Oh, how I love Jesus,
Oh, how I love Jesus,
Oh, how I love Jesus,
Because He first loved me.
My four-year old sings that song, and I sang it when I was the same age. And even though I’m in my forties now and have decades of bible study, university theology courses, stacks of classical and modern books and thirty years of seeing evidence of God’s love for me, it still starts with “because He first loved me.”
If he wasn’t divine? Well then he wouldn’t be Jesus, now, would he? Would you love your Mom if you didn’t know her?
Right, but take another gander at the logic I listed above. Some could argue the interpretation was off, or whatever. Did Matt have bad hearing? I think that’s a sermon right there! [insert “Life of Brian” jokes here]
You love Jesus “because He first loved me”. I don’t get this. Why does it follow that you love Jesus as a consequence of Him loving you first? If my next door neighbor pledges undying love to me, that’s doesn’t mean I have to love him. If he’s an evil, puppy-murderer, he’s not worthy of my love. On the other hand, I could love my neighbor even if he didn’t love me first. One has nothing to do with the other.
Secondly, what does him being divine have to do with him loving you? If he were non-divine he could still love you. Love you in the same abstract way that Jesus says we need to love each other, but love you just the same.
This is not analogous to the OP. The question is if Jesus’s nature turns out to be different that what is currently believed, would you still love him. He’d still be Jesus…just not Jesus infused with God. He still could have been a miracle-performing prophet, though. And his teachings would still be the same. Would these things not make him worthy of love?
Would you love your Mom if it turned she wasn’t your biological mother? This question is more in line with what is being debated.
That’s okay; I’m not surprised that you don’t understand. There are days that I don’t either. It’s not really the fact that He loves me, but the effect of his love in my life – if that makes it any clearer.
How could a man who has been dead twenty centuries love me? If Jesus wasn’t divine, he’s dead. I could admire and respect a centuries-dead philosopher, but I can’t imagine loving one or being loved by one.
No. Admiration and respect, perhaps; or maybe I could love him the way I “love” Mark Twain; but you can’t have any kind of relationship with someone who is dead. I mean, you could say I still love my dead grandmother, but only because of the love we shared before she died. I can’t claim to have loved my great-great grandmother whom I never knew.
Think about it this way: if you found out that your Mom was not your biological mother, but it was a stranger across town, would you love the stranger instead? A Jesus who was not divine is a stranger to me; I love someone else. If it’s not Jesus, I’d have to figure out who in the Universe it was.
If you’re a Christian, I assume you believe in the afterlife. Jesus’s body might be dead, but his soul could be alive. And that soul could love you.
Even if we accept that Jesus is dead as dead, when he was alive he could have loved you in the “love your fellow man past, present, and future” sense. To the extent that this statement makes any sense, this love would not be any less tangible than Jesus loving you now. All it requires is faith in the idea, so it would seem to me.
So you love Jesus because you have a relationship with him. That makes sense to me, even if I don’t believe in this personally. On the other hand, loving him “because He first loved me” will probably never make any sense to me at all.
Why would a non-divine Jesus be a stranger to you? He’d be exactly the same person, except for the “son of God” thing. Everything else–his teachings, his lack of sinful conduct, his miracles, his sacrificial philosophy–would be the same.
Just curious: How do you differentiate your relationship with Jesus from God? Are they interchangable entities in your mind, or do you see them as separate beings? If it turned out that Jesus was not divine, would this impinge upon your view of God? Or would God be untouched?
If you could come up with anything that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt to any reasonable person of the Christian faith, that Jesus was not the Son of God, then that would bring an end to Christianity on the whole as a faith. It would still continue due to denial and momentum, as the super-religious are wont to do, but Christianity is built on the belief in Jesus as the Christ.
That wouldn’t necessarily mean you’d have to discontinue belief in God, or even the God of the Old Testament, as Jesus has nothing to do with it — him, or someone like him, was only prophesied in those books.
The protestant brand of Christianity™ I’m familiar with tells you the only way to the Father (God), is through Jesus. You pray only to Jesus. Many feel a strong sense of a relationship, as they believe/feel that the Holy Spirit is present around them, and is basically Jesus’ courier to mankind.*
So: Without Jesus, you’d have to scrap the NT, go back to the OT, which from there gives you a few options if you still want to go the religious route and commune with God.
*I have never felt this, as much as I wanted to while being raised in the faith, and is one of the reasons I remain agnostic. Granted, there were some times when I thought I might be feeling a sense of communion, but I could never shake the idea I was fooling myself due to peer pressure.
Perhaps, but not really any differently than any one else who is dead. How would he know me?
But that’s awfully impersonal. Martin Luther King loved his fellow man, but I wouldn’t say that MLK loved me, specifically. IMO it would be a lot less tangible. I believe Jesus takes an active role in my life that MLK cannot, nor could a non-divine Jesus.
“Because He first loved me” is an oversimplification from a children’s Sunday School song. It’s shorthand for the fact that Jesus loved me while I was unlovable, that he has changed me and given me a life of abundant joy. These are reasons I love him.
But, he’d be a static, historical figure. He’d be no more familiar to me than any ancient religious teacher like Siddartha or Mohammed.
[quoteJust curious: How do you differentiate your relationship with Jesus from God? Are they interchangable entities in your mind, or do you see them as separate beings? If it turned out that Jesus was not divine, would this impinge upon your view of God? Or would God be untouched?[/QUOTE]
As a Trinitarian Christian I tend to use the two interchangeably in this context.
I would still honor, respect and admire Jesus immensely if He were proven to be only human.
But the major reason why I am a Christian would no longer be there. I am able to believe that God is good (despite the sorrow and trouble of the world) because He went down into the trenches with us, cried and sweated and was afraid, and suffered a terrible death. In the absence of an adequate explanation for why life hurts, we got solidarity, a God who would walk with us the whole way to the bitter end.
I could not worship a God who was not willing to get his hands dirty, so to speak, and go through the same grief that his creatures suffer.
I’m not an expert here. But loving someone just because they love you seems kind of self-serving. Wouldn’t it be more Christ-like to love someone based simply on how they conducted their lives and the wisdom they taught, rather than on the idea that they love you specially? Especially when Jesus has quadrillions of followers who also believe the same thing?
I would like to think I would love my father irrespective of his personal feelings about me, simply because of his actions spoke of love and caring.
The children’s song referenced above makes me think of brainwashing.
Jesus loves me
this I know
For the Bible tells me so.
Not because Jesus has come down from the heavens and personally revealed yourself to you. But because the Bible tells you he loves you. And not a generic “you”, but a personal “you”. Um, why don’t Christians find this to be propagandist in nature…a way of luring you in?
It reminds me of Jim Jones. He also professed to loving each and every one of his congregants. And that’s why people loved him so much. People want love, obviously, and they’ll get it anyway they can. But this desire can turn grown adults into retarded children who’ll drink poison-laced Flavoraide without a second thought. Or make them believe fully in a book that is full plotholes and inconsistencies. Does not make sense to me.
This is actually something I’ve considered, and the conclusion to which I’ve arrived is straightforward; my faith doesn’t depend upon his divinity at all. To put it simply, Christian, to me, means that I am a follower of Christ and his teachings. Even if some parts of his life or his nature are misrepresented, it doesn’t invalidate his teachings and the fundamental message that he’s getting across. And, of course, the most basic and prevalent part of that message is love.
So, I’d have a hard time imagining that there would be any condition under which I wouldn’t.
Not exactly, if you’re thinking of Mark 9:1 –
And [Jesus] said to them, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
This does not unambiguously refer to Jesus’ second coming, and in fact is more often interpreted to mean one of two things:
Jesus’ transfiguration, which occurs immediately following in the narrative and is witnessed by Peter, James and John; or
Pentecost, which occurs several weeks after the resurrection and is witnessed by many.
I think you believe Jesus loves you because you were taught that, but that doesn’t make it true. If you like to believe that then I see nothing wrong with you believing it, and if you also follow all that Jesus taught like many who claim they love Jesus but spend most of their time, judging others and doing a lot of things he asked them not to do, like not turning the other cheek, or acting like the Pharisee’s( who Jesus didn’t seem to like)because they wore their religion on their sleeves and kept the letter of the law ,but mot the spirit! Too busy seeing the speck in their neighbor’s eye but missing the plank in their own. It seems to me that in the story about Jesus he spent most of his time with sinners and riff raff that the so called good Christians today spend all their time looking down on.
When one studies only things that agree with, what they want things to be, it really isn’t study but looking for things that help them stay in the same frame of mind. One can’t say in truth they know Jesus, Just what they were taught or read, or in their own minds thought! If the Psalmist writings were indeed inspired, then all men are gods, so all would be devine.Jesus seemed to take that psalmist literally!
I’d still love a non-deity Jesus, but the love would be completely different. It would be the love of someone who helped me understand God. It would be the love I have for Paul, my pastor, my Sunday school teacher, etc.
No, it wouldn’t invalidate his teachings, but the term “Christ” is to mean the awaited, prophesied Hebrew Messiah, who would be God incarnate. Therefore, if Jesus was proven to be just any other man, like you or me, you wouldn’t be “Christian” anymore, you’d be… Yeshuan?