From Wooly Liberals to the Back End of Palestine…

I wish to look more at the dichotomy that is so apparent between religious actuality and the bible. As a Christian, I never did prefer a literalistic interpretation of scripture… but why?

Resoundingly, the reason was underneath it all, I simply didn’t believe it to be true, so I bypassed it and I ‘cherry-picked’. Theologians, especially our friends the woolly liberals (CoE etc) would cry at me, “but we’re moving on! We’re making the bible relevant! Jesus loves gays, it’s OK!” Many people don’t preach this- but too many people are… It’s a travesty of theology. The bible in its canonised form, which, if you are in any way reformed theologically speaking, is the authoritative word of God. I believe Timothy had a something to say on the matter. If it’s the authoritative word of God- which, it might as well be- I mean, why would God lay down in history an imperfect book to represent himself? A world-wide best seller is a good way of publicising yourself… you may as well make it perfect in every sense if you’re the almighty. If this is true by theology, then why are churches teaching it’s OK to be a practicing gay man, and bless gay-marriages… that it’s OK to do many things just not preached in the bible. The bible says you must go through Jesus to be saved on to eternal life… but then liberals would say, “we believe God is good and just and fair….”. Pardon me if I read that God is also a jealous God on top of that- and it never says anywhere in the new testament that he will save non-believers after Christ’s ascension to heaven, let alone the horrific verses in the book of Revelation, detailing the rapture of the faithful. “It’s a faith thing”… of course it is. Furthermore, they throw at you the quotes of Galatians about being free from the law and all things are permissible whilst under the law.. and then we go into very different theology. Not all things are beneficial but everything is permissible. What a loop-hole and certainly not what Jesus had in mind.

As with most of scripture, sense is washed into the background and ‘faith’ prevails as the great equalizer. But how? Why would God make this doctrinal stance so complicated? Saved by grace, saved through faith, saved by works, but not by works alone? The letter to the Ephesians was a dialectical nightmare for theologians back in the day… it continues to be.

I mean, obviously- I’m being facetious- and I’m not so wilfully ignorant of Christian theology to know that if you take a specific doctrinal stance- you can make it make sense. Of course you can. We’re intelligent human beings. (It doesn’t help that it’s still all crap though.)

But why is it not unified? As the ‘body of Christ’ – why are Christians not unified? The Christian church, corporeally speaking, looks like the charred remains of a dismembered bomb victim. Mormons and Jehovah’s witnesses, counted as Christian denominations, are two groups which are evidence if ever there was any evidence, that simply anyone can write a book that coheres with a previous book and satiates a human demand for numinousity… only the New Testament had nearly 2000 years to shape and hone itself into a self-fulfilling text before people could ‘truly’ examine it with a better knowledge and grasp of the world, through many cultures, times, peoples and trials.

Prophecy. It makes me incredibly frustrated when people point out the servant songs of Isaiah and Jesus being ‘Led like a lamb’ to the slaughter and killed and rising on the third day in glory. OF COURSE. He must be the messiah, because it’s written in one book that’s what would happen… and it’s written in this other book, a long time after the first one, that that’s what does happen. I mean, I take it that people comprehend that all the people who wrote the New Testament had to do… was read the Old Testament? So they basically just had to be from a Jewish background (or have some Jewish teaching in the case of Luke) and have lived in the area of Jerusalem. Furthermore, the ‘historical’ reliability of the text is an interesting casing point.Maybe it’s accurate though. Maybe Luke wrote that whole gospel and his facts were, as Sir William Ramsay puts it, “as a first class historian” would have written them. We’re talking about the author’s ability to describe his surrounding landscape, when people praise his ability !! The LANDSCAPE around him, and write in a bit of detail about certain places. That certainly does make him geographically reliable… and maybe the therefore events happened too. But in terms of numinous reliability- who on earth could bestow the rank of a ‘first rate mystic/Godly man’ on to Luke? We have simply no idea… he’d never met Jesus… neither had many of the writers of the NT. It’s woeful, because we throw such respect at the historical reliability of the gospels without pausing to think that it doesn’t matter one single bit- because it doesn’t mean Jesus even existed. I mean, JK Rowling was able to depict Kings Cross station rather well in her Harry Potter series- but it doesn’t mean that Harry Potter existed… or any of the incidental characters he meets on his journey. A frivolous example, I’ll grant you- but the same would apply for novels of classical English literature- looking at Brontë and Austen… both can describe lovely cities and quaint little villages with religious fervour, but it means nothing when deciphering the truth of a story.

“Why would they lie though?” – Oh please. Let’s not start that. Delusion? Corruption? Misplaced faith? Maybe they weren’t lying at all but truly believed in something they had no evidence to prove. Look at how much the Catholic church is worth today. Look how much money the ‘mega-churches’ make today.. not that everyone in religion is out there for the money. I honestly don’t believe that. I believe that religious fervour can be very genuine. But misplaced. We rely on relics and insular words of wisdom. We rely on the pious words of a bygone era and our own disjointed thoughts to clamber together a ‘God’ in our mind.

Why, if there were a God, would you leave a world with not one piece of proof that he exists?

“Because we live in a scientific era now, we seeks evidence that’s not feasible” – Let me leave with this. Is that not an awfully depressing thing to think that God could not have forseen this woe and conflict of our age and is static to within one age of the earth (the Jewish one… in a small city… in the back end of Palestine….) I understand Christians who say that God wants to love us, but blind-faith is better than forced-faith through brute-evidence… but I don’t buy it. I think it’s a cop-out… we wouldn’t need THAT much evidence… maybe just a little raising from the dead? Maybe just a little curing the blind… the sick… the lame… but he doesn’t. He never did.