B. U. G. S.

Yes you are right, charity means love. The word was used in the KJV to translate agape. Agape was not ordinary love; as you probably remember it is the boundless love given by God to anyone who needs it whether he deserves it or not. Thus serving free food to the poor is agape is love is charity. Our word charity has loss its main meaning of love as it has come to mean what used to be “alms” for the poor. But if you get a good agape love feast going, you can sure feel the love. But now we usually call that a rip-roaring potluck.

Comment by Pain

MY OBSERVATION:

From now on I may use “MY OBSERVATION” here instead of “MY REPLY.” The reason for this, I am perversely proud to say, is the result of my clinging to a completey outdated Southern obsession called “courtesy.”

A “reply” should be addressed entirely to what YOU say. All of us have had far too much of people pretending to answer the points we took some trouble to formulate while they just ramble on without dealing with anything we actually said.

That’s RUDE.

The fact is that when I deal with a comment, I usually go on and say what it makes me think of. Obviously you wouldn’t be here if you were offended by that, but my sense of courtesty tells me I shouldn’t refer to a wandering off into what you made me think of as a “reply.”

And you shouldn’t allow anyone else to do that, either.

What Pain reminded me of here was a recent get-together of the mainline churches in which they all agreed that the essence of Christianity is taking care of the poor. As a Bible Belter who has the disadvantge of knowing his Bible, I remember the whole context of what Jesus meant when he said, “The poor we have always with us.”

What he said and what he meant was that the ONLY purpose of his mission on earth was to save souls. From the point of view of mainline churches, that is about as bad as you can GET. The whole point of being a MAINLINE church is that you are mainline in our Politically Correct society. This is exactly like RESPECTABLE conservative. Respectable means mainline modern.

I am proud to say that I don’t attract commenters like that. mderpelding and Mark may be totally down on Shari’s ideas, but they are more than willing to share a forum with somebody who HAS ideas. Shari may enrage them, but “mainline religion” SICKENS them. My commenters are the sort of people who can argue with someone who makes us mad, but if somebody buzzard’s meal SICKENS us the way a buzzard’s breakfast does, all we ask is to put as much mileage between us and that buzzard’s tidbits as we can.

Shari puts ALL her chips on salvation. Shari is either RIGHT or WRONG, fashion be damned.

Mainline religion gets together and decides that they don’t want to take an extrmeist position like Shari’s. If they did that, they would be laughed at by all the political commentators and paid intellectuals. So they say, “All right, maybe this whole salvation bit is absurd. But we really do love poor people, and all the Intellectuals have to admit that is a nice thing and it is Socially Relevant.”

What Peter Pain does not mention is what happened AFTER Jesus’s miracle of the loaves and fishes, though it is exactly his point. The day after the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes the crowd grew to enormous size. It grew to enormous size because they wanted MORE loaves and fishes.

At that point Jesus shrugged and walked away. He was deeply disappointed.

To a mainline churchman, this reaction is inomprehensible, which is why it is never mentioned in a mainline church.

After all, as in Peter Pain’s description of the agape, Jesus was providing food for those who needed it. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? According to mainline theology about the New Testament, Jesus was being a really bad sport.

Jesus had this idea that he had not come to earth to die on the cross entirely for the purpose of feeding the poor.

How unprogressive can you get?