People like to add words to different characteristics of God. Instead of just saying God expresses wrath, they add revel in it or God being sovereign it’s, tyrant or God executing a judgement that He warned would come if people continued in rebellion it’s, murder. This is man judging God and shapping Him by there own carnal understanding.
And because of this they pervert the scriptures, setting them aside and justify themselves and their own image of God. They end up having faith in a false God they have created.
That is man rightfully judging and rejecting false parts of manmade understandings of God. Prophets and reformers have to come in and clean up all the religious crud that accumulates every few centuries it seems. Search the new testament indeed! That is always a good exercise for any of us, Cody - especially the gospels.
Yes - I thought Daniel Bell expressed things very well in that article. I don’t know anything else about him; but just based on that article alone, it would seem he has a very scripturally-informed view. Of course I only read it once. There may be stuff in there I missed. If you’re curious about some specific point of his, feel free to ask.
I look at what Jesus lived like and how he related to people. The only wrath we ever see on exhibit was against religious leaders and authorities. My understanding of God and Jesus words about God (not all of which are comfortable for any of us) are nonetheless shaped accordingly.
I have to go now … to celebrate (and mourn!) the life of a recently departed friend and saint. So while I look forward to continuing this, I don’t know when I’lll get back to it.
“But alhough Christians have never practiced blood sacrifice, the logic of blood sacrifice often shapes the way Christians think about God and, consequently, how we act in the world. From fire-and-brimstone sermons like Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to a T-shirt sporting an image of Christ crucified with the caption “His Pain, Our Gain” to Mel Gibson’s blockbuster movie The Passion of the Christ, Christianity is permeated with images of a wrathful, angry God who demands blood and suffering and threatens to inflict terrible violence as the just punishment for sin.” Daniel M. Bell Jr.
From man’s side, motive and paticipation in it, the cross was murder. But from God’s side it was where His justice and mercy were united. And from that union, the children of God were born.
At our remove of two thousand years, it seems natural for us to look upon Jesus’ crucifixion as a sacrifice. Christians are heirs to a long tradition of talking that way, praying that way, thinking that way. But first-century Jews who witnessed the event would not and could not have seen the crucifixion as a sacrifice. It bore none of the marks of a sacrifice in an ancient world. On Calvary there was no altar and no credentialed priest. There was indeed a death, but it took place apart from the Temple, which was the only valid place of sacrifice in Jerusalem, and even outside the walls of Jerusalem.
St. Paul, however, made the connections for his generation, and especially for his fellow Jews. In First Corinthians, after introducing the word of the cross (1:18), he calls Christ “our paschal lamb” who “has been sacrificed (5:7). Thus he makes the connection between the Passover celebrated as the Last Supper and the crucifixion on Calvary.
Indeed, it was that first Eucharist that transformed Jesus’ death from an execution to an offering. At the Last Supper he gave his body to be broken, his blood to be poured out, as if on an altar.
As Paul retold the story of the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:11:23–25), he spoke of the event in sacrificial terms. He quotes Jesus as calling it “the new covenant in my blood,” an evocation of Moses’ words as he made a sacrificial offering of oxen: "“Behold the blood of the covenant” (Exodus 24:8). It was the sacrificial blood that ratified the covenant, because Moses said so, in the one instance, and because Jesus said so, in the other.
Paul also quotes Jesus calling the Supper a “remembrance,” which was another technical term for a specific type of sacrifice (the memorial offering).
And just in case we missed any of those connections, Paul compares the Christian Supper (the Eucharist) with the sacrifices of the Temple (1 Corinthians 10:18) and even with pagan sacrifices (1 Corinthians 10:19-21). All sacrifices, he said, bring about a communion, a fellowship. The offerings of idolatry bring about a communion with demons, but the Christian sacrifice brings about a communion with the body and blood of Jesus (1 Corinthians 10:16).
Paul’s vision of the Passion is stunning. He shows us that it is not merely about how much Jesus suffered, but about how much he loves. Love transforms his sacrifice into sacrifice.
The death on Calvary was not simply a brutal and bloody execution. Jesus’ death had been transformed by his self-offering in the Upper Room. It had become the offering of an unblemished paschal victim, the self-offering of a high-priest who gave himself for the redemption of others. He is both priest and victim. For “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (Ephesians 5:2). That is love: the total gift of self.
The Eucharist infuses that love into us, uniting our love with Christ’s, our sacrifice with his. Saint Paul preached: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship (Romans 12:1). Note that he speaks of “bodies” in the plural, but “sacrifice" in the singular. For we are many, but our sacrifice is one with Jesus’ own, which is once and for all (see Hebrews 7:27, 9:12, 9:26, 10:10).
Paul teaches us that the Eucharist is ordered to the cross, and the cross is ordered to the resurrection. It is the crucified and resurrected humanity of Jesus that Christians consume in Holy Communion. We come to it by way of suffering, but we receive the Host as a pledge of lasting glory, and we have the grace to endure the rest.
This is something we cannot appreciate fully until we have learned to see it “as it was in the beginning,” as it was for those Jewish Christians, who saw an old, familiar world ending and a new one descending as a heavenly Jerusalem.
Jesus is called the Agnus Dei, slain from the foundation of the world, and when he died, the veil in the temple was rent. That suggests something fairly definite, I should think, especially considering what was required of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.
Your conclusion that hell doesn’t exist isn’t one that follows from Daniel Bell’s words any more than this conclusion that you worship a devil follows from your words. Just because someone doesn’t believe in an angry sadistic torturer God doesn’t mean he thinks hell does not exist. Hell can exist because bad people create such a place rather than because God likes to torture people.
But it is interesting how you make such connections… if you need to believe in indulgences for your sin paid for by blood magic… then you need to believe in a god of necromancy and blood magic… already sounds halfway like a devil… so it is not much of a leap from there to one that loves torture.
But there are other ways of thinking about this without indulgences, blood magic or a God who likes torture.
And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.
“All of this is wrong. God does not demand or require blood to redeem us. God neither inflicts violence nor desires suffering in order to set the divine–human relation right. In spite of its pervasiveness in Christian imagery, the cost of communion, of reconciliation and redemption, is not blood and suffering.” Bell