Christian theology thread for Christians - Deus homo factus est naturam erante, mundus renovatus est a Christo regnante

[BIG SHOT Autos]

It’s hard to put it into words, because most of where I heard those claims from were from black Christians. “Our race is the chosen ones” type of thing.

It's just general human retardation I think. I know several other Christian groups that don't technically belong to a cult, but have a similar mindset.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Question by a non Christian, is there anything special with Mary Magdalene compared to the other apostles? I remember hearing that her importance is put into question.

 

[Squanto Airi]

Question by a non Christian, is there anything special with Mary Magdalene compared to the other apostles? I remember hearing that her importance is put into question.

Well she is the first apostle to see Christ Resurrected.

 

[Neverender]

Question by a non Christian, is there anything special with Mary Magdalene compared to the other apostles? I remember hearing that her importance is put into question.

Hello and welcome!

Mary Magdalene wasn't one of the capital-A Apostles. None of the women that followed Jesus received the formal title (which translates roughly to 'one who is sent out') because they weren't 'sent out' to heal and cast out demons (Luke 9) or to become the first bishops. On a more metaphysical level, Mary and the other ladies of the early church just weren't men and therefore couldn't accurately 'stand in' for the personage of God on Earth, as a priesthood needs to be able to do to honor God correctly.

However, Mary was an honored and beloved disciple, one who learns from a master, and if one wants to quibble about titles versus nouns, she was a lowercase-a apostle, which is often conflated with the formal and specific title of Apostle. She was one of the primary female companions of our Lord, the witness of His Resurrection, and one of the first members of the church. She was an apostle in the same way I or any of the other members of the Church are, someone who tries to spread the Good News and follows the Great Commission.

A lot of the discourse around Mary Magdalene comes from inane bullshit like The Da Vinci Code, where her status as a female companion to Christ and conflation with various other Marys in the New Testament lead people to think she and Jesus were married and sexually intimate. These misinterpretations lead people to think Mary Magdalene was something she wasn't and generally undermines clear understanding of her place in history. There's other stuff too, but I've yapped enough.

 

[VeteranOfTheRetardWars]

Question by a non Christian, is there anything special with Mary Magdalene compared to the other apostles? I remember hearing that her importance is put into question.

Basically, she was a woman who had seven demons cast out of her by Jesus and so she became a follower of Jesus. She was present during Jesus’ crucifixion, present at his burial, and she was the woman who told people that Jesus came back and the tomb was empty. She was the first person to see the risen Jesus, and that was a pretty big deal overall.
There’s a lot of confusion around her because there’s a few other Marys in the Gospels. She’s mainly confused with the Mary of Bethany who washed Jesus’ feet with perfume and her own hair before the crucifixion, and that confusion gets her confused with an unnamed woman who also washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, hair, and perfume. Someone more versed on the history could probably explain how the myth of her being a prostitute got started, but that is totally false and has not a thing to do with scripture.

 

[Dan of Steel]

Basically, she was a woman who had seven demons cast out of her by Jesus and so she became a follower of Jesus. She was present during Jesus’ crucifixion, present at his burial, and she was the woman who told people that Jesus came back and the tomb was empty. She was the first person to see the risen Jesus, and that was a pretty big deal overall.
There’s a lot of confusion around her because there’s a few other Marys in the Gospels. She’s mainly confused with the Mary of Bethany who washed Jesus’ feet with perfume and her own hair before the crucifixion, and that confusion gets her confused with an unnamed woman who also washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, hair, and perfume. Someone more versed on the history could probably explain how the myth of her being a prostitute got started, but that is totally false and has not a thing to do with scripture.

The confusion's also compounded by Pope Gregory either misidentifying or intentionally trying to say that she was a prostitute as well. Then that gets into the weird Dan Brown fanfiction where Jesus and Mary Magadelene were married, and this somehow being the beginning of the Carolingian dynasty? (what the fuck was Dan Brown smoking). There's also the Gnostic fanfiction of her being the reincarnation of Sophia in some interpretations to go along with Christ saving humanity from the Demiurge, which, while a fun idea, is still weirdo Gnostic fanfiction.

I've always liked her having the title "apostle to the apostles" I think that's a good way to honor her in helping Christ's mission.

 

[VeteranOfTheRetardWars]

 

[Twix Eatr]

I won't say too much about NDEs since this isn't the thread for it. They don't quite fit into Christianity, or any religion, or lack of religion. I don't know what they are exactly, but I'm convinced they're not just hallucinations of a dying brain.

Yes, they're interesting. Many people have overlap in them. An experience I had with DMT is why I began thinking about religion differently. After experiencing something otherworldly or defying explanation, the Bible and whatnot stops looking so "supernatural." DMT experiences are more like alien abductions, though plenty of deities appear, including Biblically accurate angels. But similar to your disclaimer, I don't want to drift off-topic with it.

Earth is part of the original good creation. God created us with bodies, not as floating spirits. When Jesus was resurrected, that included his body. And the promise of the Second Coming is that our bodies will be restored as incorruptible. So I have a hard time with reincarnation saying that the spirit is the "real" us, and the body is just sort of a side thing that we happen to inhabit for a while. Humans are a totality.

The spirit/consciousness is what I thought was the part of God's image we were made in. But I was more thinking we as ourselves come down again, but that's more like simulation theory stuff in my head. God can obviously do that if he wants, to give us another go, but if scripture doesn't entertain it, it's probably not a thing.

The missing tomb is definitely not apocryphal in that sense. It's in all four Gospels and mentioned even earlier by Paul. Non-Christians might say it's "apocryphal" in the sense of being a later legend, but it's unquestionably there in the original, canon text and originated within living memory of Jesus. The belief in a risen Jesus is VERY early, as evidenced by the formula Paul uses in 1 Corinthians. It's sort of like when people might say the Lord's Prayer or the Apostle's Creed together in church: Paul uses a specific, consciously constructed declaration of faith that must have older origins. How old? I've seen even some skeptical scholars say within a few years of the crucifixion.

From what little I've researched, the resurrection is mentioned earlier than the Gospels by Paul in Corinthians, but the empty tomb and female witnesses are not. It just says that Christ had risen.

Sometimes they recognized him, sometimes they didn't. He could eat food, but he could pass through locked doors.

I'd never heard about this stuff before. Awesome. I just read up a bit. Him traveling with them for a while, but only revealing himself when breaking bread is very interesting.

We don't have full verification that all the disciples died as martyrs, but that's the tradition. Paul, James, John, and Peter almost certainly did, and if anybody was in a position to know the story was a lie, it would be them. People die for all kinds of causes, but it would be truly extraordinary for someone to give their life for something they KNOW is a lie.

Agreed.

This is a lot of the reason I'm a Christian actually. The historical record really doesn't give us an easy way out of an empty tomb, appearances to the disciples, and a new kind of Messianic movement that sprouted from those events. It's very, very hard to come up with an alternative account of the earliest origin of Christianity if something like this didn't happen. The official account only requires you to believe one impossible, absurd, completely ridiculous thing: That there is a God who raises the dead.

Hugely agree with this, too. It's also something that helped me bridge the gap between some old supernatural tale and real events. People were just as intelligent as us back then, possibly even more so. Jesus' historicity is not in question so at the very least, a guy was able to do enough to really convince people, including his own brother that he was Him. And James and his family didn't initially believe he was Christ or follow him, right? That (and the women finding the tomb empty) are both pretty good marks about the stories being truthful.

I'm reading more about His miracles, too. Which of them beyond the Resurrection do you think have the most evidence/witnesses?

Of course, we rightly ask why God allows the innocent to suffer for the sins of others. We don't know. That's the problem of evil, and I don't think there's a good answer for why. All I can say is that this is the only God of any religion who personally came to take responsibility for all the evil in the world.

Indeed. It's hard to be angry at Him when bad things happen when he willingly put Himself in the sandbox and died horrifically by his own children after leading a perfect life.

but the Jewish leadership pressured him by threatening to tell Caeser that he had let a rebel walk away. In order to keep political peace in the empire, Pilate callously executed an innocent man, killing God. And if that isn't the Fall of Man in one sentence, I don't know what is.

Jesus was executed because God came back in the flesh, and humanity was too broken to recognize him.

Damn, so the Jews did it all along, eh? God sent Himself knowing this would happen, correct?

When I say the powers of darkness, that's a deliberately a vague, non-technical term. I don't think we as humans know the half of it. It would include spiritual entities that are hostile to God and man. Historically those have been called demons, though some days I think that might be an oversimplification.

When negative/hostile entities are encountered in the DMT space, many people report that they run away in fear when people call for Jesus' name. I always found that interesting, though I am starting to lean toward them all being potential demons who show you tricks to lure you in.

I'm not entirely sure whether you mean hell literally or metaphorically here, but either way, yes. Without Jesus hell is our destiny, literally speaking, and without Jesus our lives are essentially hellish because living without a relationship with God is as you describe, metaphorically speaking, even if people try to hide it.

I meant both, I reckon, though I admittedly didn't know Hell doesn't happen right after Earthly death. But the absence of God seems to be awful in both realms, of course. Glad to hear back from you! I had a Twix when you first replied, hehe (though I swear I'm not a total fatass).