If you remove man's convoluted religion and religious procedure and just focused on Jesus' message
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Yeah, I've watched a lot of his YouTube videos. They are good.
That’s not directly attributed to Jesus, although it is in the OT and JC is quoted as saying he doesn’t want to change anything in the law.
By some accounts Jesus liked to play with naked boys. That’s in Mark.
It will not be the last time the Democrats spotlight Biden’s lifelong Catholicism. A political action committee announced last week it will spend $50,000 on ads highlighting religious reasons to vote for Biden and the convention this week will feature a nun and a Jesuit priest in high-profile speaking spots.
It’s interesting you ask that. Because there was a group of early Christians Who didn’t think Jesus was male. Rather he was both male and female and he said he wouldn’t return until the sexes were equal.
Not surprisingly they were denounced, killed and there literature mostly burned. Imagine how different the past two thousand years would have been if that was the mainstream view.
To kind of go along with what Keller said in the tweets I posted...(as an example) Homosexuality is specifically called out as a sin (along with a whole myriad of other things both sexual and non-sexual). However, many evangelicals read that as homosexuality should be outlawed, gay marriage should be outlawed, gays shouldn't have the same rights as others and that government should pass laws to do all of that. The Bible says the person must turn away from their sin and ask for repentance. Notice the difference? How should Christians address one's homosexuality (particularly of a loved one)? The Bible kind of leaves it up in the air, though it does talk about how to treat sinners as a whole.
Jesus specifically says that there will be people who claim to know Him that He will not recognize. I guarantee you that a lot of American Evangelicals will fall into that category, yes, even many Christian-claiming Trumpians.
I’d offer a counter point. To me, the need to deify the man gets in the way of the message. You started the thread by asking why we can’t just follow the message yet here you are unwilling to separate the message from the dogma. So answer your own question. Why can’t you separate them?
Evangelicals like to say Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of homosexuality but in reality they were destroyed for not helping the poor and the weak.
Christ didn't separate them. Separating the political from the religious should be easy, but one can't separate Christ's claim to be the Son of God from His teachings...they go hand in hand.
And now we have a president and his cult who take it to a level never before seen in America.
Where that conflicts for me though, is that Jesus spoke with everyone - he didn't make any exceptions. I don't recall where in the New Testament where homosexuality gets called out. Most of that seems to get mentioned in the Old Testament.
I’m going to challenge this again. The Bible is silent on the issue of loving same sex relationships except to honor them in the example of David and Jonathan. What the Bible actually condemned was the pagan practice of the time where people would sleep with male prostitutes as a way of worshiping a competing religion.
That’s the entire point of the thread. And I don’t agree that you can’t separate the teachings from the teacher. In fact I’d go further and assert that if the teachings have any value, they should stand on their own, independent of the teacher.
Paul calls out same sex religious practices in Romans. But in keeping with the point of the thread, Jesus is never quoted on the topic.
Pelosi says hi too. So does Biden. The Bible says you’re not supposed to wear your religion as a badge of honor but to practice it and demonstrate it by your deeds. As a Catholic you should appreciate that.
I believe that’s the point. Religion is between you and your gods, not you and the public.
Yes and no. We are called to share and disciple to others. We are called to community worship.
When you mix politics and religion, you get politics.
The movement into politics of evangelical Christianity in the 1980s was very good for Republican politics. It has been an absolute disaster for evangelical Christianity.
I'm pretty convinced there is no home in either party for someone trying to live and vote Christian. You have to do the best you can. I'm Catholic, and every single week for 40 years I listen to the gospels and the letters of Paul and the other apostles, and it's actually shocking how not political Jesus was in the current sense. How little he has to say about government policy and secular law.
The obsession of Christians with harnessing government, and with politicians harnessing Christianity, I think falls so far outside and below what Christ asked for.
I use my Christian beliefs to vote my conscience as much as I can, there's nothing wrong with that, and in some cases voting I think is a powerful exercise of your Christianity. I personally think it's important to vote pro-life. I think it was important to vote for candidates who did not appease the Soviet Union and it's attempt to crush out Christianity in Eastern Europe.
But I just don't see how the full on political bent of some wings of Christianity is even remotely defensible in the Gospel.
The movement into politics of evangelical Christianity in the 1980s was very good for Republican politics. It has been an absolute disaster for evangelical Christianity.
I'm pretty convinced there is no home in either party for someone trying to live and vote Christian. You have to do the best you can. I'm Catholic, and every single week for 40 years I listen to the gospels and the letters of Paul and the other apostles, and it's actually shocking how not political Jesus was in the current sense. How little he has to say about government policy and secular law.
The obsession of Christians with harnessing government, and with politicians harnessing Christianity, I think falls so far outside and below what Christ asked for.
I use my Christian beliefs to vote my conscience as much as I can, there's nothing wrong with that, and in some cases voting I think is a powerful exercise of your Christianity. I personally think it's important to vote pro-life. I think it was important to vote for candidates who did not appease the Soviet Union and it's attempt to crush out Christianity in Eastern Europe.
But I just don't see how the full on political bent of some wings of Christianity is even remotely defensible in the Gospel.
I know Paul spoke of it, along with other sexual sins.
And Jesus speaking with everyone is kind of the point. Legal action isn't called for in the Bible, it's purely an action between the sinner (regardless of sin) and God. There is nothing there saying there should be legal consequences for any sin. So, a Christian saying that a particular sin requires a particular legal action (see Keller's mention of abortion) based on the Bible is incorrect.
My biggest issue with Jesus is that he failed to give props to the dinosaurs.
Not in this case. Everything in the New Testament in based on Jesus claiming to be the Son of God. If He isn't, then his teachings are worthless because they are taught by Him with the idea that He is speaking for God. He isn't just the teacher, He is the point of the teachings. That matters
The Apostle Paul in Galatians says those who live
according to their sinful flesh produce sexual immorality,
debauchery, idolatry, hatred, strife, jealousy, fits of anger,
selfish ambition, envy, drunkenness and orgies.
He says those who live according to the power of the
Holy Spirit produce love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
according to their sinful flesh produce sexual immorality,
debauchery, idolatry, hatred, strife, jealousy, fits of anger,
selfish ambition, envy, drunkenness and orgies.
He says those who live according to the power of the
Holy Spirit produce love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Because to follow Jesus also means to surrender your life in Christ and declare Him King.
Many in this thread are cool with some of Jesus’s teachings (feed the poor) but are they also cool with rendering to Caesar what is Caesar? What about Paul’s teachings (Romans 13 and other)? Do they not matter? Paul had a personal encounter with The Man! That should count for something I would hope.
Many are OK with Jesus but will not declare Him as King over their lives. You cannot do one without the other. Impossible as that would be cherry-picking Jesus’s own words. The question is not if you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Rather, do you want a King (Christ Jesus) to rule over you? Many, Christians and non-Christians alike stumble here.
Americans today have no real, tangible experience living under absolute authority. For many of us, we can only relate to our own Father’s as king of the homes we grew up in. Many men have a difficult/complex relationship with their father’s. It should come as no surprise that men who felt unloved by their father’s and cannot trust them also have a much greater tendency to deny faith & religion.
Following Jesus is hard, like be willing to die for Him hard! To do that, requires Biblical community to strengthen you and once you have Biblical community, you have religion. Following Jesus alone is not really possible and he made that very clear. We are to be the church and the church is Christ’s bride. As a husband has been faithful to his bride, so will Christ be with the church.
This.
Additionally, I'd say in my incomplete thought in the OP, I'd ask what do most people take issue with, Jesus' teachings or man's corruption of them? For me, I see more people putting Christians on blast that Jesus.
In Jefferson's Bethke's book, Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus, he says he found talking about Jesus with others to be much easier than discussion a specific church or religion.
Thanks for the correction about Paul, I always seem to forget how many different things he touched on in his Letters.
Agreed on the rest.
I agree in part and the "religious right" often tries to ignore those or explain why it's ok if someone in our country goes hungry.
On the other hand there are other parts to scripture, parts that define what sin is. You need those parts because Jesus can not save you from non-existent sins. And this is the part that the "religious left" ignores.
It's mostly in this country though because Christians in other nations don't tend to have as much of these issues.
For example if you talk to the pope he would tell you that everyone should have access to healthcare and abortion is evil. He would tell you that we need to protect the environment and that divorce is a mortal sin.
And it's not just the current pope that would say that, the previous popes have been saying that too.
Fact is that Jesus and God for that matter are not defined by political movements in the United States. They have their own agenda. Quite frankly I think we should listen more and let that decide what kind of policies it is we support.
Supporting Ayn Rand is incompatable with scripture. Nearly everything she believed in was Anti-Christian.
Not sure I agree with all of this. A pretty careful parsing of the New Testament shows that all or almost all of the divinity claims appear only in John--the last of the gospels to be written. The scholars in the Jesus Seminar made a pretty good case that these divinity claims were inserted late in the game by folks who were looking to build a new religion around the teachings of Jesus and wanted to give them the extra appearance of authority. Personally, I doubt that Jesus actually claimed to be divine, and he actually might have been mortified by any such claim. With all of that said, most of his teachings are pretty unassailable in terms of being a moral, loving, and just way to lead one's life.
I find your position very contradictory. You explain exactly why religion and politics are essentially the same thing.
That’s really only true for John. Jesus is hardly divine at all in Mark. And the Bible is filled with teachings that are considered valuable that don’t come from a divine teacher. The nature of Jesus isn’t really important. We know that because Christianity existed for hundreds of years before his nature was settled.
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