My friend UnkleE and I have been having a wide-ranging discussion on several topics related to Christianity that ultimately come down to epistemology, or how Christians know God’s will. The discussion began in my last post, which critiqued a doctrine common to more moderate circles within Christianity. UnkleE had more to say on the subject than could reasonably fit within a comment, so he decided to do his own post in response, which is worth reading. We conversed a bit within that comment thread, where I said:
The President of the US and his spokespeople now regularly say things that are factually untrue. Yet plenty of his supporters are content to ignore reputable sources and only listen to the sources that they want to agree with. Where do you go from there?
It seems to me that the view you have of Christianity is similar. Why does the New Testament speak so much about false teachers, if it’s perfectly fine to get your beliefs from private revelation? If Paul and Hymenaeus have a disagreement, perhaps Paul is the one who’s wrong? Or maybe both of them are right, simultaneously? How can one use scripture to “teach, reprove, and correct” in such a system?
In the end, isn’t such a religion just anarchy? How can there be such a thing as “truth” when each person’s version is just as good as someone else’s? At least as an atheist, I can point to my understanding of reality and the physical world to try to reach a consensus with others. And if they can provide data that invalidates some position I hold, then I can change. But if I took my own random thoughts and feelings as revelation from the supreme creator of the universe, how could I ever be convinced of anything else?
Once again, this opened a big topic that was better suited to a full post, rather than a comment, so UnkleE offered his response here. And as my reply to that post grew and grew, I realized that I needed to offer it as a post as well. What follows will reference and borrow quotes from UnkleE’s latest post.
What Is the Gospel?
Under a section called “Another Gospel?” UnkleE gave this introduction:
Nate references Galations 1:6-9, which warns of accepting another gospel. But what does Paul mean by “gospel” (or “good news”)?
He then listed out 5 main points that he views as central to what the gospel is:
- Jesus, the “son of God”, lived and taught about the kingdom of God.
- He died to deal with human sin (how that happens is very much up for debate!).
- Jesus was resurrected and so conquered death.
- We need to change our thinking, turn away from behaviours that displease God, and seek forgiveness.
- Our new way of life should include loving God, loving neighbour, and even loving our enemies.
But it seems to me that the New Testament spends time referring to false doctrines that are ancillary to those 5 points. The entire book of Galatians has Paul accusing the Galatians of turning their backs on the gospel and trying to follow the Law of Moses, when it really just sounds like they were trying to follow both:
Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.
— Gal 5:2-6
To me, that sounds like something that we’d view as a matter of personal preference, today, certainly not something that would qualify as a “different gospel.” And look at 2 Cor 13:5-10:
Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! I hope you will find out that we have not failed the test. But we pray to God that you may not do wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test, but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed. For we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth. For we are glad when we are weak and you are strong. Your restoration is what we pray for. For this reason I write these things while I am away from you, that when I come I may not have to be severe in my use of the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down.
We don’t know the specifics of what Paul is criticizing here, but if these individuals were still present in the congregation to see Paul’s letter, then it’s likely they still held to the basic principles that UnkleE outlined above. What else could they be lacking that would make them “fail the test”?
In 2 John 7, it was considered heresy to question whether or not Christ had actually come in the flesh (like docetism, I guess):
For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.
To me, this seems kind of minor in many ways, though it was a huge deal back then. If someone still believed that Christ was the son of God and brought salvation in some way, should it have mattered if they didn’t fully understand how that happened? But 2 John shows that some early Christians had a huge problem with the doctrine.
2 Tim 2:16-19 talks about another form of false teaching:
But avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some. But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.”
To me, this also seems like a minor quibble that runs outside the principles UnkleE laid out as the core of Christianity. Again, exactly what people believe about how/when the resurrection works, or even exactly what the writer means by “resurrection” here seems minor if an individual still believes Christ is the avenue for salvation, etc. Incidentally, there’s an interesting discussion of this passage here.
And if God is unchanging, it’s hard to overlook some of the judgments he supposedly handed out in the Old Testament, like killing Nadab and Abihu for not getting their sacrificial fire in the right way. Killing Achan and his entire family when he didn’t follow the command about not looting Jericho. Honestly, there are tons of OT examples, and I won’t take up any more space with going through them. But they each show how particular God was in seemingly minor things. Now, I agree that most of the New Testament argues that such legalism is no longer necessary. But I think the passages I listed above show that it still isn’t just free rein, especially if God’s character is unchanging (Psalm 102:25-27; Malachi 3:6; James 1:17).
The New Testament gives parameters about divorce and remarriage that are pretty strict. In Matthew 19:9, Jesus is speaking, and he says:
And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.
That’s a rigorous standard that most Christians don’t really apply today, in that a large number of Christian marriages are actually adulterous, according to Jesus. Marriage and remarriage does not fall within the 5 precepts of the gospel that UnkleE laid out, but it still seems like it would be a big deal. After all, we’re told in 1 Cor 6:9-10 that adulterers can’t “inherit the kingdom of God.” What does that mean, exactly? I think it’s referring to salvation itself, and I think 1 Cor 5 bears that out. In that passage, Paul is telling the Corinthians to cast out the member among them who is sleeping with his father’s wife “so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.”
Apparently, this Christian was in danger of losing his salvation if he didn’t repent of his wrongdoing. And to go back to 1 Cor 6 for a minute, we see that far more than just adulterers would be in danger of the same fate:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
That’s quite a laundry list. Those sins might fall within the 4th and 5th points from UnkleE’s list, so does this include married couples who didn’t divorce their previous spouses for infidelity? For consistency’s sake, I would think that they would have to be included, yet very few churches make an issue of it.
In the end, I think when Paul uses terms like “the gospel,” he’s not always strictly speaking about the 5 basic points that UnkleE outlined. I think he’s also talking about any specific instructions that he (or other apostles) laid out in their epistles. Yes, passages like Romans 14 and 1 Cor 8-10 talk about issues that individual Christians may have differences of opinion over, but that’s because those were issues that no specific instruction had been given about. But today, there are so many issues, like divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, and women’s roles in the church that are considered minor by moderates today. And this is where the idea of authority comes into play. How do they justify their positions on these things?
Principles Not Rules
UnkleE goes on to argue that the New Testament focuses more on principles of how to live versus hard and fast rules. I do agree that it focuses more on principles than the Old Testament did, but I think the passages we’ve already looked at show that hard and fast rules still played a part.
UnkleE offers the following supporting points:
We serve God not according to a written set of rules, but guided by the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:6, Romans 7:6). Note that he uses as his example in the latter case nothing less than one of the Ten Commandments!
But I don’t think these 2 passages really illustrate UnkleE’s point. He makes it sound as though Paul is saying that written sets of rules no longer apply, but that’s not at all what he’s saying. He’s specifically talking about the Old Law (the Mosaic Law) in those passages, and UnkleE and I already agree that Paul argues the Old Law (including the 10 Commandments) has served its purpose and is no longer binding to Christians. That doesn’t mean there’s no longer any kind of written law — what about all the teachings in the New Testament, including the gospel?!
We can legitimately hold different views on moral issues. Paul gives several examples, some of them significant issues in his day – the eating of meat that had been offered to pagan idols (1 Corinthians 10:23-30), and the keeping of rules about Sabbath days and “unclean” foods (Romans 14:1-23). But he says quite definitely (Romans 14:13): “Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another.”
But as we saw above, these passages are dealing with issues about which there was no direction given in the New Testament. They were true matters of personal conscience. Paul does not give permission to make these same kinds of judgments on things like divorce and remarriage. And while Paul says that they shouldn’t judge one another about these kinds of things, 1 Cor 5 talks about how they’re supposed to judge the actions of fellow Christians.
UnkleE’s third supporting point is:
Therefore, Paul’s conclusion on even important matters of behaviour is that we are free to decide (1 Corinthians 10:23), we should leave the judgment to God (Romans 14:4) and it is not rules but faith that will decide, for whatever is not done in faith is wrong (Romans 14:23) and all should be done to God’s glory (1 Corinthians 10:31).
But again, all of the passages here come exclusively from 1 Cor 10 and Romans 14, which discuss issues that are merely matters of personal preference.
The Holy Spirit
This is really where my biggest concerns lie. UnkleE has this to say about it:
A key fact, which many christians as well as critics can forget, is that christians believe we have been “given” the Spirit of God. Again, I don’t pretend to fully understand how this works, but it is clearly taught in scripture. Each believer has the help of the Holy Spirit in following Jesus in our lives and – crucially for this discussion – in guiding us to truth.
The Spirit is God, which means he is above the Bible, not lesser!
This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my initial questions to UnkleE. If the guidance of the Holy Spirit can trump scripture, how can any position ever be tested? If a man is married, but strongly believes that God wants him to be with his next door neighbor, who’s to say he’s wrong? Sure, the Bible contradicts his feelings, but the Holy Spirit has authority over the Bible. Yes, common sense contradicts his desire, but “God’s ways are higher than man’s.”
UnkleE also says this:
This merits a longer discussion than I can give now (but will post on soon), but we are told that the Holy Spirit will guide us into truth (John 16:13), so we can even know God’s will for us (Romans 12:2). We see examples of the Spirit guiding the believers in Acts (e.g. Acts 11:1-18, 13:1-3, 16:6-10). But we do, I believe, need to ask (James 1:5, Matthew 7:7-8).
So far from being “random thoughts”, if we pray, and take the precautions that the Bible gives us, we can have faith that God guides us (not just me, but his whole church) through his Spirit into true understandings – not infallibly, but steadily over time.
But to me, such a system looks exactly like “random thoughts.” How could anyone tell the difference between his own thoughts and the Holy Spirit? How could Paul rail against false teachers and false gospels if guidance from the Holy Spirit carries more weight than scripture? If 1000 different Christians all believe God has given them personal revelations that happen to conflict, there’s no way to sort among them to separate the true revelation from all the false ones.
In effect, it seems to me that such a religion can end up saying everything, which basically means it says nothing.
One More Thing
I know this post is painfully long, but I wanted to add one more thing. In his closing, UnkleE makes this point:
I suggest we should always start with what the scriptures say and expert knowledge about what it means – what would this or that passage have said to the people of the day, what do the words actually mean and how do experts understand them? We must read more than one viewpoint.
Then we must pray, consider, wait if necessary, and see if we receive guidance, and see how the Spirit is working and leading the body of believers as a whole. Our own experience and thoughts (if we are allowing God to transform our thinking) will help us.
Isn’t this exactly what we, as atheists, do as well? I’m quite familiar with the Bible (more so than many believers that I know), and I try to pay attention to what Biblical scholars have to say. I consider more than one point of view. I don’t pray, but I used to. And I believe that I’m open to being wrong — I’m even open to guidance. And I would love for God to give me some kind of message, personally. Used to plead for it, in fact. What else is there for me to do?
Closing
Let me stress that I really appreciate UnkleE’s willingness to discuss these things with me. As he knows, I was raised within a very fundamentalist version of Christianity that believed in biblical inerrancy. UnkleE has a very different perspective, and it’s difficult for me to fully understand it. My arguments here are how I try to come to terms with his beliefs. If I’ve missed some obvious answer to some of my questions, it’s solely due to ignorance, not obstinacy.
Finding Truth 
UnkleE: “I’m going to say again what I said before, and I hope you [Nate] aren’t offended by it. I think you are still thinking too legalistically and over-literally. We need to look at the whole NT and get an overall picture.”
This is a beloved tactic of moderate Christians which has often been used against me: Paint the skeptic as uninformed and silly for believing that the authors of the Bible intended for their readers to literally believe in talking snakes, world wide floods, and six day creations. But then these same intelligent, very informed moderate Christians turn around in the next second and try to convince us that the biblical story that a decomposing, bloated corpse exited its tomb and flew off into the clouds is a literal fact of history.
WHAT are they smoking?
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… and the tone of their responses is often condescending and/or sycophantic.
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Copy that on condescending ! One particular person comes to mind.
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Hi KC,
But “his” demeanor is very typical of most well-studied moderate Christians who engage in apologetics. They seem to believe that God wrote the Bible as a riddle, and only those who are intelligent enough to decipher the riddle, can understand what God REALLY meant to say. It must be very exasperating for them. Whenever they discuss biblical issues with skeptics and fundamentalist Christians, I will bet that they are muttering under their breaths, “It’s a RIDDLE, moron. Stop reading it literally.”
If only they would apply this same logic to the Resurrection story. Liberal Christians have made that leap. It would be interesting to know why moderates are unable to do so.
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You are so correct, Gary. I grew up in a fundamentalist home. When the preacher came to visit our home, we kids had to hide the comic books. We never took the preacher into the “TV room” . We weren’t allowed to go to dances or movies. I never wanted to bring a friend to Church for fear we would have 2 or 3 messages in tongues.
I’ve had too many Christians tell me I never was a true Christian or I wouldn’t have de-converted. Giving up Santa Claus was hard, giving up a religion you have been a part of all your life is even harder for some and impossible for others.
Without getting into politics (which I don’t do online), watching the election on Msnbc is a good example. Each time Trump won a state, the pundits tried to come up with a possible scenario where Hillary could still win. They did this until the very end. As science continues to change our way of thinking, the scenarios for religion will eventually fade away. Will the last Christian please turn out the light. 🙂
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Here is something for Diane:
“The [seminary] course was on the exegesis of the Gospel of Mark, at the time (and still) my favorite Gospel. For this course we needed to be able to read the Gospel of Mark completely in Greek. ….in Mark 2, where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had been walking through a grainfield, eating the grain on the Sabbath. Jesus wants to show the Pharisees that “Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath,” and so reminds them of what the great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how they went into the Temple “when Abiathar was the high priest” and ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the well-known problems of the passage is that when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Samuel 21:1-6), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact, when his father Ahimelech was the high priest. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all, but that it contains mistakes.
In my paper for Prof. Story, I developed a long and complicated argument that even though Mark indicates this happened “when Abiathar was the high priest,” it doesn’t really mean that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the part of the Scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main characters. My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words involved and was a bit convoluted. I was pretty sure Prof. Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me. He wrote: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.” I started thinking about it, considering all the work I had put into the paper, realizing that I had had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork to get around the problem, and that my solution was in fact a bit of a stretch. And I finally concluded, “Hmm… maybe Mark did make a mistake.”
Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places [in the Bible] as well.
—Bart Ehrman, New Testament scholar, former evangelical Christian
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From my reading, it is one of the more notable aspects of deconversion that the deconvert is able to look back on his/her former beliefs and realise, sometimes with acute embarrassment, and even shame if they were the proselytizing type, that even while acknowledging the levels of insidious and overt indoctrination they were subject to, just how much of a complete fool they were for swallowing this garbage! ( and I say this with the utmost respect to those, like Nate, who suffered under the yoke of fundamentalism).
I think it must be more exasperating for the deconvert having to deal with the likes of Unklee, who seems to be under the impression that ”you” never experienced the genuine, loving form of Christianity he or those like him are trying to promote – the True Followers of Jesus type of Christian rather than specifically religious kind.
Such people always want to try to explain the correct position, the true understanding, and the right method of interpretation as your interpretation is so glaringly wrong and you must have obviously missed something and this was why you turned your back on ”God” (sic).
And of course if you dare to venture that ”God’ should perhaps have been a bit more forthcoming with the evidence as you prayed until you almost bled tears, well, this is your fault too, as ”God” is perfect.
And as you screwed up, you are bound for Hell. Or, if one is an enlightened, more liberal moderate and compassionate Christian, simply bound for eternal separation from God, or spending a bit of time in purgatory until you get your damn head straight.
Odd then that, while they are perfectly at home subtly and often not so subtly deriding the atheist, deconvert or (on the rare occasion) other non-believer they almost never seem inclined to fully engage their fellow Christian on doctrinal issues. Whereas, back-in-the-day, many would have been more than willing to light the kindling, and while your flesh burned, pray for your soul while your anguished screams to the character Jesus of Nazareth fell on completely deaf make-beleive ears.
Unklee seems to spend an inordinate amount of time gathering what he considers valid evidence for his case yet every scrap of evidence that flatly refutes his faith – the Exodus for example – he considers to be inconsequential to his firm belief that, a decomposing, bloated corpse exited its tomb and flew off into the clouds is a literal fact of history. ( thank you , Gary).
That there are a great many tracts of scripture which can be demonstrated to be completely erroneous are hand-waved as having little bearing on the fundamental, core foundation on which this faith is built. ( see above)
To me, these are signs of someone who is not really trying to convince others but rather convince themselves..
I wonder just how many deconverts who have walked away from the poison that is Christianity have returned to the fold?
Would any of the former Christians here on Nate’s blog in all honesty ever consider once more believing they were sinners and need salvation – under any circumstances?
Can I see a show of hands, please?
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*Hand up* Never ever. Under ANY circumstances.
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And you can understand why perhaps, I consider that in many ways Moderate Christianity is as loathsome as its Fundamentalist sibling: it tries to deftly obscure its vile, violent and supernatural core behind a cloak of false respectability.
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Does anyone have any ideas why the moderate Christian sees no inconsistency on his insistence on the absolute literal interpretation of the bodily resurrection of Jesus yet is willing to interpret almost the entirety of the remainder of the Bible as non-literal?
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unkleE,
Would you say that Gary’s characterization of the Bible as a “riddle” is fair? For reference, he said (in part),
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Ark asks:
Zoe responds: No.
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Ark, since you asked…
As far as I know the best way to discern what’s true is to skeptically evaluate claims. To that end, I try to remain epistemically open to even the grandiose claims – but my evidentiary bar is at least as tall as the tales themselves. (And admittedly, I won’t always spend the time. Life is short, and I’ve seen a lot of debunking already.) Based on my examination thus far, and in light of all the mental gymnastics that is religious apologetics, I find it hard to imagine being convinced again that some religious claim is true.
But, again, I remain epistemically open. So suppose I became convinced again that the Bible’s / Christians’ supernatural claims are true – what then?
I’m no longer a mental slave; I’m a free-thinker. So even if it were true that YHWH exists, and he says that we must mentally agree that (1) we’re “sinners”, and (2) his special human sacrifice actually occurred, and (3) we like it – in order to become his “friend” – lest he deem us his enemies and kill us – that wouldn’t mean that he or his proclamations are good.
I don’t think I’d “return to the fold”. I’d change my arguments from “religion is false and harmful” to “YHWH is an immoral monster” – or some such.
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A few thoughts, Nate…
It is not entirely clear what Paul’s gospel is, but Paul sure takes pains (see Galatians 1) to emphasize that “I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
It seems to me that Paul’s own Gospel may have only been the salvation-by-grace/new covenant interpretation of the resurrection. Jesus’ earlier followers (presumably) believed in the resurrection, but Paul added the twist that took it away from traditional messianic and apocalyptic Judaism and introduced the whole new covenant idea.
I think understanding the division between Paul and the original apostles would be key to understanding a lot of Christianity. Unfortunately, all we really have is Paul’s side. That became the orthodoxy, so we assume that was what the original followers also believed, but Paul’s letters sure seem to suggest that there was a lot more theological distance between the two groups than the orthodox tradition would suggest. To the extent that the original apostles accepted Paul, it was with the condition that he send them money.
This has bothered me for some time. There is no real clarity about which OT rules still apply and which do not. Christians like to talk about some moral/civil/ceremonial distinction, but that distinction does not exist in the Bible. The only real guide for what laws/rules still apply is which ones happen to be mentioned in the New Testament, and that is fairly hit-or-miss. But there are four rules that are very specifically identified as still applying to Christians under this new covenant. Those four were identified at the Jerusalem Council, where Paul and the apostles discussed what rules should still apply. So Christians should be able to agree that, no matter what other interpretations you might take from the NT, those four rules should be universally understood and upheld, right?
Wrong.
According to Acts 15, the four rules were “to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood.” They said that, according to the Holy Spirit, there was “no further burden than these essentials” and that “If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.”
Apart from fornication, none of those other rules have been considered applicable within Christendom for about 1500 years. The only four rules that were explicitly said to be relevant under the new covenant by a council of the earliest apostles and three of them were quickly discarded as mere local customs that were no longer applicable to Christians in later times.
There are no “hard and fast rules.” I mean, there are, but Christians have almost universally agreed to either ignore them or reinterpret them as only relevant to that time and place. So no gay sex? It still applies. Women have to cover their head and remain silent in church? It was just a rule for that church, nobody else. Keep the Sabbath? Still applies (but not the actual sabbath, and not the way it applied before). Eating meat that has been strangled? Just a local custom, no need to follow it. Prohibition on divorce? Still applies. Give your possessions away to anybody who asks? It was just figurative, or something.
Even the two rules Jesus identified — love God and your neighbor — are so vague as to be meaningless. I know people who think loving their neighbor means haranguing them about what they do wrong. There are people who think protesting gay people is “loving”. If loving your neighbor cannot be distinguished from hating your neighbor, then perhaps it’s a pretty meaningless rule.
Ultimately, I have concluded that religion is, to some large extent, a sort of moral homeopathy. People take a religion and they claim their behavior is a result of their religion. But I think they are really just taking a placebo and crediting that placebo for their own beliefs and behaviors. The moral homeopathy doesn’t really do anything itself, but it gives people something to credit or blame for the behavior they like or dislike.
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Seriously, Is there a single occasion in the Old Testament that the deity, YHWH is what we would generally consider moral?
Offhand, nothing comes to mind.
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“Seriously, Is there a single occasion in the Old Testament that the deity, YHWH is what we would generally consider moral?”
I would suggest that the time he spared tens of thousands of people in the city of Ninevah from complete and utter annihilation due to the fact that they were willing to put on sack cloth, sit in ashes, and grovel in complete submission to him, was very generous on his part and a sign of the utmost in morality.
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Jon, you sum everything up pretty well with this: Christians like to talk about some moral/civil/ceremonial distinction, but that distinction does not exist in the Bible.
That’s exactly what they do. They talk about things … and preach about things … and harangue non-believers about things … that do not exist in the Bible.
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Diana, can I ask you a question?
Can you identify which critics mocked Bible believers and told them the Hittites never existed before the discovery of Hittite monuments and documents? Preferably with some specific citations, so I can see who they were and what they said.
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And another question, Diana.
The Bible said Tyre would be destroyed for the people’s ridicule of the people of Jerusalem being overthrown. But instead of destroying the people who ridiculed Jerusalem’s destruction — those people survived and thrived — it was their great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc)-grandchildren who were killed. So, rather than killing the perpetrators of this ridicule, God waited a few hundred years to kill people who were not alive when the ridicule of Jerusalem happened, and who were not in any sense morally culpable for it.
Can you explain why God would kill children for the sins of their ancestor?
Bear in mind, this comes from the book of Ezekiel, which also said, “The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself.”
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Ark,
“The same Americans who considered that slavery was justified by your god and who were still busy slaughtering Native Americans and had in fact committed what is considered by some the worst genocide in human history.
All perpetrated by people who were recognized as Christian.
All Christians, should feel nothing but shame for what Christianity have done to humanity.”
You’ve heard of the Civil War, right? A war that was fought between two groups of Christians. One group believed that science taught racial inequality. They allowed science to be their standard of truth. They believed in polygenism. Another name for it would be scientific racism. Jefferson, Kant, and Voltaire, to name a few, ascribed to this belief. The most influential scientists of the time promoted polygenism.
The other group of Christians believed in the scriptures over any science that disagreed with the Bible. They stood on Acts 17:26. (“And He has made of one blood every nation….”) The motto of the London Ethnological Society was “ab uno sanguire” — “of one blood.” This group of believers included members of “The Clapham Sect” and William Wilberforce. One of Frederick Douglass’ most famous speeches was “Claims of the Negro–Ethnologically Considered.” He opposed scientific racism.
The Civil War was fought between two groups of people who carried God’s name. One group refused to compromise the scriptures and they set the captives free. The other group blended a foreign belief in with the scriptures and it caused massive death and human suffering.
Have you ever heard of David Brainerd? He was a missionary to the native Americans.
I think you misrepresent the Christian heart towards indigenous peoples. There were traders, explorers, Catholic missionaries, liberal protestant missionaries (who believed in social Darwinism and felt it was the “white man’s burden to civilize the darker races), and evangelical missionaries. All of these groups went out in the world at that time. To lump them all together and lay the blame on Christians for the genocide of native Americans, is the same as me blaming atheists for all the millions who died under atheistic communist regimes.
Was it atheists who defeated slavery in Great Britain and America? No. It was Bible-believing Christians. Was it atheists who finally crushed the power of the theocratic papacy. No. It was Bible-believing Christians who were even willing to be burned at the stake to oppose the false Catholic religion. Was it atheists who openly opposed Hitler? No. It was the Confessing Church whose 1000 pastors nearly all died in concentration camps.
There has always been a war going on between the wheat and the tares. One group of Christians remains faithful to the Word of God. The other group compromises and corrupts the Word of God with science, philosophy, money, Old Testament law, and so on….and millions have suffered as a result. The sad thing is that it was all done in God’s name–and then people like you use their atrocities as a justification to reject God—even though their views didn’t truly come from God.
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Gary,
“That is an important question you must answer, Diane: Is magic of any kind real?”
How did the first cells reproduce? Evolutionist answer: MAGIC!
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Gary,
Concerning Bart Ehrmann’s struggle with Mark 2:26, one simple Google search can give an answer:
PROBLEM: Jesus says that at the time David ate the consecrated bread, Abiathar was high priest. Yet 1 Samuel 21:1–6 mentions that the high priest at that time was Ahimelech.
SOLUTION: First Samuel is correct in stating that the high priest was Ahimelech. On the other hand neither was Jesus wrong. When we take a closer look at Christ’s words we notice that He used the phrase “in the days of Abiathar” (v. 26) which does not necessarily imply that Abiathar was high priest at the time David ate the bread. After David met Ahimelech and ate the bread, King Saul had Ahimelech killed (1 Sam. 22:17–19). Abiathar escaped and went to David (v. 20) and later took the place of the high priest. So even though Abiathar was made high priest after David ate the bread, it is still correct to speak in this manner. After all, Abiathar was alive when David did this, and soon following he became the high priest after his father’s death. Thus, it was during the time of Abiathar, but not during his tenure in office.
There wasn’t Google back in those days . . . but the problem isn’t as difficult as it seems. It would be like me saying, “Yes, they brought the house back when Grandma had her stroke.” It’s describing a certain time period. Grandma may not even have been a grandma back then, but we still refer to her by that title. The actual scripture:
“How he went into the house of God IN THE DAYS OF Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him?” (Mark 2:26)
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Hi Diane,
That was the same conclusion Ehrman (as a fundamentalist) came up with. His professor suggested another alternative: that Mark had made a mistake. Could you see how that is also a possibility if one allows for the possibility that there are errors in the Bible?
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I can see that being a big ‘if’ with Diana, Gary. 😉
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Hi Nate, time for me to get back to the rest of your comments from a day or two ago. I’ll try to be brief! 🙂
”Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead by God in Acts 5, though they hadn’t actually done anything against the gospel itself.”
The passage doesn’t actually say God struck them down, that is your assumption. I am as baffled by the incident as you would be. Whether you believe it happened or not, whether you believe Luke was saying God killed them or not, it is hard to understand why Luke included it. But as the story goes, it is two people dying of unstated and unknown causes.
”Christians (like Paul) had been forgiven of their past sins, but if they began to engage in them again, disregarding the teachings they had received, then I think the Bible teaches their salvation would be forfeit.”
The kingdom is both now and in the age to come. Now, we cannot be said to be under God’s rule if we repeatedly and without repentance keep going against his advice or commands. In the age to come, we cannot live with God without having received forgiveness for wrongs done. Your comments seem to forget the absolutely central place of forgiveness in christianity, and the need for repentance to receive that forgiveness. (Just to clarify, God is always willing to forgive but we need to receive it.)
”You said, “The Spirit is God, which means he is above the Bible, not lesser!” If I misunderstood you, how did you mean that statement?”
I meant exactly what I said. The Holy Spirit is God, the Bible is a combined divine-human creation. Commands of God would over-rule anything in scripture, if we could be sure of they were definitely from God – but we can’t be so sure. That is why there are checks and balances between these two, and other, methods of knowing truth.
”it’s why the writers of the Bible always stressed going back to scripture to test teachers’ claims. But you can’t do any of that with private revelation.”
You can’t go back and re-do the big bang or evolution in science, we are left with looking at the after effects. That’s sort of the same with private revelation. It should be tested, against scripture, against how other people see things, and how it works out.
For example, I have mentioned before how I believe God saved me from a serious accident by putting a thought in my head that I couldn’t have otherwise known. Now I didn’t know at the time I had the thought, but since I pray for protection every day, I acted on the thought and was saved from the potential accident. I now look back and see and believe it was from God. I could give other similar, though less dramatic, examples.
Thanks again.
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