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How can you be a True Christian™ if you don't take the Eden story literally?
- Thread starter ppp
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- fall naked bodz! soteriology
Guitar's Cry
Disciple of Pan
Adam and Eve put sugar in their porridge. ;-)
While I don't consider myself "Christian," the Christian mythology I still find inspiration in I read symbolically.
The Fall of Man represents humans beginning to differentiate between the Self and the rest of the Universe. Christ, hanging on the Cross, is the Fruit of the Tree of Life and Death (and produces some bittersweet wine and decadent but hearty meat!) and represents the death of the Self being reborn as one with the Father (the Universe as a personified Whole).
Wandering Monk
Well-Known Member
lukethethird
unknown member
Religion solving problems that religion created. Mankind fell and so Paul's Christ is the redeemer, could it be any dumber? I don't think so, except for the atrocities committed in the name of God.
ppp
Well-Known Member
Why are you asking me? There was nothing in my post that either said or impled that.
ppp
Well-Known Member
So say the adherents of most Christian sects. And yet, y'all (to put it mildly) disagree.
lukethethird
unknown member
Paul.
Wandering Monk
Well-Known Member
Its only a fall if you think living eternally as witless children is a good thing. Adam seizes the knowledge of good & evil, making himself equal to the gods. That is not a fall. If we take the layout of the garden and the layout of the tabernacle as a suggestion then the layout suggests the tree is the ark of the covenant. Through this covenant or through the ten commandments within it one seizes equality.
But Paul describes Jesus as someone who doesn't consider equality with God something one ought to grasp. Paul describes knowledge of good and evil as a catalyst which produces sin in people. The light does not merely reveal evil but causes it to grow.
How to reconcile the two is first that you don't have to hold these two views exclusively. They do not have to sync together. They are ways of looking at the same text; and Paul's writing suggests that he is aware of the first view.
Jesus is the central figure for the eucharist. You're talking about people drinking blood and eating a body. None of it makes semantic sense. Eucharist is about what you do when you are together. You eat, you talk, your forgive, you get to know each other. There is a time to apply semantic logic games, and there is a time to refrain from them.
However...what use is Jesus? Jesus is the means of imitating the covenant and spreading the innovations found in Judaism to people who are not Jews.
Paul's explanation for Jesus death is that it proves a person who has never sinned is guilty under the law simply for being a human. He says all are simply operating under grace. This, then, he uses as the basis for his theory that suggests the law cannot actually approve of anyone. He argues no one (therefore) keeps all of the law, and therefore he says all have broken it. Out of this he produces the argument that a non-Jewish person can be grafted into the Jewish nation.
But understand that when Paul is talking about these things he is speaking indirectly. The language he is using is from other indirect language. Jesus is a man who fulfills all of the prophecies about Israel -- prophecies that are not about a man. What happens is that Israel dies. It dies, and people wonder if it can be restored. By saying that Christ is resurrected in 3 days, he is saying "Yes it can be restored." This comes from some arcane language in Leviticus which states a sacrificed animal must be consumed within 3 days or the sacrifice is worthless. It is indirect language Paul is using. Further when Paul talks about Jesus death despite Jesus sinlessness, Paul is alluding (obviously I think) to the death of the peaceloving Israel which is raped and destroyed by Rome. This is symbolized by the stripes Jesus receives before his crucifixion.
You may wonder why such indirect language is employed and also why I am not using it. I am not using it, because I am not bound by such language; and I am tired of the negative impact creationism is having. I cannot countenance it. This world is not the world God makes. It is an evil world in need of change. The literalism you ask about in your OP is a problem, not a solution. It is confusion, not simplicity.
Apparently it was Yahweh. The sacrifice was offered to Yahweh to atone for the sins of mankind. Did it work? Jesus came back to life, so was there any actual salvation? Was it a theological bounced check?
ppp
Well-Known Member
Ah. You didn't mean that because mankind fell that Jesus had to die. You meant that in order to be redeemed Jesus had to die. In Christianity, that is.
To answer your question about who made that rule...Christians.
ppp
Well-Known Member
It's the language of the Christians [shrug]
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
One could argue that man was always flawed. That those stories are more about bringing your problems to God and not hiding them. There are all sorts of ways that one could rationalize those stories as morality tales that make far more sense than the actual stories themselves if taken literally.
Then all the drama of Adam and Eve goes away. It’s only fun because humans get duped and fall.
Well many of our fundamentalist Christian friends must be dead wrong. Dang.
ppp
Well-Known Member
They don't interpret the story the same way as Christians do either.
I'm not a Christian but find a certain truth here. It's the kind of truth that symbolizes reality in a form that can be taken literally but is really a teaching story. The truth I see is: at a time in the evolution leading to people, the first fully conscious humans are separated from animal ignorance by developing the sense of good and evil. Thus they departed from the easy existence of animal innocence. In this sense they "left the garden".
I take Paul here to mean: if people are fully aligned with the Divine, they know no sin, no good/evil, because their hearts are pure and their actions are also. As a round I know puts it, they "dance to the rhythm of God".
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