My Beliefs- GDR

Logic dictates that He was dead. The Romans were very good at executing people. Do we have any record of people surviving crucifixion even when nails weren't used. His legs weren't broken because He was already dead. He had a spear thrust into Him. He had been flogged which as done by the Romans was particularly brutal and often fatal. The idea that He survived the crucifixion and was nearly fully recovered a couple of days later just doesn't hold up.

Sure if it is me doing it the only option is to fake it. If it is God doing it then not so much. It would be very difficult to fake something like that with the Roman soldiers around you had to get rid of the body and not be caught. Then you have to get numerous people including the 500 that Paul talks about to go along and try to convince neighbours and then you have to get Paul who is the sworn enemy to do a 180 and believe in the hoax and become one of the greatest advocates for it. If God does not exist then the resurrection cannot have happened — end of story. If however God does exist then the resurrection becomes a question of whether or not God chose to reach out to us that way. There are many people who believe in a theistic god but don’t believe the resurrection, and there are many claims made about God, such as an inerrant Bible that I don’t believe.So yes- before we consider the veracity of the resurrection stories we individually have to come to our own conclusions about the existence or non-existence of God, knowing that there is no empirical proof one way or the other. The horse is firmly secured in front of the cart. Yes

I’m not a scientist so I’ll just lay out my reasoning and you tell me where I’m wrong. Our physical bodies are the result of about 4.5 billion years of evolution. The question is whether or not that process came about from non-intelligent material sources or as a result of an intelligent designer(s). (Not to be confused with the political movement.)If our origins are strictly non-intelligent and material then our sentience is the result of that process and the seeds for that sentience would have to be contained within initial cellular life. For that matter the seeds or information required for intelligent life must have been contained in the base elements that came together to form initial cellular life in the first place. No one has seriously made a case for unicorns, and I have never met anyone who believes they exist. There are a number of people who wrote about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in such a way that millions of people, including highly intelligent men of science, believe the accounts.

As has been pointed out numerous times they are not independent sources. There is an incestuous relationship between most of the gospels and acts.They are not independent historical sources that corroborate each other. Really? Evidence? Since the gospels and acts date to at least post 70CE and probably closer to 100CE how do you rationalize this? How many people lived to 70 at that time? How come there is no independent source from this time period?All of you arguments devolve to this. I believe by faith alone and do not need any evidence.

You have provided no argument to support this assertion. Why would seeds need to be contained in the initial cellular life?Science seems to show this is not true. Do Hydrogen and oxygen have seeds for the property of water in them? How do you show this?What properties in Nitrogen and Hydrogen are the seeds for the properties of ammonia? This is just an assertion. Back up this claim. You will need to provide some sort of definition of information if you want to make this claim. Really? The bible sure does. How about elves, leprechauns, nessie, bigfoot? You are really good at logical fallacies aren't you.Edited by Theodoric, : punctuation

Firstly, I do believe in the virgin birth but I don’t see it in anyway essential to the Christian message story or for that matter to the forgiving of sins. I’m inclined to believe it by coming back at it through the resurrection but it is only important if you believe that God the Father was absent from His dwelling place and inhabiting the body of Jesus.There are actually some scriptural reasons to actually reject the idea. Some examples are why did His cousin John the Baptist in light of the close ties between Mary and Elizabeth send a message questioning whether Jesus was the messiah or not? Why was Jesus’ brother James not a follower of Jesus until after His death? Why is it only in 2 Gospels, and not much in Luke and not mentioned in any of the Epistles? Why is the only Gospel that writes a lot about it, namely Matthew, the writer that wrote pretty much specifically for the Jews and was very anxious to have his readers understand Jesus in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures?Jesus was very clear that His followers were to do the things that He was doing and He says this in John 14:

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11 "Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves. 12 "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also ; and greater works than these he will do ; because I go to the Father.

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It is clearly the Father working through His Holy Spirit that those that believe in Him, by believing in the works of love, forgiveness, mercy and justice, will be empowered.Clearly Jesus had a relationship with the one He called Father that others didn’t have and His claim was that He spoke for the Father. As John puts it in chapter 1:

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14 And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the onlybegotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

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Jesus embodied the Word of God.In understanding Jesus as part of the Godhead it is clear that it was God the Father that put Him in that position. Jesus is very clear that He is beholding to the Father and that all that He does is in order to glorify, (do the work of) the Father. However, it seems clear that He did find himself doing what only the Father could do in the Jewish tradition. He was essentially a Temple replacement. When Jews wanted to meet with their God, or to be forgiven primarily through the offering of sacrifices they went to the Temple. Jesus was essentially saying that if you want to meet with God then you can meet Him through me. If you want forgiveness come to me but it isn’t sacrifice I want but mercy. It isn’t about buying forgiveness with animal sacrifices but about forgiveness by having a change of heart. God confirmed that message through the crucifixion, and He is now King over the Kingdom He came to establish. The political statement was that Jesus is King and Caesar and Herod aren’t. Caesar and Herod can only have you killed but God the Father, through the Son, showed that the death that Caesar can bring does not have the last word. The evil that death is has been defeated.None of that require the virgin birth.

Please see this post. Message 452

which is: You haven't shown that God exists, therefore you can't assume the resurrection. You're asserting the existence of god, then saying because god exists the resurrection is possible. Well of course it is - everything is then possible.It's a pointless, circular argument which sometimes goes anti-clockwise for you. You believe the resurrection story, therefore God must exist.So which came first for your believe in God or believe in the resurrection which then proves god?

I appreciate the thoughtful part but I suppose the term liberal is all relative. Certainly Faith would consider me liberal but I’m inclined to consider myself conservative as compared to the Spong, Crossan, Borg and other members of the Jesus Seminar.I actually said I do believe in the Virgin Birth but that it isn’t in any way essential to Christianity and there is some Scriptural causes to question it. However by back-tracking from the resurrection, (which in my view is essential) then I am prepared to say yes to the Virgin Birth even if it is a bit tentative.As far as inerrancy goes there is no good reason to consider the Bible that way. There are obvious contradictions in detail but even worse there are fundamental differences in the understanding of the nature of God. We see in Jesus and in many parts of the OT a God of love, compassion and justice for all mankind. However in some instances we see a god who is a tyrant, cold and hard hearted.The idea of getting into heaven is largely a platonic concept in the first place. The idea of being a Christian so that you get to go to heaven is a combination of that Platonic idea and a misreading of the NT. The idea of being a Christian is that yes, if you truly allow God to transform your heart the you are made right with him, but the point of that is that there is a job to be done in bringing His truth, love, mercy, forgiveness, peace and justice to the world. Baptism is a public pronouncement that you have given your life or your heart to God and that you are joining with others in the church in order to serve His Kingdom.I’m not quite sure how you say on one hand that I am a mainstream Christian and then say I’m inventing a new religion. I frankly don’t see where it is new at and and as I said earlier, I’m very close to C S Lewis and he certainly wasn’t considered new or radical.I would agree that what I believe is more consistent with what we know now of the world than what the fundamentalists believe. However, it seems to me that is what we should expect, and if you read Romans 2 you will see it is what Paul expects as well. I also contend that what I believe is very scriptural once you get away from the idea of trying to twist what the Bible says in order to justify an inerrant or God dictated Bible. I disagree that I am cherry picking. I use what we have of the words of Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, to know what is of God in the Bible.The theologians or Christian scholars that have most influenced me just happen to all be from the UK. They would be be N T Wright, C S Lewis, John Polkinghorne, John Lennox and to a lesser degree Alister McGrath. ( I’m not sure that Lennox would consider himself either a Christian scholar or theologian.) I like Polkinghorne, Lennox and McGrath for the way their use science to be influential in their beliefs. I also have been influenced by Francis Collins and Denis Lamoureux who both have doctorates in biology and use their biology to inform their Christian beliefs. The point is, that this is not something that I have made up on my own, but my views have been influenced by many people and I do consider myself to be pretty mainstream. When you consider things like the Holocaust, 9/11, the Gulag, the mass murderers in our societies and all of the other atrocities over the centuries, it is very difficult to reject the power of evil in our world. The Bible usually refers to the satan making the devil into this sort of quasi-personal character in the Bible. I frankly am not sure what to make of it. Possibly the idea of the devil is a metaphoric description for the potential of evil in all of us. Maybe there actually is some form of being who rejoices in evil and has influence over us, although I’m more inclined to go with the former.I can’t agree with your mother however. It isn’t at all a silly idea, and even if the devil is a metaphor for the evil people are capable of, it isn’t a bad idea to treat the metaphor as being literal. Evil is something that we should be aware of, something we should be able to recognize when we are confronted by it, something that we should resist with all our will, and something that we should fight with the weapons that Paul talks about in Ephesians 6.Edited by GDR, : typo

It wouldn't have been God the Father inhabiting he body of Jesus but God the Son who is co-eternal with the Father. Also, God need never be "absent" from anywhere in order to inhabit anything as He is already everywhere at once, i.e. omnipresent. His faith failed under persecution, it happens to many, no mystery. It took the resurrection, or more, the ascension, or really in the end it took Pentecost to fully persuade ALL the disciples, including Jesus' own siblings who were the hardest to persuade. As Jesus said, a prophet is not without honor except among his own people. His siblings apparently doubted their mother's story, and Jesus' not emerging as a great military leader but being this humble teacher pursued by the authorities must have increased their doubt. Why these questions? Nothing is more understandable than the doubts of Jesus' claims, that's what is being expressed at EvC all the time. Of course if people are persuaded by their doubts they're going to doubt the virgin birth along with all the rest of it. How you manage to hold on to parts of the revelation while denying the rest is really the puzzle. I don't see a problem here. It's always risky to argue from an absence you know. For one thing I wouldn't reduce Luke's report to "not much," it's sufficient to support the virgin birth. About Matthew I'd suppose that he was simply appealing to the common knowledge among the Jews of the prophecy of the virgin birth in the Hebrew scriptures. Makes sense, doesn't it? Beyond specific references to the virgin birth, the NT is full of affirmations of Jesus as God, Son of God, God in the flesh and so on, and that's the whole point of the virgin birth. Without getting into some of your assertions that I disagree with, I'd just say that much of it requires Him to be God incarnate, and that requires the virgin birth.Oh, one thing needs correction: Scripture disagrees with you: Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins, that is, there is no forgiveness. And the Letter to the Hebrews makes it clear that only the sacrifice of the Son of God can purge sin, that the animal sacrifices were meant to foreshadow His once-for-all sacrifice.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've wondered how on earth you can consider your beliefs to be "mainstream" or "orthodox" as you've claimed before, and I guess this is your answer. But of course all these guys are "liberals" and deny Bible inerrancy. It may well be that we're getting to the point that Bible believers or "fundamentalists" who believe in the whole revelation of the Bible, although our numbers are far greater still, are becoming marginalized enough that beliefs such as yours can almost get away with being called mainstream. It's one of the signs of the last days, and of course we Bible believers expect all the liberals and apostates eventually to merge into one global religion as the Harlot Church of Revelation, which I believe is Rome. You COULD take this as a prediction that MIGHT cause you to rethink things if you start to see it happening, but maybe you won't.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But this is not what the OT says, e.g. Leviticus 1:4: "And he shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him." Leviticus 4:19-20: "He shall remove all the fat from it and burn it on the altar, and do with this bull just as he did with the bull for the sin offering. In this way the priest will make atonement for the community, and they will be forgiven." Leviticus 16: "The bull and the goat for the sin offerings, whose blood was brought into the Most Holy Place to make atonement, must be taken outside the camp; their hides, flesh and intestines are to be burned up [...] on this day atonement will be made for you, to cleanse you. Then, before the Lord, you will be clean from all your sins." Leviticus 19:21-22: "The man, however, must bring a ram to the entrance to the tent of meeting for a guilt offering to the Lord. With the ram of the guilt offering the priest is to make atonement for him before the Lord for the sin he has committed, and his sin will be forgiven."It is clear, then, that the author of Leviticus thought that animal sacrifice actually worked and were perfectly capable of purging sin. I, of course, think that this is all so much tosh --- but do you agree with me?

It seems that you don't believe in the literal devil either - it's more a metaphorical concept to explain evil not a bad angel abroad in the world. Well yes, obviously. The trouble is that your damn god deliberately put evil into our world to start with. No doubt you have a CS Lewis tortuous explanation of why this was a great idea, but really......I read this elswhere here:Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

GDR will probably say this but I'll also say it: "Evil" in this context means disaster or calamity, bad happenings. In English the word means either that or sinful doings, and in this case it means that. That God cannot commit sin is said elsewhere to provide context.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes, well it DID work for them, because all things in the OT looked forward to the Messiah who was to be their fulfillment. The sacrifices foreshadowed the one perfect sacrifice of Christ. The fundamental faith of the OT saints was faith in the promise given by God of the Messiah who would save them from their sins. The sacrifices of animals provided a picture of the costliness of atoning for sin, and done in faith, done with trust in God's promises, they also saved them. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.