The Questioning Christian

Tag: Jesus

  • 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?)

    —————-

    @schari, I do appreciate your having taken the time to comment, and wish you all the best.

  • 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.

  • Jesus’ mission was a bust – at least if that mission was what the church has long claimed

    Over at TitusOneNine, commenter Jody+ asked me “what [my] understanding of soteriology is if it doesn’t include Jesus’ victory through the Cross and resurrection.  And Tory asked whether I believed that Jesus’ mission was a failure, “since Romans continued to run roughshod over Israel and other occupied peoples?  What kind of salvation did Jesus accomplish, if at all, for it certainly was not geo-political?”

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    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of liberating Israel from worldly oppression and ushering in God’s reign:  then yes, that mission was an utter, abject, desperate, and miserable failure. To refuse to face that fact is to live in a fantasy world.

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    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of winning victory over sin and death, and bringing eternal life to all who believed in him:  we have just about as much reliable evidence that he succeeded, even partially, as we do that the Heaven’s Gates suicides succeeded in joining the hidden spaceship that they believed was coming for them. 

    Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that while we can hope, we simply don’t know, what happens after we die.  To claim otherwise is, again, to live in a fantasy world.

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    What we can say with some confidence is that what Jesus characterized as the way to eternal life — the Summary of the Law — seems to touch on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe:

    • The evidence for the existence of a Creator is pretty compelling, certainly more so than the evidence against;

    • History suggests that, in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner, we seem to be “created co-creators,” participating unwittingly in a titanic process that has been gradually, and often painfully, creating order out of the chaos of the Big Bang;

    • On balance, over the long term, those who seem to contribute the most to this process of creation — and who seem most likely to survive, reproduce, and pass their genes and memes on, not just to their children but to their grandchildren — are those who face the facts of the reality wrought by the Creator, including the fact of our human fallibility.  Who don’t insist that the world must be a certain way merely because they imagine it to be so.  Who seek the best for others as they do for themselves.  In short, who seek (whether they know it or not) to follow the Summary of the Law.

    For all we know, when we die, the Creator will simply discard us his tools, the way we would throw away a worn-out drill bit. But it’s not totally implausible to conjecture that it won’t happen that way.  It’s not irrational to hope, and trust, that we’ll get to share, somehow, in the end result of whatever unimaginably-wonderful project the Creator has been up to.

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    Returning again to whether Jesus’ mission was a failure:  If Jesus thought of his mission as being to inspire all people to organize their lives around the Summary of the Law, he didn’t completely succeed on his own.  But the church he catalyzed hasn’t done an altogether terrible job of continuing the mission.

    If we would stop insisting that everyone believe traditionalist soteriology, christology, and theology, and return to simply preaching the Summary of the Law, we likely would have much more success in reaching nonbelievers and doubters with Jesus’ message.

  • 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