In a blog posting, Dr. James F. McGrath argues that in Romans, Paul was "advocating the inclusion of uncircumcised Gentiles in Judaism, the elimination for all intents and purposes of the Jew/Gentile distinction, to be replaced simply by a multi-ethnic Israel on the one hand, and those who refused to be a part of it on the other." It's a worthwhile read.
Tag: Christianity
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Response to a commenter about Jesus, God, etc.
Commenter “schari” raised some points that had enough meat in them that I thought I’d respond in a separate posting.
Thanks for the response, @schari. Unfortunately we’re going to have to agree to disagree about some fundamental points.
The inherent riskiness of revelation
@schari writes:
I can’t help but notice your greater concern is more about what people think or perceive as apposed to what GOD or JESUS said & is the truth. That should settle it. Christianity is not a democracy, and truth is not subjective but objective. May you have a revelation of the love of Christ, that God came in the flesh to set you free to perfect relationship with Him. …
When people claim that we can distinguish between “what people think or perceive as apposed [sic] to what GOD or JESUS said & is the truth,” they risk wallowing in wishful thinking — which is a form of idolatry that violates the First Commandment. That’s because, given that people aren’t God, it’s impossible to separate what God or Jesus might have said, on the one hand, from what people think or perceive they said.
Even assuming, as you and I both do, that there is such as thing as objective truth, it seems inescapable that every single person — bar none — perceives it through the distorting lenses of his or her own biases, experiences, and physical- and intellectual limitations.
Moreover, when someone claims that God said X or that Jesus said Y, my immediate response is Favorite Theological Question # 1: And how, exactly, do you know that?
(See also my recent post, Too bad there was no Twitter in 33 AD.)
Still another favorite theological question is: Why should I accept Christian ‘revelation’ on this issue, as opposed to that of the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Hindus, or the Buddhists, or even the atheists? What privileges the intuition of Christians about how things are, to exalt them over the intuitions of other people? It’s not as though Christians can demonstrate that their intuitions are a better fit with reality in ways not shared by any other belief system.
Christianity wasn’t supposed to be a new religion
@schari writes: “Christianity has ONE focul [sic] point. JESUS.”
I see it differently. As I read the New Testament and the writings of the early church, it seems clear to me that Jesus wanted our focal point to be God. I think he would have been horrified to learn that his later followers had begun focusing on him, and had started worshiping him as though he were God.
(See also my posting from a few years ago, The Apostles’ Teaching Didn’t Seem to Include a Divine Jesus.)
Jesus-worshipers don’t own the name “Christian”
@schari writes: “Take the CHRIST out of christianity and u have insanity. Otherwise look for a another name for your religion to express your views.”
Um, check your spelling on that. Seriously, though, the New Testament writings make it clear that Christianity was not supposed to be a new religion: it was supposed to be God-worship for all, not just for Jews.
(See my recent posting Goyim for God: A reformed Judaism, open to gentiles, like Paul wanted in the first place.)
Orthodox- and evangelical Christians are certainly entitled to their opinions about Jesus. But they’re not entitled to claim the name Christian exclusively for themselves, any more than Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken can reserve the term “American” exclusively for people who agree with them.
“But,” you might say, “the term ‘Christian’ is based on ‘Christ,’ which implicitly refers to God Incarnate.” No: The Greek word christos, used in the New Testament, corresponding to maschiach or messiah in Hebrew, means simply “anointed one,” someone tapped by God to carry out a particular mission. Cyrus of Persia is referred to in the OT as a maschiach.
(You yourself are probably a christos — see Are You a “Christ”? Quite Possibly.)
In order to emulate and follow Jesus, one doesn’t need to believe he was THE Christ, nor that he was God Incarnate; his followers who actually knew him in life didn’t seem to.
(See also What Did “Messiah” Mean to the Apostles?)
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@schari, I do appreciate your having taken the time to comment, and wish you all the best.
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Christian exclusivism is fading away; no surprises there
Christian exclusivism was bound to fade away over time, and to the chagrin of evangelicals like Albert Mohler, apparently it's doing just that, according to a new Pew survey. (Hat tip: The Lead and TitusOneNine.) Exclusivism's fade-out shouldn't surprise anyone. My own conjecture is that it's happening for two main reasons.
First, society is increasingly recognizing the dangers of accepting factual assertions purely on the say-so of some authority figure. This 'argument from authority,' however, seems to be the only way exclusivists ever present their case.
Exclusivists never point to specific non-Christian people who can be confirmed to be missing from heaven (let alone demonstrating that the reason they're missing is that they didn't accept Jesus as their savior). When asked if, say, Gandhi is in heaven, generally they'll hedge and (properly) say that the question is above their paygrade.
Neither do exclusivists offer evidence that any particular born-again Christians have successfully made it to heaven, and that their success is attributable to their belief in Jesus.
About the only thing the exclusivists ever do is cite the speculations of people who lived centuries ago. But they never offer a satisfying explanation why those particular ancients were in a better position to know than their non-believing contemporaries — or for that matter, why they were in a better position than we are today.
Second, the exclusivist claim simply doesn't jibe with common experience; that's certainly not dispositive, but it's definitely a fact that ought to be faced. Most of us are acquainted with non-Christians who are leading lives as exemplary and as blessed as anyone in the ranks of the born-again. On the other side of the coin, most of us know committed Christians whose lives are difficult and painful. And of course no one actually knows what happens after this life. We can hope and even conjecture that eternal happiness awaits us when we die. But anyone claiming to know for sure is operating on 'information' that isn't available to the rest of us, and painful experience has taught us that such 'information' isn't to be relied on, at least not when making big bets.
Bottom line: It's simply not credible for Christian exclusivists to claim that accepting Jesus is even a guaranteed path to eternal happiness, let alone that it's the only path. Unless exclusivists can come up with plausible support for their claim, they will end up in the same position as the odd millennialist who proclaims that The End Is Near.
Sure, some die-hard exclusivists will continue to insist that things really, really are that way. Most of the world, though, will smile indulgently and politely refrain from saying what they really think, which is that the die-hards are … different.
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The faith once delivered never actually existed
Go read “Rescuing the faith once delivered to all the saints,” written by an unnamed friend of Katie Sherrod (a leader of the loyalist faction in the secessionist Diocese of Fort Worth) and posted on her blog. The piece marvelously demonstrates how, when traditionalists bemoan the abandonment of the faith “believed by all people in all places at all times,” they’re indulging in wishful thinking and even in willful self-delusion.
The piece sketches the main theological parties of the early church, whose various doctrines were often mutually exclusive:
• Primitive Jerusalem Christianity: “… the final age has begun … history will close upon [Jesus’] imminent return; … Jesus seen more as messiah than divine being ….”
• Primitive gentile Christianity: “the concept of messiah means nothing; … Jesus the son of God came to earth, died, was resurrected and restored, is now Lord and present to his worshippers ….”
• Pauline Christianity: “… life in Christ produces what the law cannot but with few hard and fast ethical rules; love, not law: little interest in Jesus’ life, emphasis on him as Second Adam ….”
• Johannine Christianity: “Jesus’ life [was] secondary to his relation to the Father and the divine nature of Christ ….”
• Jewish Christianity: “… a continuation of Judaism, Jesus is messiah in succession to the prophets, not divine, not virgin born, will be Messiah/Son of Man at return; … an ethnic religion; they loathed Paul.”
• Gnostic Christianity: “gnosticism antedates Christianity, has roots all over the place and a vast literature ….”
The piece also recaps how, around 300 years after Jesus’ death, the Emperor Constantine knocked heads in the church leadership, provoking the production of the Nicene Creed as a brokered compromise:
[Constantine] gave the various church parties an ultimatum: clean up your act and give me a church that knows what it believes, an instrument of unity and centralization instead of the morass of claim and counter-claim and diversity and uncertainty I see now.
So the church did what it always does: it held conventions—or councils or synods as they called them—meetings where people met and argued and voted. [Extra paragraphing added.]
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Anglican reasserters could have a learning disability
I enjoy the doctrinal discussions I have with my “reasserter” friends at TitusOneNine. But I continue to be baffled by the tortured logic with which many of them try to justify their views.
A common reasserter syllogism is ridiculous
Some reasserters appear to be literally incapable of grasping that there might be possibilities in life other than the ones that they’ve conceived:
- They like Possibility A;
- Possibility B is unlikely, or disagreeable;
- By process of elimination, A it is; indeed, A it must be; and
- Anyone who wants to take into account Possibilities C, D, etc., is either foolish or malign.
Here’s a typical example of this kind of thinking, as argued by some reasserters:
- The New Testament accounts are either trustworthy, or they’re not;
- We cannot say those accounts are categorically untrustworthy; they’re at least as trustworthy as, say, Tacitus’s account of Caesar’s wars;
- By process of elimination, it’s our duty to reframe our entire lives around at least the “relevant” portions of the New Testament accounts. (Who defines “relevant,” and how, is of course another huge argument.)
Here’s another example: If Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t raised from the dead, then our faith is worthless. In other words, if we were to discover compelling evidence that Jesus stayed dead, then (supposedly) nothing he said or did during his lifetime would be of any value to us.
I’m not going to mince words: That kind of reasoning is nuts. We expect better from intelligent middle-schoolers. (And sure enough, that’s about the age when a lot of young people start questioning “The Faith Once Delivered.”)
Sure, in the right circumstances, the process of elimination can be useful. But it’s just one of the tools in the toolbox. It might not always be the one to use — when you need to make a precise cut in a piece of wood, it’s literally imbecilic to insist on using a hammer.
The proof is in the results
But how do we know that the reasserters aren’t right anyway? Well, we get a pretty good indicator in the observable results:
• Reasserters claim that their view leads to eternal life for those accepting it. But they have exactly zero reliable evidence to support that claim. We hope and trust that there’s a life after this one, but we have no idea what really happens when you die. The reasserter claim amounts to so much wishful thinking.
• In contrast, the so-called Enlightenment mindset has, by several orders of magnitude, done a better job of understanding and dealing with the reality that God has wrought. It has thereby helped us to do a better job as workers in (what appears to be) his ongoing project of creation.
Related post: How to judge the claims of testimony