A "helpful" blogger on the Huffington Post suggested "6 Things Christians Should Just Stop Saying." Interesting. So what things do we say that we just ought to stop because they clearly aren't true?
Number 1: "The Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God." Well, that's interesting. Why do you suppose that's #1? He tells us why. "You can't prove it." And why do you suppose that the very next one is "We just believe the Bible"? Well, of course, because that's the corollary to #1 (as he points out). Because you only believe your own interpretation of the Bible which is "replete with errors."
Number 3, then, is a zinger. We should stop saying, "Jesus is the only way to heaven." And there you have it. The end of Christianity. On what does he base this recommendation? Well, "I refer back to No. 2 above" which was his corollary to #1. You cannot know that the Bible is true at any point and you cannot know that anything in it is true and just because Jesus is claimed to have said it is no reason to believe that He actually did ... or, at least, that we can actually know He did because some of us disagree that He did, so there!
The rest doesn't matter at this point. Following "Christ" becomes purely subjective where we can't know what He said and we can't know what He meant and we can't know ... well, much of anything. We can know that those silly disciples that argued later that "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12) were confused. Since it was a running theme in all of the New Testament, we can be sure that all that New Testament stuff was confused. We can be certain that Jesus wasn't speaking clearly or accurately when He said, "No man comes to the Father but by Me." (John 14:6) We don't have a reliable Savior. We don't have a reliable source. We don't have ... Christianity.
Now, perhaps, you can begin to see why undercutting the Bible is the starting place for this kind of "helpful" thinking. It isn't an assault on the Bible; it's the end of Christianity.
14 comments:
Unfortunately there are plenty of christians who are way ahead of the author of this piece. When the default position of those who identify as christian is that no matter how clear and unequivocal the words of Jesus are, we must first assume that He actually meant something else entirely.
Or those that say we can’t be sure about what God did say or do, but we can be sure about what He didn’t.
We're all clear that Jesus said, "No man comes to the Father but by Me." It amazes me that they can be so sure that what the Church has always understood and what the clear meaning of the text is is NOT what it means. I'm equally baffled by the notion that without God's Word we are perfectly fine in creating our own meaning, our own beliefs, our own religion and calling it "Christian".
Isn't it interesting that those who regard uncertainty as the highest virtue in matters of Scripture and faith have real certainty without any basis.
There is an increasing tendency for people to not only ignore what the text clearly says, but to start from the place where the assumption is that the meaning is metaphorical. Which is contrary to most hermeneutical approaches.
I’m also seeing a tendency for people to try to insist that we apply definitions and limits to God based on our definitions as opposed to thinking that God transcends our definitions and limits.
Stan, are you bold enough to quantify "it's the end of Christianity"?
In other words, what is the maximum number of years that can be left before Christ returns if your statement is true?
Wow, didn't follow that at all. Like "Are you bold enough to quantify that Christianity isn't true? In other words, what color is 9?"
What does "maximum number of years" have to do with the truth of Christianity?
If we don't have a reliable source document for Christianity, then it is simply a man-made religion like every other man-made religion (which, by the way, is a contradiction in terms). If it is logical that Jesus is not the only way and multiple paths are valid, then all of logic is unreliable.
But I don't follow your question at all. What does "the maximum number of years that can be left before Christ returns" have to do with the end of Christianity? (Especially since the Bible tells me that no man knows when it's supposed to occur.)
Craig,
One of the basic tenets of postmodernism is that the text doesn't mean what the author meant. To the modernist mind, "language refers to and represents a reality outside itself." To the postmodernist, "the meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world or even an idea in the mind but rather a range of contrasts and differences with the meanings of other words." As such, the meanings of words are "never fully 'present' to the speaker or hearer but are endlessly 'deferred.'" So if Jesus said "X" and the writers of Scripture recorded "X", it doesn't actually mean "X" at all, at least, not anymore.
Welcome to the end of reason.
"I don't follow your question at all."
To amplify on it, could someone living, say, two hundred years from now and still awaiting the return of Christ reasonably figure, "Stan was correct that it was the end of Christianity back in 2018"?
I'm still not following you.
Let me make this as clear as I can. SCRIPTURE DENIES THAT ANY MAN KNOWS WHEN CHRIST WILL RETURN. So what does my knowledge (rather, the lack thereof) of the date of the return of Christ have on the question of the validity of Christianity?
Stan did not say that Christianity ended in 2018. Stan said that if the Bible isn't true and if Jesus is not to be trusted, Christianity is pointless. Nothing ... absolutely nothing to do with the return of Christ.
Enlighten me on Rev. 3:11 and Rev. 22:12. To me these are saying that the church will still be present and active at the Second Coming. That event will not take place in some distant atheistic era after Christianity has "ended," as you put it.
Furthermore, Luke 21:25-28 informs us that the Second Coming WILL happen within the lifetime of those who, like you in your foreboding, see the signs of it. How long is that? 100 years from now would be stretching it to about the limit.
[I'm 90% sure that you have not forgotten the last five words in today's blog entry, but I'll draw the attention of your visitors to that in case they think I'm putting words in your mouth.]
Apparently we aren't communicating. What I said was that IF it is true that the Bible is unreliable and Christ was wrong, then Christianity is not merely off a bit, it is wrong. THAT would be the end of Christianity. I thought it was obvious that I believe those claims are WRONG.
Having read this post hours ago, I in fact did have to go back and read the last 5 words. Stan, you did say Christianity has ended... if you ignore the rest of the post entirely. You can't pick one sentence (an incomplete thought on its own) and ask off the wall questions that have no relation to the rest of the topic. It's herminutics like that that allow Scripture to be twisted. Take a sentence out of context and talk about it without any regard for surrounding reference. That final paragraph is a summary of what the post said, if the Bible isn't inerrant, Christianity is false, and thus dead like all other religions. Not dead in that it has ceased to exist, but that it holds no value.
One of the primary reasons that famous atheist Bertrand Russell rejected Christianity was the texts where Jesus spoke of "soon", "quickly", "at hand", and the like for His return. Russell figured "He didn't do it, so he's clearly a fraud." I know of no believing Christian who actually thinks, "Jesus didn't come when He said He would." Some might think, "He didn't come when I thought He would," but that's as far as they go. There are three major views on eschatology among believing Christians. Pre-millennialism takes those references -- "soon", "quickly", "at hand", etc. -- in a non-literal sense and understand them to be relative. Both post-millennials and amillennials regard the "thousand year" thing (included in a book in the Bible that is full of apocalyptic and figurative language) as apocalyptic and figurative language. None of these have a problem with the fact that He hasn't returned yet. Further, all of them believe in the eventual final return of Christ. It was the end of the line for Russell, but a non-problem for the rest of us.
Okay, I thought Stan was saying that the views of Huffington Post are so widespread in this vale of tears that Christianity is down to its final gasp, and the End Times are at hand. That is, I thought Stan was operating in the gift of signs and wonders.
But in case anybody thinks it would be useful to comment specifically on Luke 21, can we agree that when the End Time signs are clearly here, it truly is less than a hundred years to the Second Coming, even though people won't be able to pin it down to an hour or a day?
Two things. First, widespread views do not determine what is true.
Second, no, we can't all agree that if Jesus doesn't return inside of 100 years, it was all false. Look into Preterism, for instance. And I explained that the "at hand" kind of statements aren't taken as woodenly literal by those who don't agree with Preterism.
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