A non-Christian understanding of the Christian Bible

[Longfellow]

I'm not a Christian, but I grew up in a Christian family, I went through confirmation class in a Christian church, I recognize and accept Jesus as my Lord, and I have an intense interest in what the Christian Bible says about Him and His kingdom.

In my understanding of the Christian Bible, part of what it means by "the kingdom" is a way of life that Jesus brought into the world, people learning together as a community to live the way that He says to live. When I say "Jesus," I mean the one in the gospel stories, imagining that person in the gospel stories as a person who was teaching in and between Galilee near the end of the Second Temple period, and not any kind of "historical Jesus," or "Christ spirit." I'm thinking that many people in Capernaum were learning to live that way under His care and guidance, and that kind of learning spread from there into society in all directions. One way that it spread was in communities with leaders approved by the Apostles, and that evolved into Christianity. The way that people enter that kingdom is by seeing God in Jesus and being moved by that to want to serve and obey Him and learn together to live the way He says to live. In my understanding, what they believe and don't believe, and whether or not they are "Christians" by any definition, has nothing to do with it. They could be followers of any religion, or none.


(later) I'm not sure that I know what it means to be saved. I'm thinking that maybe it means being saved from slavery to the sinful side of our nature.

 

[Vasu Devan]

I am not a Christian, nor do I accept Jesus as my Lord. But much of my analysis of Jesus jives with yours as well. The church made him divine in order to have a focus around which they could claim knowledge(created or not) so as to gain wealth and power for themselves during their birth. Gospel of John is the most popular gospel among many of the faith I've met and even if Jesus claimed to be the son of god, he also referred to fellow Christians as his brothers, sisters and also as children of god.

The main message of Jesus, for me at least, was the practice of unconditional love. Possibly the first Jew to start preaching it in fact. A man who saw the flaws in a religion built on laws and judgement of God than His love and understanding. The Bible may contain the OT but for me it is largely the hate filled system of a punitive God that Jesus felt no affinity for.

Based on my personal experiences of mysticism, I also believe Jesus may have been the earliest vocal practitioner of the philosophy of unconditional love and everything-is-One mentality that is common to so many reports of those experiencing nondual awakenings nowadays.

 

[RabbiO]

@Vasu Devan -

It is always such a pleasure when someone from the outside takes the opportunity to say such complimentary things regarding Jewish scripture, Jews and Judaism, all the while displaying such an incredible depth of knowledge about those subjects.

I hope that down the line I will be afforded the chance to do the same for you.

 

[Vasu Devan]

@Vasu Devan -

It is always such a pleasure when someone from the outside takes the opportunity to say such complimentary things regarding Jewish scripture, Jews and Judaism, all the while displaying such an incredible depth of knowledge about those subjects.

I hope that down the line I will be afforded the chance to do the same for you.

You are welcome to already. Just know that my issue was with old time Judaism and the current Zionists. I don't have a beef with modern Jews or anybody. I was strongly agnostic till my own spiritual experiences made me look into Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism. In each, I found an philosophy of life that was beautiful by itself till the mind of Man corrupted it as time passed.


Each person is welcome to believe whatever they want, even if it is based on hate. The problems are only birthed when we present our beliefs as the only valid truth and start forcing others to believe that too.

My current faith is in Advaitha, Buddhist and Daoist based philosophy. Even there I see corruption as time has passed but I hold to my faith because of my personal experience of nondual being. It only happened once but it can and did radically change my concepts of how to live my life.

 

[badger]

I'm not a Christian, but I grew up in a Christian family, I went through confirmation class in a Christian church, I recognize and accept Jesus as my Lord, and I have an intense interest in what the Christian Bible says about Him and His kingdom.

In my understanding of the Christian Bible, part of what it means by "the kingdom" is a way of life that Jesus brought into the world, people learning together as a community to live the way that He says to live. When I say "Jesus," I mean the one in the gospel stories, imagining that person in the gospel stories as a person who was teaching in and between Galilee near the end of the Second Temple period, and not any kind of "historical Jesus," or "Christ spirit." I'm thinking that many people in Capernaum were learning to live that way under His care and guidance, and that kind of learning spread from there into society in all directions. One way that it spread was in communities with leaders approved by the Apostles, and that evolved into Christianity. The way that people enter that kingdom is by seeing God in Jesus and being moved by that to want to serve and obey Him and learn together to live the way He says to live. In my understanding, what they believe and don't believe, and whether or not they are "Christians" by any definition, has nothing to do with it. They could be followers of any religion, or none.


(later) I'm not sure that I know what it means to be saved. I'm thinking that maybe it means being saved from slavery to the sinful side of our nature.

Hello Longfellow. I also grew up within a Christian community. I went to a 'Church of England' school, was confirmed by the Bishop of Dunwich, and all because of what people were expected to do. Later in my life I read about the laws of Moses and the gospels and became interested in the Jesus that had lived and worked amongst the Jews of the Northern provinces.
I came to believe that Christianity was developed by the early church rather than borne from the life and sayings of Jesus.
Much of the gospel of Mark impressed me, those of Matthew and Luke had interesting anecdotes but I found John to be more church dogma than the real facts about Jesus.
The Jesus that I read about was a clever hand worker, probably in wood, bone and stone and that he had mostly served the fishing community of Capernaum and Northern Genesseret. He stepped forward to build a movement for the working people of the Northern provinces against the totally corrupt practices of the Jewish authorities who controlled the people under the Roman occupiers which failed to grow fast enough in the North, whereupon Jesus took his complaint to the Great Temple during the Great Feast of the Passover.
I did not find a religion to follow within the story of but I am very interested in the person, life, times, people and community of Jesus.

 

[Longfellow]

Hello Longfellow. I also grew up within a Christian community. I went to a 'Church of England' school, was confirmed by the Bishop of Dunwich, and all because of what people were expected to do. Later in my life I read about the laws of Moses and the gospels and became interested in the Jesus that had lived and worked amongst the Jews of the Northern provinces.
I came to believe that Christianity was developed by the early church rather than borne from the life and sayings of Jesus.
Much of the gospel of Mark impressed me, those of Matthew and Luke had interesting anecdotes but I found John to be more church dogma than the real facts about Jesus.
The Jesus that I read about was a clever hand worker, probably in wood, bone and stone and that he had mostly served the fishing community of Capernaum and Northern Genesseret. He stepped forward to build a movement for the working people of the Northern provinces against the totally corrupt practices of the Jewish authorities who controlled the people under the Roman occupiers which failed to grow fast enough in the North, whereupon Jesus took his complaint to the Great Temple during the Great Feast of the Passover.
I did not find a religion to follow within the story of but I am very interested in the person, life, times, people and community of Jesus.

Thanks.

 

[Thomas]

... part of what it means by "the kingdom" is a way of life that Jesus brought into the world, people learning together as a community to live the way that He says to live... The way that people enter that kingdom is by seeing God in Jesus and being moved by that to want to serve and obey Him and learn together to live the way He says to live.

Very much the 'Social Gospel of Luke', as his gospel is traditionally known.

I'd recommend you check out some of the writings of David Bentley Hart, for his insights into the early community, or koinonia, as it was called.

He's written an essay: Christianity Was Always for the Poor and I've extracted some elements of it here ...

"... there is not, and has never been, a single identifiable thing that we can call “Christianity” except with excruciating generality. From the very first, “the Way” (as it was originally known among its adherents) was like a kind of pluripotential genetic code waiting to be developed by epigenetic forces; and down the centuries, its expressions continuously evolved and diverged into countless unanticipated and ultimately incommiscible breeds.

"This is not to say that the original “genetic” impulse was random, incidentally; I happen to believe, for instance, that the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth truly did have real experiences of him as alive again after his crucifixion, and that that is why their movement did not dissolve upon his death (though this is not the place to argue the point). It is only to say that there are many religious phenomena out there — such as the great mainstream of American white Evangelicalism — to which we apply the word “Christianity” about as meaningfully as we might apply the word “dinosaur” to a sparrow (there have, you see, been a few developments since those days)."

+++

"In point of fact, the New Testament, alarmingly enough, condemns personal wealth not merely as a moral danger, but as an intrinsic evil. Actually, the texts are so unambiguous on this matter that it requires an almost heroic defiance of the obvious to fail to grasp their import. Admittedly, many translations down the centuries have had an emollient effect on a few of the New Testament’s severer pronouncements. But this is an old story.

"Jesus condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such.

"... (T)he word used in Christian scripture for one of the principal virtues of the new movement: κοινωνία, or koinōnia. The standard translations of the term are usually something along the lines of “fellowship” or even “community,” but a more accurate rendering might very well be “communism.” ... (T)he first converts of the apostolic age in Jerusalem, for example, as the price of becoming Christians, sold all their property and possessions and distributed the proceeds to those in need, and then fed themselves by sharing their resources in common meals (Acts 2:43–46). And this was the pattern, it seems, of the greater community of the Way as it spread out into the Eastern reaches of the empire.

"Certainly, Jesus condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such... the story of the rich young ruler who could not bring himself to part with his fortune for the sake of the Kingdom, and of Christ’s astonishing remark about camels passing more easily through needles’ eyes than rich men through the Kingdom’s gate. But one can look everywhere in the gospels for confirmation of the message.

"Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet Isaiah: he has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim: “But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort. Alas for you who are now replete, for you will be hungry. Alas for those now laughing, for you will mourn and lament” (Luke 6:24–25).

"He not only demands that his followers give freely to all who ask from them (Matthew 5:42), and to do so with such prodigality that one hand is ignorant of the other’s largesse (Matthew 6:3); he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth — not merely storing it up too obsessively — and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matthew 6:19–20). He tells all who would follow him (as he tells the rich young ruler) to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds away as alms, thereby supplying that same heavenly treasury (Luke 12:33), and explicitly states that “no one of you who does not bid farewell to all his own possessions can be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). It is truly amazing how rarely Christians down the centuries have failed to notice that these counsels are stated, quite decidedly, as commands. Certainly the texts are not in any way unclear on the matter. After all, as Mary says, part of the saving promise of the Gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53).

"James perhaps states the matter most clearly:
Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you: your riches have spoiled and your garments have become moth-eaten; your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will serve as testimony against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have kept treasure in the last days. Look: the wages of the workers who have reaped your lands, which have been unfairly held back by you, clamor aloud, and the outcries of those who have reaped have entered the ears of the Lord Sabaoth. You lived on the earth in dainty luxury and self-indulgence. You have gorged your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned — have murdered — the upright man; he does not oppose you. (5:1–6)

"And this passage is merely the climax of a moral crescendo that swells throughout the epistle, beginning with James’s assurance to his readers that God has “chosen the destitute within the cosmos, as rich in faithfulness and as heirs of the Kingdom he has promised to those who love him,” while the rich are, as an entire class, oppressors and persecutors and blasphemers of Christ’s holy name (2:5–7).

"It was all much easier, of course — this nonchalance toward private possessions — for those first generations of Christians. They tended to see themselves as transient tenants within a rapidly vanishing world, refugees passing lightly through a history not their own.

"Near the end of the first century, the manual of Christian life known as the Didache instructed believers to share all things in common and to think of nothing as private property."

+++

 

[Thomas]

Continued ...

"A recognition of the fundamental indecency of using interest to enslave the needy appears at least as early in human history as the Law of Moses. Hence its inflexible prohibitions upon all practices of usury within the community of the children of Israel (Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25: 36–37; Deuteronomy 23:19–20), and hence the ancient Jewish condemnation of interest (Psalm 15:5; Ezekiel 18:17). Hence also the care extended in the Law to ensure that neither Israelites nor their neighbors be reduced to a state of absolute impoverishment (Exodus 12:49; 22:21–22; Leviticus 19:9–10; 23:22; 25:35–38; Deuteronomy 15:1–11). Moreover, the Law not only prohibited interest on loans, but mandated that every seventh year should be a Sabbatical, a shmita, a fallow year, during which debts between Israelites were to be remitted; and then went even further in imposing the Sabbath of Sabbath-Years, the Year of Jubilee, in which all debts were excused and all slaves granted their liberty, so that everyone might begin again, as it were, with a clear ledger.

"The Galilaean peasantry to whom Christ first brought his good tidings had suffered for years under the taxes exacted by Herod the Great... The tax collectors, the creditors, and the courts had long conspired to make rural peoples and the disenfranchised of the towns and cities into captives of their debts. And at times, of course, the only way those debts could be resolved was by the sale of debtor families into slavery.

“Do not the rich oppress you, and haul you into law courts as well? Do they not blaspheme the good name that has been invoked upon you?” (James 2:6–7).

"And Christ’s words leave one in no doubt regarding his indignation at pitiless creditors: in the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18:21–35); in his furious denunciations of the hypocrites among the scribes and pharisees who, while making a show of piety, betrayed the mercy of the Law by “devouring” the homes of widows whose husbands had died insolvent (Matthew 23:14; Mark 12:40); in the parable of the unrighteous steward, where the exaggerated debts falsely accounted against the poor are called the “Mammon of injustice,” and the unscrupulous steward who allows the debtors to reduce those charges to their fair amounts is praised for his wisdom, even though he acts from self-interest (Luke 16:1–13).

"In fact, Christ ... tells his listeners not only to give freely to all who might ask — or, for that matter, might seize — anything from them (Luke 6:30), but also to lend to those in need without any desire for return (Luke 6:3–34). For those who seek the Kingdom of God, every year is the Sabbatical year, every year is the Jubilee.

"To the debtors of his time, on the other hand, Christ’s advice was singularly and unspectacularly pragmatic: to try to settle suits out of court, even if one must do so on the way to judgment, on the road or in the street, before a judge can remand one to the court’s officers for incarceration (Matthew 5:25–26; Luke 12:58). Do not refuse the plaintiff his plaint; in fact, give him more than he asks (Matthew 5:40).

"In the actual text of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, at least in the original Greek, an ominously archetypal figure, identified simply as “the wicked man” (ὁ πονηρός), makes a brief appearance. He is almost certainly meant to be understood as a depiction of the sort of avaricious, disingenuous, and rapacious man who routinely abuses, deceives, defrauds, and plunders the poor. It is he who ensnares men with false promises wrapped in a haze of preposterously extravagant oaths (Matthew 5:37), and he whom Christ forbids his followers to “oppose by force” (Matthew 5:39), and he from whom one should request deliverance whenever one comes before God in prayer (Matthew 5:13).

"And yet in most translations — and, more generally, in Christian consciousness — he (the wicked man ὁ πονηρός) is all but invisible. In the first instance, he is usually mistaken for the devil (quite illogically), while in the latter two he is altogether displaced by an abstraction, “evil,” which has no real connection to the original Greek at all.

"Christian tradition has produced few developments more bizarre, for instance, than the transformation of the petitionary phrases of the Lord’s Prayer in Christian thinking — and in Christian translations of scripture — into a series of supplications for absolution of sins, protection against spiritual temptation, and immunity from the threat of “evil.” They are nothing of the kind. They are, quite explicitly, requests for — in order — adequate nourishment, debt relief, avoidance of arraignment before the courts, and rescue from the depredations of powerful but unprincipled men. The prayer as a whole is a prayer for the poor — and for the poor only. To see this, one need only look with unprejudiced eyes at the text as it appears in the Gospel:

Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·
ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου·
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς·
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.

Hart translation:
"Our Father, who are in the heavens,
let your name be held holy;
let your Kingdom come;
let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth;
give to us today enough bread for the day ahead;
and excuse us our debts, just as we have excused our debtors;
and do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from the wicked man.
(For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto
the ages. Amen.) (Matthew 6:9-13)

Matthew goes on:
"For, if you excuse human beings their offences, your heavenly Father will also excuse you; but if you should not excuse human beings, neither shall your Father excuse your offences." (v14-15)

"“Daily bread,” admittedly, is almost accurate enough, though the phrase would better be rendered “bread adequate for the day’s needs”; but I doubt most of us quite hear the note of desperation in that phrase “τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον” — the very real uncertainty, suffered every day, concerning whether today one will have enough food to survive."[/COLOR]

 

[Longfellow]

Very much the 'Social Gospel of Luke', as his gospel is traditionally known.

I'd recommend you check out some of the writings of David Bentley Hart, for his insights into the early community, or koinonia, as it was called.

He's written an essay: Christianity Was Always for the Poor and I've extracted some elements of it here ...

"... there is not, and has never been, a single identifiable thing that we can call “Christianity” except with excruciating generality. From the very first, “the Way” (as it was originally known among its adherents) was like a kind of pluripotential genetic code waiting to be developed by epigenetic forces; and down the centuries, its expressions continuously evolved and diverged into countless unanticipated and ultimately incommiscible breeds.

"This is not to say that the original “genetic” impulse was random, incidentally; I happen to believe, for instance, that the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth truly did have real experiences of him as alive again after his crucifixion, and that that is why their movement did not dissolve upon his death (though this is not the place to argue the point). It is only to say that there are many religious phenomena out there — such as the great mainstream of American white Evangelicalism — to which we apply the word “Christianity” about as meaningfully as we might apply the word “dinosaur” to a sparrow (there have, you see, been a few developments since those days)."

+++

"In point of fact, the New Testament, alarmingly enough, condemns personal wealth not merely as a moral danger, but as an intrinsic evil. Actually, the texts are so unambiguous on this matter that it requires an almost heroic defiance of the obvious to fail to grasp their import. Admittedly, many translations down the centuries have had an emollient effect on a few of the New Testament’s severer pronouncements. But this is an old story.

"Jesus condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such.

"... (T)he word used in Christian scripture for one of the principal virtues of the new movement: κοινωνία, or koinōnia. The standard translations of the term are usually something along the lines of “fellowship” or even “community,” but a more accurate rendering might very well be “communism.” ... (T)he first converts of the apostolic age in Jerusalem, for example, as the price of becoming Christians, sold all their property and possessions and distributed the proceeds to those in need, and then fed themselves by sharing their resources in common meals (Acts 2:43–46). And this was the pattern, it seems, of the greater community of the Way as it spread out into the Eastern reaches of the empire.

"Certainly, Jesus condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such... the story of the rich young ruler who could not bring himself to part with his fortune for the sake of the Kingdom, and of Christ’s astonishing remark about camels passing more easily through needles’ eyes than rich men through the Kingdom’s gate. But one can look everywhere in the gospels for confirmation of the message.

"Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet Isaiah: he has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim: “But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort. Alas for you who are now replete, for you will be hungry. Alas for those now laughing, for you will mourn and lament” (Luke 6:24–25).

"He not only demands that his followers give freely to all who ask from them (Matthew 5:42), and to do so with such prodigality that one hand is ignorant of the other’s largesse (Matthew 6:3); he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth — not merely storing it up too obsessively — and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matthew 6:19–20). He tells all who would follow him (as he tells the rich young ruler) to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds away as alms, thereby supplying that same heavenly treasury (Luke 12:33), and explicitly states that “no one of you who does not bid farewell to all his own possessions can be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). It is truly amazing how rarely Christians down the centuries have failed to notice that these counsels are stated, quite decidedly, as commands. Certainly the texts are not in any way unclear on the matter. After all, as Mary says, part of the saving promise of the Gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53).

"James perhaps states the matter most clearly:
Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you: your riches have spoiled and your garments have become moth-eaten; your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will serve as testimony against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have kept treasure in the last days. Look: the wages of the workers who have reaped your lands, which have been unfairly held back by you, clamor aloud, and the outcries of those who have reaped have entered the ears of the Lord Sabaoth. You lived on the earth in dainty luxury and self-indulgence. You have gorged your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned — have murdered — the upright man; he does not oppose you. (5:1–6)

"And this passage is merely the climax of a moral crescendo that swells throughout the epistle, beginning with James’s assurance to his readers that God has “chosen the destitute within the cosmos, as rich in faithfulness and as heirs of the Kingdom he has promised to those who love him,” while the rich are, as an entire class, oppressors and persecutors and blasphemers of Christ’s holy name (2:5–7).

"It was all much easier, of course — this nonchalance toward private possessions — for those first generations of Christians. They tended to see themselves as transient tenants within a rapidly vanishing world, refugees passing lightly through a history not their own.

"Near the end of the first century, the manual of Christian life known as the Didache instructed believers to share all things in common and to think of nothing as private property."

+++

Thank you.

 

[Thomas]

Yes ... sorry it's long-winded.

Here's from another essay: Christ’s Rabble: The First Christians Were Not Like Us

"I think it reasonable to ask ... whether in our wildest imaginings we could ever desire to be the kind of persons that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ. And I think the fairly obvious answer is that we could not... Rather, I mean that most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent.

"... The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism: commands to become as perfect as God in his heaven and to live as insouciantly as lilies in their field; condemnations of a roving eye as equivalent to adultery and of evil thoughts toward another as equivalent to murder; injunctions to sell all one’s possessions and to give the proceeds to the poor, and demands that one hate one’s parents for the Kingdom’s sake and leave the dead to bury the dead. This extremism is not merely an occasional hyperbolic presence in the texts; it is their entire cultural and spiritual atmosphere... There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of final judgment, and that judgment is absolute. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.

I imagine this is why the early Christians were communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days seem to be taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime.

"Thus the first converts in Jerusalem after the resurrection, as the price of becoming Christians, sold all their property and possessions and distributed the proceeds to those in need, and then fed themselves by sharing their resources in common meals (Acts 2:43–46). To be a follower of the Way was to renounce every claim to private property and to consent to communal ownership of everything (Acts 4:32). Barnabas, on becoming a Christian, sold his field and handed over all the money to the Apostles (Acts 4:35)—though Ananias and Sapphira did not, with somewhat unfortunate consequences.

"... the New Testament affirms ... the kind of people we are not, and really would not want to be. The ... earliest generations of Christians ... were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. They were rabble. They lightly cast off all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, even family. In fact, far from teaching “family values,” Christ was remarkably dismissive of the family. And decent civic order, like social respectability, was apparently of no importance to him. Not only did he not promise his followers worldly success (even success in making things better for others); he told them to hope for a Kingdom not of this world, and promised them that in this world they would win only rejection, persecution, tribulation, and failure. Yet he instructed them also to take no thought for the morrow.

"I doubt we would think highly of their kind if we met them today. Fortunately for us, those who have tried to be like them have always been few... the Desert Fathers, who took the Gospel at its word... To live as the New Testament requires, we should have to become strangers and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world.

"And we surely cannot do that, can we?"

 

[Yahweh kid]

If Christianity means the following of Christ Jesus the Shepherd, then I am a Christian. If Christianity means a specific church, I am not.

Proverbs 3:5–6 ​

 

[wil]

Hart translation:
"Our Father, who are in the heavens,
let your name be held holy;
let your Kingdom come;
let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth;
give to us today enough bread for the day ahead;
and excuse us our debts, just as we have excused our debtors;
and do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from the wicked man.
(For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto
the ages. Amen.) (Matthew 6:9-13)

We are not supposed to get political! Lol

 

[badger]

Yes ... sorry it's long-winded." ,...................... ................ And we surely cannot do that, can we?"

Does that mean that the way of Jesus is no longer followed?

 

[Thomas]

Does that mean that the way of Jesus is no longer followed?

I think that, in the sense of what Hart's talking about, is evident.

The early Christian koinonia, the community, lived a life in common, they were communist in that regard.

Today's culture is capitalist, and currently this last one hundred years (counting from now) has seen and is seeing some of the worst excesses of both those two systems when unbridled by any coherent morality.

Jesus was a champion of the poor. Today the poor are commodified and weaponised, by the rich, against themselves and against anyone the rich regard as the enemy – the poor, the sick, the homeless ... and I'll stop there, as we're drifting into politics.

But then, that's rather Hart's point. There was a clear and unmistakable politic in Jesus' message – that life has intrinsic worth, and in the face of that, all other worth, gold, jewels, land, power, is meaningless. It's not about 'Left' or 'Right', it's way more than that. His alignment was vertical, not horizontal. There are 360 degrees on the compass, but there is only one North.

An irate Roman senator once stood up in the house and declared that "even the Christians take better care of their people than we do" – and the point being that a community (this was late 1st or early 2nd century), in the time of Pope Clement I (Bishop of Rome 92-100CE) there were 1,500 widows, orphans and ill recorded on the books as being cared for by the community. Rome, for all its wealth and power, let them die.

+++

Religion, in its simplest principles, always suffers compromise in the face of the culture in which it arises. Moses, Jesus, Buddha ...

A key here is apocalypse, and the key to that is immanence. (The transcendent apocalypse occurs at the end of the Age.)

Apocalypse is from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis) meaning 'revelation', 'uncovering', 'disclosure'.

One thing all scholars generally agree on, was that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.

The early Christians thought the end was coming tomorrow, if not later today... Then nothing happened ... Then nothing continued to happen, and I suspect the Early Church, the koinonia, began to grow unsettled that nothing was happening, after all.

And so we began to compromise.

Clement of Alexandria might well have been the first to ameliorate the severity of the message, as Hart notes: "when the faith had just begun to spread widely among the more comfortably situated classes in the empire ... He distinguished the poverty that matters (humility, renunciation, spiritual purity, generosity) from the poverty that does not (actual material indigence), and assured propertied Christians that, so long as they cultivated the former, they need never submit to the latter." (from Christ's Rabble, above. My empasis)

The Reformation in the 16th century was another great comprise. Whatever else was going on, there was a paradigm shift towards a theology that was better suited to the needs of the emerging middle class, rather than the needs of the poor.

What materialist cultures need, indeed demand of their religions, is a degree of spiritual complacency, else materialism cannot thrive. Hence the desire to relegate talk of the spiritual from a public to a private domain, as if akin to some distateful but tolerated sexual predeliction.

The Reformers message of a Grace that sets us free from the works of the Law, also absolves us from any burden of seeking to become holy by our deeds. ("I am spiritual, but not religious".)

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Without diverting into politics again, I rather regard the self-serving spiritualities in the recent 100 years, post-NA tendencies that Hart called 'boutique religion' – First Nation dream-catchers, Tibetan throat-music, Reiki, crystals et al – as something of an aberration and something clearly in decline. Those structures are finding new ats of self-expression in an entirely secular way, no longer requiring religion to validate a sense of authenticity.

Looking back over my twenty years here at IO, and there has been a marked decline in religious contributions from anything like 'orthodoxy' and those who delare themselves on the fringes thereof, such as Lunamoth, Muslimwoman – I do not count @wil in that number because my brother-in-Christ would recoil at being thought of 'orthodox' in any sense whatsoever!

And I think the same might be said for unaligned spirituality – AFAIK we have one Catholic, one Evangelical, one Jew, two Muslims, who contribute regularly. An atheist Hindu, two Biblical literalists who are aligned to themselves ... apologies to anyone I have missed.

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So I would say Interfaith Org is not quite the way it was 20 years ago. Now give the Church 2,000.

 

[Longfellow]

I don’t think that I understand what Jesus is in relation to God. I don’t think that anyone does. I don’t think that it’s possible for anyone to understand it. What we can try to understand is what He says to do about it, and then we can decide if we want to try to do that or not. I decided many years ago to try to do it.

“I have no gift to bring that’s fit to give a king.” I just play my drum for Him, and hope to see Him smiling at me.

 

[Longfellow]

I've never found anyone online or offline, who seems to feel or think the way I do about Jesus.

 

[badger]

I think that, in the sense of what Hart's talking about, is evident.

The early Christian koinonia, the community, lived a life in common, they were communist in that regard.

Today's culture is capitalist, and currently this last one hundred years (counting from now) has seen and is seeing some of the worst excesses of both those two systems when unbridled by any coherent morality.

Jesus was a champion of the poor.

I don't want to talk about communists nor capitalists any more than you do and so I shall not.

If any Christian communities are thinking, speaking or acting differently from the actions and words of Jesus, then I wonder if they are truly followers of Jesus?

I sometimes hear Christians insisting that Jesus told his followers to buy swords, or his story about the lord who praised and raised successful money managers whilst turning the less efficient onto the street, but who have no interest in his constant warnings about the pursuit of wealth.

I don't meet many true Christians. I am a kind of Deist.

 

[badger]

So I would say Interfaith Org is not quite the way it was 20 years ago. Now give the Church 2,000.

Ahh! ........ The Church.

I genuinely think that the Church lost its way during the first century, I remember reading about Cephas's upsets with Paul and I do believe that G-Mark (less some edits?) was Cephas's story; maybe that was the only reason why the Church included it in their New Testament?

 

[Longfellow]

Ahh! ........ The Church.

I genuinely think that the Church lost its way during the first century, I remember reading about Cephas's upsets with Paul and I do believe that G-Mark (less some edits?) was Cephas's story; maybe that was the only reason why the Church included it in their New Testament?

The church lost its way as soon as the twelve started debating about who would be greatest in the kingdom.

 

[Thomas]

I genuinely think that the Church lost its way during the first century ...

I personally couldn't put a date on it ... I rather think a series of small, incremental steps, with some big jumps, like being adopted by the Roman state.

But then I think, within that, there is still an authentic transmission. I think the saints are largely anonymous, they just get on with it.

I do believe that G-Mark (less some edits?) was Cephas's story

I do, too ...