Senate Understanding Christianity

My pastor said something very wise about 2 years ago, and its stuck with me ever since...

"The most important thing about you is what first enters your mind, when you think of God."

 

I have many favorite verses from the Bible, but here's just one for now.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1:1.

 

I'm not a believer myself, but I always found these verses beautiful:

"Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”

Ruth 1:16

 

And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also. 1 John 4:21

 

What is meant by the term "brother"? Is it limited to siblings or does it cast a wider net?

 

It means everyone, since we are all children of God. That we should treat everyone as our brothers and sisters.

 

Much wider. Not just brothers, but neighbors as well. And when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus answered with the parable of the good Samaritan. Most people know that term, but what is not so well known is that in Jesus' time all Samaritans were despised as half breed Jews. No "real" Jew would call a Samaritan a Samaritan; it was always Samaritan dog. So Jesus' point was that even the lowest and most hated person should be loved as a neighbor and a brother. And Jesus went even further and told us to love our enemies. That's a tough one, but totally worth the effort.

 

Then what do you understand the term "love" to mean in that context? Is it unconditional love or conditional love, if conditional, then what are the conditions?

 

Unconditional. To love others as Jesus loved us.

 

That sounds like a condition to me.

 

It's a description. Jesus's love for us was unconditional. We're supposed to love other as Jesus loved us, which is unconditionally.

 

So the part where Jesus says he came not to bring peace but a sword, where those who love their children or parents more than him are not worthy of being his disciple...those are examples of his love? Ripping whole families apart because of his massive ego?

 

This is why people like you don't understand the Bible. You seem to think that what the text says must be taken at face value, when it actually may have a different or deeper meaning entirely. And throwing out single verses instead of looking at the surrounding context is not conducive to understanding it and you never will if you don't look past what's on the surface.

 

I speak the English language, and so when I read any text that's written in the language, I interpret it exactly how it is written. To do otherwise is to put my own personal spin on it, and that is not the proper way to read anything. Words that are written on a page only have the exact meaning that is written there.

 

You're compeletely misunderstanding me. The way verses are written does not necessarily mean the writers intended them to mean what they appear to say on the surface. People have to study them and try to figure out what the writers meant. And no, this is not putting "my oen personal spin" on it. Literal (ie, face value) interpretation is not always good.

 

Literal interpretation is the only method by which everyone can agree in what is being said. If the author meant something else, he would have written something else.

 

Ghost, you've said you don't believe in original sin or the Adam/Eve story and that Genesis 3:15 is baloney. I'm asking you to set that aside for a moment and just think about this.

God created the entire earth and everything in it, includings humans. He created Adam from the dust of the ground and Eve from one of Adam's ribs. He gave them an intelligence that He did not give to the animals or plants. They had the ability to make their own choices.

When the snake spoke with Eve, Satan was disguising himself as an angel of light, something he is very good at. Eve was decieved into eating the fruit while Adam deliberately did so.

Was God watching them at that moment? Most likely, given His later words to Adam.

Could He have stopped them from eating the fruit? He could have, but if He had, then what was the point of giving humans free will?

Because of that sin, the world was cursed and God set into motion a plan to provide the world with ultimate salvation through Christ. You say Genesis 3:15 is baloney. I beg to differ. The entire Bible, from cover to cover, unfolds God's plans to save humanity after the Fall. Genesis 3:15 is key to the plan, as it provides the first glimpse of the eventual coming of Christ. If 3:15 is stripped of that and made to seem an ordinary statement about humans and snakes, then it undermines the foundation of the Bible. Think about it - today, can humans crush a snake's head by stepping on it?. They're far more likely to get bitten and probably not do any harm to the snake. Making Genesis 3:15 about this is absurdly silly. No. Genesis 3:15 IS the first statement regarding the eventual triumph of Christ over Satan. You're trying to make it seem ordinary, and in the process stripping the deeper meaning from it.

 

Before engaging on this highly original and novel method of Biblical interpretation, you might want, at a minimum, to consider these little authors named Flaubert, Tolstoy, Doestyevsky, Herodotus, and Thucydides, mainly to see how many translations there have been of their works and how differently their words in their native languages have been rendered into English depending on the translator involved. Thucydides' history of the Peloppinesian War in particular has been horribly trawled over the past two thousand years for misleading, contextless quotes to imply something it was later (or contemporaneously) thought not to mean at all. And those translations only involved a rendering through one language barrier into English, not Aramaic to Greek to Latin finally to English as seems to have been the Biblical journey.

In each case you will find the translators' invariable expressions of frustration or concern that they hadn't achieved the same shade of meaning in the original text simply because the foundational assumptions of the two languages were different. Flaubert's "Madam Bovary" is perhaps the most shining example of that, being a novel that Flaubert worked over for five years to the point of agony over individual words. And that was in French. Even with that intensive precision in the original language - or perhaps because of it - the translation to English has been subject to controversy by varying French scholars and English translators over what Flaubert intended with a particular phrase. French, for example, allows an author to use one phrase to speak of the past tense and present tense simultaneously. English does not, and even there an English translator is left with the conundrum of how to address that in the English translation. Nabokov would upbraid translators of Tolstoy for hacking apart the original Russian text. And that's within the past century or so. Never mind the fact Aramaic's a dead language which renders it even harder to trace the original shades of meaning back to the intended text.

I'm no fan of Biblical literalism either, but translation is just a little more complex than that.

 

It's a good thing that the Creation myth is just that: a myth. Adam was not made from dust, Eve was not made from a rib, the Earth was not created in six days. It's all a fable.

 

Why would it be an issue for you that some things are meant to be taken literally while others are not? Isn't it a common occurrence for people to switch back and forth between wanting to be understood literally and wanting to be understood figuratively?

Also, why would it be an issue for you that other people think another's interpretation is "wrong"? it seems normal to me that people would disagree with each other.

 

If the Bible were solely interpreted as a work of fiction, then I wouldn't have a problem with how folks view individual passages. The problem comes when some folks go even further and use the Bible as justification for violence, bigotry or hatred, all on the assumption that their book is the word of a god.