I have a very relevant quesiton for you. If you knew. And I mean, knew, that one of your own children was going very bad, would you take the bastard out back and wring his neck?
I very much doubt it. And a being of pure love can creation can no more do than than I would kill my children (granted, I don’t have any, but still). We are Adam and Eve: we are jsut the same as they. We are the ones who would eat the apple. We are the kind of people who would jump off a bridge because everyone else was doing it, or just to be contrary. The problem is us, our choices. That said, it’s not as if the situastion is hopeless: Jesus’s entire purpose in dying was to both state that and make hope real.
Yeah… let’s just say that willfully making shit up to make things sound bad is not exactly a good argument.
An “interpretation” which was was never abandoned by mainstream Chistiranity because it was never a part of mainstream Chirstianity. Oh granted, it was a common peasant folk belief, but I can think of no major Christian figure (outside of a few cranks who attracted a lot of attention, but little influence) who actually held this.
Isn’t that a case of the “excluded middle”? You either kill them or damn them to hell for all eternity? How about educating them, or explaining why eating the apple is not good, or putting a fence around it, or making the snake mute? As a parent I put locks on cabinet doors and those plastic thingies in the outlets. I didn’t hand my kid a knife, say “don’t cut yourself” and then expect good things to happen. The whole idea that man is born “evil” is repellent. The idea that on would let the acts of two people many, many generations ago taint new born children is sociopathic.
There are lots of nitpicking you could do over this story. Like, why did God decide that was the time to sacrifice Jesus and wipe out sin? Why would he decide that at all? Did he realize he made a mistake condemning all humans after the Garden of Eden?
But forget that. What about the cosmological history of God’s plan? Lay out the events of the Bible. Jesus does his thing. Add 2000+ years. Jesus is supposed to come back at some point and will judge the living and the dead and all that jazz. Cool. So…what was the point of that 10,000 year block of time? Are we ants and God is the big kid with the galactic magnifying glass? Why the celestial conspiracy theory?
raindog- I think a lot of people here really don’t know what you believe about the spiritual status of Jesus & his relationship to God. Now, I do know and realize that while you do not hold him to be God along with the Father, you also hold that he is more than just another creation. So could you explain for the rest your view of the status of Jesus & why his life is sufficient to redeem all of humanity?
Btw, I’m thinking of opening up a discussion- “Does the New Testament teach that Jesus is God & if not, what does the NT teach Jesus is?” thread.
I hold that Jesus is ‘the firstborn of all creation’ and God’s Son.
As to why his life is ‘sufficient’----which I take to mean ‘In which way is he qualified?’, I would say simply it is/was his position as a perfect human life. Along the way I would note:
My reading of the OT doesn’t indicate that the anticipated Messiah was to be God, or any part of God. There was no expectation of God coming to earth.
2)It seems apparent to me that even his direct contemporaries didn’t grasp the notion of a propitiatory sacrifice. They were surprised and alarmed at the notion he’d be killed.
3)Its only later that Paul made the direction connection-----and more than once----that Jesus’s perfect life answered for the perfect [yet rebelling] perfect life of Adam. A perfect life for a perfect life; a redemption for human kind.
No where in my reading indicates that this perfect life had to be God, or even the Son of God. On the other hand, some divine intervention had to happen to provide a perfect human life, as the offspring of Adam could only produce imperfection.
It is a a result of love and concern for human kind that Jesus was selected/volunteered. Surely God could have made another human in the fashion he made Adam. In any event he chose to use Mary, and the result was that a perfect human life answered for Adamic sin.