Do you think Jesus would like the way Christianity has gone?

Great Debates
21

Yet, would I not tremble, at His coming?

But, He comes, tremble or not. And not only for me, but also for each of us. Do not pretend that God does not know, that the Lord is not here, that He does not hear us speak.

But the fear we feel comes from within ourselves, for the Lord comes to fulfill His promise to us. The other day I was approached by a woman who told me “Jesus sent me to you.” She said she could not feed her children. I gave her $20, and told her I had done all that I could.

Now I see in my heart a moment in my future, when I meet the Lord of All. My Savior, and my judge. Shall I not weep at justice if he says to me, “Here is wealth. I have done all that I could.” The fear of judgement comes from the true heart of the judged.

Besides, what do you mean “What if He came?” Are you so sure you have not met Him already? Perhaps I should have listened to that woman, and believed her. And if she asked it of me in His name, and I gave grudgingly, what shall I expect from justice?

I need forgiveness, not fairness. But Jesus is better at Salvation than we are at sin. Love will conquer evil.

Jesus loves you.

Tris

22

I think He would be dismayed at the doctrinal & moral license in liberal C’tian circles and the doctrinal & moral pettiness in conservative C’tian circles. I have no
illusion that He’s gonna spare me from a good clock-cleaning (having gone through some minor ones by Him already).

I think He commissioned Paul to continue His mission to the Gentiles, and that Paul was faithful to that mission- I think the first main stumble of the C’tian Church was in adopting too much dualistic Greek thought & setting aside too much earthy Hebraic thought. We aren’t bound to the Judaic particulars of Torah, but rather to the Noahic Law- however, even as the early Jewish Christians erred in requiring Gentile believers in keeping Torah, the Gentile C’tians made a tragic error in forbidding it. I believe JC authorized His Church to excommunicate doctrinal & moral troublemakers, and the State to punish evildoers, but when the Church became recognized by Rome, the religious & secular authorities greatly overstepped their bounds.

23

Hi, Tris! Jesus sent me to you. And, I take PayPal! Please, please, please, do all you can, as often as you like.

24

I wonder if He would say to anyone, “Do not judge, lest you be judged.”

Regards,
Shodan

25

…and on either side of any divide you care to mention, too!

Sobering point, Shodan; thanks!

26

Jesus was a Jew, preaching to Jews, advocating a kind of Jewish… revival & revolution, I guess.

How would Abraham Lincoln feel if he reappeared in a millenium or two & found that his memory was unwelcome among Americans–his own people–while not only foreigners, but Yankee-haters on the other side of the world had taken his image & turned it into a false god?

I’ve said that I don’t believe in Xtianity because Jesus didn’t come back in a generation as advertised. But maybe he was delayed a few hundred years, & really did come back. And gouged out his eyes when he saw what had happened.

27

This really just occured to me. New freaky idea.

28

Abraham Lincoln is not a good example because he had political commitments, which Jesus was fairly free of, or at least didn’t have in the same sort of manner as Abraham Lincoln. Jesus was able to take the path of the Demagogue, whereas Lincoln had to engage in some sort of realpolitik in order to accomplish anything. Jesus also had the added freedom of knowing that he was going to be a martyr and that it was only a matter of time before the powers that be took him down for causing a ruckus.

Abraham Lincoln on the other hand IMO was the worst president we ever had. He divided the country, and shredded the constitution by eliminating states rights and forcing people to fight in a war they didn’t even understand in order to get citizenship by killing other citizens of their future nation. He created the industrial worker state that America has become by disenfranchising half of the countries agrarian base, which didn’t recover for more than 100 years after his death.

Jesus was a street preacher with few obligations.

Abraham Lincoln was a politician who failed his political obligations to his constituents.

I’d compare Jesus to Ghandi or Che Guevara before Abraham Lincoln. I know the fact that I think Abraham Lincoln was a vile person skews that, and is probably not a view shared by most people, and my particular bias may be an invalid hijack, but the point about political obligations changing the character of what they did is the same. Jesus was fighting the powers that be. Abraham Lincoln succumbed the influence of the powerful northern industrial corporate interests. They are kind of polar opposites IMO.

Jesus was fighting the man, Abraham Lincoln was the boot of the man stomping on the little people. Emancipation was a side-effect of Lincoln’s policy, not the ends. By freeing the slaves, he was able to destroy the south’s worker base. Our current system of wage slavery was a direct result of Lincoln’s presidency.

Erek

29

Actually Jesus came back three days later, within three hundred years he was the ruler of the Roman Empire, and has been the ruler of Earth ever since. ;p How do you know the pope doesn’t actually meet with Jesus?

Erek

30

I think the reaction I would most like to see is if modern Christians would accept Him. A returning Jesus would probably be labelled a heretic, loon, pinko commie, liberal, radical Jew, etc and be run out of town.

31

I doubt he’d be run out of town. According to the bible Jesus comes back to murder all the heretics. If Jesus came back he’d assemble an army and probably assassinate all the heretical leaders of church factions very quickly, along with key politicians. Then he’d come and claim his throne, and rule for 1000 years. :wink:

I’ve always found it kind of amusing that Christians don’t realize that the scriptures say Jesus is going to murder the vast majority of the population when he returns.

Erek

32

I am not trying to equate Abe Lincoln with Jesus. The question was how he would feel. I used Lincoln, not as a paragon of goodness, but as a familiar paragon of nation-defining revolution. How would any nationalist feel to find himself worshipped by foreigners & despised by his own?

33

And, Erek, your fantasies of a living Jesus in Rome are… amusing.

34

Unfortunately, these attempts at merging wit and scripture are usually not nearly as amusing.

They’re rarely witty, and even less often than that, intellectually edifying. :smack:

35

I think it would be hilarious if subsequent to his second incarnation Jesus was embraced primarily (initially) and then solely (after a couple generations) by atheists, who translated the word “God” as “Nature” and “God’s Law” as “Natural Law” and dispensed with conventional religious trappings much as Christians largely dispensed with Jewish traditions the first time around.

36

We prefer “execute judgement” or “unleash wrath”.

37

If he does that, there won’t be anyone left. :wink:

38

Me, I prefer mercy, but whatever floats your boat! :wink:

39

As I see it there are three basic ways to to interpret Jesus:

(1) He was an actual being whose words and actions are decently well in line with what the Gospels say.

(2) He was purely a work of fiction, unrelated to anyone or anything that actually lived.

(3) The story of Jesus was cobbled together from a variety of sources, or there was a real Jesus but most of what’s written in the Gospels was modified or exaggerated.

I find (3) to be by far the most likely explanation. However the topic of this thread only makes sense in the context of (1), so for the rest of this post we’ll assume that (1) is true.

What is Jesus’s message? First, love God. Second, be nice people. Be meek. Be pacifist. Love your neighbor, love your enemy, love everyone and everything (except fig trees). Do not judge others. Be charitable. Help the poor and the unfortunate.

But we must recall the context in which this is said. Jesus during his life had a very small and essentially powerless group of followers. They lived in turbulent and dangerous times. They were surrounded on all sides by powerful political and religioius forces, many of which were more than happy to use violence. The situation was volatile, and just about anything could trigger confrontation.

In a situation like that, Jesus’s message makes good sense. You don’t want to be agressive or warlike or nasty when you’re surrounded by other factions that are bigger and tougher than you.

But those were the only circumstances that Jesus ever preached under. Would his message have stayed the same in other circumstances? Suppose Jesus was still around in 400 A.D., at a time when his followers held total control over much of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In Europe, at least, a vast majority of the population was Christian, and the non-Christians were politically and militarily weak. In those circumstances, there would be no earthly reason for Jesus to continue extolling pacifism and meekness. Aggression and violence would be far more plausible. So would Jesus have changed his tone, or not?

We’ll never know.

40

As do I- remember that I do wrestle with the hope of Universal Salvation.

I meant that we C’tians who believe that JC will kill a bunch of people at His Second Advent prefer those terms to “murder”.

And I do not see Divine Judgement/Wrath and Mercy as excluding each other- the Deluge & Sodom are the main Biblical examples of the former, yet Christ descended to evangelize those killed in the Flood (I Peter 3) and Ezekiel (Ch 16) told Judah that as her sins made Samaria & Sodom look good, that God would in His mercy restore Sodom and Samaria both rather than irrevocably destroy Judah.