‘The Pharisees used hell to threaten sinners and other undesirables and mark them as the excluded out-group, hated by God. Their rhetorical use of hell made clear that God’s righteousness was severe and merciless toward the undeserving. Jesus turned their rhetoric upside down and inside out and used hell to threat­en those who excluded sinners and other undesirables, showing that God’s righteousness was compassionate and merciful, that God’s kingdom wel­comed the undeserving, that for God, there was no out-group.’ (74)

Does anyone buy this?  Has anyone read this book?

Mephi: Granted with clarification. The idea of the Incarnation gives us decent reason to believe that Jesus' life and action in some way points towards God's "heart" more than those of any other human being who ever lived.

Tom: Why? We’ve just about discredited most everything Jesus had to say (about human origins, justice, mercy, love, hell, wrath, eternity…). We surpass Jesus’ understanding of all these issues. So what’s left? Jesus got it right sometimes, but no more right than any other Jew of his day got it right. I mean really, now you wanna argue that Jesus HAS to be right about SOMETHING? You said Jesus was wrong and I disagreed and said he had to be right. Now I agree he was wrong and you argue he has to be right. I friggin give up!

Why MUST Jesus be right about anything? He was a human. He wasn’t omniscient. Remember? Can you provide any LOGICAL reason why the incarnation guarantees anything truthful about Jesus’ words? You already say it: ALL the incarnation is for is to guarantee that the human nature needing salvation is assumed by God and is sinless when it gets to the cross. There’s no other reason to believe Jesus’ words about ANYTHING are necessarily true just because he’s God. Right?

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Mephi: DEEP clarification. Jesus, being fully God, represented Divinity in a way unparalleled by any other human being who ever existed.

Tom: But you said the incarnation ONLY insures divinely assumed sinless human nature. That’s all. Jesus wouldn’t even need to have known this about himself. It doesn’t mean anything else about Jesus’ WORDS have to be truthful at all.

Mephi: This may include Jesus' passionate goodness towards people, righteous anger at sin, and impressive demonstration of the Reign of God.

Tom: Just righteous living. OK. That’s his sinlessness. But nothing about his WORDS and teachings need be trusted.

Mephi: Jesus, being fully human, lived a life that was meaningfully circumscribed by his cultural and times. He was NOT an epistemological "overman" of any type, but actually DEVELOPED as a human being, being socialized by his surroundings, and provided his plausibility structures within his cultural community. Any demonstrations of the Reign of God he did with those plausibility structures firmly in mind. This is NOT to say that the Father couldn't provide Jesus with certain "revelation knowledge" of things outside the plausibility spheres available to Jesus as a 2nd Temple Jewish Galilean carpenter's son…more than this is to say that it's POSSIBLE that Jesus's demonstration of the Reign of God could point, though inaccurately, towards the absolute truth of things dealing with cosmology, theology, and eschatology.

Tom: “Point inaccurately towards”? What’s that even mean?

Never mind though. Who cares bro? Really. Don’t worry about Jesus’ words/teachings. They’re disposable. I mean, IF they agree with what makes sense to US, with what WE are able to verify independently of Jesus as true, then we’ll say Jesus was accurate. But IF they don’t jive with what WE believe, we’ll just say Jesus was circumscribed by the ignorance of his culture and dismiss him. Words don’t matter after all. As you described—it’s Jesus’ ACTIONS (passionate goodness, anger at sin, demonstration of the reign of God, healings, sinless life, purity of heart, etc.) that matter.

Let me put the truth this way. If we had not a single word of Jesus preverved--no teaching, no parables, nothing, we wouldn't be any worse off than we are. If all we had was the same gospel story minus all the 'words' of Jesus, we'd basically be in the same boat. Jesus' teachings are superfluous. Let's just admit it. On all the issues that matter (love, justice, mercy, truth, hell, human origins, etc.) we've demonstrated ourselves to be perfectly capable of establishing the truth independent of Jesus and Paul (and any other biblical author for that matter). So we don't need their words. We just need to know that Jesus loved people pretty well--better than most (though not perfectly)--and died for us as God incarante.

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Mephi: Clarification. The Bible is a divinely inspired human endeavor produced though the synergistic work of the Holy Spirit and human beings. It uses a variety of genres and claims to point to God's activity in the world, culiminating in Jesus. Divine inspiration is NOT a guarantee of infallibility or inerrancy (in the typical evangelical sense).

Tom: What IS inspiration a guarantee of Mephi? If it doesn’t issue in some unique characteristic about the Bible’s message, then what does divine inspiration necessarily issue in? Why continue to bother with inspiration. Nobody knows what it really means, what it really results in, what it guarantees if anything. So what's the point? If you wanna say it's 'inspired', hey, go for it. But until you can say what the Bible IS as inspired that it couldn't be as it is and uninspired, you haven't demonstrated the need for it. So let's dump it.

Why believe in inspiration anyhow? Who told us the Bible is inspired? Doesn’t Paul claim it? And Peter says a bit about prophetic speech too. Big deal. They’re first century Jews who have a stake in the idea of their ‘book’ being inspired. A good reason for suspecting them to be wrong. Why shouldn’t their belief about inspiration and the truth it would seem to imply just be more first century baggage? Makes sense. It’s understandable given their climate I mean. So just blow ‘em off. The Bible is JUST a book. Just a human book. The only thing divine about it is the fact that it’s subject matter for the most part has to do with God. But that’s all. It just happens to narrate the particular history of God’s dealings with a nation, the incarnate Christ, and the history of early believers. Besides that very general point, there’s no reason to expect the details to be right on. Probably more reason to suspect their truth. The ONLY friggin reason we embrace the Bible over any other book anyhow is not because it’s inspired or authored by God in some synergistic way, no. It’s just because people who choose to live in ITS STORY meet God and are changed by God’s power whereas people who choose to live in any OTHER story do not in fact meet God and are not changed by his power.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 12/12/2005 7:25:01 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (rj1) : 12/12/2005 9:38:48 PM (GMT-6)

Nobody is.  But some here obviously have a problem with what divine justice “looks like” here.  ECP?  Riiiight! And yes, my view of hell would be VERY similar to what Greg has said in SATPOE, but I think some clarification will be needed in order to clear up some misconceptions about God being all or perfectly loving while at the same time people are living eternally in torment.

Now, before I get into any biblical exegesis, let me state something here about good and evil to set up where I’m going with this OK?  So just hear me out first.

It is often said that the world is full of evil and suffering, and that life is more-torture-than-not, and that the evil present world order is not “good enough” to have warranted being created itself.  However, let’s just assume that this world is NOT the worst of ALL possible worlds.  That it is much, much better than “the worst of all possible worlds.”  That if we were to look at some area which is consider to be considered, “vast suffering,” at a big-picture level, the ‘actual numbers’ are overwhelmingly in favor of  “there is more good than bad, for us humans”, relative to life on earth. This point needs to be taken quite seriously. Why?  Because one moment of pain is unbearable and stark, when it occurs in a life of uninterrupted bliss. But in a life that is characterized by chronic pain, the simple moment doesn't even get noticed...Evil gets 'noticed' by us and is used in a theodicy BECAUSE it stands in such contrast to ordinary lives of non-evil...statistics of deaths by violence and actual deaths by hunger, for example, show these to be very, very non-majority in human life on the planet as a whole.

Now let’s look at different levels of suffering by way of categorization.  These would be:

A“low-grade” suffering or discontent

B. systemic discomfort.

C. “crisis level” suffering.

D. “serious” suffering.

Low grade suffering or discontent—these would feelings of modern discontent, alienation, bad situations, and the like.  You can’t REALLY call these “suffering or torment” as they can be done away with easily.  in moments of happiness, fun, or even co-miseration(!), and since they are generally dwarfed (quantitatively) by the simple pleasures of eating, sleeping, nature, friends, music, love, humor, family, and (often) progress or results, and (sometimes) even victory/triumph over adverstity! These feelings can also often be incitements to better ourselves as well as clues to the Reality beyond ourselves. Although intellectuals frequently complain about the malaise of life, the common folk, although they constantly complain about bosses, wives, kids, sport figures, politicians, in-laws, taxes, bad food, etc., etc., etc., would not appear so morbid or concerned as the “sensitive elite” might lead us to believe. In this category I would also include the annoyance-level illnesses (e.g, colds), and accidents of non-life-changing nature.

Systemic discomfort.  This would include “continuous” diseases (e.g., diabetes), accidents that force major changes to lifestyles (e.g., amputations), and physical or mental abnormalities that force systemic changes to our ways of life. Generally, these changes then become routine and become part of the “background” of our lives. We develop “work arounds” for these, and often develop compensatory and off-setting skills as well.

“Crisis level” suffering. This would include events, accidents, severe emotional trauma, debilitating violent crimes, or onset of some serious disease, which prompt a ‘crisis’ in life. In other words, this type of suffering is episodic or incident-based, and often gives rise to questions of personal identity, existence, purpose, etc.

“Serious” suffering. This would include painful diseases of chronic nature or long-term torture.

Now, the more ‘serious’ the suffering level, the less ‘statistically present’ it is in human experience. Category D is by far and away the most intense, and yet is very rare, statistically speaking. Category C we could note in  “parts per 100,000 people” frequency measurements. Category B is still very small statistically, and most of the elements that would be included do not involve large-term physical pain of intense nature. [They could, of course, be related to C and fall into that category as well. And there are also psychological dimensions associated with each of these categories as well, but that phenomenon is much more variant among people than are the physical aspects. In other words, how one ‘deals emotionally’ with crises, impairments, accidents is much less predictable than the physical pain associated with a broken leg.] And Category A cannot be considered “suffering” in any but the most trivial sense (although for various reasons, they sometimes escalate for various reasons, to Category C).

This has struck me for some time now in all this talk of evil that, that we can be “off-balanced” about evil itself.  That is, we focus so much on evil that we really do seem to forget how much good there is (Meph Man does this sometimes.  Also, this is not meant to minimize evil, but rather to think of it more contextually). So, for example:

A.  If life really were more evil than good, then humanity might have killed itself off long ago, by a combination of homicide, genocide, suicide, xenocide.  But somehow, life “outruns” self-destruction in our history.

B.  If life really were more evil than good, then the headlines of the nightly news would not captivate us very well…Plane crashes of hundreds of fatalities, earthquakes with similar body counts, serial killers of dozens of people would all be virtually trivialized by the daily experience in each life on earth(!) of "majority evil". If evil were the majority (i.e., more “bad” than “good”), news of it would not be "news" in the least, and the horrors of concentrated points of evil in history (e.g. the Holocaust, the western Slave Trade) would not provoke such moral outrage or pessimism over human nature as they do.

C.  There is a basic philosophical argument, that evil, as parasitic on ‘good’, simply cannot exist in the ‘majority’ or it would starve itself, so to speak. You simply cannot have significantly more vampires than you have live humans.

So, that by far and away, the VAST majority of pain and suffering is preventative--it alerts us to take evasive action to avoid more pain and harm. As such, the vast majority of “suffering” is constructive and helpful, even though unpleasant. By the same token, MUCH adversity and challenge result in personal achievement and community care responses; and many horrendous evils result in public outcry, resulting in macro-shifts in public morality and cultural 'compromises' (e.g., the Holocaust, Bosnia). And even the low-level "whining" of discontent sometimes irritates us enough to better ourselves or to change our situation/future.

It is important that to satisfy this criteria only requires that ‘obvious, intense suffering’ be 49% or less of all conscious experiences. It does not require suffering to be at an absolute minimum, or non-gratuitous, or correlated exactly with “virtue” or “vice”. Well, this Poor Man’s theodicy is much more ‘tangible’ and ‘intuitive’, and seems to fit reasonably well with our basic moral notions and decision-making approaches.

So, as concerns this EARTHLY life, there is more good than bad or evil.  You with me so far?  Back later on today. 

(Stealth post, real quick-like) :

God's perfect love is omnibenevolence, the highest good of all. For the unrepentant to be consigned to Hell is for the highest good of all, just as imprisonment of violent criminals is for the highest good of any society. Hell is the best that God can possibly do for unrepentant rebels against His omnibenevolence. Though it is certainly not a doctrine that evokes warm, nice feelings in my heart, it is not clear to me how ECT is necessarily contrary to God's benevolence (perfect love).

God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but would much rather that he "turn and live." (Ezek. 18). He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should be brought to repentance (2 Pet. 3:9). And yet some will choose to supremely love themselves so permanently that they will forever refuse to be redeemed.

The rebel against God would make a hell for himself even in heaven, for he would rather retain his self-rule (mind set on sin) in Hell than serve benevolence/holiness in Heaven.

I realize this view will not "resonate" with many here, but for whatever reason I felt led to post it. I shall now return to my cave.

Post Edited (JEE) : 12/13/2005 1:34:31 AM (GMT-6)

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. - CSL

Post Edited (MephEternal) : 12/13/2005 9:50:22 AM (GMT-6)