Amen, or so it seems. Personally I find it extremely hard to read the Bible so I’m pretty sympathetic with Christians who don’t.
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Incorrect. That is just like the previous presumption that you have to be a Christian in order to be a good person which is offensive. I see more flexibility in the phrase “faith community” than in the word “Christian,” and see no reason why the former cannot be extended without changing the meaning of Christian to make one religion indistinguishable from another. The only crime here being one against that of language and clear communication. Church meetings have never been exclusive and church membership tend to distinguish between denominations let alone religious affiliation. Furthermore there are lots of ecumenical meetings of different religious groups and that could be called a faith community. Why not?
If many are gathered, only one or two are likely to agree with me. haha.
Yes, we are all limited, stumbling around in the dark trying to find our way, and we all accept handed-down knowledge as authority on a range of subjects. We have to. I accept the scientific consensus on a variety of topics because I don’t have the time or expertise to investigate it myself. The same goes for the spiritual realm.
I have chosen to accept the Bible as my inspired, authoritative guide in spiritual matters. Why?
First, if God is Spirit, then we cannot reach him by any means at our disposal, including logic. For us to know anything of God, he must reveal it to us. Therefore, if he exists, he should be found within one of the existing faith traditions on Earth. For that reason, I don’t trust homemade religious brews, including my own. It’s one person’s best guess. The chance that one individual has gotten it “right” is as miniscule as the chance of a high-school dropout inventing a new calculus.
Second, people have found this book a reliable guide for thousands of years. Knowledge is handed down because it is valuable. Many have walked this path before me. It seems brave to say that we can blaze our own trail up the mountainside, but in reality it is foolish pride in our own individual strength and wisdom. Others have drawn far closer to God than I have, so I wish only to follow their example. I surrender my authority to the master, Christ, because I find him to be the prototype of what a human being can and should be.
Jesus is true north for me. The longer I walk this direction, the more that I am convinced of its truth. The conviction is not intellectual, but experiential. That is what Jesus meant when he said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
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I think I have to apologize for continuing to harp on the same old points. It might seem like I’m promoting something but I don’t think of it that way. Makes me think of the many apologists and just plain believers who show up on atheist forums and seem a little insistent about what they believe. Most regard them like pushy salesmen but I’ve noticed many times they seem more to be arguing for the justification of the choices they’ve made than for advisability of others doing the same. I don’t advocate my choice for anyone else really but I do think it is the best one for me.
I’ve never seen anyone argued into the kingdom of God. If people ask, I try to point them in the right direction. Sometimes, I’ll notice someone going the wrong direction and advise them to turn around. They rarely listen, but that part is out of my control.
Removed by me
- Mark
I think I see your point. I guess I had in mind something closer to what it is that holds a particular group of Christians, as in a church or denomination together. I’m aware that there are a few with a fairly open door policy, with Unitarian Universalists having perhaps the widest revolving door of all.
I can’t help but think that if God was as you seem to suggest, he could also write his message in multiple languages in the sky, have written words from him rain from heaven, and bodily appear daily to every human in the planet.
Whoever God is, he does not seem to desire to “make his message as easy to accept as possible.” Not in the way you seem to suggest, at least.
Not to mention, Jesus spoke to the people in parables specifically so that many would not understand or grasp the message, and he turned many people away (or allowed them to turn away) because his message was deemed too hard, unacceptable to them, and otherwise certainly did not make it not “as easy as possible” to follow him…
“He who puts his hand to the ploughing and turns back is not worthy…”
“Anyone who does not hate father, brother, etc…”
“Go, sell everything you have…”
Etc.
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And for what it is worth, I don’t view it as a logical necessity, but as a historical reality. I believe it because I recognize it to have happened, not because it is some kind of useful dogma that I needed to believe to get into a spiritual club I wanted to join.
And certainly it the sine qua non of Christianity. No one is “required” to believe it, but if one doesn’t believe why call oneself a Christian? The early Christians’ belief in the resurrection is why there is such a thing as Christianity, and Paul wrote around 55AD that if you don’t believe it, you don’t believe the faith.
Would you similarly object that Islam insists that Muhammad is a prophet, or would you object to Hinduism on the grounds that it similarly insists in the truth of reincarnation?
Not all of us (or I would even say none of us at all times) are ready for salvation. Jesus came to save us from our sins, but not all of us are just quite ready to part with all of our sins yet. We want to hold on to just a bit of this or that yet and we find ways to rationalize that maybe it really isn’t quite so sinful after all.
So … should God forcefully save us from ourselves? Or are we allowed to be spiritually shaped (almost certainly through suffering - much of it caused by our own or others’ attachment to sin) in order to be made ready for being in God’s presence? Most of us would not appreciate being yanked out of where we are and forcefully be made 100% compliant with God’s will. I mean - yes, most of us will probably ‘say’ we are because we know that to be the ‘correct’ bible study answer. But when push comes to shove, we tend to hold back at least a little of this and a little of that hoping that God wouldn’t mind too much we if pursue at least some of our own pleasures or obsessions a ‘bit’ more than we know we ought to.
So when Christ (or the prophets of old) speak in parables or riddles so that people would ‘hear but not understand’, I’m pretty sure this isn’t an expression that God actually desires ultimate and eternal condemnation for those so consigned. I think what Christ shows us is that he is gentle and won’t violently force our entire redemption on us (not typically anyway) in any sudden, cold-turkey fashion. He lets us learn the hard way, probably knowing that such learning will be the more enduring lesson. Not everybody is ready to hear and understand/accept/obey all his words, but yet he must utter them so that the rich man (that’s all of us) knows where he’s at, and can compare that with where he needs to be as he walks away sadly back to his wealth [and yet not quite so sadly as to cause him to repent of it and prefer Christ instead! …at least not yet…] We (who fancy ourselves among the ‘poorer’ folks, after carefully selecting who we can compare ourselves to) smugly imagine that parable only applies to money. But the reality is, we all have a whole lot of baggage that we’re pretty attached to in addition to money.
Dear Daniel,
Jesus spoke in a picture language (parable) for a number of reasons. He knew that the priests and scribes would misinterpret or even falsify His message, as they had with all the prophets. So, for the message to have longevity, hiding it in a simple story provides the most protection because it held in the hearts of the people, not in the text of the scribes.
Remember, Jesus said: “Don’t throw the pearls to the swine.” (Matt 7:6) Disguising deep spiritual meaning in a picture language is how He followed His own advice. The people of His time were not ready to hear the full weight His message, just as many today are not. So the stories were designed to unfold as people gain more enlightenment, revealing more of His message.
Jesus was not trying to get everyone to follow Him, only those that are ready to seek, and when they have knocked on the door, does He open it.
Best Wishes, Shawn
This is from Greg Beale’s essay “Purpose of symbolism in the book of Revelation”:
When the prophets used symbolic parables, it was a sign that judgment was in the process of coming upon Israel (i.e., the Babylonian exile). Therefore, for hardened unbelievers (Israel), the literary form of symbolic parable ( mashal ) appears whenever ordinary warnings are no longer heeded, and no warning will ever be heeded by those so far disobeying, but the believing remnant can be shocked, by the unusual parables, back into the reality of their faith. This is the point of Isaiah 6:9-10, where the prophet is commissioned to tell Israel to “keep on listening but do not perceive . . . render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dull . . . lest they . . . hear with their ears . . . and repent and be healed.”
The parables are also intended to have a jolting effect on the remnant who have become complacent among the compromising majority. Israel did not want to hear the truth, and when it was presented straightforwardly to convict them of sin, they would not accept the fact of their sin. The parables, how- ever, functioned to awake those among the true, righteous remnant from their sinful sleep. The same pattern found in Isaiah is apparent in Ezekiel, where the Isaianic hearing language occurs in Ezekiel 3:27 (“he who hears, let him hear”), followed directly by the prophet’s first parable, and in 12:2 (“they have ears to hear, but they do not hear”), followed immediately in verses 3-16 by the prophet’s first parabolic act before onlooking Israel (for similar wording to Ezekiel’s hearing formulae cf. Jer. 5:21; 17:23). Ezekiel’s usage is a development of that already found in Isaiah. Thus, the parables of the prophets served to judge intractably unrepentant people but shock the faithful remnant out of their spiritually numb and lethargic condition.
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Yes, yes I would
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If you accept that God is real, then the only opinion that really matters is God’s, isn’t it?
Seems that’s the kind of thing theists say that convince atheists that theism is dangerous. So if your “God” is of the opinion you should go out and shoot everybody then you would be one of these people doing these mass shootings, right?
If you think God’s opinion is important, then that would make your opinion as to what God’s opinion consists of rather significant. So clearly God’s opinion isn’t the only opinion that matters.
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Hello Reggie,
[I asked Mervin to re-open the thread after I saw it in a Biologos email]
That is not passage is saying. Doctrine is not a dirty word biblically, there is true doctrine:
“Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” (1 Timothy 4:16)
So not only is there true doctrine, we need to persevere in it, in a way that will save our hearers. And there false doctrine:
“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” (2 Timothy 4:3)
(That to me is describes the views of the majority in the Christian world). Paul also predicted false doctrine:
“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 2 Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.” (1 Timothy 4:1-2).
Also on this thread some posted that Jesus saying, “Don’t throw your pearls to swines” (Matthew 7:6) means that Jesus’ teachings were inherently mysterious and too deep for the people of his day. I’m sorry, but that is SO wrong! That passage means, “don’t waste your time with people who aren’t open”. Jesus’ teachings are simple and he came specifically at that time when Isreal was at it’s humblist (as predicted in Daniel 2). He taught to repent, become his follower and be baptized, which is what Peter taught in Acts 2 (“repent in be baptized”, v 38). What is so conceptually difficult about that? It’s difficult to do because it goes against our natures, which is why Jesus had to be tortured and murdered before we woke up to our sin. But it’s not difficult to understand.
I’m here on a beautiful SoCal morning shorttly before our park service is to start, so I have to go. But you’ll hear from me again for there were many responses in this thread that I found simply, “off”. Hope to hear from some of you! (I’m sure I will).
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