To Be Born Again Is To Become A Little Child Again: Not To Believe But To Be Ready To Believe

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. -- John 3:3

"You know, my hearers, the text was spoken during some conversation between the Saviour and Nicodemus, who came to him by night. Important as this conversation is supposed to be by modern professors, one thing is certain, it was not regarded by any of the Evangelists but John, of sufficient importance to record. So that had it not been for the fact that John recorded this circumstance, we should hardly have known that it was necessary for one to be born again, as none of the Apostles, in their preaching or writings have referred to it, except Peter. I make these remarks, my hearers, in order to show you that the text and context was designed to apply to Nicodemus particularly, and not to the world. For it is not to be supposed, if the doctrine taught in the text is so highly important as some modern preachers imagine, that Matthew, Mark and Luke would have neglected to record so important a truth. Neither can we suppose, if it was designed to apply to all, and was so important a lesson, that Jesus would never have said it to any one but to Nicodemus, and that in the night, when none could hear but the one to whom it was addressed. ... There is, however, one phrase, which I think exactly corresponds with our text in its meaning. 'Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.' Becoming as a little child, and being born again, I think are synonimous terms. Here Jesus tells us, unless we become as a little child, we cannot believe the gospel. What is it to become as a little child? How is a little child? They are ready to be instructed, and anxious to learn. This is just what Nicodemus wanted. He wanted to be born again: to become as a little child, and with child-like simplicity to receive truth. Then, and not till then, would he believe."

-- from a sermon by Rev. Isaac D. Williamson (August 1831)

Castration Is Divinely Inspired !

 

I just wish that those troublemakers who want to mutilate you by circumcision would cut their own nuts off!

-- Galatians 5:12

Paul Was Not An Inerrantist

some signatories to the '78 Chicago Statement

Otherwise why try to persuade?

James McGrath, here:

"[Paul] doesn’t simply make statements of fact, or issue commands. He seeks to persuade. He corrects himself at times. He writes like we would expect a human being writing letters to write, not as we would expect God causing his words to flow through a human vessel to write."

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Or why the need to add to Paul with creeds, confessions and systematic theologies if Paul is the sine qua non or the terminus ad quem?

How Come You Are Poor But Your Pastor Is Rich?

Wage Statistics for 2011 from SocialSecurity.gov

Maybe because a fool and his money are soon parted one from the other.

Your average pastor makes enough money before benefits to put him/her/it firmly in the top 10% of net compensation paid in 2011, if the numbers in this story are close to reality:

"How much should we pay our senior pastor? ... Many refer to surveys by the National Association of Church Business Administration and Christianity Today’s Compensation Handbook for Church Staff, both updated regularly. But a Google search on the subject yields endless links — some the results of scientific polls, others a collection of anecdotes. National averages in those surveys range widely — from about $83,000 (not including benefits such as health care insurance and retirement contributions) to about $112,000. But national averages often are less decisive for personnel committees than factors closer to home."

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"For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen." -- Acts 19:24

Save Your Selves From The Libertarians: They Think You Are Worth Less Over Time

As Megan McArdle thinks, formerly of The Atlantic, here:

Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset.  The longer you stay out of the workforce, the less valuable you are to potential employers.  You lose market intelligence and industry connections.  Your technical knowledge and skills atrophy.  And as my colleague Don Peck wrote in a devastating piece last year, the psychological effects of long-term unemployment change you permanently.  Many of the people who have now been unemployed for years may never work again, or not at anything like the income that they had been expecting. ... Now think about what is happening to millions of people out there ... whose savings and social networks are exhausted (or were never very big to begin with), who are in their fifties and not young enough to retire, but very hard to place with an employer who will pay them as much as they were worth to their old firm. Think of the people who can't support their children, or themselves.  Think of their despair. That is what these numbers mean: millions of people, staring into the abyss of an empty future.  We don't know how to re-employ them.  The last time this happened, in the Great Depression, World War II eventually came along and soaked up everyone in the labor force who could breathe and carry a toolbag.  I hope to God we're not going to do that again, so what are we going to do with all these people?

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That's what objectivism does to people. It turns them from your brother into The Other. But in your heart you know it is not so. You'll only be an object if you let them make you one, but to G-d you'll always be a subject, in which He is deeply interested.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

-- Matthew 6:26

The apocalyptic Son Of Man and the King Of Israel are one and the same

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand . . .. 

 

 -- Matthew 25:31ff.

Speakers In The Tongues Of Men And Angels In Africa Don't Realize The Devil Knows Every Language

Superstition begets superstition.

T. M. Luhrmann in The New York Times, here:

LAST month I was in Accra, Ghana, to learn more about the African version of the new charismatic Christian churches that have become so popular in the United States and are now proliferating in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Ghana and Nigeria. What struck me was how much people spoke in tongues: language-like sounds (usually, repeated phonemes from the speaker’s own language) thought by those who use them to be a language God knows but the speaker does not.

I went to services that lasted three hours and for most of which people prayed in tongues. People I interviewed spoke about praying by themselves in tongues for similar stretches of time. They said they did so because it was the one language the devil could not understand, but what I found so striking was how happy it seemed to make them. “We love to speak in tongues,” one young Ghanaian woman told me with a laugh.

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'But even Michael, one of the mightiest of the angels, did not dare accuse the devil of blasphemy, but simply said, "The Lord rebuke you!" (This took place when Michael was arguing with the devil about Moses' body.)'

-- Jude 1:9

Estimated Revenue Lost To US Churches' Property Tax Exemption Is Next To Nothing

It has been estimated as recently as 2011 that the value of property owned by churches in the US could be as high as $500 billion. Think of all that as a large city with 2.5 million single family homes each valued at $200,000.

Assuming a taxable value of $250 billion and a tax rate of $3000 per $100,000 of taxable value, the revenue lost to local taxing authorities would come to just $7.5 billion.

Local government revenues in the US in 2011 came to $1.2 trillion, so the revenue lost to churches' property tax exemption comes to a measly 0.6% of that.

Big whoop.

Southern Baptists Think They Are Heard For Their Much Speaking

As reported here:

But SPAN [School of Prayer for All Nations] isn't focused on lectures and notes. Students spend as much time living out what they've learned as they do in class. Large blocks of time are carved out of each day's schedule for prayer. While some is done alone, students are also assigned to small groups of three called "prayer triplets." These groups are given daily prayer assignments, often praying over something that was just taught in class. One evening, students were asked to pray through the night, signing up for 20-minute shifts to provide real-time prayer support for missionaries working in other time zones around the world. ... "It's not a retreat," [Ashley Allen] said. "This is serious Kingdom business that we've been engaged in. A lot of people might say, 'C'mon, they're just praying!' [How serious could it be?] But we've been constantly on our faces before the Father interceding for the lost and for missionaries around the world." ... On their final night together, SPAN students gathered for a unique finale that Fort called the "concert of prayer," two hours of worship and focused prayer. As thunderstorms rumbled outside, the SPAN classroom resonated with the murmur of soft voices lifted to heaven. Some were moved to tears. Others displayed creases of deep concern and concentration on their faces as they asked God to soften hearts to the Gospel. It was an intimate moment with the Father and with each other. 

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"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him."

-- Matthew 6:5ff. 

O That I Might Leave My People . . . Adulterers All And Treacherous Men!

"O that I had in the desert a wayfarers' lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a company of treacherous men."

-- Jeremiah 9:2

DoDoDoDo, DoDoDoDo: The Devil's In The Pageviews

The Laugh Of The Day, From John Dickson, "Historian"

In "How Reza Aslan's Jesus is giving history a bad name":

"And here is where Aslan's theory must finally give up. Few contemporary scholars - whether Christian, Jewish or non-religious - doubt that the New Testament sources (known as Mark, Q, L and Paul) were written independently of each other: in other words, the authors of these texts did not have access to the writings of the others. Just as few specialists would dispute that all four of these sources portray the message of Jesus as involving a radical ethic of non-violence, inclusivity and love. The source known as Q, dating from around the 50s AD, even contains a story of Jesus' compassion toward a Roman soldier and his scolding of Israel for not having the faith of this pagan overlord."

That just points up the disagreement of contemporary scholarship with past scholarship, not the latter's necessary shortcomings. It may be accepted by many today that Q and L must have existed and been used, but they don't exist and never have, except in the imaginations of their contemporary creators. For an "historian" to call them "sources" on a level with the Synoptics, John, and apocryphal and pseudepigraphical gospels just shows how contemporary scholarship has declined intellectually. We have evidence which we can examine in manuscript, but Q and L are not among them.

"War is the father of everything," but the history of those wars is written by the winners, and our contemporaries are vying to write their own no less than past characters who have met on the field. Time will tell who wins, but not necessarily who is right. At least Polybius was aware of his bias in favor of Rome and stated it, but John Dickson only imagines "the even-handed sifting of evidence that characterizes historical enquiry." Otherwise he would not caricature Jesus as a preacher of "inclusivity" when some of the evidence quite clearly shows a different Jesus who excluded the Gentiles from his missionary activities and warned that the way to life is hard and that few will find it. The Christian normally suspends judgment and never resolves such a dilemma, but the historian is forced to make a choice and explain it.

Bias is inherent in the species. Good historians are aware of it. John Dickson is not.

Ehud's Pointed Message From G-d Makes King Eglon Of Moab Shit His Pants And Die

Ehud walked over to Eglon, who was sitting alone in a cool upstairs room. And Ehud said, "I have a message from God for you!" As King Eglon rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, pulled out the dagger strapped to his right thigh, and plunged it into the king's belly. The dagger went so deep that the handle disappeared beneath the king's fat. So Ehud did not pull out the dagger, and the king's bowels emptied. Then Ehud closed and locked the doors of the room and escaped down the latrine. After Ehud was gone, the king's servants returned and found the doors to the upstairs room locked. They thought he might be using the latrine in the room, so they waited. But when the king didn't come out after a long delay, they became concerned and got a key. And when they opened the doors, they found their master dead on the floor. While the servants were waiting, Ehud escaped, passing the stone idols on his way to Seirah.

-- Judges 3:20ff.

"Search Me": With God You Have No 4th Amendment Protection

"Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

-- Psalm 139:23f.

Jesus Imagined Justification Without The Cross

 

 

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

-- Luke 18:13f.

Extremism Incompatible With Christianity? Extremism Defines Christianity.

"All forms of xenophobia, racism and extremism are incompatible with Christianity," Bamberg Archbishop Ludwig Schick told a news conference in Wuerzburg on Wednesday.

-- quoted here

"So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own."

-- Luke 14:33

This Jesuit Pope Knows Not Christ

But then again, who does?

"[M]en and women who work are dignified. Instead, those who do not work do not have this dignity."

Quoted here.

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You mean Jesus and The Twelve had no dignity?

Did the Son of Man, who had no place to lay his head, work? Did the disciples, who had left all and followed him, work? Did they leave their nets, their very jobs and their families, or not? Did Jesus ask them to do that, or not? Did Jesus tell the young ruler that what he lacked was to keep working to help the poor, or that he needed to sell everything, give it to the poor, and come follow him? Do men who work have to ask God for their daily bread? Are we to sow not, nor gather into barns, or like the fool build bigger ones to hold all our gain?

Can you say, "I do not possess silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you: In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene—walk!"?

This Pope could have written the First Thessalonian Epistle, but not the Synoptics.

Reza Aslan Should Have Better Acknowledged His Debt To S.G.F. Brandon

So says Dale B. Martin of Yale in The New York Times, here:

Mr. Aslan’s thesis is not as startling, original or “entirely new” as the book’s publicity claims. Nor is it as outlandish as described by his detractors. That Jesus was a Jewish peasant who attempted to foment a rebellion against the Romans and their Jewish clients has been suggested at least since the posthumous publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s “Fragments” (1774-78). The most famous case for the thesis is the 1967 book by S. G. F. Brandon, “Jesus and the Zealots.” Mr. Aslan follows Mr. Brandon in his general thesis as well as in many details, a borrowing that should have been better acknowledged. (Mr. Brandon gets only a cursory mention in the notes.) And the basic premise that Jesus was zealous for the political future of Israel as the kingdom of God on earth is neither new nor controversial.

Teach A Man To Fish, My Eye: Dependence On God Was Jesus' Aim, Not His Fear

Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to give . . .  and live

"Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away."

-- Matthew 5:42

"Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?"

-- Matthew 6:25f.

Christ Mad? Perhaps. But Still Right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 But is there anyone here, right now, who can explain to me . . . Is Christ a myth? A madman's whim? Some say Christ can cure our sin. Is there a way to contact Him? Or will I die not knowing how? Listen, I only came to church to see if they could offer hope, but everything that happened there was way outside my scope. Like afterwards, outside . . . was a beggar on the grass. He held out his hand, and people'd smile, then they'd pass. I'm sure he reached for something real, for something more than cash. He begged them for a little cheer, and they all pretended . . . not to hear. I get the message, loud and clear: Church is middle-class.

-- Larry Norman, "Poem", Street Level (1970)

At Least Ross Douthat Is Aware Of Jesus The Apocalyptic Prophet

That's why they pay him the big bucks.

Here in The New York Times, where for him it sort of comes down to the idea that Jesus is Everyman:

Part of the lure of the New Testament is the complexity of its central character — the mix of gentleness and zeal, strident moralism and extraordinary compassion, the down-to-earth and the supernatural.

Most “real Jesus” efforts, though, assume that these complexities are accretions, to be whittled away to reach the historical core. Thus instead of a Jesus who contains multitudes, we get Jesus the nationalist or Jesus the apocalyptic prophet or Jesus the sage or Jesus the philosopher and so on down the list. ...

The mystical Jesus is for readers who wish we had the parables without the creeds, the philosophical Jesus for readers who wish Christianity had developed like the Ethical Culture movement. And a political Jesus like Aslan’s is for readers who feel, as one of his reviewers put it, that “Jesus’ usefulness as a challenge to power was lost the moment Christians first believed he rose from the dead.”

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Well, "Legion" contained multitudes, too, didn't he? What if Jesus' family really was right, that he was "a little off"? If you've ever encountered a religious fanatic in your own family, you know what I'm talking about.

 

"John thinks God cured his eyesight so he's not wearing his glasses, and oh, by the way, he says the world is coming to an end next May on Israel's birthday. Something about the significance of 66. He stayed up all night reading the Bible and came down to breakfast this morning all bleary eyed muttering how God had revealed it to him. He's not sure if he was awake or not when it happened. Anyway, he's quitting his job and plans to share this message with anyone who will listen from now until then, hoping they'll repent and be saved from what's coming when it happens."

Nowadays it's common to describe people who are a complex mixture of extremes as suffering from bipolar disorder, but it's still too hard for most people to entertain the idea that the history of their entire civilization might just quite possibly be the Nachleben of a madman.

Stephen Prothero Asks The Most Important Question About Reza Aslan's Book ZEALOT

Here in The Washington Post:

What are we to make of Jesus’s apparent lack of interest in doing anything practical whatsoever to prepare for holy war? If he has come to fight for “a real kingdom, with an actual king,” where are his soldiers and their weapons? And why no battle plan?

The reason this is the most important question about the book is that its answer, which Prothero does not provide, exposes the false choice between a Jesus who is a political revolutionary, the argument of Aslan's book, and a Jesus who is the founder of a spiritual religion whose kingdom is not of this world, the argument of most Christians and especially of the Fourth Gospel.

As an apocalyptic preacher, Jesus' thorough-going eschatology fully expected God to handle the practical details of the holy war to end all holy wars, a war which was coming imminently, when the Son of Man would descend from heaven with a shout and the angels of God would gather up the wicked in bundles and cast them into the eternal flames, and God would install his holy one on the throne of God in a heavenly Jerusalem descended from heaven to earth on the very spot where the temple of Herod once stood, its stones not left one upon another.

The framework for this interpretation was first erected by Albert Schweitzer about a century ago, and while a fair number of New Testament scholars continue to build on his work, like James Tabor and Dale Allison, Reza Aslan is not one of them.

Matthew Calls It False Testimony That Jesus Spoke Against The Temple, Luke Plainly Says Otherwise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the last came two false witnesses, And said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.

-- Matthew 26:60f.

And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, he said, As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

-- Luke 21:5f.

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Luke clearly preserves the eschatological context of the original remarks, in which it may be imagined that Jesus envisioned the coming of the kingdom down out of heaven from God, with the holy angels and the Son of Man in the lead, and the replacement of the earthly temple with the heavenly one. In keeping with the loss of this interpretation in the wake of its failure, Matthew's passion narrative reflects the new consensus view that Jesus died for sins and rose again, and thus spoke of the temple of his body, not of Herod's.

The Most Influential Verse Of The NT For The Western World: Neither carest thou for any man

 

And [the Pharisees] sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men.

-- Matthew 22:16

Reza Aslan's Ideas Are Hardly New

S.G.F. Brandon was a prominent exponent of the Zealot theory in the 1960s:

"His most celebrated position is the controversial one, that a political Jesus was a revolutionary figure, influenced in that by the Zealots; this he argued in the 1967 book Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity."