Forgiveness

[slave2six]

No, meaning that the Bible is what it is. The Church wrote, compiled, edited and canonized the Bible. The Bible is the witness of the Church. Therefore, the "Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it" argument is moot.

This is convenient to your mode of thinking because it alleviates the need to submit to any authority. But it is completely irrational to call oneself "Christian" while refusing to accept that which was accepted from the beginning. "Christian" literally means "Little Christ." You can't be that without knowing what Christ said or did and then following his instruction. You are just a pretender and deceiving yourself. Again, you are building with fog. (You remind me of those vampire things in the Matrix who simply disappeared when being attacked only to appear somewhere else to strike.)

You may as well say that while the US Constitution is good and all, what this nation is really about is the redistribution of wealth. There are many who hold that opinion but don't realize that their thoughts are based in socialism or communism and not on the principals upon which the republic of the US was founded.

 

[sojourner]

Meaning that your group simply does what it wants and uses whatever is convenient to support it rather than considering whether they are conformed to some outside authority. Again, such a religion is meaningless and without value as it is built on anarchy.

No, meaning that my group subscribes to what it has discerned is the most humane, moral and uplifting theology. The Roman Fathers is not the only community. The community has always been diverse in its theologies. I'm not RCC because I don't buy into the RCC theology of substitutionary atonement.

 

[sojourner]

Respectfully but no it isn't. That would be like walking with Jesus and listening to him, being taught by him and then saying that you'll take his teachings into consideration. The student is not above his master. Your problem is that you have no master.

How do you know that I don't walk with Jesus and listen to him? The problem here is that you're trying to force me into a sola scriptura box that Just don't fit the contents it's asked to contain. Jesus' teachings are not fully encapsulated in the canonical gospels. The Bible is not Jesus. The Bible presents us with several theological constructs that it's up to us to wade through. Then we come to a "sense of the community."

 

[slave2six]

No, meaning that my group subscribes to what it has discerned is the most humane, moral and uplifting theology.

Based on what standard? Whatever makes you feel good? Not a very sound basis for reasoning.

The Roman Fathers is not the only community. The community has always been diverse in its theologies. I'm not RCC because I don't buy into the RCC theology of substitutionary atonement.

I did not say the Roman fathers. I said the Early Church Fathers. The Orthodox also hold to their teachings. And, it seems to me, that the closer you can get (chronologically) to Christ the more likely you are to have teachings that are accurate and are defined within the context of the culture in which those teachings were delivered.

Have you read any of the Early Church Fathers? They were brilliant and extremely brave. To discard them is like spitting in your parent's eye.

 

[sojourner]

This is convenient to your mode of thinking because it alleviates the need to submit to any authority.

The Bible is authoritative, but not an authority to be submitted to.

But it is completely irrational to call oneself "Christian" while refusing to accept that which was accepted from the beginning.

The earliest representations of Christ are as Pantokrator, not as "Suffering Servant."

"Christian" literally means "Little Christ." You can't be that without knowing what Christ said or did and then following his instruction.

there are many who embrace a sola scriptura stance and a literalistic interpretation, but still have no idea what Jesus said. And many of them certainly don't follow his instruction!

You are just a pretender and deceiving yourself.

You are just a pariah and trying to box me into an absolute that doesn't exist.

Again, you are building with fog.

Better than building with crap. At least, after time, the fog disperses and allows the light to shine. The crap just piles up and keeps on stinking.

 

[sojourner]

Based on what standard? Whatever makes you feel good? Not a very sound basis for reasoning.

1) scripture
2) tradition
3) reason

Not upon "what makes me feel good", but upon "what makes sense to us."

 

[sojourner]

I did not say the Roman fathers. I said the Early Church Fathers. The Orthodox also hold to their teachings.

And yet, the Orthodox have very different ideas with regard to atonement.

And, it seems to me, that the closer you can get (chronologically) to Christ the more likely you are to have teachings that are accurate and are defined within the context of the culture in which those teachings were delivered.

You're absolutely right. But you're leaving out an important part of the equation.

Have you read any of the Early Church Fathers? They were brilliant and extremely brave. To discard them is like spitting in your parent's eye.

The Fathers and Mothers wrote in a different time and place. The cultures don't always jive. We don't discard them -- we embrace them, but we embrace them through modern and post-modern Euro-American eyes, instead of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, ruining both peg and hole in the process.

 

[slave2six]

How do you know that I don't walk with Jesus and listen to him? The problem here is that you're trying to force me into a sola scriptura box that Just don't fit the contents it's asked to contain. Jesus' teachings are not fully encapsulated in the canonical gospels. The Bible is not Jesus. The Bible presents us with several theological constructs that it's up to us to wade through. Then we come to a "sense of the community."

You can't walk with someone who has no leg or hear someone who has no voice. That is all metaphor for "I hear voices" which is not very rational either. And if the voices you hear in any way contradict or exclude what it known to have been said by Christ (I am speaking from within the confines of the Christian faith) and how the Apostles understood the Christian faith then your voices are wrong.

Again, what you hold to be true is consistent neither with the Bible nor with the teachings of the Early Church Fathers (and I'd be willing to bet that they are not in line even with Martin Luther's teachings and he was a millennium later). These were the men who were the keepers of the faith and who defined precisely what that faith was.

You sound to me like a student who comes into a college course on Cosmology who is only willing to accept those things that the tenured Professor says with which you agree and not to learn from someone who is vastly superior to you in the subject matter.

How can you even formulate an opinion on the Early Church Fathers if you have never read them? This "me and Jesus" mentality is born of very bad theology and certainly is not in any way "Christian" seeing that it has no basis in authority but merely in whatever feels good or comes into one's own head.

That's the problem that I have with Protestants. You can't even debate Christianity with them because they don't even know what Christianity is. Certainly they have no understanding of what it was for the first 1,500 years of its existence. It has now become "every man did what was right in his own eyes." It's sad really.

I'm done with you. Feel free to respond once you have educated yourself on your own faith. To be honest, you are missing out on a lot that is rich and meaningful within the faith.

 

[sojourner]

And if the voices you hear in any way contradict or exclude what it known to have been said by Christ (I am speaking from within the confines of the Christian faith) and how the Apostles understood the Christian faith then your voices are wrong.

This is what I've been trying to say by talking about "the sense of the community." Let me ask you: Just exactly what are "the confines of the Christian faith?" Not even the apostles all agreed with each other with regard to atonement. There's a very, very, very wide swath to the aforementioned "confines." I could go a lot further afield and still be on the safe side of the fence.

Again, what you hold to be true is consistent neither with the Bible nor with the teachings of the Early Church Fathers (and I'd be willing to bet that they are not in line even with Martin Luther's teachings and he was a millennium later). These were the men who were the keepers of the faith and who defined precisely what that faith was.

Yes, it is. The teachings have to be understood in light of our experience. In fact, the Apostolic Succession guarantees that those teachings live, grow and change over time, just as human beings live, grow and change. The Early Church Fathers didn't have any way to deal with human cloning or nuclear annihilation, either. We have to interpret their teachings in light of the reality in which we live.

You sound to me like a student who comes into a college course on Cosmology who is only willing to accept those things that the tenured Professor says with which you agree and not to learn from someone who is vastly superior to you in the subject matter.

It sounds to me like you're projecting, because:

How can you even formulate an opinion on the Early Church Fathers if you have never read them? This "me and Jesus" mentality is born of very bad theology and certainly is not in any way "Christian" seeing that it has no basis in authority but merely in whatever feels good or comes into one's own head.

I've been refuting this type of thinking throughout this thread, and you refuse to acknowledge it.

That's the problem that I have with Protestants. You can't even debate Christianity with them because they don't even know what Christianity is.

Perhaps they don't have a good handle on what you think it is. Do you know? You seem to advocate the RCC in certain threads, and dismiss them in others. What, exactly, are you?

Feel free to respond once you have educated yourself on your own faith. To be honest, you are missing out on a lot that is rich and meaningful within the faith.

You are in a pi**-poor position to evaluate my education. To be honest, you don't have the slightest idea what I embrace. Nor do you care. You simply want to assume a lot of things and dismiss me along with all the fundigelical wackos.

Y'know, what's sad, really, is to hear you go on about not knowing what Xy is, and then demonstrate an abysmal lack of knowledge of the wide diversity present in the proto-church, as demonstrated in the canon NT! It really sounds mor like you want to parrot the RCC.

 

[Riverwolf]

I don't see that suffering and growing necessarily have to go hand in hand. It does not take being homeless to know that acquiring a skill, learning to cook, etc are good things that allow for a stable and more fruitful life. Nor does it require that someone stab you to know that knives are sharp and need to be handled properly. We are intelligent beings who are able to maintain knowledge and wisdom. "Experience is the best teacher, but he is a fool who learns only from his own."

All that is requisite is that someone wiser than us instruct us on what to avoid and what to pursue. A parent is useful in this regard. Not that the parent will do everything for you. A good parent will teach you how to be self-sufficient. It is every good parent's joy to see their child become a person who no longer needs the parent. It is every child's joy to be independent of their parents and yet to honor them for raising them up to become so.

You know, you've just summed up a Spiritual Journey.

My grandfather was abandoned by his father at the age of 5 and was raised by a truly awful woman who beat him every day because he "did something wrong today." When my uncle was born, my grandparents literally lived under a tree with a tarp as a roof and a hole in the ground to keep their perishables in. They went on to raise four children and even though my father's childhood was not without its dramatic challenges, it was better than his fathers. And my childhood was better than my father's, although not perfect. My children have consequently had pretty good childhoods. I have one grown child, three adolescents and one entering into adolescence. None are or have been required to "suffer through adolescence" to "become a productive, independent adults." All of them speak to me openly about their lives and are willing to hear me out when I offer advice or relate stories that are pertinent to their situation. They are the first in at least five generations of my family to attend college or to even believe that they can have professional careers as business owners, medical doctors, etc. My grandfather suffered far more than I ever have. I can tell you from his life that such suffering was not a benefit to him or to his wife and family nearly as much as my lack thereof has been for mine.

But maybe theirs was beneficial to you, for from them your kin and yourself learned what NOT to do.

To my mind, it is the religious person who refuses to step out of childhood and to grow up to maturity. It is because of this that I debate on this forum because I simply cannot believe that God can be defined as "good" in any sense of the term and still be responsible for setting up things in the way that Christianity explains life. I believe there is a God and that by definition He must be good, although it seems clear that he/she is not present as a "personal" God in the sense that my parents were present and personal in my life. But this is a relatively new realization to me. Having been indoctrinated in a hyper-religious family, all of my mental energies were spent in understanding God from within the framework of Christianity. I was never taught why Christianity was true. I was simply told that it was. It wasn't until I began to evaluate the thing as a whole, rather that merely accepting the premise, that I realized how absurd the premise upon which Christianity is based really is. I am firmly convinced that thinking is better than believing.

In my opinion, the Spiritual Journey isn't about trying to understand the external, physical world. That's for science to explain. It's about becoming a better person, however you defines that.

Therefore, you can be spiritual without having a religion or believing in God.

 

[Jordan St. Francis]

So, you do accept the premise that the human sacrifice was required before God was willing/able to render the "outpouring of grace necessary for salvation." This was the premise of the OP. But it seems clear to me that in order to believe this one has to assume that God is sub-human simply because every human is capable of forgiving/outpouring grace on someone who has offended or sinned against them and it is precisely this ability to show grace without prerequisites that makes forgiveness/grace such a powerful force. It is also the central theme to the life of Christ, a life that did not demonstrate the need for sacrifice in order to affect reconciliation but rather that simply poured out forgiveness and instructed his followers to do the same. This is in stark contrast to the death of Christ and the purpose that you describe above.

I do not believe that the Cross was an event which occurred in order to satisfy the “blood lust” of God. As I said, the Cross is part of God’s wrath upon the old and broken human nature- that is to say,he undoes in Christ what Adam has wrought for all humankind. He puts to death the sinful nature- this is in itself an act of grace because it accomplishes what human beings can not do themselves. Perhaps it can be said that, were God to destroy the sinful nature without Christ, that is, impart the grace upon us which restores us to Him, we ourselves- in our darkness- would be destroyed by the brilliance of His light.

Christ descends, Christ incarnates as one of us, Christ becomes the body of sin and presents the sinful nature to God because he alone, in His divinity, can endure the great purging of human nature that is the Cross and the violent birth pangs of the new creation - and therefore he alone can carry it in its restoration and elevation in the Resurrection.

Could God have saved us in another manner? I’m not sure, and I tend not to consider it. I deal with God as he has been revealed, and the Cross is to me one of the most astonishing moments of God’s self revelation. In a way, totally unexpected, here in the thorns and the nails the fullness of God, as Son, stands as our brother in the same movement which illustrates to us, and brings to shame, the disorder of human life.

The Cross is foremost a mystery, which will always surpass thought, and it sounds to me like you are caught up in its scandal, as St. Paul himself always said: The cross is a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.

I am also inclined to believe that “the history, death and Resurrection of Jesus is the display in the created and sinful order of the eternal and unchanging relation of Father and Son within the Trinity” So that it is proper to say that the Cross is the Son’s eternal act of living for and from the Father as it appears through the reality of a broken creation. All of creation subsists between the Persons of the Trinity, created in the eternal begetting of the Son, redeemed in the Son’s eternal carrying out of the Father’s will.

This is rather like saying that just because we won the war doesn't mean that the Nazis are no longer in power and therefore Jews in Germany are still at risk of being gassed to death. That makes no sense at all.

I am not saying that sin has disappeared from the world, I am saying that sin has been given its death blow in Christ. Christ has departed, returned to the Father, and humanity is left with the commission of applying the work of Christ to human living- already assured of the victory which we alone can not secure. Christ died for all human beings, but this is not a passive salvation, we must claim the salvation which he won for us, we must apply his life to ours. In traditional Catholic theology, this begins with the sacraments, with the dispensation of grace which enables us to ever strive for holy living. With the sacrament of reconciliation, and the medicine of His Body and Blood, we can progressively model our selves in his image.

To use your own analogy, it would be exactly so that the Nazis are still strutting around in all the terrible grandeur of the Third Reich. But, for those of us who accept the great hope of the Cross, we know that their arrogance and abuse of power is in vain, that they have been robbed of all final victory.

This enables us with the courage to live as rebels.

 

[slave2six]

I do not believe that the Cross was an event which occurred in order to satisfy the “blood lust” of God...

Thanks for the response. None of this makes sense to me, though. It's not that the idea is in itself offensive so much as that it is in complete contradiction with the ideas of forgiveness, reconciliation, mercy, et al.

I am not saying that sin has disappeared from the world, I am saying that sin has been given its death blow in Christ.

But isn't that like the Allies bombing the heck out of Germany and then telling the German civilians that they now have the power to take down Hitler, the Gestapo, the SS and the rest of the German army and we'll supply them with weapons? To leave a job of that magnitude unfinished just seems wrong to me.

Ultimately this is just a nice discussion (and you are a very nice person). I am convinced that there never was a perfected man and a fall of man or that God cursed an entire race because of the sins of the first two. The Garden story is physically impossible and allegorically nonsensical as, like the OP here, it flies in the face of all that we consider to be "good."

Try this on for size. Suppose you have God-like powers. Now suppose that you are boiling water and you tell your child, “Do not go near the stove or you’ll get burned.” So, of course, as soon as your back is turned, your child races over, tips the pan and gets scalded in the face so badly that she ends up permanently disfigured and losing sight in one eye. Your first reaction is to curse the child so that every one of her descendents is born with a disfigured face and one blind eye. Then you kick her out of the house and leave her on the streets to fend for herself. Of course you keep an eye on her and her children but you only talk to them whenever they have done something wrong and then you blame her children for not being good enough to live in your house while at the same time telling them that you really long for them to be whole and pure enough to live with you.

Words mean things. When we say that “God is good” and then we look at the story in the Bible of the first encounter that man has with God, we come away baffled. Is there any definition of the word “good” that meets with such behavior? If you treated your children the same way that God allegedly treated Adam and Eve and all their descendants, you’d be thrown in prison and your kids would become wards of the State. And rightly so.