Rocko’s statement is at the end, but I think you will get a sense of what he said from my reply.
MY REPLY:
Rocko, you are being very unfair to me, but I survived it.
I never said anything remotely approaching the concept that hypocrites calling themselves “Christians” invalidates Christianity. Please, NEVER accuse me of that!
I never even hinted anything of the sort.
Try to understand that I deeply resent “Christians” precisely because I am, or try to be, a Christian. So being told that I am being anti-Christian is not what I want to hear.
As I have said over and over and over and over and over and over, Jesus was not an Old Testament savior any more than Aramic is the holy language. He spoke Aramaic because the people around him would not have understood Hindi or Swedish. He spoke in Old Testament terms because nobody where he was preaching had read the Zoroastrian Avesta (?) or the Eddas.
What language would you EXPECT him to speak? What scriptures would you EXPECT him to cite?
But in the end, he said that the Old Testament was as worthless as pagan myths. He, not Moses, was the way, the truth and the light. The ONLY way. He left not a micro of room for the Old Testament or anything else.
People listened a moment and then went right back to what they always did.
Which is what humans always do.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross because we were WORTH it.
ROCKO SAID:
I think Bob and joe rorke have missed a crucial point here, and have adopted a sort of “magical” view of Christianity, that somehow the fact that people have been hypocrites in every era and civilized society somehow shows that Christianity is false. That is very poor reasoning.
The Sermon on the Mount is a sermon against hypocrisy. Jesus constantly condemned the leaders of his day as hypocrites. His most important (at least recorded) sermon is focused on that. As Bob has often said, when he figures something out that makes real sense, he realizes Jesus said it better already.
Jesus said “By their fruit ye shall know them”. It is fine to moan about how bad so many “Christians” are, and condemn the whole thing, if you just ignore the plain teaching that Jesus himself pointed out. Why do you think he kept repeating the point? Obviously He knew it would be a big problem.
joe rorke is right, that the warmonger attitude is not a result of what Jesus taught. How does that invalidate Him? Just because Bob’s spelling is poor, that doesn’t invalidate the English language. It is Bob that is at fault, not the language.
Bob uses a phrase, “Old Testament Christians” to say what Jesus said more simply, that is “hypocrites”. Almost everything Jesus said came straight out of the Old Testament, so does that make him an “Old Testament Savior”?
“He is my brother and my sister who does the will of my Father”, said Christ. There it is again. If they don’t do the will of His Father, then what does that mean? It isn’t complicated.
#1 by Rocko on 09/30/2005 - 11:23 pm
Bob,
Thanks for responding to my comment. I didn’t mean to impugn you, but I do think your thinking is still a bit sloppy. For example, Jesus told the pharisees that if they believed Moses that they would believe him because Moses wrote of him. He told them that he didn’t accuse them, but that Moses accused them, and that if they couldn’t believe Moses, how could they believe him?
If this is the case, how can you say the Old Testament is as worthless as pagan myths? If Moses wrote of Christ, then he must have been on to something, wouldn’t you say? What you are saying impugns the integrity of Christ, for why would he condemn the pharisees for not believing nonsense, and hold them accountable? Not only were they wrong, but just believing what they claimed to believe would have pointed them to believe in Christ.
I don’t think you mean to do this, but just haven’t thought this out very well. It is simple logic.
Jesus condemned the pharisees for the traditions of men that obscured the laws of God. It is analogous to the “living constitution” you have written about so eloquently. By making up their own stuff, they made the laws of God of no effect, in the same way liberal judges make the constitution of no effect, because it can mean anything.
#2 by Morgan Kinnon on 10/01/2005 - 5:26 am
Rocko was diplomatic, and I agree.
Bob says: “But in the end, he said that the Old Testament was as worthless as pagan myths. He, not Moses, was the way, the truth and the light. The ONLY way. He left not a micro of room for the Old Testament or anything else.”
This and other statements and facts here are wishful fantasy, considering your posts as a whole. Moses would agree with your one sentence mentioning his name, you’re pretty safe there. Moses is not the Old Testament.
Every Southern Bible-belter over 40 knows it. Every Methodist, the old pre-dialectics school especially, knows it. Every Baptist knows it, but carps about it. Every Catholic (of any stripe) knows it. Every age of historical Christian knows it. But with a big smile, the arch enemy is happy. The Older Testament (covenant: legal bequest or will cut in blood by definition) and the Newer Covenant. The New Covenant was cut in the blood of Jesus Christ, who met every requirement he put forth in it without flaw in spirit or in behavior. The Old Testament viewpoint and requirements themselves cannot save anyone. It follows naturally that you please and learn from those you love and respect.
Hebrew was merely the language of Moses and his kin groups that he used to begin his revealing. It was not known to the much earlier groups who went before, but no less men he said were great in faith (the priest Melchizedek). Greek (not Latin) was the language to the nations and the language of major commerce. Now it is English. Zorastrians? They were never on the radar and wouldn’t have been. Daniel was to that group and did a job like no other prophet in history. They knew the signs and had been watching for centuries. More evidence of God. Jesus fulfilled what he had started at the beginning in the lineage he prepared to launch it.
Bob says: “And as Screwtape said, Satan doesn’t care how you got Down There. He just wants you There. An obsession with sex is great way to get somebody Down There. It doesn’t matter if the obsession is with having sex or with not having sex.”
And as Screwtape said, Satan doesn’t care how you got Down There. He just wants you There. An obsession with not having sex and needing the Old Testament not to be of, about, or by Jesus Christ, Son of the Father, is a great way to get somebody Down There. It doesn’t matter if your obsession is with the Old Testament not really being God and not having sex or with the Old Testament really being God and having sex. Both are closely related.
Each Testament has a distinct purpose and each was named by Christ to his disciples, that’s where we derive the ideas in fact to label our Bibles. The Old was demonstrated and perfected and fulfilled and by the New. Jesus himself names those points. He personally in the flesh cut the new covenant-testament in his own blood fulfilling all of the Old covenant and extending it forward in his perfected terms which raised the requirements.
The people who fell under his whip on two occasions or under his condemnation on many more knew exactly who he was and what he meant and they obsessed over him and obsessed over him, until they finally hunted him down, bound him, tortured him, nailed him out on his altar, hung him up on spike nails to slowly asphyxiate, drove a sword through him, and sacrificed him.
The Old Testament spoke of every detail precisely and no court of law has had that much predictive (premeditative) testimony to exhaustively prove a case with such finality verified by third-party witnesses.
He said unless you repent of your self-made god and ideas of right and wrong and believe that only with and through a personal relationship with him, Jesus, you will be lost in the outer darkness abyss of hell, totally void of any good. It is absolute punishment and abandonment by God or absolute grace and complete acceptance into his dwelling all legal, signed, sealed, in his blood.
Jesus said, “BY THEIR FRUITS (behaviors and words) YOU WILL KNOW THEM.” Do unto others as you would have them do unto you hardly applies to sado-masochists types. Even you’ve parsed around that one. It doesn’t apply to others we can think of either. Simple stuff, common sense you’d think. God is always good and right. God is never wrong or bad. If your ideas don’t all align with his, you are wrong or bad and need to repent and change. He does that over time with his own through salvation. Common grace to the creation is demonstrated continually.
Jesus stated in his last days after others had confessed it already. “I and the father are one. If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” He agreed that he was the “I AM” used the Old Testament.
#3 by Elizabeth on 10/13/2005 - 12:38 pm
The Zoroastrians WERE “on the radar.” Their ideology — light is Good, darkness is Bad,
etc. — is all over the post-Exilic books. Their ideology was all over the eastern
Meditteranean and Greece (Platonism). It also shows up in the late B.C. Jewish philosophers, such
as Philo. Later, it shows up in the New Testament, especially in Paul’s writings. (Paul’s
education included Plato.)
Cyrus, the Persian king who conquered Babylon and freed the Jews who were held there,
was Zoroaster’s patron, and one of the first Zoroastrians.