Agreed. I mentioned it as debt you can't repay to stress that it's just not something we can ever "fix," but admittedly don't have a better term. Perhaps ransom.
I kind of liken it to needing to be perfect, but we can't be. Ever. Like it would throw the balance off of God and defy His own logical function, hence our need to be purified by Christ first. But this is just how I see things in my head to make sense of it, it's not based on anything I've read since I haven't read much.
I didn't bring this up in my last post, but one Christian view of the goal of human existence is deification, or theosis. That our purpose as humans is to become like God, so far as that's possible. We don't literally become gods, of course, but we reflect God's love and holiness. It's impossible to completely achieve that, but to progress in it should be taken as encouragement, not despair at chasing an unobtainable goal.
The fall of man undoubtedly changed the path to that goal in the sense that we now need redemption first, although it's hard to say what it might have looked like otherwise. Would Jesus have incarnated and been received with open arms? Would there have needed to be an incarnation at all if communion was never broken? Impossible to know.
Same! Since I was a really young kid, before I thought much about the afterlife, I always just assume that was a real thing. I used to call it my "life movie" and I would all my good moments, including bad, people I hurt, etc. Just the full curtain reveal. I didn't know they were such a staple in NDEs.
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.
If God is all there is, I think even if we were in hell, we would be a part of him in some way, right? But I agree with you, or at least I hope we are correct in that God wouldn't give up on us. I feel like it might just be harder to get back to him if we are shutting him out. But I also think God can see what's in our hearts and doesn't want to give up on us.
I don't know if I'd say that humans are part of God, exactly. I'd caution against pantheism, that we're fragments of a divine whole. That's much more of an eastern belief than a Christian one. Rather I would say that God is present everywhere, and in humans most of all. Whether God is present in hell... is tricky. It depends what you think hell is. I'll offer two possibilities.
The first is something like CS Lewis said, the doors of hell are locked from the inside. That hell is a place or state that people end up in by running from God. They may, in some limited sense, be shielded from him. I don't think it's blasphemous to say that God's presence is weaker or more filtered at some times or places. The Bible says quite clearly that the earth will some day be even more full of God's glory, telling us that we haven't seen it all yet. So hell may be something like that.
It may also be that heaven and hell are the same thing: The unfiltered presence of God. A preacher once said that heaven would be hell to an irreligious man. Hell may be trying to escape that but being unable to.
Maybe we just respawn down here, which is the purgatory, until we make it clear we want to rejoin him.
There's a pretty strong consensus against reincarnation in Christian history. I see no indications in the Bible that it's true, and a lot that it isn't. I've found a lot of people view earth of some sort of training ground for heaven, and I used to think the same thing, but I've really come to reject that.
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.
I sure hope so. If God is there, I don't want to reject him. At the very least, Jesus was a really rad dude you'd want as a neighbor. I like how Christianity's God in fleshy form is just an all-around awesome dude.
I heard the tale of Jesus and the adulteress was apocryphal and added later, but I like it. It's a good lesson. I also heard the missing body in the tomb was also apocryphal, but didn't Christ appear to some of the disciples after? And they were executed while still maintaining Christ had come to them.
The story of the woman caught in adultery is probably apocryphal, and the main reason that's the consensus is that it keeps moving around in early manuscripts. This is a hallmark of something added to the text later. There's some thought that it MAY be unused material from Luke, but that's pretty far from certain.
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.
Jesus certainly appeared to the disciples as well, in a sense that they didn't take to be a spirit or a hallucination. They knew all about visions and visitations from the recent dead, things that are common even today. They knew the difference between those and having a full conversation with a man who was tortured to death, but could now be mistaken for a gardener or a traveler. Sometimes they recognized him, sometimes they didn't. He could eat food, but he could pass through locked doors. This is all extremely strange, and not the kind of thing you would expect if they were trying to concoct a believable story.
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.
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.
Hmm, interesting. I will have to read more about the ransom theory. That sounds like Archons or Demiurge stuff or something.
Are the powers of darkness spiritual or our own creation, like simply referring to us as fallen and needing to be saved?
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. It would include Satan, The Accuser, once a powerful servant of God who later turned against him. (A lot of what we "know" about angels and demons comes from Paradise Lost, not the Bible, but angels and demons are certainly IN the Bible.) It would include humans who are hostile toward God, who oppress other humans, who abuse money, sex, and power for their own ends. It might even include properties of the fallen cosmos like entropy, since that leads to evil things like sickness and death. And if there are any other so-called gods, which is deeply unclear, they're rebels and usurpers.
I would not include the Demiurge or any sort of Gnostic concepts in that. Again, the physical world is a real, good thing, though fallen. God created the physical world, including embodied humans, and saw that it was good. We should think about the earth being restored, not destroyed or escaped.
I wonder if it's like some tipping point thing. After the flood, God promised to not do that again or what? Because I feel like as an American, we aren't giving him many reasons not to nuke the joint. When a nation can't defend it's women (a woman is whoever she says she is), and they don't defend the weakest, most innocent among us (just a "clump of cells"), and we aren't even defending our borders (no human is illegal, except the unborn, I guess), it's like damn, that seems to be a total rejection of Him.
The first three major stories of the Bible (Eden, the Flood, Babel) are extremely complicated. They have strong parallels in pagan mythology that existed alongside Judaism. That's not to say the Jews "stole" those stories for the Old Testament, but rather they were providing a different set of answers to the same questions that were present in their world. But the promise of not flooding the earth seems to be a promise that God would never return the world to primordial chaos. The final judgment will be something quite different.
Sometimes a people's (or individual's) sin becomes so great that God passes judgment on it in this world, either directly or through human instruments. More often he lets us suffer the consequences of our own actions. We tell God that we don't want to live in the way that he created us to live, and he says "have it your way".
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.
I think Bryce added some details that aren't totally accurate, but the main point still comes off: Christ was flesh and was severely and brutally beaten, eventually dying an agonizing death. I like his conviction about how for the longest time he didn't know Him, but now he does and nothing is the same.
It's been a while since I looked into the mechanics of crucifixion, but the broad strokes of a horrific death are right.
This is what I would dispute: Jesus wasn't crucified for healing people. The Romans didn't crucify people for healings. They crucified political rebels, basically the modern equivalent of terrorists. (Not exclusively, but especially.) Jesus didn't get executed because he had a message about being vaguely nice to people and escaping to heaven someday, the authorities wouldn't have cared about that.
Jesus declared himself to be the new Temple, the bridge between man and God that was then occupied by the Jewish preisthood. This was seen as a challenge to their authority, and if false, certainly WAS the highest form of blashpemy. Who can fogive sins but God alone? The Jewish leadership sought to kill him, and pawned him off to the Romans to keep their hands clean. They told Pilate he had declared himself a king, and Jesus had to explain what he meant by that. Pilate didn't particularly care about this new religion as long as it didn't challenge the state, 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.
