How to Read the Bible, and Still be a Christian

[Windwalker]

It's fairly easy to read the Bible, and be a Jesus follower.

Not going with your interpretations, though.

Why is that so for you?

 

[wizanda]

I've never heard it put quite so bluntly as, "worthy to exist".

Yeah most people don't study independently; being isolated at school so much, was useful for independent thinking.

before the God who created us destroys us. Shape up boys, daddy's come back with an axe for you!

From the global eschatology the same, what is happening is a reformatting of reality after mankind creates Armageddon soon in the Middle East (Israel Vs Iran aka Babylon), and nearly wipes everything out.

Revelation 11:18 The nations were angry, and your wrath came, as did the time for the dead to be judged, and to give your bondservants the prophets, their reward, as well as to the saints, and those who fear your name, to the small and the great; and to destroy those who destroy the earth.”

God is removing those destroying its creation, and replacing it as it was in the Garden of Eden; certain characters are being tested at a root level to see if they're ravenous predators in any ways.

The literal code of this current reality is breaking down because of this corruption at a root level, so this is being isolated, and removed.

Scripturally it is called removal of the Rephaim (Isaiah 17:4-6)/Tares (Matthew 13:40) at the Harvest; they are anomalies that exist in the raw fabric of reality, that have then crept into the matrix corrupting everything, so they've been Snared to be removed - at the same time as mankind wipes its self out, and then God keeps the enlightened Saints.

The God Most High (El Elyon) comes with 100% maths, not an axe; anything not in alignment with the original mathematics will be replaced, some people are anomalies, not everyone.

Do you get keeping to the Law is a legal requirement for maths checking?...Fair enough Moses was a bit over zealous in places, as are most humans; yet the idea the Master coder of reality requires disciplined algorithms is logic.

Like I'd never had believed I'd be saying something like this; yet having studied some of it across the religious texts in detail, it is too profound not to.

In my opinion.

 

[JJ50]

It was when I started reading the Bible from cover to cover as an older teenager, I realised it had no credibility and I lost my faith.

 

[sojourner]

Yikes!! To see who is worth to exist? Wow. We'd better get our acts together toot sweet then, before the God who created us destroys us. Shape up boys, daddy's come back with an axe for you!

I've never heard it put quite so bluntly as, "worthy to exist". It's a little jarring.

And just ... wrong.

 

[whirlingmerc]

This thread was inspired by another recently posted here called Excuses, Excuses, where it calls out, what I later identified as a typical believer's simple attempt to try to convince themselves through rationalizations to address their own cognitive dissonance when confronted with the stark contradiction of the differing presentations of God within scripture.

For instance from the New Testament,

The Path of Love Jesus

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.​

Vengeful Payback For All Your Wrongs Jesus

His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
....

The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia [180 miles].
...

And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”​

You can find examples of this same irreconcilable difference in character attributed to God throughout the Old Testament books as well. Is God a Jekyll and Hyde with a split personality, one day Absolute Love, Grace, and Forgiveness, and the next day be filled with a lust of absolute destruction of human beings who dare pollute his holy perfection!? These cannot exist together in any experience of reality we can live with, without it cause damage to our minds and souls if we were to be subjected to that from the same person of trust in our lives. Even if they never would do that to us, they would do that to others and that make them a monster, or us a monster for condoning it.

While I don't like to identify as following any particular religion, my background is in Christianity where I first learned the myths and was taught to believe them as literal and factual truths, and that to doubt them was to open yourself to deception of the devil trying to steal your faith from you. Nonetheless, the love for truth that was in my heart compelled me to question these contractory things I was hearing and being presented as a Divine Revelation not to be questioned.

Very, very long story short, after a long time of distancing myself from Christianity and exploring more critical understandings of the world through modern sciences and research, I've taken an interest in what I would call attempting to rescue the Baby from the bathwater. Not everything in Christian faith is this wrath-filled angry God image that should scare the hell out of everyone of us. Those were the bits that really smelled "off" to me. But I clung to as best I could the good bits, like Jesus in the Beatitudes, quoted above, in order to swim in that stream with them for the sake of trying to find myself and grow spirituality. But who the heck is that frightening monster in Revelation? And why did that seem okay to them?

So anyways, I've be reading from a very well respected, at times controversial modern historian and former Catholic monk, John Dominic Crossan. The last book I just finished reading of his is, How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Is God Violent? I found it speak to me as a postmodernist to integralist thinking person, who happens to have a great deal of interior work in my own personal spirituality and faith, as it were. Rationally, and emotionally, I could never except the "excuses", the quasi-rational arguments as justification for accepting such contradictory positions of character. God becomes unpredictable and terrifying, that he could both be the God of Love, and be absolutely amoral at the same time as to be responsible for the atrocities attributed to him by various biblical authors, both Old and New Testaments.

In a quick nutshell, his historical research and cross-disciplinary scholarship takes note of a shift in the various images of God arising at one time under surrounding circumstances set in the ancient Near East, as a Priestly image of God as one of non-violent, distributive justice, where all receive fair share of the bounty, to a radical shift to the Deuteronomic image of God as a violent, God of retributive justice, punishing, threatening, and cursing. He details all the verses and the scholarship behind the authors and their times. The contrast is plain to see, as in the above verses about Jesus I included.

His observation, and I'd call it a very, very good one, is that this swing between the non-violent God of distributive justice, and the violent God retributive justice pulses back and forth in what he terms "the biblical heartbeat". You see this swing of culture everywhere actually, all the way to today. We swing from the progressive, to regressive, to progressive, etc., patterns in cyclical patterns, as we are even today in our social and political climates. That was no different then. And what you see in the Bible, is simply a wonderful collections of writings reflecting those social and cultural swings, that cyclical pattern, that we see today.

I find that view he has unearthed changes the way in which someone who has a connection with the Christian faith, yet finds the image of God portrayed at times both contradictory and genuinely troublesome, that this helps takes away this created mythological image of the Bible as some "single message about God". That "Biblical Inerrancy" claim, is a modern mythology, which is purely a matter of faith without adequate evidential support. People of ancient times would never have thought in those terms. They were never think of these things in the terms we do today, especially those of modern apologists. Trying to use modern reason, to read a collection of mythologies of the various periods of time and place they were birthed out of, as some single roadmap to understanding God, is a deeply flawed, and impossible thing to do.

For those interested, I found this presentation he did about his book from a few years back where he covers these points in greater detail.

Both the New and Old Testament have the love and judgement and God as father of believers, the new brings it into much more clarity

God is long suffering and full of mercy. The gospel offered and if not taken 'it is appointed for man to die once and then comes judgement'. God is not 1 dimensional and if you only emphasize one aspect you might have a caricature of God.

Jesus is consistent with the Old Testament images of the shepherd king God of the Jews who protects but warns in psalm 95 but wipe wipe out unrepentant in psalm 94 or the shepherd of a joyful singing world in psalm 100 but makes the earth quake and tremble in 99.

 

[BilliardsBall]

This thread was inspired by another recently posted here called Excuses, Excuses, where it calls out, what I later identified as a typical believer's simple attempt to try to convince themselves through rationalizations to address their own cognitive dissonance when confronted with the stark contradiction of the differing presentations of God within scripture.

For instance from the New Testament,

The Path of Love Jesus

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.​

Vengeful Payback For All Your Wrongs Jesus

His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
....

The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia [180 miles].
...

And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”​

You can find examples of this same irreconcilable difference in character attributed to God throughout the Old Testament books as well. Is God a Jekyll and Hyde with a split personality, one day Absolute Love, Grace, and Forgiveness, and the next day be filled with a lust of absolute destruction of human beings who dare pollute his holy perfection!? These cannot exist together in any experience of reality we can live with, without it cause damage to our minds and souls if we were to be subjected to that from the same person of trust in our lives. Even if they never would do that to us, they would do that to others and that make them a monster, or us a monster for condoning it.

While I don't like to identify as following any particular religion, my background is in Christianity where I first learned the myths and was taught to believe them as literal and factual truths, and that to doubt them was to open yourself to deception of the devil trying to steal your faith from you. Nonetheless, the love for truth that was in my heart compelled me to question these contractory things I was hearing and being presented as a Divine Revelation not to be questioned.

Very, very long story short, after a long time of distancing myself from Christianity and exploring more critical understandings of the world through modern sciences and research, I've taken an interest in what I would call attempting to rescue the Baby from the bathwater. Not everything in Christian faith is this wrath-filled angry God image that should scare the hell out of everyone of us. Those were the bits that really smelled "off" to me. But I clung to as best I could the good bits, like Jesus in the Beatitudes, quoted above, in order to swim in that stream with them for the sake of trying to find myself and grow spirituality. But who the heck is that frightening monster in Revelation? And why did that seem okay to them?

So anyways, I've be reading from a very well respected, at times controversial modern historian and former Catholic monk, John Dominic Crossan. The last book I just finished reading of his is, How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Is God Violent? I found it speak to me as a postmodernist to integralist thinking person, who happens to have a great deal of interior work in my own personal spirituality and faith, as it were. Rationally, and emotionally, I could never except the "excuses", the quasi-rational arguments as justification for accepting such contradictory positions of character. God becomes unpredictable and terrifying, that he could both be the God of Love, and be absolutely amoral at the same time as to be responsible for the atrocities attributed to him by various biblical authors, both Old and New Testaments.

In a quick nutshell, his historical research and cross-disciplinary scholarship takes note of a shift in the various images of God arising at one time under surrounding circumstances set in the ancient Near East, as a Priestly image of God as one of non-violent, distributive justice, where all receive fair share of the bounty, to a radical shift to the Deuteronomic image of God as a violent, God of retributive justice, punishing, threatening, and cursing. He details all the verses and the scholarship behind the authors and their times. The contrast is plain to see, as in the above verses about Jesus I included.

His observation, and I'd call it a very, very good one, is that this swing between the non-violent God of distributive justice, and the violent God retributive justice pulses back and forth in what he terms "the biblical heartbeat". You see this swing of culture everywhere actually, all the way to today. We swing from the progressive, to regressive, to progressive, etc., patterns in cyclical patterns, as we are even today in our social and political climates. That was no different then. And what you see in the Bible, is simply a wonderful collections of writings reflecting those social and cultural swings, that cyclical pattern, that we see today.

I find that view he has unearthed changes the way in which someone who has a connection with the Christian faith, yet finds the image of God portrayed at times both contradictory and genuinely troublesome, that this helps takes away this created mythological image of the Bible as some "single message about God". That "Biblical Inerrancy" claim, is a modern mythology, which is purely a matter of faith without adequate evidential support. People of ancient times would never have thought in those terms. They were never think of these things in the terms we do today, especially those of modern apologists. Trying to use modern reason, to read a collection of mythologies of the various periods of time and place they were birthed out of, as some single roadmap to understanding God, is a deeply flawed, and impossible thing to do.

For those interested, I found this presentation he did about his book from a few years back where he covers these points in greater detail.

How is it irreconcilable for a being to show love and justice, grace and just punishment, in one being? Humans routinely show all aspects of God's character.

 

[sealchan]

This thread was inspired by another recently posted here called Excuses, Excuses, where it calls out, what I later identified as a typical believer's simple attempt to try to convince themselves through rationalizations to address their own cognitive dissonance when confronted with the stark contradiction of the differing presentations of God within scripture.

For instance from the New Testament,

The Path of Love Jesus

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.​

Vengeful Payback For All Your Wrongs Jesus

His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
....

The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia [180 miles].
...

And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”​

You can find examples of this same irreconcilable difference in character attributed to God throughout the Old Testament books as well. Is God a Jekyll and Hyde with a split personality, one day Absolute Love, Grace, and Forgiveness, and the next day be filled with a lust of absolute destruction of human beings who dare pollute his holy perfection!? These cannot exist together in any experience of reality we can live with, without it cause damage to our minds and souls if we were to be subjected to that from the same person of trust in our lives. Even if they never would do that to us, they would do that to others and that make them a monster, or us a monster for condoning it.

While I don't like to identify as following any particular religion, my background is in Christianity where I first learned the myths and was taught to believe them as literal and factual truths, and that to doubt them was to open yourself to deception of the devil trying to steal your faith from you. Nonetheless, the love for truth that was in my heart compelled me to question these contractory things I was hearing and being presented as a Divine Revelation not to be questioned.

Very, very long story short, after a long time of distancing myself from Christianity and exploring more critical understandings of the world through modern sciences and research, I've taken an interest in what I would call attempting to rescue the Baby from the bathwater. Not everything in Christian faith is this wrath-filled angry God image that should scare the hell out of everyone of us. Those were the bits that really smelled "off" to me. But I clung to as best I could the good bits, like Jesus in the Beatitudes, quoted above, in order to swim in that stream with them for the sake of trying to find myself and grow spirituality. But who the heck is that frightening monster in Revelation? And why did that seem okay to them?

So anyways, I've be reading from a very well respected, at times controversial modern historian and former Catholic monk, John Dominic Crossan. The last book I just finished reading of his is, How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Is God Violent? I found it speak to me as a postmodernist to integralist thinking person, who happens to have a great deal of interior work in my own personal spirituality and faith, as it were. Rationally, and emotionally, I could never except the "excuses", the quasi-rational arguments as justification for accepting such contradictory positions of character. God becomes unpredictable and terrifying, that he could both be the God of Love, and be absolutely amoral at the same time as to be responsible for the atrocities attributed to him by various biblical authors, both Old and New Testaments.

In a quick nutshell, his historical research and cross-disciplinary scholarship takes note of a shift in the various images of God arising at one time under surrounding circumstances set in the ancient Near East, as a Priestly image of God as one of non-violent, distributive justice, where all receive fair share of the bounty, to a radical shift to the Deuteronomic image of God as a violent, God of retributive justice, punishing, threatening, and cursing. He details all the verses and the scholarship behind the authors and their times. The contrast is plain to see, as in the above verses about Jesus I included.

His observation, and I'd call it a very, very good one, is that this swing between the non-violent God of distributive justice, and the violent God retributive justice pulses back and forth in what he terms "the biblical heartbeat". You see this swing of culture everywhere actually, all the way to today. We swing from the progressive, to regressive, to progressive, etc., patterns in cyclical patterns, as we are even today in our social and political climates. That was no different then. And what you see in the Bible, is simply a wonderful collections of writings reflecting those social and cultural swings, that cyclical pattern, that we see today.

I find that view he has unearthed changes the way in which someone who has a connection with the Christian faith, yet finds the image of God portrayed at times both contradictory and genuinely troublesome, that this helps takes away this created mythological image of the Bible as some "single message about God". That "Biblical Inerrancy" claim, is a modern mythology, which is purely a matter of faith without adequate evidential support. People of ancient times would never have thought in those terms. They were never think of these things in the terms we do today, especially those of modern apologists. Trying to use modern reason, to read a collection of mythologies of the various periods of time and place they were birthed out of, as some single roadmap to understanding God, is a deeply flawed, and impossible thing to do.

For those interested, I found this presentation he did about his book from a few years back where he covers these points in greater detail.

Cultures swing back and forth through times of relative safety...I see the angry God as a God of a people abused by other nations. The loving God may have come from a time when conquest was a more distant memory or a foregone conclusion and relative peace and stability were in place. Then again there may be different authors living at the same time with different attitudes. I could imagine a Roman citizen like Paul having one attitude while a Jew who felt the suffering of his people's ability to worship under Rome might have another perspective.

Certainly the Bible was written by human beings. God, as a psychological reality, inspired those writings as did the author's influences from previous writings both within and outside of the Jewish tradition.

 

[Windwalker]

Both the New and Old Testament have the love and judgement and God as father of believers, the new brings it into much more clarity

Yes, both the Old and New Testaments have both the God of Love, and the contradictory God of Vengeance present in them. That is what this thread examines. Why are these incompatible visions of God and Jesus in the Bible?

It can't be because we are talking about a single vision of God, because we would not accept this as normal or healthy behaviors for us as moral agents made in the image of God. Is God a Jekyll and Hyde with a multiple personality, showing both loving kindness, and terrifying viciousness? Does he show love to some, and rageful hatred to others?

If so, what does this say of the character, or stability of such a creature? It is a contradictory image, that I for one find disturbing as hell if true. I've lived with a mentally ill person who acted like this. Psychologically and emotionally healthy people do not swing to extremes like this. Is God mentally ill?

God is long suffering and full of mercy. The gospel offered and if not taken 'it is appointed for man to die once and then comes judgement'. God is not 1 dimensional and if you only emphasize one aspect you might have a caricature of God.

I'm not suggesting God is one dimensional by any means. I am saying that the God of Vengeance, is a flat contradiction to the God of Love. Are saying you saying we should see God as both God and the Devil in one Person?

Jesus is consistent with the Old Testament images of the shepherd king God of the Jews who protects but warns in psalm 95 but wipe wipe out unrepentant in psalm 94 or the shepherd of a joyful singing world in psalm 100 but makes the earth quake and tremble in 99.

No, the image of Jesus is not consistent with itself in the NT, and the image of God is not consistent with itself in the OT. Both images of God are present in both, and they are contradictory images. They cannot be reconciled, without distorting God into some unstable, mentally ill deity in order to reconcile these contractions.

 

[Windwalker]

How is it irreconcilable for a being to show love and justice, grace and just punishment, in one being? Humans routinely show all aspects of God's character.

Then why does Jesus guide us to say no to those violent, destructive aspects of our self, if we are to then celebrate it in God as "just"? Is vengeance and slaughter one of the Fruits of the Spirit? It should be, if we consider it to be of God, shouldn't it?

Did Jesus call us to seek the destruction of the "enemy", or to do good to them, and to rise above hatred and revenge in ourselves, to take the higher road, to resist violence, to bear the fruits of the Spirit, which does not list violence as one of them?

Why would he condemn those who take up the sword, if his own is dipped in the blood of his enemies with his white robes drenched in their blood? Why would he pray to forgive them, and then turn around and slaughter them? Why would he teach us to be nonviolent, if the violence in God is to be considered good?

None of that would make any sense, on any level, unless God is psychologically unstable. Do you think soaking your clothing in the spilt blood of others is showing the Love of God in your life to others? Did Jesus teach, "Do as I say, not as I do?"

And yes, Jesus does certainly teach about justice. But if you read the OP, you will see listed two different, and contradictory ideas of justice. The first, is non-violent distributive justice, and the other is violent retributive justice. I follow the former, as the latter is a contradiction to the former.

 

[sojourner]

I hear what you're saying here, and I am somewhat in agreement, but it's not that simple. Yes, there is an evolving understanding of God, but there is also running right along side that track the cycle of pull and push, affirm and deny all the way up the levels of development. That push/pull or affirm/deny is also seen in the NT, as it is seen in the OT.

The Priestly vision all the way back in the book of Genesis, echos that transcendent world, that "kingdom of God" Jesus spoke of. And just as you have that nightmare vision of Jesus Christ in the book of Revelation, you also have the transcendent vision of God in the Old Testament, right alongside that spiteful and vengeful deity of the Deuteronomic vision, as well as later the terror of Jehovah mirroring that vicious Assyrian god Ashur.

So both of these faces of God, these projections of what God is like seen through different eyes and different time, within the overall general stage of human development from the early archaic and magic forms of religion, to the mythic stages found in earliest stratas, to the more universal, cosmopolitan God of a more evolved culture in an empiric Roman world.

It's helped me to understanding that it's not just the OT God is the God of Vengeance and Violence, but there is also the "Gentle Jesus" image of God back then too. We just imagine Jesus changed all that. But if we read the book of Revelation... guess who's back again? That projection of Ultimate Reality as imagined in God, reflects existentially human's confrontation with the Infinite. Both faces of God do. One is the face of terror, and the other the face of love and peace.

It's really helping me to put things into perspective like this for myself.

This is the best response on this thread.The fundies come out with this literalistic claptrap that completely undermines the theological depth of the mythic nature of the texts. Then the atheists come along and dismiss the texts, poking fun at the fundies for their literalism, all while taking the texts literalistically too.

The problem is that with this back-and-forth “Nuh-uh! — Ya-huh!” argument that barely skims the surface of what’s really going on in the texts, the real theology that’s honest, that serves a real purpose in human enrichment, is completely ignored in some sandbox bid for “who’s right.”

It’s precisely this push/pull paradigm you so thoughtfully have brought to our attention that forms the basis for the texts’ theological efficacy (and successfully rebuts the stance of the OP). This is how we doubt. This is how we question. This is how we push ourselves and expand our vision. None of this is about “providing answers to life’s questions.” It’s not about “God’s ‘Moral Instruction Book.’” It’s about providing space for us to really explore our deepest longings and question the stances we have taken that have become implacable blockades to any further growth.

 

[pearl]

Very, very long story short, after a long time of distancing myself from Christianity and exploring more critical understandings of the world through modern sciences and research, I've taken an interest in what I would call attempting to rescue the Baby from the bathwater

Welcome to historical critical methodology in renewing your understanding of Scripture. There has been an explosion of critical scholarship, do not confine yourself to one exegete, look for a consensus among notable scholars as opposed to apologists. You will read/hear Scripture with a reconciled faith and knowledge.

 

[Windwalker]

Cultures swing back and forth through times of relative safety...I see the angry God as a God of a people abused by other nations.

Yes. Crossan goes into this in some detail in his book this thread is titled after. The Deuteronomic tradition in the OT is born out of the Northern Kingdom under the thumb and rule of Assyrian tyranny. Jehovah takes on the same characteristics of the god Ashur which is a very viciously violent deity. And the style of the Covenants, which originally were fashioned after the Hittite Kings in a more inviting relationship, to the Assyrian style covenants which were more threatening, "Do this or be cursed without mercy" form.

The loving God may have come from a time when conquest was a more distant memory or a foregone conclusion and relative peace and stability were in place. Then again there may be different authors living at the same time with different attitudes. I could imagine a Roman citizen like Paul having one attitude while a Jew who felt the suffering of his people's ability to worship under Rome might have another perspective.

That is very true, and as already indicated you see that very thing in the Deuteronomic tradition coming out of the Northern Kingdoms, as opposed to the Priestly traditions. Paul's vision of the kingdom of God was far less hierarchical than you find in the Jerusalem vision.

Certainly the Bible was written by human beings. God, as a psychological reality, inspired those writings as did the author's influences from previous writings both within and outside of the Jewish tradition.

Where I take this a little further is that images of God that shift around in the Bible like this reflect the human push and pull against the divine pull. The Divine is all about persuasion, and never force. But the world human system is about force.

As we surrender to the ways of God, we go with the flow, so to speak. When we draw back into trying to control the situation, we exercise force to make that happen. There is a great deal that can be said here. This is quickly revealed to anyone who practices meditation. The Spirit guides, if we surrender control. But the human mind, the egoic mind, seeks to protect itself, to defend itself, to gain for itself through the force of the will pushing for the desired goal held in mind. (Why a key component of a good meditation practice is to let go of any mental expectations of outcome).

You can see this entire dilema on display in the Bible, with the projected image of God being displayed, reflects that mentality of Force over Persuasion, or actual Power. Power vs. Force is a better descriptor, as true Power is invitational. It never forces itself. It is like Yin/Yang this way, where Yin is passive and does not force itself to overcome Yang's force. Rather it invites for Yang to empty itself in it it, into Ground. It then becomes the Source out of which creation springs forth through Yang or force. The balance of these in ourselves results in true power in the world, as opposed to the egoically guided summoning of force to get what it wants. It is the spiritual Will that ground and centers both of these in ourselves, and gains access to true Power through surrender of the ego to Spirit, or God, or the Tao.

That's interesting as I'm typing this line of thought out here. It is that natural cycle we are seeing here in this "biblical heartbeat" that Crossan termed. When Yang settles back, then Yin or Spirit can be heard inviting to surrender to the Way, as opposed to fighting your way into peace. Sorry if this is a little stream of conscious here, but I've been exploring the deeper aspects of the Taijiquan form that I practice daily as meditation, and I'm seeing certain threads of realization crossing over several different symbolic systems here. I'm jumping language systems here, and introducing confusion.

There is definitely a lot here to explore for quite some years yet to come for me. It creates a very cool metalayer image of what goes on at a cosmic habits level. I tend to see the world in these emerging bigger picture views as systems, and systems within systems, and the unitive whole aspects. Rather than get stuck at arguing exactly which hue of blue this strip of paint is colored, as if that will resolve the grand answer to life itself. It all relates and moves as a Whole.

 

[sojourner]

Thank you. There was a post @Sunstone had posted recently about there being more challenging, or some other word he used posts than the typical fundamentalist bouncy balls we see all the time. And this is something that I've been processing personally after finding myself drawn to him, as his thinking is more than just academic scholarship, but it reflects of vision of the world as I've seen it, looking through the more integral spiritual frameworks, rooted and grounded in deep personal experience.

Why aren't discussions like this being had, rather than rehashing that the earth can't possibly be 6000 years old, drivel nonsense? That's child's play, there are serious other views that people who don't think of these things as challenges to modern knowledge and intellectual integrity, have in their understanding of longstanding faith traditions. "That's can't possibly be real", is what a child argues with his friend who is making some claim of seeing a magic toad in the forest. The subject of God and existence, is far, far, far, far, more deep and involved than that very limited range of understanding.

Behind all the masks and myths we create, there is Truth that lives in everyone of us. And that is that existential Core, which connects us with Life itself. So to begin to understand that all of it, all our words, all our images we project from ourselves on the screen of the Infinite, are all coming from that same Core, I can hear that soul of ancient times reaching out with that same existential longing as me today. Time is irrelevant. Words are irrelevant. It is the longing to connect to the Source which gives us existence that is present in everything we do, no matter our languages, or our mythologies.

It's nice for me to be able to legitimately embrace and identify with the teachings of scripture which do resonate with me still, without this "how the hell can there be that other stuff in there" contradictory face of God confusion. But even respecting its presence is important in understanding that both the fallibility of us as humans projected on to God, see God as the ultimate expression of human culture (half the bible), and as the ultimate expression of our existential desire for Unity with the Divine, "on earth as in heaven". It's that same push pull within all of us, moving from our spiritual core, to the world system. And that makes it a valuable book, if viewed this way.

I take back what I said in my last post. This one is the best response on this thread.

What aren’t discussions like this one being had, rather than this sandbox “Nuh-uh/Yah-huh!” argument? What the atheist naysayers are missing (and I’ve had this discussion before with one of my best friends who’s an atheist) is precisely what you mention here: the search for meaning in our existential core.

John Philip Newell is one of my favorite authors/theologians. He says that “there is a tune deep within the human soul that we are being invited to remember.” I like that; it sounds very nice — and I think it’s true. But it goes beyond being just “something nice.” It fundamentally gets to the heart of humanity. We do have (as you say) that “existential longing” that comes from the “same core.” Newell calls it “the one heartbeat of God.” and the “push/pull” you mentioned in your other post is precisely the forest of theological implications we place upon ourselves that we have to travel through in order to even be able to perceive the “one heartbeat.”

We have to peel back layers of hate, fear, shame, avarice, violence, greed, ego, etc. to access that “core.” The mythic stories of God asking for murder, killing babies, destroying the earth, striking people dead, causing famine, are just that: mythic stories we tell about God that showcase our own propensities toward these horrors. The stories hold them up before us so we can see them in a theological way that helps us in our existential search. Because, in the end, the theological process is one of creating a way of perceiving our own divinity. we have to make our way through our physical bodies, our emotions, our wants, needs and wishes, in order to come to an understanding of our “Christ consciousness,” and, finally, our core will-toward-being. The Bible isn’t the be-all-end-all of “God’s message to us.” Rather, it’s our process of finding our selves through all the crap we’ve created to surround ourselves with. At least, that’s how I see it.


To bring this around finally to the OP, the poster is taking the stories way too literalistically. The problem isn’t the Bible (I said that in another post, which was roundly dismissed). The problem is how we misapprehension and misuse the Bible. We have to weigh the texts — that is, find the treasures of wisdom amongst the thorns (and many times the thorns, themselves are treasures of wisdom when they point to our own darker side). We see ourselves within the gruesome texts, and we have to make our way through that to get to the selves we want to see — the beings we wish to become — the ones who are kind, gentle, forbearing, courageous, peaceful, forgiving, honest, and whole. To just dismiss the texts because they don’t meet with the sensibilities of one’s “approval” is to sell them short for the good they can do us. Similarly, to sell them short as very surface “Words of God” is also to do them an injustice.

No, we don’t have to follow Levitican Law to the letter in order to become good people. But if we’re willing to seek the deeper meaning, I think those meanings can lead us to enlightenment and wholeness.

 

[Muffled]

According to Charles Caldwell Ryrie I summarize:

1. Understand the words (sometimes this requires understanding the Hebew or Greek)

2 Understand what the paragraph is talking about (local context)

3. Correlate with the rest of scripture (context determines whether things correlate or not)

4. Be guided by the Holy Spirit

 

[Muffled]

Why would we? It’s scholastic, it’s unbiased, it’s analytical. What more do you want? Your infantile method of “interpretation” where the Bible is concerned is not Carte Blanche for you to sit in judgment of more considered opinions.

I believe often schools teach things as true whether they are or not.

I believe only God is unbiased and everyone else is.

I believe that almost sounds reasonable except that all kinds of errors may arise from doing so.

 

[pearl]

So anyways, I've be reading from a very well respected, at times controversial modern historian and former Catholic monk, John Dominic Crossan.

You might also enjoy this;
SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals

'Anti-Semitism and the Cry of “All the People” (MT 27:25) ', it is an analysis on an article by Crossan, 'Anti Semitism and the Gospel'.

 

[Muffled]

When you read the bible you're supposed to process it with your heart, not your mind.
Your heart has to be purified by Jesus' blood through forgiveness first, though.
Don't think, feel. Trying to understand/question god opens oneself to satan's manipulation.

I believe if the heart is right the mind should follow suit.

 

[Muffled]

No, we really can't summarize that way. Not even remotely. It's with eyes, and mind, wide open, taking in as much knowledge and information as we can, rather than swallowing a prepackaged mythology whole. We're living in the 21st century, not the 12th.

I believe the 21st century has plenty of myths. I am glad the Bible isn't mythology.

 

[Muffled]

Yikes!! To see who is worth to exist? Wow. We'd better get our acts together toot sweet then, before the God who created us destroys us. Shape up boys, daddy's come back with an axe for you!

I've never heard it put quite so bluntly as, "worthy to exist". It's a little jarring.

I believe I can't say that it is Biblical concept. God loves everyone so He must consider everyone worthy of existence. If yo need a verse for that try John 3:16.

 

[pearl]

And yes, I do listen with my heart, but I also engage my mind, rather than suppress it in the misguided name of faith.

A believing knowledge and a knowing faith. They do not have to contradict one another.