Sarah, I loved you article, especially the contrast between the gods of ANE and Jesus and the one of the beginning of the gospel of John and its ending. I came across your work a few years ago but lost track. Happy to have found you on Substack. Praying for you about your struggle against C. Keep up the good work.
Well put! I’ve been noticing something similar reading The Iliad. The gods are just as carnal as the Greeks themselves, fickle and subject to their passions. A god who is just as sinful as you is hardly to be worshipped out of admiration. Yet our God is truly great and worthy to be praised because of His nature, not because we want to appease His anger and get Him on our side.
Given how the whole Biblical narrative coalesces in the biographies of Jesus, it looks like the work of a Great Author. All of the literary symbols set up in the Old Testament come together in a climactic trio of events -- Jesus' crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension-- that turns what came before on its head but in a satisfying way that leaves you thinking, "Oh! So that's what that meant all along." (There is always something shocking yet perfectly fitting about the climax of a good movie, for example.)
This is what good human writers do, and if our Creator were to reveal Himself in a way that is concrete and understandable to us, an intricately woven story about human lives (including His own) is the best way to reach everyone. Just appearing in the sky with a loud voice, for example, would not be something any human could relate to or understand with the same emotional depth as, "He suffered the punishment due to us so our debt of sin could be paid and also forgiven."
Thanks for the encouragement Sarah. Grace to you and yours. I love what is plain and clear about "God" and the mysterious. Keep seeking. Jesus said that those who seek will find.
Let me try to provide a perspective from someone who was an atheist, and is now strongly "leaning" towards Christianity.
I think there are truly massive challenges in Christianity as a model of the world. The creative interpretation of prophecies is somewhat arguable, as the Jewish pattern of divine action is fascinating. The repeated story of divine action challenging the assumptions of the believers is real, and I think it grants vast rhetorical and practical power to Christianity.
Where I think Christianity's weakness comes from is on a few levels. One is that I think the model of Christianity towards the miraculous seems incomplete. Less incomplete than the atheist one, but I don't think the model of saints, God, angels, and the attributes given to them fits the reports used as evidence of their activity. This is complicated by the first point, but I think the traits of Jesus are extremely hard to reconcile with the last two thousandish years of history, where he didn't come back on the timetable he promised.
Where the tension lives is that I think personalized investigation and heterdoxy feels obviously flawed. Looking at the history of protestantism, I think the track record of "well, I know the truth about God" is more appalling than Catholicism's "this is complicated, bro." (I am being a bit flippant, but I think the pattern is real. Collective and informed philosophy seems to have produced something more durable, practical, and nuanced than personal relationships and study.)
This is an extremely awkward position. I have my own speculations. I think Christianity is appealing, logical, no-less-justified than most secular world views, and has a strong track record. Employing my reason, I also strongly suspect that extremely important ideas are being badly misunderstood by every mainline institution, while I lack any faith in my own ability to choose between institutions or act independently.
Let's look at the strongest and probably most controversial example. I strongly suspect that the doctrine of damnation is a misunderstanding, and so is salvation as an afterlife. Christianity starts with the promise of resurrection after death. Heaven emerges over time. I think there's a strong Screwtape-like logic to "an impossible to prove fate of extreme good or eternal torture, where you are conscious, and can no longer influence your fate after the evidence is given" which honestly makes me wonder if this "Devil" figure might've helped solidify the idea.
The literal explanations of damnation, the "can't be saved because you're dead" element, make much more sense as descriptive features of not consciously existing. If we go with little or no afterlife, but mass resurrection in the future, the Christian cosmology loses the vast majority of marks against it that atheist arguments use and many people find concerning. There's no "waiting around for people to die" experienced, but a transition to a reunion of everyone, including a vast community of people who you couldn't have imagined, born after you died. The "why would a loving God torture people for legalistic reasons" is resolved much more cleanly with "no conscious afterlife, we all get resurrected, judgment happens collectively and at human scales after the resurrection."
I think this helps ground the issue. My instincts on this topic are about the single most important question of Christianity. I arrived at them by methods I distrust. I can't see an honest way of integrating this tension outside of "be vaguely Christian/Unitarian Universalist and hope for the best." Admittedly, Saint Christopher provides an excellent model for "be a dog-headed monster with autism, be sensible about information, become a saint after divine confirmation you did a good job, still respected." So it's not entirely hopeless, but it is a real tension in my attempts to resolve towards "identify as Christian" instead of "think good thoughts about Christianity."
Regarding the past 2000 years of history, I think it makes sense that Jesus would come early in history rather than later. Roughly 80% of all people who have ever lived have lived after Jesus' time. This makes it easier for more people to hear God's full plan for making them holy through his Spirit, which Jesus promised to those who accept him as Lord/King.
(Short of salvation in Jesus name, many people are still pardoned by grace for their faith in their Creator, as Paul said in Romans 4; so, God is not some monster who rejects people for not believing some perfect theology about Himself.)
The apparent delay vastly increases the number of people who can hear the Gospel and choose a life on Earth filled with the Holy Spirit, which allows the "Kingdom of God" to "break through" (as Jesus often said, e.g. Mark 1:15) and transform life not only in heaven but here in our mortal years, too. We catch glimpses of this divine plan for life and loving communities once in a while, but it does not take long for wretched/lost people to hunt them down and tear them down so we all can be as miserable as they are again.
I can't think of any great horrors in those 2000 years that were acts of God. They were all the result of human moral evil, if we can be honest and take accountability for the roles we have played in shaping our own history.
Bob, you raise two primary objections to Christian belief. Here are a couple of comments that sit alongside your.challenges.
First, the problem of miraculous events. As a Christian I am open.to the miraculous. I will agree that I don't look at.them skeptically. I am predisposed to phenoma that are unexplaimed by natural "laws". Miracles challenge our explanations. If we grant that events that don't fit the normal can occur it is difficult to discuss and classify them under the.categories of our universe. Interesting discussions here.
The question of afterlife and how it relates to our time on earth is usually answered by speculation. I don't see definitive answers to all of our questions in our primary sources, Hebrew and Christian Bibles.
With "incomplete" material to draw from for answers, details have often matched the writer's cultural beliefs more than Christian sources.
Your identification of these two subject areas is important. My own understanding has widened through life. In my late 60s now I am comfortable with gaps in understanding.
Moving from the declaration of Genesis that God created to the final Revelation scenes where the create desire of God is to be with humans is a story worth considering.
Sarah covers the same scope in her article,.using John's gospel to cover the same scope. John gives us a divine initiation and concludes with a meal. Within that story I find my place.
I appreciate your articulate and careful response. Your objections raise real issues. All the best as you wrestle with them.
I would clarify that my issue with my current speculation is more structural than content-based. I think the important issue is that the methods I am using to approach Christianity feel like ones that lead to outcomes and claims I don't agree with. It's the same Protestant mechanism that creates Young Earth Creationism and Rapture theology, the attempt to look at complex evidence without full context and derive the true meaning through a personal relationship. It seems flawed, but the simple "listen to the people with the best track record" produces a theology I find deeply uncomfortable on a moral level, that of conscious agony for much of humanity. This tension is what I have failed to resolve so far.
Thanks for the careful response. I know YECT and Dispensation thinking well. These were.the air I breathed as a young person.
I apologize that I don't have time now but to ask if you know other structural approaches?
Any explanation of what Scripture says to me must begin with what it meant to the first hearers. Are you familiar with structural approaches that honour this print?
Thank you. I would be curious about the structural approach options. While I've done some research, reading bits and pieces, I haven't really had a systemic approach, which is an oversight on my part. Understanding the field as a whole would be very helpful for me.
Bob, you could start with BibleProject.com. They have a series of videos that show the layout of each book. Their series of 10 short videos called How to Read the Bible is a great introduction to a study of the Bible as it is written.
You won't quickly find alternative conclusions on particular teachings in that series. They have subject based videos as well.
The classroom series are at an undergrad level. I am two thirds of the way through the Hebrew Bible sessions.
Tim Mackie, who is the lead teacher is a thinker with a serious mind. I didn't picture him as a skateboarder but that is his background. He came to Christianity through a church that ran a skate park in Portland.
I think Bible Project is the best and most accessible teaching on the layout, structure and interconnections in the text.
If you choose to go through a video series I can watch the same one and discuss it if you like.
The most recent one quibbled about the meaning of "virgin" in Isaiah and how Jesus could be descended from the line of David when Joseph wasn't His biological father. Good questions, but they're not insurmountable problems for the prophecy.
Excellent. Thank you for putting words to these things our minds strive to encompass.
That was so good, Sarah. I enjoyed that so much. Majesty->Humility. ❤️🩹
Sarah, I loved you article, especially the contrast between the gods of ANE and Jesus and the one of the beginning of the gospel of John and its ending. I came across your work a few years ago but lost track. Happy to have found you on Substack. Praying for you about your struggle against C. Keep up the good work.
Thank you, Serge.
Well put! I’ve been noticing something similar reading The Iliad. The gods are just as carnal as the Greeks themselves, fickle and subject to their passions. A god who is just as sinful as you is hardly to be worshipped out of admiration. Yet our God is truly great and worthy to be praised because of His nature, not because we want to appease His anger and get Him on our side.
Given how the whole Biblical narrative coalesces in the biographies of Jesus, it looks like the work of a Great Author. All of the literary symbols set up in the Old Testament come together in a climactic trio of events -- Jesus' crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension-- that turns what came before on its head but in a satisfying way that leaves you thinking, "Oh! So that's what that meant all along." (There is always something shocking yet perfectly fitting about the climax of a good movie, for example.)
This is what good human writers do, and if our Creator were to reveal Himself in a way that is concrete and understandable to us, an intricately woven story about human lives (including His own) is the best way to reach everyone. Just appearing in the sky with a loud voice, for example, would not be something any human could relate to or understand with the same emotional depth as, "He suffered the punishment due to us so our debt of sin could be paid and also forgiven."
Great article! Thanks!
Well said.
Thanks for the encouragement Sarah. Grace to you and yours. I love what is plain and clear about "God" and the mysterious. Keep seeking. Jesus said that those who seek will find.
My protagonist’s wild and not-so-wild conjectures at the end of my novel. Food for thought.
https://josephmazzilli.substack.com/p/from-my-novels-epilogue-and-afterword?r=1g7i8f&utm_medium=ios
Ah, but you didn't go far enough. Let's get to Armageddon and we have
the ancient near eastern deities battling it out for souls and horrid bowls
being poured on the earth. Death and destruction. Full circle back to the
beginning and see that the A & E myth is just that. We can surmise a better
prelude that has nothing to do with failure and still have our Savior as you
so aptly described.
Let me try to provide a perspective from someone who was an atheist, and is now strongly "leaning" towards Christianity.
I think there are truly massive challenges in Christianity as a model of the world. The creative interpretation of prophecies is somewhat arguable, as the Jewish pattern of divine action is fascinating. The repeated story of divine action challenging the assumptions of the believers is real, and I think it grants vast rhetorical and practical power to Christianity.
Where I think Christianity's weakness comes from is on a few levels. One is that I think the model of Christianity towards the miraculous seems incomplete. Less incomplete than the atheist one, but I don't think the model of saints, God, angels, and the attributes given to them fits the reports used as evidence of their activity. This is complicated by the first point, but I think the traits of Jesus are extremely hard to reconcile with the last two thousandish years of history, where he didn't come back on the timetable he promised.
Where the tension lives is that I think personalized investigation and heterdoxy feels obviously flawed. Looking at the history of protestantism, I think the track record of "well, I know the truth about God" is more appalling than Catholicism's "this is complicated, bro." (I am being a bit flippant, but I think the pattern is real. Collective and informed philosophy seems to have produced something more durable, practical, and nuanced than personal relationships and study.)
This is an extremely awkward position. I have my own speculations. I think Christianity is appealing, logical, no-less-justified than most secular world views, and has a strong track record. Employing my reason, I also strongly suspect that extremely important ideas are being badly misunderstood by every mainline institution, while I lack any faith in my own ability to choose between institutions or act independently.
Let's look at the strongest and probably most controversial example. I strongly suspect that the doctrine of damnation is a misunderstanding, and so is salvation as an afterlife. Christianity starts with the promise of resurrection after death. Heaven emerges over time. I think there's a strong Screwtape-like logic to "an impossible to prove fate of extreme good or eternal torture, where you are conscious, and can no longer influence your fate after the evidence is given" which honestly makes me wonder if this "Devil" figure might've helped solidify the idea.
The literal explanations of damnation, the "can't be saved because you're dead" element, make much more sense as descriptive features of not consciously existing. If we go with little or no afterlife, but mass resurrection in the future, the Christian cosmology loses the vast majority of marks against it that atheist arguments use and many people find concerning. There's no "waiting around for people to die" experienced, but a transition to a reunion of everyone, including a vast community of people who you couldn't have imagined, born after you died. The "why would a loving God torture people for legalistic reasons" is resolved much more cleanly with "no conscious afterlife, we all get resurrected, judgment happens collectively and at human scales after the resurrection."
I think this helps ground the issue. My instincts on this topic are about the single most important question of Christianity. I arrived at them by methods I distrust. I can't see an honest way of integrating this tension outside of "be vaguely Christian/Unitarian Universalist and hope for the best." Admittedly, Saint Christopher provides an excellent model for "be a dog-headed monster with autism, be sensible about information, become a saint after divine confirmation you did a good job, still respected." So it's not entirely hopeless, but it is a real tension in my attempts to resolve towards "identify as Christian" instead of "think good thoughts about Christianity."
Regarding the past 2000 years of history, I think it makes sense that Jesus would come early in history rather than later. Roughly 80% of all people who have ever lived have lived after Jesus' time. This makes it easier for more people to hear God's full plan for making them holy through his Spirit, which Jesus promised to those who accept him as Lord/King.
(Short of salvation in Jesus name, many people are still pardoned by grace for their faith in their Creator, as Paul said in Romans 4; so, God is not some monster who rejects people for not believing some perfect theology about Himself.)
The apparent delay vastly increases the number of people who can hear the Gospel and choose a life on Earth filled with the Holy Spirit, which allows the "Kingdom of God" to "break through" (as Jesus often said, e.g. Mark 1:15) and transform life not only in heaven but here in our mortal years, too. We catch glimpses of this divine plan for life and loving communities once in a while, but it does not take long for wretched/lost people to hunt them down and tear them down so we all can be as miserable as they are again.
I can't think of any great horrors in those 2000 years that were acts of God. They were all the result of human moral evil, if we can be honest and take accountability for the roles we have played in shaping our own history.
Bob, you raise two primary objections to Christian belief. Here are a couple of comments that sit alongside your.challenges.
First, the problem of miraculous events. As a Christian I am open.to the miraculous. I will agree that I don't look at.them skeptically. I am predisposed to phenoma that are unexplaimed by natural "laws". Miracles challenge our explanations. If we grant that events that don't fit the normal can occur it is difficult to discuss and classify them under the.categories of our universe. Interesting discussions here.
The question of afterlife and how it relates to our time on earth is usually answered by speculation. I don't see definitive answers to all of our questions in our primary sources, Hebrew and Christian Bibles.
With "incomplete" material to draw from for answers, details have often matched the writer's cultural beliefs more than Christian sources.
Your identification of these two subject areas is important. My own understanding has widened through life. In my late 60s now I am comfortable with gaps in understanding.
Moving from the declaration of Genesis that God created to the final Revelation scenes where the create desire of God is to be with humans is a story worth considering.
Sarah covers the same scope in her article,.using John's gospel to cover the same scope. John gives us a divine initiation and concludes with a meal. Within that story I find my place.
I appreciate your articulate and careful response. Your objections raise real issues. All the best as you wrestle with them.
Thank you.
I would clarify that my issue with my current speculation is more structural than content-based. I think the important issue is that the methods I am using to approach Christianity feel like ones that lead to outcomes and claims I don't agree with. It's the same Protestant mechanism that creates Young Earth Creationism and Rapture theology, the attempt to look at complex evidence without full context and derive the true meaning through a personal relationship. It seems flawed, but the simple "listen to the people with the best track record" produces a theology I find deeply uncomfortable on a moral level, that of conscious agony for much of humanity. This tension is what I have failed to resolve so far.
Thanks for the careful response. I know YECT and Dispensation thinking well. These were.the air I breathed as a young person.
I apologize that I don't have time now but to ask if you know other structural approaches?
Any explanation of what Scripture says to me must begin with what it meant to the first hearers. Are you familiar with structural approaches that honour this print?
I hope to continue an open discussion, Bob.
Thank you. I would be curious about the structural approach options. While I've done some research, reading bits and pieces, I haven't really had a systemic approach, which is an oversight on my part. Understanding the field as a whole would be very helpful for me.
Bob, you could start with BibleProject.com. They have a series of videos that show the layout of each book. Their series of 10 short videos called How to Read the Bible is a great introduction to a study of the Bible as it is written.
You won't quickly find alternative conclusions on particular teachings in that series. They have subject based videos as well.
The classroom series are at an undergrad level. I am two thirds of the way through the Hebrew Bible sessions.
Tim Mackie, who is the lead teacher is a thinker with a serious mind. I didn't picture him as a skateboarder but that is his background. He came to Christianity through a church that ran a skate park in Portland.
I think Bible Project is the best and most accessible teaching on the layout, structure and interconnections in the text.
If you choose to go through a video series I can watch the same one and discuss it if you like.
Enjoy, David
Did those who claimed Jesus didn’t fulfill the OT prophecies say which ones they can point to?
The most recent one quibbled about the meaning of "virgin" in Isaiah and how Jesus could be descended from the line of David when Joseph wasn't His biological father. Good questions, but they're not insurmountable problems for the prophecy.
As a Christian and a one-time astronomy major (journalism was the ultimate choice), I incredibly appreciate your work, Sarah.
Lee Strobel (another journalist!) addresses the "virgin" passage in Isaiah pretty well here, IMHO: https://www.biblegateway.com/learn/biblical-living/holidays/how-messianic-prophecies-point-jesus/
Thanks for all you do. Really looking forward to your book!