Christianity and the End Times

You Brits make me sad when I remember the great Christian leaders you once produced. I've listed them before but when I hear all this debunkery of what they taught and believed I want to list them all again. For all I know you haven't even heard of half of them, but as I was becoming a Christian I read a lot of them or at least read their biographies.John Wycliffe
William Tyndale
The King James Bible translators, all of them immense scholars and Christians
John Newton
William Cowper
George Herbert
William Wilberforce
John Owen
Thomas Boston and a dozen other great Puritan teachers
John Wesley
Charles Wesley
George Whitefield
J C Ryle
Martyn Lloyd Jones
John Bunyan
John Gill
Hudson Taylor
William CareyJust a few off the top of my head. Others will come to me I'm sure
abe: Cromwell
Latimer
Ridley
Cranmer
Gladys Aylward
Amy Carmichael
John Knox
Charles Spurgeon How did I forget him?
/abeJust a bunch suffering from glorious self deception according to you I guess.Of course you've also got
Charles Darwin
Aldous Huxley
Bertrand Russell
A bunch of nonChristian poets
The Beatles
The Rolling StonesEdited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

My list is of people who share a theology, and again I doubt you are familiar with even half of them, or read any of them at all. However, the Catholic Lord Acton had some valuable things to say. And G.K. Chesterton too.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As you go on to say Jesus was no FALLIBLE human being, he was the only perfectly sinless human being since Adam and Eve prior to the Fall. He did not inherit the sin of the Fall since He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. He was therefore a sinless man. Capable of being tempted by the sin that tempts all of us but strong enough to resist it. True, we're all fallen, and all it takes is one little sin to send us to Hell because God is holy and cannot have sin in His presence. Jesus had to be perfectly sinless in order to qualify to be the Mediator between humanity and God, whose death could pay for our sins. He had to be "without blemish" as the animals were required to be that were sacrificed for the sins of the people in Old Testament Israel. One sin would have disqualified Him. That argument is utterly unscriptural. What I say above can be documented in scripture.;Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This hits me as a bizarrre non sequitur. What ARE you trying to say?If you were at all familiar with any of those on my list I don't see how you could keep up this nonsense. It is so strange to see what you unbelievers come up with about something I've spent years studying and know to be amazingly consistent and full of complex layers of meaning. "Nothing else to go on?" You really have no idea what you are talking about. You decided some time or other that all religion is false I guess and you've got yourself so convinced of that you just continue to say stuff that fits with tht assumption and can't seem to take in any contrary information.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What utterly ridiculous nonsense. Evidence you've never spent half a minute familiarizing yourself with it or those who know it best -- or that you are delusional. And of course you say nothing about whether you've read even half a page of any of those I listed as the illustrious Christians of the UK's past. Such soberminded highly intelligent people who treat the Bible as God's word could give you a different perspective if you spent any time getting to know them. That's an odd thing to say since it wouldn't be true of any book whatever let alone the supernatural work known as the Bible. All the names on my list agree on the basics about the Bible. And you are apparently ignorant of history as well as the Bible.

Because he rejects parts of the Bible he doesn't like, quite willing to make up his own version of Christianity from the parts he likes. Tradition and dogma mean nothing to him; whereas I regard the Bible as God's word and seek to learn what it asks of me without imposing my own will on it. As do all those on that list I made for you.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The definition of a follower of Christ is a sheep. You have a strange habit of reversing everything Christian and getting it completely backwards. Willfully obviously.

First, what sin is it that nobody has committed? Original sin? But we don't need to make that much of original sin since having that propensity in us means we all sin all the time every day anyway and need atonement for our own personal sins.You've made this statement a number of times and it's such a strange misrepresentation of the Christian doctrine I have to answer. God the Father allowed His Son to be put to death. He didn't kill Him and the Son didn't kill Himself. Four thousand years of animal sacrifice should have set the stage for it, as also did the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. These were all pictures of what the OT teaches over and over again: sin cannot be atoned for except by blood sacrifice, and animal sacrifice won't really do it, that was all just a picture of how costly the sacrifices must be. The true sacrifice must be human, and the victim must be perfect and unblemished -- all this pictured in the laws of sacrifice too. And the sacrifice of Jesus Himself is spelled out in the Letter to the Hebrews in particular as well.He gave Himself for the role, but He did not kill Himself. And though He is God He is one of the three Persons who are all God, so that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all God but all separate Persons with separate roles though the same mind.I know it's all fiction to you no matter what, but if you're going to try to say something meaningful about what Christians think you should at least try to get it right.So sacrifice of a HUMAN BEING was necessary for the remission of our sins, and the only one who could qualify for that role was a perfect sinless human being and the only one who could be perfect and sinless was the Son of God.Thank you for your careful attention to these things."Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes original sin is foundational and jesus would have died only for that but the fact is that we all sin personally all the time BECAUSE we inherit original sin. So you can't get away with saying he died for a sin nobody committed. Even original sin we commit because we inherit its guilt and its consequences, but I want to make it easier for you so I emphasize that we all sin personally anyway.I'll accept that God did the killing because I wouldn't be a good Calvinist if I didn't, and I should have said so before, so the problem here is getting across the Trinity. You have to recognize that the Godhead is one but there are Three Persons who all share in the attiributes of God so that the Son does in fact act independently of the Father and the Holy Spirit acts independently of Father and Son, all three nevertheless being God as to attributes.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The weird thing is that you think we are inventing all this bloodshed though a brief glance at the history of the world -- not to mention the daily headlines, and what is going on everywhere else on the planet -- should show you that it is endemic to the human race that people kill each other all the time for all kinds of reasons. So here comes God giving us a way out of it and instead of thanking Him you accuse Him of inventing all that which is simply what fallen human nature does. ONE sacrifice to save us all and you impute all the bloodshed in the world to the one who would save us from it.And you think somehow it's all ended in modern times? That is maybe the most dangerous thing people think these days. Well, not just maybe, that is a very dangerous delusion. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I really shouldn't bother to answer such silliness but oh well.They are all three omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. They all inhabit all space everywhere, they all know everything past present and future, they all have power over all things. And they are all INVISIBLE. Until Jesus became incarnate as a human being none of them has a physical body. Now He does and it is His link to us, and the reason He can save us. No angel could save us, it had to be someone human like us. But as to His attributes as God He is invisible as well as omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. All the perfections of love, wisdom, mercy, goodness, justice etc etc etc belong to God. They are really beyond our ability to imagine so trying to explain it is going to miss by light years.Did Jesus shave? I don't know. Maybe he trimmed his beard.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Time for me to take a break, probably a nap too, because I missed the whole problem here. GOD CAN'T DIE. So God can't "kill himself" anyway. The Son of God can't die, but Jesus the Man could, at least He could after accepting all our sins as His own burden, though as sinless in Himself He couldn't die then either. But carrying our sins in His human body He died for us, was killed for us or whatever. But as God, no, God cannot die.Nap time.

I was making the simple point that the reason blood is prominent in the Bible has nothing to do with some particular love of bloodshed in the Bible but with the sad fact that bloodshed is simply what the human race does. Forget the Bible, forget Christianity, you've still got a whole world with a long history of war and murder. I dread hearing what your plan for this change might be. You have no sense of fallen human nature for starters, and a Leftist madness on top of it.And as a matter of fact in the West we've gone far in that direction in the formation of western socieities with liberty and justice for all. And a lot of that came out of the influence of Christianity. In fact without Christianity, whatever other influences may have been involved, this kind of society could not have existed at all. And this has been achieved in western societies to a phenomenal extent, again mostly because of our Christian heritage, and our capitalistic system which encourages individual creativity and enterprise and eventually brought about the wealthiest nation in the world with the wealthiest poor class.If the Left would stop trying to change things to fit their crazy utopian theories that only lead to murder, mayhem, a tyrannical ruling class and extreme poverty for everybody else, and pursue the same strategies that have always worked, with small tweaks where necessary, it would only get better, but if the Left has their way we'll all be poor again.And America also does a lot to help other countries. Unfortunately if they are not somehow led to form the kind of government that made the difference for us they will not be able to overcome their poverty. Socialist governments pit a tyrannical rulling class against the people and guarantee equal poverty for all below that class. Where do you plan to do this? We already have those things here so all you could accomplish with a Leftist version would be to undo it all. As I said, if you want to help the rest of the world you have to get them to choose to form a government on our model. I don't think that's going to be easy to accomplish. And you aren't even thinking of that, are you? You've got the usual failed Leftist utopian nightmares in mind which you are all cramming down our throats at every opportunity.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The idea that there is any violence in Christianity is so insane I think you must have spent your life in some weird kind of indoctrination cult. Where do you get such an insane idea?

Yes I did say it wrong before, not thinking. Jesus was goth God and Man but He could only die as Man. But the other statement about God doing the killing wasn't wrong, it's just that God can't be killed, only the Man Jesus could be killed. And scripture says in separate places that God did it and that Jesus Himself laid down His own life.I'm not at all confused. Jesus is both God and Man and that is standard Christian theology. We don't have to understand how things like that are possible, God is beyond our comprehension, but scripture is clear that it is the case so we know it is the case. Scripture contains the descriptions we rely on.Yes I know you think you are smarter than God, but it all hangs together if you bother to learn about it. The fact is that death is the consequence of sin or disobedience to God. Death was the consequence of eating the forbidden fruit and it is the consequence of every sin we commit, playing out in a variety of infirmities until the whole body dies. As scripture says "the wages of sin is death."So death in the place of the sinner is the solution. Animal death was only a token of what is really needed to free us since we aren't animals. The death must be the death of a human being. But it can't be a fallen human being, it has to be a perfectly sinless human being to effect the necessary remission of sin.The consequence of sin, or death, has to be fulfilled, it can't just be cancelled by decree, but our own death just sends us all to Hell. But if God paid the price for us, becoming Man so that He could do that, then He frees us from that consequence into eternal life.Instead of assuming that two thousand years of believers are all idiots, especially if you have any sense at all of some of the great minds among us, ought to give you pause in your rush to come to the silliest possible conclusions. But it doesn't and it won't. Too bad.