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Not a theologian, but I've always found it interesting that the Romans crucified Jesus with "King of Jews" above him, which certainly seems to imply Jesus was making claims to temporal power, even if the later written Gospels try to distance the Roman authorities from responsibility. Not exactly surprising, given what the Romans did to Jerusalem that the Gospel authors wouldn't exactly be eager to take a run at Imperial authority. But it's all interpretation, of course.
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Nov 24, 2022 22:11
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Keromaru5 posted:For what it's worth: Saint Paisios the Athonite had this to say: "Personally, if the communists weren't atheist, if they didn't hunt Christ, I would agree with them. It's good for the plots of land, the factories, to belong to everyone; not for one to be hungry while someone else is throwing away food." Source. None of the Gospels were actually written by anyone who had ever met Jesus. Mark, assuming you follow the most commonly accepted dates, was written 35-40 years after Jesus' crucifixion, Matthew and Luke 50-55 years after, and John 55-75 years after. Obviously those are guesses but the starting point of all Gospel text is at best written and spoken accounts from people who met Jesus, not from any of his preserved writing. It was really only the fear of no longer having those living witnesses to tell the stories that prompted the writing in the first place. And it also must be stated that we don't have much if any text from the Gospels until 75-100 years after their composition, and even the earliest versions we have show textual deviations that cannot be explained by scribal error. There was an active and ongoing attempt from the earliest days to represent Jesus' views according to whatever the local communities viewed as most correct and while I don't think that they necessarily tried to portray him inaccurately, it's impossible to be objective. For comparison, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated 54 years ago. We have access to voluminous writing and videos of him delivering his message. Look at what has happened to his message, how watered down it has become. Then look at how he has been basically canonized in secular society despite being one of the most reviled men in his own time. I've seen polling which says that during his life's he was roughly as popular as Nixon was on the eve of Nixon's impeachment. Barring some improbable recovery of 1st century documents, it isn't something that we will ever know for sure, but I have a hard time reading the Gospels and not seeing Jesus as someone who was not deeply challenging to the existing social order, especially regarding the treatment of the poorest and most marginalized in society. I don't think he wanted to be a king but the idea that he was cool with the current rulers continuing to rule seems to fly in the face of both the Jewish authorities and the Romans viewing him as a genuine threat to their power, much in the same way they viewed John the Baptist.
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Nov 25, 2022 05:36
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Yeah, the part that we don't get a sense of from the Bible stories is just how long crucifixion takes to kill, as Jesus died very much on the quick end, suffering "only" for six hours, whereas it would normally take up to 4 days as I understand it. I was taught, dunno if it is true, that there was a good deal of leeway on times because it depended on how much "comfort" someone was given with water and wine, which would provide temporary comfort but ultimately prolong the suffering by keeping them alive, or whether they would break the condemned person's legs, which would seem cruel but significantly hasten death. Also, there's the inevitability aspect of it. The condemned is going to die, and they know this, but they're conscious and able to communicate with the others who are condemned and anyone who comes to watch. Whether that is more or less painful than another kind of death, well, pain is only part of a way of dying being "the worst". Beyond the pain, which I can only assume is horrific, it's hard to imagine a less dignified or more humiliating way to die.
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Nov 28, 2022 04:13
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Prurient Squid posted:This is what I want. To become an orb, "it's own rotundity enjoying".
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Dec 3, 2022 13:44
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Prurient Squid posted:I don't understand why what I said is so controversial. Haven't multiple people said "people don't want socialism, they want to personally get ahead", "people don't even want a meritocracy, they want advancement for themselves even by nepotism". It's not a very flattering portrait of the ordinary man on the street. But I'm not going to continue down this road because it's not my vibe. I once saw speculation that in any given political or economic system, roughly 10% of people are true believers, and this holds true in capitalism, communism, or whatever other system you want to have. The remaining 90% don't care ideologically and just want to get by, some are willing to engage with the system as a supporter so long as it gets them ahead and some just want to live their life unbothered. The author was specifically talking about North Korea, but made a general comment and it's something that I've largely come to believe. So, it's true that the people don't want socialism, and it's also true that the people don't want capitalism, what the people want is to go about their daily lives with a predictable system that allows them to achieve their goals. For some people, it's working the "meritocratic" ladder to achieve high status (wealth, power, acclaim, etc.) and for some it is having their material needs met and being able to pursue whatever personal interest drives them (reading, mountain biking, model trains, video games, etc.).
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Dec 13, 2022 15:35
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Prurient Squid posted:The Gospel of John is the best one so far. I've always enjoyed Mark the most. There's something about seeing God at his the most human that really hits me.
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Dec 14, 2022 13:09
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Prurient Squid posted:At some point somebody raised the question of how much you can disagree with the Catholic church without metamorphosing into a Protestant. There's a Tillich quote that reminded me of the discussion. It's worth pointing out that a lot of the differences between the various Protestant denominations are more historical and traditional than actually theological. For example, the ELCA is in full communion with the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Moravian Church, and the United Methodist Church. That's enough unity that they can literally share clergy, and combines major denominations that, as a matter of historical origin, came from Martin Luther, Jan Hus, John Calvin, and uh ... Henry the VIII. A pet theory that I have is that while there are very real and likely irreconcilable differences between the theologies of those Protestant denominations, Roman Catholicism, and the Orthodox churches, once one accepts a Trinitarian view of God and works from (at least mostly) the same books of the Bible, that there is only so far that a comprehensive theology can drift from those the orthodoxy of one of those denominations. Or, maybe more accurately, it is really difficult to invent a truly new heresy that hasn't been done at some point in the last two thousand years without either cutting away chunks of the Bible that flatly contradict the new interpretation or bringing in extra-Biblical texts that bolster it.
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Jan 2, 2023 18:45
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Bar Ran Dun posted:It’s also no accident that the example is the ELCA.
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Jan 2, 2023 19:32
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I am still very very sad that the "woman taken in adultery" story is a later addition. I have decided that it's good, therefore true. Just because it was not in the original text of John does not make it any more or less true than the rest of John. The Gospel of John itself was not written by John (or by a different eyewitness in his name) so it's not like the rest of the stories in John that aren't in the Synoptics can make any better claim to authenticity than the woman taken in adultery. We know it was added later, but Papias appears to refer to a story quite like it only a decade or two after John was written, so there's a solid claim that even if it wasn't in the original text of John that it was a story circulating in the Christian community in some fashion. There's also the possibility that it was in the original text but that it was removed by some copyists early in the process, likely because they thought it encouraged adultery, as pious copyists are well known to remove and change "problematic" passages to better match their understanding, and that the later copies we have actually represent an earlier manuscript tradition for which we just have no extant evidence. I wouldn't say that's likely, nor would I argue that such a thing is true in a debate, but I don't think it's impossible. We know that there were a lot more stories of Jesus circulating than ever made it into the Gospels, the author of John directly says so, and we also know that there's stories in the Gospels that are unlikely to have actually occurred, so even if this was just a good story circulating in some early Christian community that a copyist added in, I don't see how that makes it any less "true" than canonical stories written by other non-apostle authors who themselves were not eyewitnesses. I definitely like it as historical as much as the passage from Paul about how women can't be leaders and need to be silent when just a couple chapters earlier Paul refers to an apostle named Junia, which conservative theologians have undertaken Olympic-level mental gymnastics to explain as not referring to a woman. Edit: fixed a typo Azathoth fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Jun 3, 2023 |
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Jun 2, 2023 23:58
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Bar Ran Dun posted:The thing to have in mind is that Greek thinking men won the fight for leadership in the church and the canon reflects changes made by them . But they aren’t complete changes because there was a lot of this stuff. Yep. There's solid evidence that women had a prominent role in the early church, not just because that but also because if they didn't have such a prominent role, Paul (or someone putting words in his mouth) wouldn't have had to tell the churches he was writing to not to allow women in leadership. Women not leading was the norm and so he wouldn't have had to mention anything, but yet he is compelled to rail against it. Like, if in 1000 years they dig up a law code for Anytown, USA and there's a law on the books that makes it a felony to trap squirrels for sexual purposes and another law against loving squirrels, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a significant portion of Anytown, USA was loving squirrels, or at least trying very hard to do so.
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Jun 3, 2023 00:56
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How about Eusebius for poo poo-talking Papias?
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Jun 3, 2023 00:58
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The problem is that the issue isn't really with God, it's with us. A solution that God enacts unilaterally isn't gonna fix humanity without humanity's participation, and for reasons we can only speculate upon, God decided that the best way to get humanity to change was to do what Jesus did. Did it work? Well, it's pretty hard to argue that no one in history changed the world more than Jesus did, albeit through his followers. It's so massively changed that I don't even know how to begin describing what the world would look like if he hadn't lived. Going further I suspect would basically just devolve into the question of good and evil.
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Jun 14, 2023 21:12
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Josef bugman posted:And who made us like this? There is no getting around it that if you believe that God has a hand in the creation of all life then, ultimately, they bare some level of culpability for it as well.
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Jun 14, 2023 23:49
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Josef bugman posted:I am very grateful to all the thoughtful responses and I am very much aware that I may be being crass with my responses, but I am trying to communicate emotions and my ideas about divinity as best I can, I'm just hopeful I have done so with a measure of respect. I also want to say thank you to everyone who has responded to me, it is appreciated. I chose not to respond to you because your response to me was angry and disrespectful. Getting angry about something is your business and I won't tell you not to be angry but then venting your spleen at a random person just trying to have a conversation is inappropriate and not conducive to fruitful discussion. The regulars here seem to like you and tell you that you're a good person while you do that, but I will provide a dissenting opinion and tell you that if that's how you treat strangers, you reevaluate how you conduct yourself because all that will do is drive people away who don't like being yelled at for no reason.
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Jun 17, 2023 18:59
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It's all conservative Victorian attitudes toward sex being spread around by various religious movements, in light of and often in response to various more libertine ideas that were floating around. Now, the ideas of groups like the Oneida Community were never common or particularly popular in society, but because of groups like that a lot of the more conservative groups, who would ultimately win that culture war, made prudish ideas about sex into articles of faith. Over time the reason for that being important to distinguish was lost (or directly suppressed) and it became common wisdom that the church and western culture in general were always like that. We're still undoing a lot of the damage from Victorian archaeologists seeing obvious sexual stuff and hastily scribbling "unknown ritual purposes" on a note and slamming it into a drawer so they won't have to think about it.
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Jun 18, 2023 22:49
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two fish posted:Alright. So, admittedly, this was actually prompted by watching Jesus Christ Superstar last night (the trippy 1973 movie), but it reminded me of many portrayals I've seen of the Passion. No small amount of ink has been spilled on exactly that question. I'll offer my own thoughts, which I think are generally in line with mainstream Protestant interpretations, and I'll touch a bit on the Historical Jesus, as that's one of my personal areas of interest. First, that cry must be understood as Jesus directly quoting Psalms 22 and so any interpretation of what the cry itself means has to be grounded in what the psalmist is saying. I'd recommend reading the whole thing, which I'll link but not quote: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2022&version=NRSVUE. The psalm is about someone feeling that all is lost but still trusting in God, so keep that in mind as we go forward. Given the psalm, I take the cry to be that of one suffering in absolute desolation and despair, which is fitting for someone being crucified, as crucifixion is not only designed to be supremely painful but also supremely humiliating. Jesus, at that moment, feels furthest from God the Father, but with his cry he doesn't just express that he also expresses his trust in God's plan. This is an area where Jesus the man as understood in the context of the Historical Jesus butts up against later theological development of the Trinity, which I'll address more in your second question, but for now, let's not inquire too deeply over exactly who's plan we're dealing with. This idea of Jesus being willing to suffer and die is prefigured by his anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane earlier when he says "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." (Matthew 26:39) and then "My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.” (Matthew 26:42). I would also argue that Jesus, as fully human, experienced the full range of human experiences and an unavoidable part of that is feeling despair at not being able to perceive the presence of God in times of hardship, yet with that cry, he also simultaneously expresses that he knows God is there and that he trusts God. Now, admittedly, this is a complex reading of the text and more plain readings are possible. One of those readings is that Jesus the man was crying out to God because God had actually departed from him before his death. This is a view considered heretical by most modern Christians. Basically it says that Jesus wasn't born divine but that God entered into Jesus at his baptism by John the Baptist and he then departed Jesus on the cross, usually reasoned because God cannot possibly die. It also has the advantage of explaining why Jesus needed to be baptized at all, another theologically tricky question. I don't personally hold to that view, but it was common enough in early Christianity that it needed to be condemned as a heresy later. Now, this brings up a point that will take me into your second question. The four narratives of the crucifixion presented in the canonical Gospels are irreconcilable. Jesus cries out to God in Mark and Matthew but says other things in Luke and John. So we have to ask ourselves, did Jesus really quote Psalm 22 from the cross? My answer to that is that it's possible but we don't really have a way to know. Matthew is very concerned with portraying Jesus as the fulfillment of Israelite prophecy about the Messiah, so having Jesus quote a Psalm there fits perfectly with what he's doing. That Mark includes it when he doesn't have the same goal is a point in favor of authenticity, but it's an open question in scholarship exactly how scripture Jesus would have been able to recite as it's generally accepted that he was illiterate. Personally, I think it's likely that, on the cross, he did express a feeling of abandonment and desolation, though I question whether it was in those specific words. And here we come to the Historical Jesus. quote:This also made me wonder another thing: as Jesus walked the earth in the body of a man, was he aware that he was God, or in some way was his awareness taken away for the duration of it? The mainstream (little-o orthodox) understanding would say that Jesus understood at all times that he was God and this view seems to have developed early within Christianity, though it was by no means universal in the early Christian community. It is, however, the view expressed by the eventual winners of the theological struggle. Something that may help here is understanding the order in which the Gospels were written. It is generally accepted that Mark was written first, followed by Matthew and Luke, then John. Whether Luke used Matthew or vice versa is an unsettled area of scholarship but most scholars agree that they were written pretty close to each other and that they used Mark when writing, with John coming later. Personally, I subscribe to Mark being written first, then Matthew who had a copy of Mark, then Luke who had a copy of both Mark and Matthew. This is relevant because on the chain of Mark -> Matthew -> Luke -> John, we see a historiographical shift in the presentation of Jesus. In Mark, Jesus is portrayed as the most human while in John he is portrayed as the most divine. Scholars will vary on that, but to me it is plain as day, with the caveat that I think Matthew and Luke both are about on the same level. It's also important to remember that despite the names attached, none of the authors knew Jesus. None of the writers claim to be disciples, and we know with certainty that they were not. Mark claims to have been written by the companion/translator of Luke, but that is not likely for a variety of reasons. So basically it needs to be accepted that although the writers of the Gospels were passing on hearsay about the life of Jesus. Also note, they are called by convention after the name of their Gospel though not accepted by anyone anymore to actually be said historical figures. So when Mark includes the direct Aramaic that Jesus spoke, he didn't hear it from Jesus' lips. He also likely didn't hear about it from someone who heard it directly either. Same for Matthew, who likely included what Mark wrote because it fit his goals, not because he necessarily knew it to be historically accurate, though he may have thought it was. By the time we get to John, we have gone from the very human Jesus sweating bullets about the crucifixion in Mark to a very divine Jesus in John who acts much more in line with the modern view of a Jesus who could look upon the world in knowing bemusement as it all plays out. Personally, I think that Jesus understood himself to be the prophecied Messiah eventually but not right away at birth. My reading, informed by a historical critical framework, is that Jesus was initially a follower of John the Baptist and at some point around his baptism came to understand himself as the one John was talking about, and thus began his own public ministry. I tend to view this as being caused by the killing of John the Baptist, which caused Jesus to rethink a lot of things. I get this and the next point from Historical Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan, who asserts that Jesus' big innovation was understanding that humans were waiting on God to fix the world and God was waiting on humans to start the process. So Jesus preached about the coming Kingdom of God, which he viewed as very much an earthly creation. Note, this is in express contrast to little-o orthodox understanding of the Kingdom of God as something spiritual. He asserts that it is likely that Jesus thought he was building an earthly kingdom and that God would eventually place him on the throne of said kingdom. I am dubious on that specific point about earthly power, in that I view Jesus through an apocalyptic lens (which Crossan does not). My view is that Jesus also thought the world was going to be radically remade by God in the very near future, so unlike Simon bar Kokhba who a hundred years later would claim to be the messiah and rule over an earthly kingdom, I don't think Jesus thought that it would get that far before God came back, resurrected the dead, and instituted his kingdom on Earth. As for why Jesus would not know all this, well, if he knew everything, he wouldn't be fully human. Humans cannot be omniscient so it makes sense that Jesus would have a period where he would experience that. I don't think that continues today of course, but there's a bunch of places where Jesus either explicitly or implicitly lacks full knowledge, and that's fundamental to the human experience. I've rambled enough on this, so I think I'll just cut this here.
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Jun 19, 2023 17:28
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Winifred Madgers posted:I want to quibble with the illiteracy claim, at the very least: Jesus read from the scriptures in the synagogue. He also quoted scripture many, many times and was intimately familiar with it. I was debating putting that in, because I didn't want to imply that he was unaware of the scriptures and was obviously quite familiar with them. He obviously gets Son of Man directly from the book of Daniel, as an example. As for how illiterate he was, at a minimum, he could not write. No Christian writer, biblical or otherwise, speaks of the writings of Jesus, nor do any survive. A bunch of later writing claims to have been written by Jesus but for a variety of good reasons, no scholar thinks that is authentic. As for how much he could read, I'll grant that it is possible he could have had some reading ability, but he was also from a poor peasant family in the hinterlands of a minor kingdom that had recently been incorporated into the Roman Empire. He would have gotten a religious education in the synagogue but I question how much that would have involved learning to read the scriptures himself vs. hearing those scriptures recited by local priests. Exactly how well he was able to quote direct vs. paraphrase is a good question. The Gospels clearly show him quoting directly, as you say, but given the distance in time from composition, I assert that it isn't possible to know whether he was quoting directly or using a gloss. Also, I would point towards the story in Mark and Matthew where Jesus is rejected by his local synagogue because he was a "tekton", which is where we get the idea that Jesus was a carpenter. However the general use of the word is probably better understood as what we'd today call a construction worker. Someone with building skills who in the time and location would not have been expected to be literate. We do then see him reading a scroll directly in Luke, but that also fits with my assertion about the evolving portrayal of Jesus in later written Gospels. Regardless, I did not mean to imply he was ignorant of the scriptures, in any reconstruction of Jesus, he clearly was highly versed in what they say. ----------------
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Jun 19, 2023 18:35
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Nessus posted:I can't back-cast it reliably, but I know that after the Babylonian exile there was a lot of education for male children. It is possible Jesus qua Jesus was not much of a writer and did not do much writing; I imagine a lot of people who could read to at least some extent did not do much or any writing, other than maybe things like short lists or using letters while sketching something out on a slate or in the dust. There's one from him as a child where he goes to Jerusalem and teaches the teachers, but that's about as historically reliable as the infancy narratives. For his adult ministry, he is rejected by the priests and the scribes. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone and all that. On the whole writing front, I'll reiterate that it begs belief that if Jesus wrote anything that we wouldn't have mention of it let alone an actual copy. I'm well aware absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but beyond the Gospels we have Paul who also doesn't mention any surviving writings of Jesus yet we have his surviving writing, nor do we have mention of such writing from any early church father, which seems like something they would have mentioned.
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Jun 19, 2023 18:55
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Bar Ran Dun posted:He writes in the dirt in John. In a passage that doesn't appear in our earliest and most reliable manuscripts of John and which is generally considered to be a later interpolation (assuming you're referring to the story of the woman taken in adultery), though as I posted up thread, I do hold open the possibility that it was original, though I wouldn't bet on it. I really like the message of that story and would like it to be authentic but it's hard to ignore that it's very likely a late addition to a gospel that was already written 50+ years after the crucifixion.
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Jun 19, 2023 19:17
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I don't think it's an article of faith or anything, and I don't have more to say on the topic, but as it relates to the original question about whether Jesus was aware that he was God while alive it's super tangential and I regret the derail. To that original question, I think he did. I don't think he expressed things in a neat, triune theology but it's also hard for me to read the Bible and even at the earliest not see that the claim was part of his ministry. What complicates matters is that he also clearly was cagey about claiming it out loud so it's a common theme that the people around Jesus, even his closest disciples, didn't get it until after the resurrection. My read of this is that he would have led his disciples to this understanding in private, after he knew that they could be trusted, but wouldn't have claimed it to strangers as he was going about his ministry. As for why, well, claiming he was the Messiah (which is not the same as claiming to be God mind you) is what ultimately got him killed. Had he gone around proclaiming that he was literally God, he would have immediately been locked up either by the Romans for sedition or by the Jewish authorities for blasphemy.
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Jun 19, 2023 20:24
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killer crane posted:The Roman empire was an existential threat to the nation of Israel at the time. They were an occupying force, and would eventually spell the end of the second temple era. If the Jesus story is a continuation of the Yahweh story then it makes sense for Jesus to arrive at a time of great crisis for the people of Israel. I want to build on this, because 1st century Roman Judea is an absolutely fascinating place. The ten cent history of the Israelites is that they were a people who lived at the frontier of two great empires, Egypt and the Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids. Through their history, they had been pushed and pulled between the two, with one ascending in power and pulling Israel (and later Judah) into their sphere then one waning and the other ascending. The Israelites were kind of on this rollercoaster and you can see this desire to be the masters of their own destiny all over the Old Testament. And then in the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire, they achieved it when the Hasmoneans ruled effectively independently. Right up until about 30 years before Jesus was born when the Romans stepped in and took over, first indirectly through a client king, then when Jesus is about 10 they take control directly. It was the most traumatic series of events since the Babylonian Captivity hundreds of years before, to the Jewish people, it must have seemed like the world was ending. If ever in history was there a time for God to manifest on Earth, that was it. Nessus posted:On the topic of souls, is it held that souls are created at the birth/quickening/let's not be too particular you know what I mean of the individual? Do they pre-exist? Did God create all necessary souls at once or do they get thrown down as more humans come about? Something that is worth bringing up beyond the other very good answers given is that the body and the soul are very much intertwined. It isn't until very late in the Old Testament do we see an articulation of the idea of a separate soul going to an afterlife. Before that, it was very much all about being right with God while you're alive not because that then gets you a reward in the afterlife but because of all the great things God did for Israel. The latter focus remained but by the time of Jesus there's a theological spat over this between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, with the Pharisees having a belief in a resurrection of the dead and the Sadducees more or less saying that it's all about the here and now. A gross oversimplification but I bring it up to highlight that the community Jesus was from and preached to either thought that their body and soul would be resurrected together or that there was no afterlife at all. The New Testament definitely has a concept of an afterlife (duh) but it doesn't really touch more on the concept of the creation of souls. The Greeks, as Bar Ran Dun alluded to, had a definite idea of a preexisting discorportated soul that exists forever in the afterlife. I don't find much evidence of platonic philosophy leaking into the biblical text itself, which pretty clearly outlines that we die, we go to some place and await the resurrection of the dead, then we all come back and get new spiritual bodies and live in the world to come. We still there don't see much of an idea of a separate body and soul though the soul definitely does rest in comfort while awaiting resurrection. I bring all this up to say that while the Bible is largely silent on the creation of souls, it could be argued that it isn't mentioned because the authors didn't conceive of the two separately so when they talk about creation of the body, they are also talking about creation of the soul. God is creating things all the time, it never made sense to me why he couldn't just create souls as needed. However, I think a variety of theories on that could be supported by the texts.
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Jun 20, 2023 03:51
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Also two fish, be careful about thinking about the experience of God in sterile scientific terms and trying to perceive a kind of clockwork order that fully explains the nature of God. These are the best human terms we have come up with to describe something that is so beyond our understanding we need a whole new vocabulary to meaningfully discuss. Just by the nature of language they're going to be imprecise, so try not to get too hung up on things like exactly how much does the relationship of God the Father and God the Son mirror that or a human father and son or things of that nature.
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Jun 20, 2023 04:20
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Also I don't think it's accurate to say that trinitarian theology is explicitly present in the New Testament. I think it's more apparent than in the Old Testament as you've got the second person of the Trinity right there front and center in the New Testament, but it's never laid out in terms like you'd see in the Nicene (or Athanasian) Creed. That doesn't mean it isn't there in both the Old and New Testaments. There's a good reason why the vast majority of Christian denominations explicitly claim trinitarian theology. I'd go so far as to say that it's a nearly inescapable conclusion so long as one doesn't bring in additional scripture like the Latter Day Saints or use translations that vary significantly from scholarly consensus like the Jehovah's Witnesses.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:55
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It's super easy to fall into an Arian or Docetic christology because it's super easy for us to envision God as the powerful ruler of the universe sitting on his heavenly throne but way harder to imagine a being with that much power deciding to live a mortal life with all the attendant daily suffering (to say nothing of the suffering of death by crucifixion). I once heard someone describe the Docetic view as Jesus basically having a bad weekend at human camp. Like, he came down, some poo poo bad poo poo happened, he went back up and wiped his brow and said well that sure was a trip. It's much harder to wrestle with the fact that he was and is still fully human because in our limited imaginations we have trouble wrapping our heads around willingly putting oneself through that, even though that really is the whole point.
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Jun 21, 2023 01:21
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Nessus posted:You know, when you put it like this, it actually illuminated one of the things I had wondered for a long time, which is 'so why, other than the general vibe in the last few decades of Religion hating Science due to the Devil's Doctrine of EVILUTION, would Christianity be shook so bad by discovering intelligent aliens?' The infamous Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, has for a couple decades now gone hard into the belief that UFOs are actually demons. There's a theory that one of the reasons the Air Force is absolutely unwilling to investigate UFOs (anymore) is that this is also a sincerely held belief by a portion of the top brass, who are notoriously into that sort of fundamentalism. Personally, I don't see what the big deal is, the Catholic statements on the matter seem sensibly logical in extending biblical concepts to the issue even to me as a Protestant, but I guess when you believe in an actual factual Adam and Eve as the first two humans and sin being sexually transmitted down from them that intelligent beings outside that transmission chain can make you freak the gently caress out.
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Jun 21, 2023 01:43
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Nessus posted:I don't particularly see the problem either, but this is a case where the presence of strange strains of Christianity, swollen by being in America and having media access as well as political power, loom large over a much more sensible conceptual landscape. lol yeah he's as right about UFOs as he is about anything else. As for the Space Force, I have no idea but I don't exactly have high hopes that it wasn't seeded with the same kind of shitbags running the Air Force
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Jun 21, 2023 02:46
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Something that doesn't get brought up enough with regards to the literalist, fundamentalist, young earth creationist types is just how small their view of God really is. The idea that God couldn't create life elsewhere in the universe just because Genesis didn't say "and on Nibiru, yea God did create Glorbnax and Antiglorbnax..." is borderline denying God's power and majesty.
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Jun 21, 2023 16:12
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Nessus posted:This would be the Torah. But: what if the one true Book was lost because it came before then? Etc etc. i think religion as a process of revelation and moral knowledge is much less fragile and arbitrary. There's an interpretation of biblical text which sees God shepherding us along throughout history and giving us as much as we are able to handle. So when the Old Testament gives laws about how to treat women captured in war and forced to be married into someone's household, God was not endorsing that as a moral teaching for all time but rather pulling the Israelites from enslaving women and giving them no rights to giving them laws about how those women should be treated better than they were, because God understood that "don't take slaves you jackasses" was not a teaching they could accept yet. In the New Testament Jesus acknowledges that God gave Moses laws that said divorce was cool because they weren't ready to hear that divorce totally isn't cool. And yes I know that verse is saying a lot more than that and shouldn't be taken strictly literally, but I bring it up because there is Jesus telling us some version of crawl, walk, run for the law. Under that theory, older texts don't necessarily reflect God getting it right the first time but rather God working with us to get us as far as we can go before going on further, which strikes me as a better way to view it overall.
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Jun 21, 2023 20:46
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Nessus posted:This would be the Torah. But: what if the one true Book was lost because it came before then? Canonically, Moses went up the mountain, got the 10 Commandments from God, came back down the mountain, saw the poo poo the Israelites had gotten up to in the meantime, destroyed the tablets with the divine revelation, then had to go back up the mountain to get it again.
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Jun 21, 2023 20:47
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I believe in apocatastasis. The reconciliation of everything at the end of all things with the origin. I’m also a Panentheist. Everything is within God (not a pantheist which is everything is God). I also extend “community” to everybody alive. Out of curiosity, have you read Whitehead or Cobb, or anything else related to Process Theology?
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Jun 21, 2023 22:18
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Yes. But it’s been quite a while. Fair. I've seen some folks mention it elsewhere and the panenthist thing made me think you might know about it since if what I've gotten by osmosis is right it's something that a lot of process folks claim as well. I haven't read anything by them so was curious on your thoughts if you have any.
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Jun 21, 2023 23:02
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I definitely need to read Tillich. For the Theology of the Cross, did you read The Cross in our Context by Douglas John Hall? It's the only book I've read that references it and the ideas are absolutely enthralling. If you've got other recommendations on that line, I would welcome suggestions.
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Jun 22, 2023 02:31
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One of the more surprising things to me on my first full read-through of the Bible was just how much of it talks about what you're describing there, having a right relationship with your community, the wider world, and God, and conversely how relatively little it actually talks about the afterlife. Was rather eye opening.
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Jun 22, 2023 21:11
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two fish posted:Had some more questions come to mind to me while I was at work. I don't know enough about the history of Judaism to answer this intelligently, as my knowledge drops off basically right at the period you're asking about, but I'd like to make a couple points should you look into this further. First, to get this out of the way, Jesus was a Jew and was preaching largely to his fellow Jews. He absolutely must be understood in that context. The Gospel of Matthew is where this is best exemplified, as that was clearly written for a Jewish audience, but it was largely a post-crucifixion innovation, led by Paul, to open what would become Christianity to non-Jews. And I say "what would become Christianity" because at the time that was being fought it was just a movement within Judaism. The exact point where the split happened is a matter of debate but it didn't happen immediately and took some decades for the Jewish authorities to decide that nascent Christianity wasn't Judaism and for early Christians to decide they weren't Jewish. This is important to acknowledge because there's an explicitly antisemitic line of biblical interpretation that sees Jesus as not just non-Jewish but also anti-Jewish. The two religions definitely diverged quickly but it's an ahistorical interpretation. Jesus definitely laid the groundwork for gentiles to be included but that kind of conversion didn't really kick off until Paul, the self-styled Apostle to the Gentiles got involved. Second, with that explicitly stated, it must also be stated that Second Temple Judaism, which was the umbrella under which we understand 1st Century Judaism, is quite different from the Rabbinic Judaism practiced today, which developed as a direct result of the destruction of the Temple in 70CE and their ultimate defeat in the Roman-Jewish Wars. That isn't to say that they weren't Jews nor are today's Jews not their direct descendants, but just as modern Christianity has a lot of innovations that weren't present in the first century, so does Judaism. Third, although Jerusalem was clearly a important center for early Christianity, it flourished largely outside of Roman Judea and because it accepted non-Jewish converts. Judaism at the time wasn't really interested in the goings on in the wider empire or what gentiles were doing. By the time the Temple was destroyed in 70CE the split was well underway and was fully cemented well before the Romans put down the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 136CE. Judaism at the time had four major sects, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Zealots. The followers of Jesus were not numerous enough to be major players in the struggle for which direction to take Judaism as a whole. None of those sects gave a crap what non-Jews were doing in the wider empire and didn't really look for gentile converts. By the time Christianity became numerous enough to possibly be influential, the Jewish authorities had made it quite clear that Christians weren't welcome in the synagogues and Christians were quite happy to not see themselves as Jewish given what Rome was doing to the Jews at the time. Fourth, both Second Temple Judaism and nascent Christianity developed in an environment heavily influenced by Hellenistic culture. In fact, a lot of the law in the Bible can be seen as an explicit rejection of Hellenistic cultural practices in favor of maintaining a cohesive cultural identity. By the time Christianity became a major cultural force, the two had diverged massively and while I'm sure that ideas moved back and forth, at least subconsciously, at the period you're asking about Christianity just didn't have the cultural force to really see their ideas move back and influence Judaism. Someone who knows more about Judaism in the second century and onwards would need to answer the question after that point, but to your question about early Christianity, I just don't see it yet having the kind of cultural juice to seriously influence late Second Temple Judaism.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:08
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killer crane posted:And if you take into account that modern rabbinical Judaism (the majority of modern Jews) is a direct descendant from the pharisaic sect, then it makes sense for some interpretations to be anti-[modern]Jewish. I think that saying it "makes sense" vastly overstates the degree to which it is a valid interpretation based on the text. Unlike say slavery or anti-LGBTQ bigotry, for which I see at least a colorable interpretation within the biblical text even as I disagree, the idea of the Bible having a valid anti-Jewish interpretation requires an extremely selective reading of only certain passages. Granted, it's pretty clear that the author of the Gospel of John doesn't like the Jews of his day because they rejected that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and he puts the moral responsibility for Jesus' crucifixion on them. That's in contrast to the Synoptic Gospels where it's either the Romans alone (Mark) or the Romans with the connivance of the Jewish leaders who crucify Jesus, to say nothing about how there are whole New Testament books written entirely for Jewish audiences. Throughout history, Christians have cherry picked those verses to justify their antisemitism but the interpretation is about as valid as Young Earth Creationism, in that it can't withstand even the lightest of critical examination.
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Jun 23, 2023 19:17
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two fish posted:Are there any Scientologists on the forum? I would be very surprised. In the aughts when these forums were more of a cultural force and Scientology was much more overtly aggressive about shutting down anyone saying bad poo poo about them online, this place went hard against them. There was a bunch of protest organizing and other offline/offsite stuff too like folks getting involved with the Operation Clambake stuff. Given the way the Church of Scientology seems to hold grudges (non-actionable expression of opinion), I wouldn't be the least bit shocked if we're still on their shitlist.
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Jun 30, 2023 00:13
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I'll provide the ELCA Lutheran (mainline Protestant) answer to this. Also note that Lutherans only have two sacraments, baptism and communion, unlike Catholic and Orthodox, which have more. The reason for this is a bit in the weeds. Baptism: As long as the baptism was done in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, there's no need for another baptism. The only large denominations that aren't trinitarian would be Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses, though there are smaller denominations as well. Someone coming from one of those groups would require a trinitarian baptism but most traditions recognize each other's baptisms. Communion: We practice open communion so anyone who believes what we believe about communion is welcome at the table. Note that this varies widely within Protestantism and even within Lutheranism, it's a denomination to denomination thing who can commune. Catholics and Orthodox have materially different beliefs regarding the presence of the body and blood in the bread and wine at communion from what I do, transubstantiation vs. "in with and under", and there's other denominations that don't believe in the presence of the body and blood at all. Also, just because my denomination practices open communion doesn't mean that I would take communion at a church that does not. It would be highly disrespectful and likely actually sinful to do so. Funnily enough, this means that I would not take communion at the church where I was confirmed despite it also being Lutheran. If someone from a denomination that practices closed communion came forward, they would be welcome just like anyone else, but members of those denominations are highly unlikely to do so, as while we don't view it as spiritually harmful, they likely do. Clergy: We maintain a list of denominations with whom we are in "full communion". This means we can take communion at each other's churches and share clergy without the need for the clergy to be ordained separately by the other denomination. Where I am at, it is not unusual for someone to be a pastor for two denominations at once, which would happen when, for example, the local Presbyterian and ELCA churches cannot individually afford to hire a pastor so they basically pool their money and share. Happens a lot in rural areas. However, note that this doesn't mean that those denominations have identical beliefs. Beyond being historically distinct and having their own traditions and organizational structures, there are material theological differences, but each denomination has agreed that the differences are not so much that we cannot work together in that fashion. This winds up manifesting in odd ways sometimes. Like when the ELCA and the Episcopal Church (one of the American branches of the Anglican Church) agreed to be in full communion, there was a big discussion over the concept of apostolic succession. The idea there is that it matters whether the clergy of a denomination stand in an unbroken line of succession going back to the apostles. The ELCA believes in "the priesthood of all believers" which basically says that having apostolic succession doesn't matter and it matters a lot to the Episcopal Church. They absolutely could not accept an ordination by someone not in that apostolic line and we don't care, so a compromise was reached that at each ELCA bishop installation, an Episcopal bishop would be present and thus would bring that bishop into the line of apostolic succession, so then when they ordain ELCA clergy, they are automatically in that apostolic line and thus on a long enough timescale all ELCA clergy would be eventually brought in. It was a big enough deal that a section of ELCA churches split over the issue and formed LCMC, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, in protest over the compromise. I'd close by noting that these discussions make the differences between denominations seem large, in practice our theological underpinnings are quite similar. We as Lutherans confess the Nicene Creed, as do most other Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. Orthodox reject the later inclusion of the so-called filioque clause, which wasn't present in the original creed and got added by the Roman Catholic Church in what I can only describe as a real dick move. But regardless, the rest represents a massive list of the ways in which our beliefs are the same, but like so many non-religious things, most folks don't want to talk about all the myriad ways we are similar and prefer to focus on the relatively fewer ways we differ.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:27
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Keromaru5 posted:As the resident Filioque denier, I actually wouldn't put it that harshly. My read of the filioque situation (which might not be 100% accurate) is that it was originally added by local Western churches to help Germanic tribes make sense of the Creed; but then in the cross-generational game of telephone that followed, everybody kind of forgot that they added it, until it got to the point where the Pope was wondering why the East wasn't using it. That's fair, and to be clear, I don't have an actual opinion on who is right about that particular theological point. I just really dislike that we treat it as an expression of theological unity across churches when it's got that big asterisk saying that yeah no it is except for this point but we're gonna pretend that it's still the creed determined at the Council of Nicea. Or, maybe put another way, an ancient mistake is still a mistake.
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Jul 1, 2023 22:15
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Blurred posted:Okay, here's a question I've often wondered about (and I swear that I'm not high right now): how would the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence affect theology? I suspect that this would be less of an issue for Buddhism (since there is nothing preventing skandha being instantiated independently of human life) or Hinduism (since all consciousness can be subsumed under the concept of Brahman and as part of samsara), but how would the Abrahamic faiths - which hold that human being hold a special and personal relationship with God - deal with that? What if the ETs didn't believe in God, or believed in something very different? Would we insist that they need a saviour or divine guidance? If they lack religion in any recognisable sense, could we say that God has abandoned them? Would we hold that they were also created in the image of God? Do any serious theologians give this issue any thought? The dividing line is going to be which groups consider them demons and which do not. For a preview of the former, take a look at what Hal Lindsey, of Late Great Planet Earth infamy is saying about UFOs. Spoiler alert: literal biblical demons. I'm sure a good number of his ilk will claim that, but I'd anticipate the vast majority of Christians to conclude that if they have consciousness and are able to think and reason as we do that they would have souls as we do. This is what I believe, for what it's worth. As for them not having religion or not having one that we recognize as such, well... Christianity hasn't exactly been shy about rolling up to nonbelievers and telling them they need Jesus irrespective of their present beliefs, so I don't see why the denominations that don't consider them demons wouldn't begin evangelizing immediately. As for how it'll go, well that'll depend a lot on the aliens, but we have psychos who try to evangelize to the Sentinelese people despite them being very clear that they'll kill anyone who comes ashore so I doubt there will be much that anyone can do to stop missionaries from trying, no matter what the aliens want. If we're lucky, they'll get a pat on the head and a one way transporter beam back to earth. If we're unlucky, well any aliens that can get here can almost certainly grab a few asteroids on the way to kill us all off dinosaur-style. A lot of this hinges, of course, on the aliens being similar enough to us that transfer of knowledge and concepts is possible. We could just as easily end up with aliens out of Arrival / The Story of Your Life or Solaris and then who the gently caress knows. Personally, I find the idea of someone chasing around a von Neumann probe and trying to tell it about Jesus to be very, very funny.
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Jul 6, 2023 00:08
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Something else to consider is what claims the aliens themselves might make. There are various claims running through experiencer reports that the aliens created or seeded life on earth and that they have previously used their advanced technology to impersonate gods and create religion. This is supposedly what Jimmy Carter was told was true by the intelligence community and allegedly this is why he reversed his public stance on UFO secrecy. It is a claim that's been made publicly by a variety of contactees, for what it's worth, and while I don't buy that we have evidence of that but I do buy he was told we have evidence of that. A laim like that directly from aliens would shake a lot of religions and depending on levels of proof offered could actually change things but if they just land on the white house lawn one day and start shaking hands, I'm less inclined to think it would actually pose any theological issue for most groups.
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Jul 6, 2023 13:56
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