I think that whatever "the good news" is, it should be stated in simple terms. The congregation should be able to grasp it at once. We should not need to know Hebrew, Greek or Latin to comprehend it. I stand by my earlier post.
The only truly, absolutely, universal, transcendent good news is that all will be well, for all. Faith should break through all the yeah buts to that every time surely? Even if I had my instance of the fingerpost, I would still need faith that that is beyond the NT. Because it's not in it.
Taken to the wide(r) frame, Christianity is one of the religions which teaches active feedback between behaviours and results. Many other faiths seem to have a much lower association, and most rituals seem to be completed with no expectation of anything specific happening to the individual.
Or perhaps to put it another way; in Christianity you have a choice, in other religions you are swept along by an ultimate reality that you have no choice but to sink/swim within.
And whilst that might be a "fake choice" (for example you might misunderstand what it is to choose and do it wrong), there are clearly benefits. For one thing there is the liberating effect of choice: clearly it can shake up the individual, it can empower individuals to resist oppression, there is the positive mental impact of having chosen something significant for oneself.
On the other hand, arguably the individualism of "choice" faiths reflects badly on Western civilisation and tends towards behaviours that promote the individual's freedom and views over everyone else.
Of course this is imperfect analysis, for example Islam appears in some ways to be a "choice" faith but often expresses itself as a more communal faith.
Anyway, my contribution to the discussion is that the "good news" of Christianity is that you are a person that matters, and you can make choices that have consequences. But that's also "bad news".
The problem for a God trying to separate the oppressor from the oppressed is that so often we can be both. The world is not neatly divided into Good People and Death Eaters.
...
Like any other metaphor, it would be a mistake to take it as anything else.
Any metaphor that relies on someone from an "oppressed population", domestic abuse and child abuse is a terrible metaphor.
Please, at the least, and given that you say "we can be both", try to illustrate oppression with an example of oppression in which you participate.
The problem for a God trying to separate the oppressor from the oppressed is that so often we can be both. The world is not neatly divided into Good People and Death Eaters.
...
Like any other metaphor, it would be a mistake to take it as anything else.
Any metaphor that relies on someone from an "oppressed population", domestic abuse and child abuse is a terrible metaphor.
Please, at the least, and given that you say "we can be both", try to illustrate oppression with an example of oppression in which you participate.
The metaphor does not rely on the example. I chose the example I did to illustrate in stark terms.
I do not think personalising it specifically to me is actually helpful in elucidating the basic point and have no intention of doing so. This is a discussion board, not a confessional and doing as you suggest would drag the conversation Epiphanies-wards.
In relation to personalising it, I used the word "participate", not "perpetrate".
Oppression that both you and I participate in includes how we shop and what we buy. Whether these things were produced or packed or delivered by people (or children) being paid below the minimum wage, the unhealthy or dangerous conditions they work in, whether they are forced to work 18 hours a day...
I can't see why you can't make your basic point about how the love of God burns against us, who participate in and enable oppression, as well as for us.
In relation to personalising it, I used the word "participate", not "perpetrate".
Oppression that both you and I participate in includes how we shop and what we buy. Whether these things were produced or packed or delivered by people (or children) being paid below the minimum wage, the unhealthy or dangerous conditions they work in, whether they are forced to work 18 hours a day...
I can't see why you can't make your basic point about how the love of God burns against us, who participate in and enable oppression, as well as for us.
I wanted to use stark examples because people find it relatively easy to excuse themselves in "everybody does it", "it's unavoidable" and "I'm no worse than him over there" examples. It would be easy to posit God just overlooking those. There is something in @MaryLouise 's "unforgivable" category which I wanted to highlight as actually being where the impossible might be deemed to need to occur for there to be Good News for all.
The banality of everyday evil doesn't quite cut it somehow, not without serious unpacking of its ramifications.
Mr Cheesy, once of this parish, used to go so far as to say there were two gospels. The gospel to the poor is the Beatitudes as just quoted. The gospel to the rich is "Repent".
I think that might be overstating things as in reality we're all of us in different situations and at different times and from different perspectives both sinners and sinned against, but then I am drawn to the parable of Lazarus and Dives. There's no "Lazarus repented and believed the gospel and accepted me as his personal saviour, and you didn’t". No, it's "Lazarus had a terrible time on earth which you could have done something about and you didn't" - which does I think give the two gospels model some legs, at least as a construct to guide our thinking.
Turning back to the fact we're both sinner and sinned against, in different contexts oppressor and oppressed, we can see that if God is for the oppressed and against the oppressor I can see a massive conflict in any thorough judgement of any of us. I wonder if we can see the playing out of that conflict within God themself* as God acts as Judge and in Christ's representative humanity both victim of oppression and oppressor, and so the judgement is turned back in on themself as the only place it can go without condemning us as oppressor despite also being the oppressed on whose behalf God is exacting justice.
Does that make any sense at all?
If it does, than can we not see ourselves as potentially both Dives and Lazarus, in different areas of our lives? And all this talk of Heaven and Hell is about how the Dives part of us ultimately must be utterly destroyed so that the blameless Lazarus can become the people who can inherit the Kingdom of God.
*grammatically disputed reflexive pronoun chosen on theological grounds so bite me.
Interesting, @KarlLB , but I wish I could understand your third paragraph.
I'll try to elucidate.
The problem for a God trying to separate the oppressor from the oppressed is that so often we can be both. The world is not neatly divided into Good People and Death Eaters.
Consider a man from an oppressed population made to do back breaking work 18 hours a day, but who when he gets home regularly assaults his wife and beats his children, by way of an illustration.
This creates a conflict. On the one hand the burning love of God burns for the man and against those who oppress him for his labour, but also burns for his wife and children and against the man who is abusing them.
I suppose what I'm seeing in the Cross viewed from this perspective is God working out this conflict within themself, because there's no other place it can go without injustice also being done to those who are oppressed as well as oppessor, ironically in the name of justice.
Like any other metaphor, it would be a mistake to take it as anything else.
I think you’re on to something with the Trinity.
And i don’t have a problem with your illustration because you’re clearly not getting at anybody, I’ve seen that precise situation dozens if not hundreds of times in real life, and your argument requires a clear and nonsubtle example. And i presume that, if you were aware of a case in your personal life where you personally were committing oppression, you’d take immediate steps to amend it. Which leads to a death of examples.
My people call that situation being both sinner and sinned against, but your example is clearer than church-speak.
Sounds a lot like "love the sinner, hate the sin" to me.
I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. If my boss is a bully and malignly exercises his power to bully me, there I am sinned against. If from my more lowly position I spread untrue malicious gossip about others, there I am sinning. The point is that for most people, if not everyone, they are both sinners and sinned against.
I don't think it has to be nuanced. It's Sin itself that's abhorrent to God, not the soul, status or relative position of a person committing it. God themself decided we'd be this way from the very beginning. It only stands to reason that this duality would be accounted for from the very beginning, too. Everything else is just a matter of degrees.
Actually the point I was making was that almost everybody has got a foot in both camps. That's all.
And that I thought Karl was quite right about this being something God worked out "internally," as it were, with the crucifixion as the result. If he'd tried to find a solution that involved us balancing accounts, we'd be here forever. Rather like the problem of reparation to American Indians in the U.S. What do you do with a person who is descended from both oppressors and oppressed, and perhaps lives under oppression in one area of life while actively enforcing it on someone else in another?
So what's the actual good news, then -- Universalism? We have a current thread about that. Everyone is both oppressor and oppressed. Everyone is the embodiment of sin and yet redeemed. God is bungling and capricious and inconsistent, and humanity suffers all the way through to perfection, albeit with some enjoying more reward than others, in spite of itself because... God?
Everyone is both oppressor and oppressed. Everyone is the embodiment of sin and yet redeemed.
I'm OK with both of those, FWIW. 'If was say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us'.
God is bungling and capricious and inconsistent
Hang on - why does that follow? Existence is capricious and inconsistent, sure - but God is only bungling if we were told it was going to be easy and to relax, He would take care of it. When we were told that, this side of heaven?
and humanity suffers all the way through to perfection, albeit with some enjoying more reward than others,
What's this about reward? Follow me, He said...if that was a Good Friday, I wouldn't want a bad one...
The good news is that we are saved from loneliness and oblivion, because God is with us and we endure in that relationship. But all relationships can be impaired through neglect on one side, even if the other side is faithful.
To loosely quote the late Jonathan Sacks: sin is separation, and religion is the redemption of solitude.
and humanity suffers all the way through to perfection, albeit with some enjoying more reward than others,
What's this about reward? Follow me, He said...if that was a Good Friday, I wouldn't want a bad one...
Heh.
You know, this week I had to do something I've never had to do before--tell someone (who asked--seriously, you think I'd want to dump this on someone who didn't ask for it?) that she needed to stop waiting for someone to fund the mission need that she saw so incredibly clearly, and that she was more than willing to do if someone would just give her a salary--or failing that, some grant funding...
to tell her that IMHO she just needed to go ahead on the assumption that NO money would ever be forthcoming, and do the work anyway. Funding herself and whatever work came of it on her disability pay, which is worse than peanuts.
Yeah, I got to tell someone to pick up their cross and start down the path to Calvary. With the predictable ending, yeah.
It sucks.
Somehow it's so much easier to do it yourself than to tell anybody else to...
I’m going to stick with forgiveness and eternal life.
And I’m going to stick with Jesus, God-with-us, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us and who reconciles all. And to that I’ll add the news that that absolutely nothing, including death, will be able to separate us from the love of God made known in Jesus Christ.
The good news is that we are saved from loneliness and oblivion, because God is with us and we endure in that relationship. But all relationships can be impaired through neglect on one side, even if the other side is faithful.
To loosely quote the late Jonathan Sacks: sin is separation, and religion is the redemption of solitude.
Comments
The only truly, absolutely, universal, transcendent good news is that all will be well, for all. Faith should break through all the yeah buts to that every time surely? Even if I had my instance of the fingerpost, I would still need faith that that is beyond the NT. Because it's not in it.
Or perhaps to put it another way; in Christianity you have a choice, in other religions you are swept along by an ultimate reality that you have no choice but to sink/swim within.
And whilst that might be a "fake choice" (for example you might misunderstand what it is to choose and do it wrong), there are clearly benefits. For one thing there is the liberating effect of choice: clearly it can shake up the individual, it can empower individuals to resist oppression, there is the positive mental impact of having chosen something significant for oneself.
On the other hand, arguably the individualism of "choice" faiths reflects badly on Western civilisation and tends towards behaviours that promote the individual's freedom and views over everyone else.
Of course this is imperfect analysis, for example Islam appears in some ways to be a "choice" faith but often expresses itself as a more communal faith.
Anyway, my contribution to the discussion is that the "good news" of Christianity is that you are a person that matters, and you can make choices that have consequences. But that's also "bad news".
Please, at the least, and given that you say "we can be both", try to illustrate oppression with an example of oppression in which you participate.
The metaphor does not rely on the example. I chose the example I did to illustrate in stark terms.
I do not think personalising it specifically to me is actually helpful in elucidating the basic point and have no intention of doing so. This is a discussion board, not a confessional and doing as you suggest would drag the conversation Epiphanies-wards.
Oppression that both you and I participate in includes how we shop and what we buy. Whether these things were produced or packed or delivered by people (or children) being paid below the minimum wage, the unhealthy or dangerous conditions they work in, whether they are forced to work 18 hours a day...
I can't see why you can't make your basic point about how the love of God burns against us, who participate in and enable oppression, as well as for us.
I wanted to use stark examples because people find it relatively easy to excuse themselves in "everybody does it", "it's unavoidable" and "I'm no worse than him over there" examples. It would be easy to posit God just overlooking those. There is something in @MaryLouise 's "unforgivable" category which I wanted to highlight as actually being where the impossible might be deemed to need to occur for there to be Good News for all.
The banality of everyday evil doesn't quite cut it somehow, not without serious unpacking of its ramifications.
I think you’re on to something with the Trinity.
And i don’t have a problem with your illustration because you’re clearly not getting at anybody, I’ve seen that precise situation dozens if not hundreds of times in real life, and your argument requires a clear and nonsubtle example. And i presume that, if you were aware of a case in your personal life where you personally were committing oppression, you’d take immediate steps to amend it. Which leads to a death of examples.
My people call that situation being both sinner and sinned against, but your example is clearer than church-speak.
And that I thought Karl was quite right about this being something God worked out "internally," as it were, with the crucifixion as the result. If he'd tried to find a solution that involved us balancing accounts, we'd be here forever. Rather like the problem of reparation to American Indians in the U.S. What do you do with a person who is descended from both oppressors and oppressed, and perhaps lives under oppression in one area of life while actively enforcing it on someone else in another?
I'm OK with both of those, FWIW. 'If was say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us'.
Hang on - why does that follow? Existence is capricious and inconsistent, sure - but God is only bungling if we were told it was going to be easy and to relax, He would take care of it. When we were told that, this side of heaven?
What's this about reward? Follow me, He said...if that was a Good Friday, I wouldn't want a bad one...
To loosely quote the late Jonathan Sacks: sin is separation, and religion is the redemption of solitude.
Heh.
You know, this week I had to do something I've never had to do before--tell someone (who asked--seriously, you think I'd want to dump this on someone who didn't ask for it?) that she needed to stop waiting for someone to fund the mission need that she saw so incredibly clearly, and that she was more than willing to do if someone would just give her a salary--or failing that, some grant funding...
to tell her that IMHO she just needed to go ahead on the assumption that NO money would ever be forthcoming, and do the work anyway. Funding herself and whatever work came of it on her disability pay, which is worse than peanuts.
Yeah, I got to tell someone to pick up their cross and start down the path to Calvary. With the predictable ending, yeah.
It sucks.
Somehow it's so much easier to do it yourself than to tell anybody else to...
Fixed quoting code. BroJames, Purgatory Host
Then God is the chief sinner.