Good plans have contingencies.
And anyway… which came first? The crucifixion or all these verses you talk about?
All the NT post-dates the crucifixion. Though if you do take the suffering servant of Isaiah as being about Jesus then that predates it.
I’d say there is definitely a lot of post-Easter faith retrojected back onto the lips of Jesus in the NT. How to Navigate the Cross and all that scripture as Christians is an important matter to me. In Matthew Jesus says you have to take up your cross but I am not sure that is even reasonable before he was crucified.
I think Jesus figured out he was going to die shortly before it happened. He prayed and made His peace with God and understood it was his will to go along with it and allow it to happen. That death was turned into salvation for many.
You can certainly believe God gave us his Son in the sense that he allowed it. But any systematic theology text will at least lay out all the scripture supporting various models of atonement. Scripture describes the death of Jesus in numerous ways and most Christian’s and the New Testament itself believe the Cross was a pivotal event in human history that somehow changed the nature of things. It also seems to be described as a predestined event but I’m not a Calvinist so I have to ignore plenty of other predestination/election verses.
Distraught to the point of hematohidrosis about not having a different option available? Unlikely.
I think we can agree that something was going on beyond what we can understand well?
Ha! I guess! 
Try thinking about God’s relationship to time and get a headache. I’ m not a Calvinist either… well, sort of: I’m a God-is-omnitemporal Calvinist. (So of course ‘predestined’ has to have scare quotes around it and maybe with the first syllable underlined since it is a timebound word and God is not. ; - )
As you know I don’t jut “ignore” the Calvinism verses, there are just a lot that say something else. God and time is definitely a pickle.
So maybe ‘predestined’ does apply, with an associated qualifier? Then you wouldn’t have to figuratively hiccup when you read. 
1 Like
Yes
The idea of God sending Jesus, who is God incarnate, to die for our sins is Christianity 101. True for Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Protestants.
It’s all over the Bible. OT and NT. You can’t miss it.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.
When you make his life an offering for sin,
The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
Jesus is the lamb slain “from the foundation of the world.”
“Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us”
It wasn’t something horribly gone wrong.
Jesus knew this was God’s plan for him and didn’t try to escape. He knew perfectly well what would happen to him in Jerusalem.
Like I said, Christianity 101
2 Likes
Big if. For the Jewish people the suffering servant was Israel. They had faith that their suffering served the will of God for the salvation of the world. Still do…
So while it certainly applies to Jesus because He was crucified. It simply would not be about Him if He had not been killed. Certainly the Jewish people didn’t expect such a thing. They expected according to passages which Christians have now decided are about the second coming.
So… like I said… contingencies. You could say we were not quite ready for the kingdom of God on earth. Jesus saw many signs that this was the case, and the last straw was that His disciples could not stay awake and pray with Him. And I would say it is ultimately not God who demanded the death of Jesus but human beings. Literally. Did they not cry “crucify Him!”?
1 Like
I’m new here, so hello to start with.
I have returned to the flood following the suggestions that were made by Graham Hancock, that the flood was indeed a cataclysmic event that took place roughly 12000 years ago, and virtually wiped out existing cultures, and caused a restart with nomadic hunter-gatherer and shepherding peoples. Now, admittedly, Graham Hancock is not supporting any theological explanation of the flood, which seems to be specific to what culture reported it, but many people saw it as a retribution for bad behaviour.
I tend to believe in the Bible as an anthology of experiences that have religious interpretations, which individually are profound, but when we start to follow the narrative, we are building a picture of the world that history is unable to affirm. I also see no need, because we all interpret events from our perspective, which may be completely different to someone else’s perspective, and therefore objectivity becomes difficult to ascertain. Who interpreted it right?
I am also a believer in the progression of understanding God, which tends to undulate over time, but initially grew out of what Owen Barfield called immediate participation, a feeling of being caught up in a cosmic drama, which we also find in other cultures, and around the time of the prophets, a new paradigm gave people a new outlook. It was a step back from the previous experience of being caught up in a mythic journey, and provided a new vision of God.
This explains to me why the prophets were killed or incarcerated, and led to the rejection of Jesus, who quoted the prophets quite extensively, or at least that is what my NIV Bible with the Thompson Chain reference suggests. I tell you this so that you know where I’m coming from.
For this reason, the actual event of the flood has been used to express theological positions and thereby become something like a parable, because its interpretations go beyond the historical account, and its legend of Noah incorporates so much symbolism, that it is hard to take everything literally. That doesn’t mean that the interpretation isn’t profound.
Well, that’s my tuppence worth for the moment.
1 Like
Welcome @Rob_Brewer ! Good to have you here . I think the historical basis of the flood story based on cultural memory of real events is a distinct possibility without the account itself being a historical narrative. In the end, while interesting to consider, the real meaning is theological rather than historical in my opinion.
I have had some argue that if not historical, then the story lacks meaning, with that argument used when applied to the book of Job. Do any feel that the meaning of the text is dependent on its being history? What about other scriptures? Are the parables of Jesus lacking meaning if not historical?
1 Like
Thank you for the welcome Phil
I think we are in agreement, and the Bible seems to be a theological interpretation of the times, with large portions supplying Israel with a grounding narrative that suggest historicity, displaying also the changing perspective of a nomadic people becoming sedentary, and the establishment of a national identity. God is the commentator in many cases, warning Israel about their follies, and the Babylonian captivity seems to have been a moment in their history in which a lot of it came together. I have learned much from many sources from many traditions.
I come from a background that is a little odd perhaps, having discovered Christ in Germany after leaving the army and marrying here, belonging to a Pietist group that has long traditions in Germany, but after I became a geriatric nurse at 38, I developed a different approach to faith. Accompanying multiple people from various traditions as they approached death, I saw how the different traditions had equally different approaches, which were again diverse according to character and situation. I found that it was important for me to serve these people in honouring their own traditions, and this diversified my own spiritual life.
I am also someone who has focussed mainly on the sermon on the mount, although I went through training as a lay preacher which covered the whole Bible, because I had the feeling that the criticism of Christianity (and much of its failings) came from a misunderstanding of that source. When reading those words, I am reminded that we read an interpretation rather than just a translation of Jesus’ words, because he was speaking a Semitic language that had a different structure to the Greek and contained nuances that we have lost to some degree. This was an understanding that a local philologist imparted to me over many conversations about ancient Hebrew, but which was furthered by books by Neil Douglas-Klotz, who used the Peshitta version of the Bible to illustrate this point.
This means that not only are the Gospels a composition made to give readers a feeling of what it was like to follow Jesus to his cross, but they were an interpretation for the largely Greek audience they were writing for, who couldn’t understand the implications of the meditative language he was using. St Paul attempted in his own way to translate as well, developing his own style from his being at home in Hebrew and Greek, but in the end this endeavour seems to have been more important than historical accuracy. This doesn’t mean, of course, that historicity is sometimes given.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.