IOW, Jesus was the greatest and final sacrificial lamb?Because only the offering of a God can atone for perfect love, trust, obedience, gratitude and glory that humans owe to God. This is all that God desires of them.
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IOW, Jesus was the greatest and final sacrificial lamb?Because only the offering of a God can atone for perfect love, trust, obedience, gratitude and glory that humans owe to God. This is all that God desires of them.
We believe so.IOW, Jesus was the greatest and final sacrificial lamb?
And with that we arrive at one of the major stumbling blocks between Christianity and me.We believe so.
I suppose that depends on what you think "hell" means. I don't think it's a place of eternal punishment. I think it's a state of being in which those who have not embraced the eternal life that is theirs, exist in a state of death. But I don't think that mortal death is the "last call for Jesus." I think God waits for us until.Soj,
I'm not sure if you are denying the existance of Hell or embracing it...
Unless I'm misundertanding you, you seem to be accepting that Hell exist but that this place is not eternal, but rather temporary. That right?
I agree with you, and this is a beautiful statement. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with the word "atone," though.I know you were asking Joe, but for catholics (and most Christians I'd say) it's not necessarily the death on the cross but just the fact that he died that makes it possible for humanity to be in a perfect relationship with God. Why? Because only the offering of a God can atone for perfect love, trust, obedience, gratitude and glory that humans owe to God. This is all that God desires of them.
The theology only becomes convoluted like this when one accepts the concept of "substitutionary atonement." I don't think the cross was penal in nature.A God who, at the prospect of leaving the guilty unpunished, would inflict unthinkable suffering on the one being in all of existence who is truly innocent sounds to me to be almost infinitely unjust.
What would you think of a mortal judge who, in the course of a capital case, declared "I don't care who I send to the chair, but somebody's gonna fry!"? Does this become any more just when the magnitude is increase many billion-fold?
IMO, this concept is common to most of the denominations that I'm personally familiar with; what other teachings are out there? Would you say that Jesus was necessary for salvation at all?The theology only becomes convoluted like this when one accepts the concept of "substitutionary atonement." I don't think the cross was penal in nature.
IMO, this concept is common to most of the denominations that I'm personally familiar with; what other teachings are out there? Would you say that Jesus was necessary for salvation at all?
IOW, since God became a human, God knows better what it's like to be human and can hence understand humanity and its failings better?Try the Orthodox, for one. Try the Episcopalians for another.
Yes. Jesus was necessary for salvation, because Jesus was God Incarnate. God became one of us, thereby reconciling us to God's self.
Some Protestant, but mostly Catholicism, though many of the Catholics I know aren't that up on their theology.Most of the denominations you're probably familiar with are Protestant, who subscribe to the "classic" Protestant theology, which is rooted in the substitutionary atonement.
Who's "us"? Episcopalians, perhaps, particularly the universalist ones...but not for the authors of the Creed itself in the early Church.I disagree with your last statement. I don't think it's being dishonest with the text. I think it further clarifies the text. "Hell" is such an emotionally-loaded term for us.
What emotion? No more emotion than "heaven"...should we eliminate that term?using "the dead" instead of "hell" takes the emotional baggage off of a theological statement, so that it is not clouded by the emotion.
I see your point, but to me it's just side-stepping the obvious. You are a universalist (or so it seems), and thus you cannot fathom in your theological framework a place of everlasting conscious punishment, and thus when you discover things like "Hell" in early Christian writings, you radically re-interpret them.Who goes to hell? Sinners. Vile, unrepentent, disagreeable, nasty, evil people. At least, that's what we've been taught to think. And only good people go to heaven. But That's not the truth. The truth is that sinners go to hell and sinners go to heaven. All of us are sinners. No one is good, but God. The concept of hell is that it is really a place for "the dead." Heaven is a place for "the living." So, rather than saying that Jesus went to hell to release vile, nasty people, we say that Jesus went to bring life to the dead. Which makes a whole lot more sense to me, and is a more theologicallt solid statement to make
That doesn't really answer the question though. All you've done is repeated the "what" of salvation, which you've done dozens of times before.
The question is how does a person being nailed to a cross actually accomplish this feat of salvation? Magic blood? Just because God says so?