A better question is why should I assume Kazantzakis knows what he is talking about?
And I’m not trying to diminish the subject or lessen the depth of its purpose. I have no problem with the subject. My problem is that I can do my own research and can think for myself about this problem without having someone with no real expertise in the area trying to guide my thoughts.
Thankyouverymuch.
Well, since Mr. Kazantzakis is considered one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th Century , who had a particular interest in christianity, I’d give his thought more weight than that of the average Joe. And in any case, you were not attacking Mr. Kazantzakis prsonally in your first reply, but the very idea that anyone could learn anything of value about the topic of Jesus from a film (an absurd position that I see you are not repeating in this subsequent reply).
Well, gee whiz, then why do we need philosophers at all? Why don’t we just toss the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Emmanuel Kant, and Jesus Christ in the sewer. I mean, you can do your own thinking about the problems they discussed without turning to people “with no real expertise in the area.”
Sheesh.
Kirk
sorry, i can’t agree with kirkland1244,…some of the greatest philosophers, even so-called Christian ones of the last centuries, have been responsible for promulgating more heresies or bad doctrine, Bible-wise, than is imaginable. now, to the main…
i think that Jesus gave up quite a bit just coming to earth to be born to mankind. Can a God, who created a universe and the heavens, come to earth in the likeness of sinful man, without that, in itself, being an unimaginable sacrifice/loss?? And then there’s the crucifixion and resurrection…
i, personally, don’t think that Zeus (cartoon or otherwise) is a good reference for what is and what isn’t really good theology.
The Bible contains very few clearly-defined “doctrines.” It is the role of theologians and philosophers to discern the actual precepts of the Christian faith. Yes, some have gone astray (like, Martin Luther and every Protestant after him), but without philosophers we’d have no understanding of the Trinity, and our ability to concieve of the Incarnation – a subject dealt with very shallowly in the canonical Bible – would be highly truncated.
Anyone who disregards theological philosophical thought reduces Christianity down to the rump of the dead letter of the Bible, rendering it a meaningless, truncated and incoherent religion.
Kirk
Perhaps not, but who has been talking about Zeus?
Stinkpalm mentioned the movie Hercules in the OP…
Kirk
Too right. I’d forgotten that–but then, I usually ignore references to Disney with its butchered texts and conflation of Greek and Roman traditions.
Disney’s not the worst at that, actually. Ever read any DC Comics Wonder Woman books? Roman stuff, Greek stuff, all intermingeld. Gets confusing.
Kirk
I wasn’t really trying to make any sort of statement about Zeus in particular, I was just referencing what he said about being a hero and risk. If you know something won’t hurt you then it is not heroic to fight it. That was his point in the movie and that is my point here.
If Jesus knew he would be resurrected or whatever, then was what he did really considered a sacrifice or heroic?
Possibly not, but the point of Christian teaching (no longer accepted or understood by all Christians these days, of course, despite the riots in the streets that occurred when this was originally made part of doctrine) is that Jesus, as fully human, did not know that he would be brought back to life. He believed in the resurrection (as many Jews of the time did), but he had “poured out” or “emptied himself” of his Divinity and had only a human belief or hope in the resurrection, not knowledge.
**handsomeharry wrote:
i, personally, don’t think that Zeus (cartoon or otherwise) is a good reference for what is and what isn’t really good theology.**
Have you ever read up on the theological thought of ancient Greek religion (NOT mythology) and found out? Have you communicated with Zeus in any way shape or form to confirm that?
Gotta agree with Shodan. Before Jesus was arrested and tried and crucified, He predicted the crucifixion. He also predicted Peter’s triple denial in less than 12 hours to Peter’s subsequent amazement. He promised the Holy Spirit and certainly aware of the resurection to come.
But wouldn’t god, being omnipotent, have known about how it was all going to wrap up before he embarked on this whole ‘coming-down-to-earth’ lark. So he might have lacked the knowledge of his fate as Jesus, but he must have been fully aware of his fate before he ‘became’ Jesus.
Perhaps so. Nevertheless, he endured the same span of years as we do (well, shorter than most of us) and lived with pain, doubt, and hardship during that time. He became human for us, with all that entails. You may, in fact, have been told the entire future of your life before you took human form; it does not follow that your choices as a memoryless human are any less valid.
—I think the deal is this: although Jesus was God, he was also fully mortal when he was on earth, with all the normal weaknesses and temptations, and was just as subject to pain and fear as any man.—
The problem is, you can’t have it both ways. Either he was fully human, or he was special in some way that made him different from other humans. And pretty much all theology demands that he be special in some way. You can’t, for instance, both be a regular joe AND sinless, and claim to have experienced regular joeness in full.
Whether Jesus personally knew or not is beside the point. God is said to be the one making the sacrifice, and God, presumably, knew the outcome, risking nothing.
The story still seems to come out like this: God demands a debt, but it’s an odd one in the history of debts. It’s one that was never actually incurred in return for anything, but rather that he himself created people as having inherently, in addition to inherently not having any capacity to pay off the debt themselves (sort of like an indentured servant who owes more than a lifetime worth of work for his passage to the new world). After either a long unknown plan or just after it taking him millenia to realize that his servants can by the very nature he created them with never pay off their debt themselves (which for some reason makes him mad, and for some reason takes time, despite him being timeless), God decides to offer them forgiveness. But instead of simply forgiving the debt, God decides to kill himself by coming to earth as Jesus and commiting a capital crime under Roman law. After a spot of suicide by state, God for some reason feels better about the whole thing, is willing to forgive, and somehow now has powers to commune with humans that he did not have before (despite always being omnipotent).
—Tillich/Spong style theology suggests that this concept is inadequate to explain exactly what God is.—
Whatever it is, I still don’t currently believe in it as “God” much less the Christian god in particular, unless you really take seriously Tillich’s rewriting of half the dictionary to make theology safe for atheists… even when they don’t know it.
You see, even Republicans are actually Democrats, because the Democratic platform is the ground of all being.
People seem to be taking the Jesus=God thing without factoring in the difference between God the Father and God the Son. God the Son, in the Incarnation, was fully God in terms of his substance and nature, but also fully man. He did not have all the traits of God the Father during his Incarnation.
I guess an athiest cannot read or understand the text of the bible?
—was fully God in terms of his substance and nature, but also fully man.—
eh? How could one person be both fully man, and yet unlike every other man who’s ever existed? It’s the same problem with the “greatest human being.” Jesus cannot both be a human being and have a nature that is, for instance, without sin. No human being is like that.
Apos, that’s the mystery of the Incarnation. How a person can be 100% God and 100% Man. We don’t know, we simply take it on faith that he was. If you’re a Christian, that is.
So… you don’t actually understand what you’re talking about, and have no answer to the question? Why were you chastizing people for not “factoring in” your particular reading, when you admit that it does not good in explaining the issue anyway?
What we have here is a substantive problem, and you either have a resolution to it or not. It’s claimed that Jesus was so impressive because he was fully human… but he also had a sinless nature that no human being has. So why, then, is it particularly impressive that he didn’t sin? And so on…