The inevitable failure of everyone to be good is kind of a fundamental premise of Christianity. No one should be shocked to find out there are vicious Christians… least of all the Christians.
Gnosticism long preceded Christianity and has never gone away since. It will happily subsume any interesting or mysterious figure and turn them into a sage with the keys to a secret club.
This is a weird characterization. To say that Christianity–especially early Christianity reviled its martyrs is just nonsense. And no one arguing against Donatism thought that recanting one’s faith was a good thing. The question was whether the sacraments performed by those who recanted (particularly the ordination of the next generation of priests and bishops) were tainted and invalidated by the failures of those who performed them. Frankly, sacramental theology aside and being purely practical, sticking to the Donatist judgment could have destroyed the early Church.
Even the terms omniscience and omnipotence are human approximations or blinkered descriptions of a God that is held to be the foundation of all that is, not simply a powerful being but Being itself.
Thanks for the movie recommendation, Tom. I’m going to check out Corpus Christi. Calvary was a tremendous film, I thought. (Far better than First Reformed, which was arresting but (I felt) pretty hollow at the core.)
Personally, I don’t think this is baked in to Christianity, and that there are many good reasons for Christians to reject it, but there’s no doubt that the influence of Plato on a lot of Christian theology has left us with plenty of inherent dualism in our theological discourse.
As a Catholic, I don’t read Superman myself, but wait for my pastor to recap it for me.
Thank you for this description. It’s a decent summary of why the Protestant understanding of grace doesn’t(or shouldn’t) justify a belief in “I can do whatever I want as long as I ask for forgiveness”. Having been raised in that tradition, I find the attitude of certain radtrad Catholics I’ve come across as utterly alien, where at least some of them do see it as doing all of that work to simply avoid punishment, including a comment that was basically “well if hell didn’t exist or I didn’t have to worry about going there, why should I even bother with Christianity?”.
It’s interesting that the older I’ve gotten the more these limits of human comprehension have really become apparent to me. I guess it’s likely a matter of deeper examination of concepts that seem comprehensible when you just look at surface definitions.
In some ways Gnosticism is the first in a very, very long line of religious… subgroups forming in the Middle East, in reaction and dialog with the majority religions there, from late second temple Judaism, Christianity itself, Mandaeism, Manichaeism, the Alawites, Yazidism, neo-Platonism and all it’s later influences in Christian and Islamic branches, ect. But i wouldn’t characterize Gnosticism as pre-existing before Christianity.
No i wasn’t saying that early Christianity “reviled” it’s martyrs in general, that would be deeply incorrect in just about every way, but that in this particular instance the question became one where the character of those performing the sacrament mattered to the performance of their duties. And the ultimate rejection of that as not being decisive might well be considered what created “bureaucratic” Christianity, the Church as an institution, with all the knock on consequences of that.
Understanding of course how annoying (if not actually impractical) it would be if your marriage or your driver’s license became invalid due to the changing character of the person who issued your license. Which is fine - but suddenly if that person issues licenses (indulgences?) for profit, well, you also suddenly have no easy way of revoking them either. A Medieval Age full of princes that only take confession on their deathbeds and monks in “full fat” living off large estates ran by Church peasants might not be an obviously direct consequence of this way of thinking, but i might argue it was certainly a danger that might well have resulted from it.
The usual answer is that he is just referring to the triumphant part of a psalm.
Imagine someone said, “At first I was afraid, I was petrified…” The first thing you think is “I will survive!”, not “Wow, he sounds scared”. This is basically the biblical analogue.
I guess I was thinking of Zoroastrianism and mystery cults, but maybe those were more proto-Gnostic.
There are still plenty of ways for a sacrament to be made invalid, and simony (not always rigorously enforced, I’ll grant you) was one of them. It’s just that the subsequent recantation of the presider was not. And anyway, the theology is sound: No sacrament is the act of a person; God does the work in all cases, and he’s plenty used to working through broken vessels.
Well, it’s an interesting connection to make, if nothing else.
Heh. My wife is not Jewish; I am. I don’t exactly keep true kosher, with the separate dishes and all that, but as part of tradition I don’t eat pork or shellfish, or foods that blatantly combine meat from milk-giving animals with cheese, etc. Years ago I asked my rabbi at the time, now retired, about how to handle different dietary guidelines at home. He said, essentially, “well, domestic harmony is also a mitzvah! Eat the ham if you have to.”
This thread seemed like an appropriate place to talk about Esau McCaulley’s latest book, Reading While Black.
As a straight white man, I often have a difficult time understanding how those in marginalized groups see the world, and the experience of a Black Christian is no exception. Reading While Black isn’t written for me, rather directed at the Black Christian community, but nonetheless it helped me to improve my understanding of their culture and experiences. I’ll never fully understand, but every advance helps!
One of McCaulley’s primary points uses an understanding of the Bible as a whole to argue against the practice of using individual passages to justify slavery, Jim Crow, or other types of discrimination. I think we as Christians can learn a lot from taking this approach in all areas of our lives. Looking at any one passage and thinking it justifies some kind of action that causes pain to others is simplistic thinking that can often lead us astray.
Another argument that I particularly appreciated is the distinction made between what God tells us to do because it’s His vision for our best lives, and what He tells us to do because it will limit the inevitable sins that we will commit. The latter may look like approval for imperfection, but God recognizes that a realist approach to living in an imperfect world is necessary for now, and we need to do the same.
Reading While Black isn’t an easy book, but it is a powerful one. Highly recommended to anyone, of any race or culture, who desires a thoughtful perspective on the issues facing Black Christians today - and how those can apply to all of us.
When it comes to finding biblical justification for anything in society or politics, my default stance is that it should always throw red flags if anyone just quotes a verse or two in isolation. If someone is tossing out a line from Paul, you have to ask “Who was Paul addressing this to and what was their situation?” If it’s Leviticus or something, you have to ask “What does this mean to a post-Exilic Israel?” And in all cases, you do better looking at the whole story of salvation than at a verse by itself. Slavery? We know it existed and was accepted in different periods of history. We know Paul referred to it without radically demanding its abolition. Is Paul cool with slavery? Instead of picking those verses out or trying to simply figure out St. Paul’s political take, we’re better off asking “What is the orientation of the bible story toward slavery?” Then I think we can clearly say that God’s action in the world is explicitly one of liberation; that slavery of many kinds afflicts humanity, that God’s covenants promise freedom, and that when we can work in favor of liberation in truth we are participating in advancing the kingdom of God.
The Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) is basically the establishment (more or less) of a Hebrew culture and society. And, as you might expect with any society, the initial laws laid down are not particularly enlightened, nor are they particularly compassionate. Leviticus especially is just full of shit like that.
A whole lot of the gospels is basically Jesus telling his own people “The hell is wrong with you assholes?”
