Should we ever ridicule other's beliefs?  Are not some beliefs worthy of mockery?  How would Old and New Testament examples fit into our pluralistic age?

Their beliefs, NO. 

 

Their country of origin, YES, especially if they have a picture of another country's queen on their 'currency'.

 

 

Is that who that is Laika?  I always just thought that was some old bat.  Huh...I guess you learn something new everyday. 

 

I'll be back with a response later today, especially with Tom.  How do you justify going from an Old Testament analogy to application?  I know you weren't sure on it, but just wonder'n.

 

Why would we?  Love is kind.  I do not believe that ridicule was the mission of Jesus hence it should not be our mission either.  Jesus did at times set the Pharisee's straight but he did not ridicule them by making a mockery of them. 

 

My answer:  We are commanded to love and love is kind. I do not believe that it fits within our job description as disciples of Christ to ridicule other people for having differing beliefs.

So in one corner we have Trosie saying, “No” to ridicule and mocking because love is kind.  In the other corner we have Miss E saying that it is OK to mock beliefs, but we need to be sure what ridiculing or mocking of beliefs really is.  Miss E would say to mock the person’s belief system, but not the person and it depends on how one goes about doing this.  That is we don’t do it in arrogant condescending way as opposed to doing it out of love.

 

And I think you guys see that this kind of question gets to the heart of the differing ways in which we Evangelicals do theology as well as evangelism.  D.A. Carson criticizes post-modern Christianity over this question because post-moderns seem to want to “dialogue” and not offend.  He feels that Christianity is always offensive no matter how nicely you put it because it is exclusionary.  That is, that according to some, God has given us a sense of the absurd and means for us to find some things ridiculous and if we don’t find some things absurd or ridiculous, what does this do to the Gospel and the Christian faith.

 

I would say this.  Jesus embodied and taught parabolic correctives to misappropriations to the law.  These would be described as prophetic and (in the truest OT sense of the term) and "apocalyptic" (in the 2nd Temple Jewish sense of the term).  In these traditional forms of confrontation, "demeaning" is never the performative sense of corrective dialogue or action.  The attitude of prophesis in the tradition that Jesus belongs to is better described as "confrontational," "insistent," and "provocative" such that to say that he was “demeaning” is specious at best.  Jesus role as teacher is bound up in his role as Savior, they are all part of the same eschatological package. The odd tension between Jesus' confrontation of the contemporary Jewish system and His role as Messiah come to a hilt in Matt. 23:37. That verse places Jesus' pointed discourses in the context of God's indefatigable love for Israel, yes, even the ones that begged for His execution.

 

If we take the most ridiculous religious movement in Palestine, the Samaritans, we see in John 4 what Jesus’ attitude was toward such people.  So, guess what?  While you won’t find anything in the records of Jesus demeaning others, we do see that Jesus was in the habit of “telling it like it is” when it came to confronting demonic perversions of nature and theology, but denouncing something manifestly "Satanic" still doesn't strike me as "demeaning." Even looking at Paul, we see that he balances his “sharper speech” with compassion of the Christian faith.  In this way he effectively subverted the very rhetoric that was often "demeaning" in antiquity, so while he may come and visit your town and spar with you verbally, he will travel thousands of miles to bring you cash and risk his life in the process.