You were responded to with the same measure you were giving Orthodox Christians. Whatever persecution complex you have with the Church, it bleeds into your responses. Since you know scripture you know that Christians have to spread and preach the Gospel:
Jesus: Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.ā
Or maybe you think that was a parable for all religions are the same and no ones beliefs matter? A dog barks, a duck quacks, a Christian spreads the Gospel. Whether anyone likes it or not, we believe God incarnate told us to do this. Who are we to disagree with our Creator?
Whatever they think the gospel is, they have to spread it. I doubt anyone understands the fullness of the Gospel or what Jesus actually did on the Cross.
My theological understanding of the Gospel --correct or false-- doesnāt save people, God does. Jesus offers life and salvation. I just preach the good news. God came to earth in the form of Jesus to save us. How I would relay the gospel would be different from place to place and person to person. The best way to preach it is to try to live it though. Other than that the key is to listen to them (and the Holy Spirit hopefully) and meet them where they are. What we do here is hammer out theology/doctrone/belief/apologetics amongst believers. Very different.
Surely original sin has to be made up to cover everybody? The innocent? Those with no free will; i.e. even less than the rest of us? So that the Loveless Fall - Crucifixion arc can be ājustifiedā.
with my irregular attention to biologos I missed this thread at the time.
My understanding is that original sin - e.g. āthe fallā is a poetic description of puberty, e.g. the separation of the child from the father by rejecting his authority over ones self. The eating from the tree of realisation of good and evil represents this separation in the form of setting ones own moral code and perceiving good and evil in relationship to the āselfā instead of the father.
Now an all knowing God would have known that this was to happen and accepted it as the self formation is necessary to obtain free will and to love in the way God loves, e.g. to willingly surrender ones self to another.
One of the biggest misunderstandings of the fall is to perceive death as Gods punishment for sin, as if he would say āif you eat from that tree I will kill you as a punishment for your disobedienceā. To the eternal God the ending of ones temporal existence is not a punishment but a call to return to the eternal existence with God - and only if you do not want to do so you will suffer eternal separation.
The implication of this interpretation is that physical death is the logical consequence of this separation from the eternal being by defining ones self in the physical body which is mortal.
The inheritability of sin comes from the self-propagating intentions of procreation, the continuation of ones tribe / bloodline ā¦.
As such, sin is not the act of sexual procreation, as God tells humanity to be fruitful and multiply, but from the intention behind it to the glory of the parents. this is different in the case of Jesus if you understand his conception not as an act of wishful thinking of having a magical Child making you a celebrity as for being special, but the awareness that Jesus lived against human will, only becoming flesh in submission to Gods Word to love thy neighbour like thy own, e.g. to accept a life that nearly every human rejects. Considering the situation of Israel, living under a brutal military occupation out to destroy their society and you come up with a different interpretation of the same text. The question is why such a story would not be good enough for our perception. why would we think God would not be strong enough to become a human as the lowest of the low we can imagine?
