St. Paul on Same Sex Marriage.

[John D. Brey]

But I feel good that a smart guy like you can only muster a one sentence reply to my previous comments.

I feel like I understand your comments, and agree with them for the most part, within the context you seem to be using to make them. I see nothing wrong with your logic or reasoning except that as best I can tell you assume they come from some kind of authority, be it logical, or reasonable, that I don't believe has the authority you appear to assume it does.

Nevertheless, so long as you believe logic and reason are more sound than an appeal to God (which isn't to justify an appeal to God either), it's pretty difficult to go much further. You'd need to agree with say Karl Popper, that reason isn't really founded in a reasonable authority, and or that logic isn't a self-contained nor a self-reinforcing system of authority.

Nevertheless, to agree with Popper, you might've had too, like he, and me, gazed at the majority of your many teachers (so-called) in wide wonder at the lies they tried to feed you since you were a wee lad. If you swallowed most of that hogwash I fear it's too late for you. In most cases their lies are a fatal poison with no antidote. Far worse than parents letting their infants be circumcised without their decision in the matter is parents allowing their children to be completely brainwashed by churches and public schools, poisoned really, before they have even a fighting chance to escape intact.



John

 

[F1fan]

I feel like I understand your comments, and agree with them for the most part, within the context you seem to be using to make them. I see nothing wrong with your logic or reasoning except that as best I can tell you assume they come from some kind of authority, be it logical, or reasonable, that I don't believe has the authority you appear to assume it does.

Logic doesn't assume an authority, it's just a set of reliable tools that we humans can use for reliable thinking.

Nevertheless, so long as you believe logic and reason are more sound than an appeal to God (which isn't to justify an appeal to God either), it's pretty difficult to go much further. You'd need to agree with say Karl Popper, that reason isn't really founded in a reasonable authority, and or that logic isn't a self-contained nor a self-reinforcing system of authority.

Well it's like either putting gasoline or water in your car's gas tank. We can observe that the gas works, and that the water doesn't. Logic and reason works, appeals to God doesn't. That's why slavery ended in the USA as the South lost a war that was for a cause justified by the biblical God.

Nevertheless, to agree with Popper, you might've had too, like he, and me, gazed at the majority of your many teachers (so-called) in wide wonder at the lies they tried to feed you since you were a wee lad. If you swallowed most of that hogwash I fear it's too late for you.

You can always pray to God if that helps you with your many feelings. And I suggest more thinking and less feeling.

In most cases their lies are a fatal poison with no antidote. Far worse than parents letting their infants be circumcised without their decision in the matter is parents allowing their children to be completely brainwashed by churches and public schools, poisoned really, before they have even a fighting chance to escape intact.

Well, these parents are doing God's will, so they were told. So it seems you aren't much of a supporter of what God demands.

To my mind a successful escape is generations rejecting religion and superstitious beliefs. But much of this is biological and genetic and it isn't as easy as making a decision to not be attracted to religious belief. So, who knows.

 

[John D. Brey]

Well it's like either putting gasoline or water in your car's gas tank. We can observe that the gas works, and that the water doesn't.

Context is always important. If your car runs on hydrogen, then putting water in the tank is going be wiser than putting in gas since the gas might make a hydrogen engine go up like a tinder box.

Logic and reason works, appeals to God doesn't. That's why slavery ended in the USA as the South lost a war that was for a cause justified by the biblical God.

Many if not a majority of the slaves that were freed would take offense at your logic. They fervently prayed to God and sang negro-spirituals all the day long until God heard and answered their prayers.

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
And why not every man?

He delivered Daniel from the lion's den
Jonah from the belly of the whale
And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace
And why not every man?

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
And why not every man?

The moon runs down in a purple stream
The sun refused to shine
Every star did disappear
Yes, freedom shall be mine!

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
And why not every man?​

John

 

[John D. Brey]

Three paragraphs and no evidence for an absolute. No acknowledgment of fallibility in your belief. . . So in essence, you want to believe in an absolute even if you are mistaken. And you can't be sure you are mistaken if you don't think about it. That's why we needed a war to settle slavery.

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John

 

[1213]

Forcing a rape victim to marry their attacker is obviously abhorrent.

Thank you for the example. I think that is a rule, not a law, because law tells what one should not do and what one would deserve, if he brakes the law. Was there punishment for not marrying the rapist?

But, even if we would agree that it is not a law, it would be rule and you would think it is a bad rule. Reason why I think it is not necessary bad rule is that it would happen only in the case of that both of them would be virgins. In that rare case it could be that they both would really accept it and it would have been good for the child to have both parents. I think it is also good to notice that people had right for divorce.

 

[John D. Brey]

Logic doesn't assume an authority, it's just a set of reliable tools that we humans can use for reliable thinking.

Logic may be a reliable tool. But it only functions within a set of a priori variables. It doesn't provide the variables, but only a way to interpret them a posteriori. For instance, take the observations logic uses as its a posteriori context. It's logical to assume that a particular car is the color red based on axioms related to the word "red" as those letters are used to describe the quality experienced when certain electromagnetic wavelengths are received by the human eye.

And yet there's nothing red about the electromagnetic wavelengths bouncing off the car. And it's only an evolutionary, prejudicial quirk, that experiencing those electromagnetic wavelengths as the color red provided a survival enhancement that locked that abstract, ad hoc, way of experiencing those electromagnetic wavelengths, into the orthodoxy associated with how our eyes and brain experience those electromagnetic wavelengths (i.e., as the color red).

And yet if another creature can experience the exact same electromagnetic wavelengths as smell, or taste, rather than "red," and therein gain a survival leg-up on competitors, then that electromagnetic wavelength, logic or no logic, will be experienced as smell, or taste. It'd then be perfectly logical to put on your I-tunes and listen to a crooner chiming about a little tasty corvette that's too fast.

Which is merely to point out that logic only deals in pre-existing prejudices, like your own , and doesn't provide a means for judging metaphysical ideas like good, bad, right, wrong, true, false.

It's only when the animal part of the brain, retains it's authority over the divine part of the brain, that the world experienced by the animal part of the brain, the sensual, natural world, as experienced biologically (to include qualia like the color red), is still accepted as the simple, logical, reality, even truth, even though the divine part of the brain knows full-well that the animal brain is so far from truth it's not even funny.

It is the glory of the human cerebral cortex that it ---unique among all the animals and unprecedented in all geological time ---has the power to defy the dictates of the selfish genes. We can enjoy sex without procreation. We can devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old brain's genetic urging that these are a waste of time ---time that "should" be spent fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners: "As I see it, we have a profound choice to make. It is a choice between favoring the old brain or favoring the new brain. More specifically, do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of the selfish gene? Or, do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?"

Richard Dawkins, introducing Jeff Hawkins, One Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. (Last quotation is Dawkins quoting Hawkins from the book.)​

It appears to me that you're using logic to justify the authority of the animal brain (Dawkins "old brain") over the greater insight of the new brain?

The cerebral cortex has the power to realize that our sensual world is a play thing for monkeys; that there is no "red" in the world, except for the children locked in the sensual world, of the sensual body, and further that the true purpose for having the new brain, far from merely serving the old brain, the animal brain, the reptilian brain, empowered though it be by dumb-logic, is to put off the flesh, and its simple-minded (old lame-brained) logic, in order to focus on metaphysical realities having nothing to do with the logical constructs confined within the serpentine dictates of the animal body and brain.

Now, the main thing we were made for is to work with others. Secondly, to resist our body's urges. Because things driven by logos ---by thought ----have the capacity for detachment ---to resist impulses and sensations, both of which are merely corporeal. Thought seeks to be their master, not their subject. And so it should: they were created for its use.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7, #55.​

John

 

[John D. Brey]

To my mind a successful escape is generations rejecting religion and superstitious beliefs. But much of this is biological and genetic and it isn't as easy as making a decision to not be attracted to religious belief. So, who knows.

For billions of years life on planet earth didn't need to escape religion and superstitious belief in God: there was no such thing. Religion and superstitious belief is a product of the cerebral cortex: the new brain, that deals in metaphysical realities and not biologically ordained truisms that are not so much true, as they're useful.

Before the cerebral cortex, i.e., the new brain, which is to say the non-animal part of the human brain, all logic was the ad hoc tool, the useful idiot, of biological survival mechanisms. Logic was merely useful. Logic was a useful idiot of idiots uselessly trying to survive in the animal realm. It was universally that way until the arrival of the cerebral cortex offered up the truth of everlasting life if only the animal brain could let go of its billions of years old, ingrained and engraved into the genes, fear of death.

Jesus said that he who believes in him needn't fear death as does an animal or a human trapped in their old brain. In the new world of the cerebral cortex (where Jesus reigns supreme) everlasting life is free for the taking. One need only put their hand down and quit reaching for an apple or their genitalia and instead fix one's gaze on the tree of everlasting life that's worn around the necks and between the breasts of many of one's contemporaries if not companions.

Now don't you just wish you'd have left it alone when I answered you with a mere sentence?



John

 

[F1fan]

Context is always important. If your car runs on hydrogen, then putting water in the tank is going be wiser than putting in gas since the gas might make a hydrogen engine go up like a tinder box.

Of course that wasn't the context of my point. But I'm glad you understood the science.

 

[F1fan]

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John

There's a reason this is a cartoon and not a video, or a true story of an actual event. That's because this is propaganda meant to suggest a negative thing about academics and biology. This only works on people with contempt for science.

 

[F1fan]

For billions of years life on planet earth didn't need to escape religion and superstitious belief in God: there was no such thing.

Right, no evolved brains capable of abstract thought that could create religions and decide any number of thousands of gods exist. This is a recent development, about the last 200,000 years.

Religion and superstitious belief is a product of the cerebral cortex: the new brain, that deals in metaphysical realities and not biologically ordained truisms that are not so much true, as they're useful.

Well the human brain evolved as a believing organ, and this belief in the tribal norms is what helped early humans survive. They were able to cooperate and establish trust due to tribal rituals and beliefs. Humans today don't need the primitive drive to align to tribal norms as we can think in more abstract terms and make numerous and complex alliances. But our genes still express these tribal impulses and we are attracted to religion, a highly triable form of meaning.

Before the cerebral cortex, i.e., the new brain, which is to say the non-animal part of the human brain, all logic was the ad hoc tool, the useful idiot, of biological survival mechanisms.

Well there was no logic or reasoning before our frontal lobes evolved. Even though the evolution of this part of the hominid brain we still didn't have language, math, or logic. All we really had was trial and error like other animals. But we probably had the ability to learn faster and not suffer losses like animals do.

Logic was merely useful. Logic was a useful idiot of idiots uselessly trying to survive in the animal realm. It was universally that way until the arrival of the cerebral cortex offered up the truth of everlasting life if only the animal brain could let go of its billions of years old, ingrained and engraved into the genes, fear of death.

Do you mean thinking? Logic is a set of rules for thinking that was developed by the Greeks.

[quoteJesus said that he who believes in him needn't fear death as does an animal or a human trapped in their old brain. In the new world of the cerebral cortex (where Jesus reigns supreme) everlasting life is free for the taking. [/quote]
None of this works. First why need to believe in Jesus except to get the benefit of everlasting life in heaven? And also being saved for the eternal torment in hell. That was a brilliant invention of propaganda. Not just the promise of heaven, but also avoiding hell. Second, Christians fear death all the time, so they don't have 100% faith in Jesus.

One need only put their hand down and quit reaching for an apple or their genitalia and instead fix one's gaze on the tree of everlasting life that's worn around the necks and between the breasts of many of one's contemporaries if not companions.

Ironic because you are well informed so you have reached for the apple quite a bit in your time. Perhaps the other thing as well, which segways us back to sex. Or not having sex.

Now don't you just wish you'd have left it alone when I answered you with a mere sentence?

Probably not as much as you.

John

 

[John D. Brey]

For billions of years life on planet earth didn't need to escape religion and superstitious belief in God: there was no such thing.​

Right, no evolved brains capable of abstract thought that could create religions and decide any number of thousands of gods exist. This is a recent development, about the last 200,000 years.

According to science and the experts it's much newer than that. The kind of thought capable of conceiving of an infinite being who contrasts all else we know to be real, begins, precisely when the written word does; that's about six-thousand years ago (according to science) which is about the time the bible situates the creation of the first modern man ha-adam.

Human language, with its ability to transform immaterial observations and ideas into material symbolic forms which can be stored in brains and on tablets, scrolls, paper, and pixels, is the beginning of man's encounter with God.

Psychologically our thought, apart from its expression in words, is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no preexisting ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.

Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 111.​

The first written symbols of human language were hieroglyphs (sacred-symbols). The ancients considered the hieroglyph sacred because it was itself, the symbol was, a manifest, tangible, emblem, of a thought, idea, or observation, that was intangible until its incarnation in the tangible symbol. In this sense, every glyph used to manifest the unmanifestable idea, was the incarnation of the immaterial idea, and a material symbol, making every symbol, like every Rabbi, Jesus.

Our current age was born into the profane ---demotic---use of language that evolved after the fact of the recognition of its sacredness as the incarnation of the immaterial, and the material, god, and man, body, and soul/spirit.

From the most elementary hierophany – e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree --- to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act --- the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural “profane” world.

Mircea Eliades, The Sacred and the Profane.​

John

 

[John D. Brey]

Ironic because you are well informed so you have reached for the apple quite a bit in your time. Perhaps the other thing as well, which segways us back to sex. Or not having sex.

Paul's treatise on homosexuality is an extremely concise explication concerning everything we're speaking about. It's brilliance is almost too amazing. Everything Paul says is pure genius and divine revelation compacted in a manner that even today is almost completely opaque as misinterpreted by the majority of readers.

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; 19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Romans 1:18–20.​

We know retroactively, if we've read the whole treatise, that Paul is speaking of same-sex as the rejection of some divine principle Paul is noting above. In Paul's mind, that principle isn't moral or religious; it's philosophical, logical, and theological: human thought (as opposed to non-symbolic thinking) is impossible without the ability to unify invisible, immaterial, ideas, concepts, thoughts, with tangible symbols, mythological emblems, which, this unification, is always the unification of unlike properties implying that only this kind of unification of unlike properties is able to produce living, live, offspring: more human thought.

Language moves in the middle kingdom between the `indefinite’ and the `infinite’; it transforms the indeterminate into a determinate idea, and then holds it within the sphere of finite determinations. So there are in the realm of mythic and religious conceptions `ineffables” of different order, one of which represents the lower limit of verbal expression, the other the upper limit; but between these bounds, which are drawn by the very nature of verbal expression, language can move with perfect freedom, and exhibit all the wealth and concrete exemplification of its creative power.

Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth.​

As we see when we read ahead in Romans chapter one, Paul is claiming that human gender, sacralized in holy matrimony, is the crowning hieophany whereby we codify our great difference from the unspiritual animals of old, precisely when we recognize marriage as the human ritual par excellent since by recognizing human gender, male and female, as biological types of absolute binary difference, i.e., the invisible, versus the visible, man versus woman, we celebrate what we know to be the genesis of our very humanity (the unification of polar opposites) to produce modern man as the spiritual end to the kind of natural evolution that led to apes and peacocks.

Paul's contemporary, Philo, who was familiar with the context Paul uses in his epistles, claimed that "male" represents "immaterial," whereas "female" represents the place the immaterial is housed. The Talmud, Yoma 2a, calls a man's wife his "house," while the French philosopher and Professor, Jacques Lacan, said that the phallus is always invisible, unseen, when it's busy in its most seminal act. It's always hidden inside the place where that seminal union of invisible and visible takes place; the place Rashi called the "bedchamber" where God is manifest.

Understood in context, Paul makes same-sex marriage a full-frontal attack on man's very soul, which comes from man's ability to unite binary opposites, God/man, Jew/Gentile, male/female, as the sacred ability that literally, in Paul's mind, produces the epiphenomenon of that union of opposites: God.

In Paul's mind, same-sex marriage is therefore demonic in that it sanctifies the state of reality before mankind produced, and then observed, God. In Paul's mind, nothing could be more Godless than to sanctify and sacralize a marriage of non-binary things since that marriage is not only non-productive (it can produce nothing living) but by honoring it and celebrating it society is worshiping, and celebrating, the god of death, and the destruction of all that is truly God:

26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28

Romans 1:26–28.​

Paul claims it's when a society begins to take the gift of God, the ability to think as humans are able to think, for granted, as though it's natural, mundane, and doesn't require, or produce, God-consciousness, he, God, as almost a joke, gives a majority of the society or civilization over to homosexuality so that the homosexual-phallus, which is invisible in its most seminal act, is hiding, during that act, in gehenna, or what we might call a sewage treatment plant, a sewer.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

As we see when we read ahead in Romans chapter one, Paul is claiming that human gender, sacralized in holy matrimony, is the crowning hieophany whereby we codify our great difference from the unspiritual animals of old, precisely when we recognize marriage as the human ritual par excellent since by recognizing human gender, male and female, as biological types of absolute binary difference, i.e., the invisible, versus the visible, man versus woman, we celebrate what we know to be the genesis of our very humanity (the unification of polar opposites) to produce modern man as the spiritual end to the kind of natural evolution that led to apes and peacocks.

Where the statement above is somewhat understood, Wittgenstein's adage that all reality is codified in the nature of the written word segues directly into Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin's great essay: The Word and Allegory; or, Origen on the Jewish Question.

Where Boyarin's ideas parallel the ideas in the cross-hairs of this thread is when he notes Judaism's acceptance both of the divine indeterminancy of scripture's language (Ernst Cassirer's infinite or indeterminate boundary), but also the other boundary which Cassirer calls, "the sphere of finite determinations." -----As Boyarin points out, the finite determination concerning the meaning of a divine (infinite and indeterminate) revelation, by reason of its very finite nature, must render or accept all interpretation as indeterminate or else crucify the divine (indeterminate) element for the sake of a particular interpretation of of the non-particular revelation.

Without delving too deeply into the argumentation and logic of Boyarin's correct ---for the sake of this examination ---- explication, we can jump forward to one of his codification of these ideas where he says:

For midrash, however, in its final development, there is no transcendental signified. God himself can only participate, as it were, in the process of unlimited semiosis and thus of limitless interpretation. The result will be not simply a multiplicity of interpretations that we cannot decide between, nor even a plethora of interpretations that all stand in the Pleroma of divine meaning, but finally a rabbinic ascesis that virtually eliminates the practice of interpretation entirely. Midrash, in its culminating avatar, eschews not only allegory and a discourse of the true meaning but renounces "interpretation" altogether . . ..​

In Romans chapter one, Paul implies that our ability to access, and somehow intuit, a divine indeterminancy, requires the kind of intuition required to make human-style thought possible in the first place; the kind of thought he posits that profane societies (ripe for destruction) ignore or accept as so natural as to not require further thought.

Judaism, on the other hand, knows otherwise and accepts the existence of the divine indeterminancy which it receives ---as the Torah or Law ----and which is the basis for Jewish thought as opposed to the pagan conceptualism which assumes post-adamic thought is as natural to nature as is the thinking of any other mammal.

What Boyarin perceives is the fact of a fundamental distinction between Jewish acceptance of the necessity for divine indeterminancy as a boundary to determinate thought, versus how Christianity soulves the problem of a "transcendental signified" that can authenticate a particular interpretation of an indeterminate text, or thought, and do it in a manner that appears not only necessary, but which, in Boyarin's able hands, appears to work.




John

 

[Fallen Prophet]

Exegesis associated with the thread, Jesus on Same Sex Marriage (which became the essay by that name), pointed out that Jesus inferred and prophesied that his followers could know the end of the age, and of the imminence of his post apocalyptic return, when, as was the case in the antediluvian civilization, and Sodom and Gomorrah, same-sex coupling became normalized to the point of allowing marriages of persons of the same sexual gender.

Whereas Jesus said nothing about homosexuality but that when it was normalized it would be the primary sign of the end of the age, his disciple, St. Paul, put forth a theological treatise in the first chapter of his letter to the Roman's that takes a stab at why homosexuality will be the final sign marking the final decades of the end of civilization as we know it. In his deconstruction of homosexuality, he implies that a homosexual mind and mentality comes before, and is the root cause concerning, rampant biological homosexuality. Exegesis of the mid to latter part of Romans chapter one justifies the fact that St. Paul explicitly makes this claim. What he's implying is that a mind and or a society that doesn't distinguish between binary-reality versus an infinite anything goes (or merely non-binary) state of affairs, is a mind (and or society) with fatal flaws and fatal liabilities.

In Paul's thinking "male/female" is binary-reality codified in human biology (tragic though that codification, Genesis 2:21, may be).1 He's implying that rampant homosexuality is the canary in the coal-mine concerning a society or civilization that's about to implode or explode because it's opened the Pandora's box containing a kind of thought that no longer confines itself to the binary realities of the current world order. In Paul's parlance, and thinking, non-binary thought denies the limitations and realities of the current world order as though the mind, which in some sense really does transcend these limitations and liabilities, can ignore the body, and the world, and storm the gates of heaven bull-at-a-gate, ignorant, and ignoring, the realities of the body and its world.

The great irony, or paradox, is that Paul himself claims that in Christ's resurrected Church, there will be no binary gender, no male or female, such that one might wonder why a movement to be inclusive toward same-sex relationships, and non-binary identification, would be in the cross-hairs of Paul's buggy-whip rather than something he would applaud? Why does Paul demonize something that appears to be an evolutionary advance toward the state of perfection he himself dangles in front of Christians as the goal?




John

I don't believe that Paul taught that there would be no male or female - for he even taught that was no man without the woman or woman without the man in the Lord - but rather than God loved everyone - not just men and not just women - but everyone.

 

[Fallen Prophet]

Paul didn't like the idea of anybody having sex.

You encouraged people to get married and have sex.

 

[John D. Brey]

I don't believe that Paul taught that there would be no male or female . . ..

Who is Paul to disagree with you (Galatians 3:28)?



John

 

[lukethethird]

You encouraged people to get married and have sex.

Wrong, I never encouraged anyone to get married.

 

[Fallen Prophet]

Who is Paul to disagree with you (Galatians 3:28)?



John

You have no idea what you are talking about.

You are trying to quote Paul out of context.

Paul wrote to the saints in Galatia because they had begun to apostatize from the truth. He said after the introduction in his epistle,

"I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel:

Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ." (Galatians 1:6-7)

He then goes on to recount his own conversion and how he was called to be the Apostle to the Gentiles and how he had often contended with other Apostles over the Law of Moses.

Many of the original Apostles believed that many aspects of the Law should be preserved - such as Jews not eating with Gentiles or forcing Gentiles to observe Jewish customs - and how they were wrong to do that.

He taught that we should live by the Gospel - not the Law - for Christ was crucified for all - not just the Jews.

He also said, "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20)

Are you going to interpret this verse literally as well - like you did Galatians 3:28? Do you believe that Paul was literally crucified with Christ?

No? Why not? Because it doesn't suit your bias?

Anyways - Paul taught that all of the faithful have died as to their sins and they live now as one with Christ.

That is when in chapter 3 he chastises the Galatians for foolishly adhering to aspects of the Law - such as separating men and women when they worship or abstaining from eating with Gentiles - which deny the Gospel.

And he taught that everyone that had received Christ was adopted into the seed of Abraham and were inheritors of the promises.

Chapter 3 ends with him saying,

"For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.

For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise." (Galatians 3:27-29)

Paul was not literally saying that Jews, Greeks, bonded and free, males and females did not exist - only that the Gospel freed them from the expectations of the Law, and none should be treated any differently - for they all were one in Christ Jesus.

 

[John D. Brey]

He also said, "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20)

Are you going to interpret this verse literally as well - like you did Galatians 3:28? Do you believe that Paul was literally crucified with Christ?

No? Why not? Because it doesn't suit your bias?

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: 4 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: 5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 1:3–5.​

Yes, we were all in Christ during the crucifixion. Jesus gave birth to his offspring only after the crucifixion. No one was born-again until the water and the blood poured from Jesus on the cross.

Jesus is the tree of soul life. All the fruit was in him when he hung on the cross. I was in him when he hung on the cross. Paul was in him when he hung on the cross. And it's the cross that makes it possible for us to realize who our mother is. Jesus is our mother, brother, father, sister, aunt, and uncle.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

Paul was not literally saying that Jews, Greeks, bonded and free, males and females did not exist - only that the Gospel freed them from the expectations of the Law, and none should be treated any differently - for they all were one in Christ Jesus.

Is that a footnote in the Living Bible?




John