This week’s classic threads begings with the quote: “What if God was one of us?”
I know this isn’t the place, but…
For me, one of the most powerful things about Christianity is the fact that he WAS.
Instead of simply judging from on high, Jesus actually came down and “walked a mile in our mocassins.”
This, of course, assumes that one believes that Jesus is God. I do. Many of you don’t. Neither of us will be convinced otherwise in this forum, so we’ll just leave it at that.
Kid-Gilligan writes:
I always thought that Jesus was the son of God. Maybe I was learned wrong. But if God was one of us who would he be? Might he be a woman? 
I am not weird, I’m just normle challenged.
I really like that song.
Peace,
mangeorge
Work like you don’t need the money…
Love like you’ve never been hurt…
Dance like nobody’s watching! …(Paraphrased)
I HATE that song! God was human, but He was NOT “one of us.” Know what I mean? Jesus is God. So, while He was human, and shared our emotions, pains…etc, He was not like ANY of us. Or, I should say, that none of us, are even close to Him. He never sinned, and was perfect. Can any of you say the same about yourselves? Did I mention how I abhore that song!?!
Adam
“Life is hard…but God is good”
Was???
Peace,
mangeorge
If God was one of us, the paparatzi would never leave him alone
I always like the perfect phrase as pertaining to God. Gives rise to the age old question, how can someone (something)z perfect create something imperfect?
So, according to someone here, WE are not like GOD? Isn’t that contrary to christian believe? Don’t christians say that we were made in his image?
Anyways, in order to help Nickrz keep this thread in GQ, I’ll say no more.
But if God was one of us… Man! He/She’d be hiding!
Men will cease to commit atrocities only when they cease to believe absurdities.
-Voltaire
I think what Adam is trying to say is summed up in the Hebrew translation of the Archangel Michael. * Mi-cha-el * “Who Is Like Unto God?”
“…send lawyers, guns, and money…”
Warren ZevonKid_G - If you know “this is not the place” then please try to determine “where is the place?” before plunking a comment on Cecil’s column into GQ.
Nickrz
GQ Mod
One of the most pathetic things about Christianity is that Christians miss their own point: you can’t comprehend Jesus of Nazareth, or our relationship with God, without beginning with the assumption that Jesus of Nazareth was one of us.
It was the author of one of the gospels who wrote “only begotten son”. Jesus himself, when accused of blasphemy for claiming to be the Son of God, explained himself by referring to a verse in Psalms which states that we are ALL children of the Most High. He also (as you will recall) led us to pray (the “Lord’s Prayer”) using the kick-off phrase “OUR Father, who art in Heaven”. I am the son of God. Charles Darwin was the son of God. Janet Reno is the daughter of God. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was the daughter of God. Jesus was the son of God.
Jesus of Nazareth was the SPECIFIC son of God who bore a message for us, a message that someone else could have borne had that someone else prayed to God to know what needed to be told to the people, and, indeed, no doubt would have been borne by someone else had Jesus of Nazareth died young after being kicked in the head by a passing camel in his 3rd year of life. And, as people familiar with other religions point out, his message HAS in large part been borne by other messengers of God at various times. No surprise there.
I would say that God is a sense of identity which you and I have, in a valid sense, but not as individuals; individually, I am not God any more than I am “the Straight Dope Message Board Community”. God is an all-encompassing sense of identity, the ultimate All, THAT WHICH IS (“I am that I am”). To believe in God is to believe the universe to be sentient, to exist on purpose, as its own purpose, and to believe that we are part of it all.
Jesus was not “send down” (God, a champion of free well, does not deploy wind-up Messiatons, and Jesus started off down here much as you did), and did not intend to get hisself killed (the purpose was to bear a message; the confrontations that led to his death were designed to challenge the rigid legalistic Pharisaic [sp?] Judaism in which the Mosaic law itself had taken the place of the God that had inspired it. To whatever extent he anticipated arrest, I’m sure he hoped to force people to recognize that literal mindless application of a law that would sentence someone to death for telling people to be kind to one another and share and forgive is WRONG and they would see his point. They didn’t. He was crucified and died painfully, a hideous martyrdom not a triumph of God, who was NOT required [by whom would God be required to do such a thing] to sacrifice his “only begotten son” before he would be allowed to forgive the rest of us for not being perfect.
The messages of Jesus of Nazareth are mainly buried under metaphysical Christian bullshit about human lamb sacrifices, resurrection, Jesus being God + God’s son in ways that the rest of us are neither, and the notion that God for some reason mainly cares only that you believe and state that “Jesus was the son of God and He died for my sins”. I doubt if Jesus of Nazareth would have given a rat’s ass whether you remembered him personally or not: the intention was to pass on a message.
If you wish to understand God as one of us, you can indeed look to Jesus, but first peel the gold plate off his corpse and see Jesus as one of us.
Designated Optional Signature at Bottom of Post
Oh, no. Christians. What’s next on this board?
Religion is bad science.
Before this gets move to “Great Debates” – which I have no intention of getting into:
Facts about Christian doctrine:
I. The Trinity
A. There is one God.
B. In this one God, there are three Persons, known as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
C. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.
D. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father.
E. The Father eternally begets the Son.
F. The Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father, or from the Father and the Son (this is controversial).
G. God is a spirit “without body, parts, or passions”, and without gender. (For most purposes, “he” is preferable to “she” and “it”, but neither “she” nor “it” is necessarily heretical.)
II. The Incarnation
A. Jesus of Nazareth was a completely normal human being, with a completely normal body, mind and soul.
B. He was also God the Son.
C. Jesus and God the Son are the same person. (A very tiny minority object to this.)
D. Jesus and God the Son are not the same being. (A somewhat less tiny minority object to this.)
If you want to believe something else, go ahead, but this is what the small-o orthodox Christian doctrine on these points actually is.
As to the above complaints, you also have to address: “Before Abraham was, I AM,” “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” and “You are my Lord and my God.”
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Contrary to the assertion by Ahunter3, Jesus was not crucified for telling people “to be kind to one another and share and forgive.” That is just ethics, and many wise people have said the same thing. Jesus was crucified because he claimed that he was God, and the Jews who disagreed with him regarded this as blasphemy. Back when people took religion seriously, the penalty for blasphemy was death.
Christians believe that Jesus was and is exactly who he claimed to be. They also believe that he was and is “true God and true Man.” As C.S. Lewis once put it, the astonishing claims that Jesus made about himself force one of only three possible conclusions about him: that he was “lord, liar, or lunatic.” All evidence points to his being “lord.”
Something doesn’t get any more true for being 2,000 years old or being taken seriously by millions of people.
If you go by Lewis’s “lord, liar or lunatic” idea, you end up with either liar or lunatic - it’s impossible to know exactly what was going on in his head, whether he really thought that he was the son of god or just pretended to. The idea that there’s “evidence” that suggests that he actually was is nonsense.
Religion should stick to faith and stop trying to bring science into it. It just looks embarrassing.
ben
Not really; he could have been misquoted. He might be entirely a legend. There are other options than those three; to limit it to those is bad logic on C.S. Lewis’ part. (I like his books, though).
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Again, so that this thread doesn’t get dumped into GD or MPIMS (or whatever it is) and so that this thread is devoted to the mission of CA in stamping out ignorance, let me say:
Look carefully at what John W. Kennedy wrote. That is what the credal statements of Christianity are saying (the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, The Apostles Creed). That is what the overwhelming majority of all Christian denominations officially believe. Unfortunately, many, many (maybe even a majority!) of the members of these denominations don’t fully understand this dogma, and when they try to put in their own words – they get it wrong. And what they say would technically be classified as heresy.
When ARG220 says that Jesus ‘was not one of us,’ he forgets the credal statement that Jesus was ‘like us in all things but sin.’ Sin is not a necessary aspect of the human nature, and so, there can be a truly human person without sin. So, except for the sin part, Jesus is like any of us in humanity.
While ARG220 was downplaying the humanity of Jesus, AHunter3 was downplaying the orthodox belief in Jesus’ divinity.
AHunter3 rejects a redemption (‘pay a price’) theology of Jesus’s existence (which is not necessarily heterodox); but in doing so, he leaves out a definite claim on the divinity of Jesus. Yes, it would have been unlikely for Jesus, in his humanness, to be going around thinking and saying, “Hey, I’m really God!” And, yes, the ‘son of God’ phrase in the gospels does not have the trinitarian definition that the latter Church attached to it. However, it is the belief of the Church, after experiencing Jesus’s resurrection, that this is God’s Son in a metaphysically real way in which the ordinary human isn’t.
In short, orthodox Christianity believes: at the same time, without mixing and creating some new reality, Jesus is fully human and fully divine. Both God and Human at the same time in the same person. “God become flesh.” Or, as the formulation at Chalcedon (451 AD) put it:
(Note that the original Greek referred to Jesus become ‘flesh’ and ‘human’ and sharing in our ‘humanity’ – the ‘man’ and ‘manhood’ is an outdated English translation.]
Peace.
Outstandingly good series of posts. It would seem as though we can discuss religion without getting into flame wars. Great!!
Adam, can I draw your attention to the fact that several people have posted what has been solid doctrine in almost every Christian denomination for about 2000 years? In looking at Jesus as personal Lord and God the Son, you must not miss the fact that he was also as human as any of us. That is how He reconciles us to God – he can’t build a bridge with both ends on the same side of the cliff!
Remembering a line from a Christmas sermon: “Probably the most important part of the Christmas message can be summed up in the implications of ‘God messed his diapers’!”
John W. Kennedy writes:
I am not weird, I’m just normle challenged.
<< Jesus was crucified because he claimed that he was God, and the Jews who disagreed with him regarded this as blasphemy. >>
Well, actually, no. Although that statement was argued by many prominent Christians over the centuries, and used as the justification for anti-semitism and persecutions of Jews. However, cold reality (read the gospels with a tiny bit of historical awareness!) is that Jesus was arrested under the accusation that he was about to lead a political revolt against Rome – an accusation he denied. The Romans killed him for political reasons; any rabble-rouser was viewed as a political threat, and was dealt with harshly. Crucifixion was never permitted under Jewish law, but was a favorite of the Romans.
This is not to say that there were not Jewish leaders who heartily endorsed imprisoning such dangerous people. But the Jewish leaders were pretty much puppets of the Roman government. Any Jewish leader who spoke or acted other than what the Roman government wanted, very quickly lost leadership position (and possibly life, tongue, or other body parts.)