvious you belong to a cult. Your group is excessively devoted to the teachings of a single prophet who supposedly received new revelation from God. Most of us aren’t interested in joining a cult, or a new religious movement if you prefer. We like our Christian belief system that has a nice trajectory tracing all the way back to the apostolic tradition and not relying on any mystical figure delivering radically different teaching from God.
cult /kəlt/
noun
a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
As long as there are hundreds of Christian beliefs, all are cults - none are the true teaching of Jesus.
But when your system of veneration depends on the teaching of one person who claimed some new revelation from God, whether that is Joseph Smith, or Charles Taze Russell, Mary Snaida-Akatsa, or Beatrice Brunner, it’s not just another flavor of Christian beliefs, it’s its own belief system. There is a something that counts as “Christian orthodoxy.” Different groups can argue about where exactly the boundaries are between in and out on various peripheral matters or details, but there is a center that everyone agrees on, and it comes from the apostolic teaching and the creeds, which instruct us in how the earliest believers understood Jesus’ life, ministry, and teachings. When you start adding revelation, you aren’t anywhere near the center anymore and it’s not just the peripheral issues you are outside the boundaries on.
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Dear Christie,
The only veneration that goes on in my circles is of God the Creator through Jesus, the King. You say I get my my information from many sources, but it is that I have discovered God’s inspiration in many non-biblical texts, reinforcing the words of the prophets and Jesus. Christian Orthodoxy is only a small subset of the gift Jesus promised. Again, I do not venerate Homer, Socrates, Origen, Zwingli, Greber, or Brunner, but I do thank them and all those who have helped God to bring us the Word.
Best Wishes, Shawn
[In addition to Christy’s expressed concerns above… ] Reincarnation and solicitation of the spirits of the departed are not good “omens” (so-to-speak) for any program that purports to be carrying on the Lord’s work in any orthodox fashion. Lord knows that many of us may push around the edges of current orthodoxy in many ways, but to push in certain directions from within (i.e. starting with, or even returning to scriptures as many such reformers would claim) and to pull (against scriptural exhortation) from without are two very different things.
Dear Mervin
@Christy was invoking Jesus’ promise to send the spirit of truth to justify her “knowing the mind of Jesus.” Many claim to be filled with the Holy Spirit and speak in his name. In orthodoxy this seems to be acceptable. But what about the rigorous testing need to show that these truly come from God? (1 John 4). I have never advocated communing with the dead, but rather rigorous testing of the messages received from multiple sources including all the authors of the bible. I cannot accept the stance that orthodoxy takes to exclude all new revelations that Jesus promised to send.
Best Wishes, Shawn