What does the Lord need from us?
pablito1954
Shipmate
in Purgatory
"Our Lord Jesus Christ said: Hear O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord the God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets." (From the Book of Common Prayer as proposed in 1928(in England) quoting Mark 12.29-31.)
"The way of life is this: first, you shall love God who created you; second, your neighbour as yourself; all those things which you do not want to be done to you, you should not do to others." (From the Didache 1.2)
"And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6.8)
As someone who has struggled all my life with doctrine and dogma, I have personally pared down my beliefs to the above quotes. One from the Lord Jesus Himself, one from a very early Christian source (The Didache), and one from the OT (Micah). Most Christians would say that's nowhere near enough for salvation. Because it leaves out Christ's redemptive work through his crucifiction, resurrection, and ascension.
I don't have any problem in believing that Jesus lived a life of total surrender to God's will. Thy will be done is both in the Lord's Prayer and the agony of Gethsemane (paraphrasing Mark 32.36). I also believe that His whole life and death was a sacrifice of self to God. I believe He told His followers that they too need to similarly sacrifice self in order to follow him. But I have grave doubts about a bodily resurrection, though I believe that His followers likely continued to experience His presence. I can't accept a literal virgin birth, seeing it more as a metaphor for the closeness of Jesus to His Father.
I struggle with the Trinity, which is at best hinted at in Scripture, it is nowhere explicit. I think it's a logical absurdity. And while I see Jesus as a divinely appointed agent, ie Messiah, I don't think He's the only one in human history, and I think other religions and cultures are equality valid paths to union with God.
So I'm interested in other's opinions of what God actually needs from us in terms of belief and living out of those beliefs.
"The way of life is this: first, you shall love God who created you; second, your neighbour as yourself; all those things which you do not want to be done to you, you should not do to others." (From the Didache 1.2)
"And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6.8)
As someone who has struggled all my life with doctrine and dogma, I have personally pared down my beliefs to the above quotes. One from the Lord Jesus Himself, one from a very early Christian source (The Didache), and one from the OT (Micah). Most Christians would say that's nowhere near enough for salvation. Because it leaves out Christ's redemptive work through his crucifiction, resurrection, and ascension.
I don't have any problem in believing that Jesus lived a life of total surrender to God's will. Thy will be done is both in the Lord's Prayer and the agony of Gethsemane (paraphrasing Mark 32.36). I also believe that His whole life and death was a sacrifice of self to God. I believe He told His followers that they too need to similarly sacrifice self in order to follow him. But I have grave doubts about a bodily resurrection, though I believe that His followers likely continued to experience His presence. I can't accept a literal virgin birth, seeing it more as a metaphor for the closeness of Jesus to His Father.
I struggle with the Trinity, which is at best hinted at in Scripture, it is nowhere explicit. I think it's a logical absurdity. And while I see Jesus as a divinely appointed agent, ie Messiah, I don't think He's the only one in human history, and I think other religions and cultures are equality valid paths to union with God.
So I'm interested in other's opinions of what God actually needs from us in terms of belief and living out of those beliefs.
Comments
Anyway I once asked my Pastor about this. He advised me to concentrate on the second and it should take care of the first.
Not only do Matthew and Luke omit the Shema, but the miss the point of the story, which is that the Temple with it's sacrificial system, is of much less important than proclaiming God, loving Him, and loving each other.
I have always thought they omit it because it contradicts the concept of the trinity.
I rather thought that the NT authors were observant Jews who would very much rally around the shema and hold it to be consistent with the latent trinitarian doctrine they also expound.
I have to say, I have never agreed with the concept of the Trinity, and this sort of cements my belief.
I don't suggest that hints of Jesus' divinity are entirely absent from Mark, but it's much more developed in Matthew. I don't think a concept like the Trinity would ever have occurred to the writer of Mark.
As for you all who think he doesn't believe in/speak of the Trinity--what, for goodness' sake, do you do with John 13-17? Just to start with.
Okay, you can yell at me now.
No, I would think that if Jesus was going to proclaim a Trinity, he would have actually said so, like "hey, I'm here to tell you that the monolithic Lord you have always believed in is actually Triune." and he didn't come out with any such thing.
I don't in any way deny Jesus' sonship to the Father, but there He makes it clear that they aren't equal as in the Church's doctrine of the Trinity. You might just about get away with it if you adopt the Orthodox view of the Trinity, sans filioque, because there, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father, making the Father the "senior partner" in the Trinity, but the double procession of Western Christianity completely upends that.
I think the Trinity is a doctrine of the early Church which it's hard pressed to find in Scripture.
After Jesus, both of the main branches of Judaism as then was, namely rabbinic Judaism and what was to become orthodox Christianity tidied their doctrine up a bit; Judaism by taking all such references as metaphorical and Christianity by taking them as referring to the Son as revealed in Jesus or the Spirit.
Christians were rather forced into making something of these ideas by the fact that Jesus was supposed to have said and done things that any strict monotheist must think can only be done by God alone (save the world most obviously, but also Jesus talks about himself as if he is the presence of God). But they were adapting ideas that were already in their heritage, not making them up out of whole cloth.
Strangely, Hinduism which is often seen as polytheistic, with numerous Incarnations of the divine, reduces everything to manifestations of Brahman, who alone truly exists. I generally support that view of ultimate reality. Even if God comes to us as a Trinity, which I've never managed to comprehend, I think everything folds into one eventually.
Well, in Mark 2, when some folk brought their paralyzed friend and lowered him through the roof, some thought Jesus was claiming to be God, and while he chided them, he didn’t correct them: Likewise, in the trial before Pilate,the Chief Priest accused Jesus of blasphemy for claiming to be the Son of God, which was perceived as being a claim to being equal with God.
In John 8, we have: That’s just one of the times in John applies “I Am” to himself, though perhaps the most direct time, and given that the crowd wanted to stone him, it seems clear they believed him to be claiming equality with God.
The gospels try to whitewash Pilate's guilt over the crucifiction, because they were written in the Roman world. But he was crucified with a plaque saying "Jesus of Nazateth King of the Jews" above him. He was crucified for claiming to be King, Messiah, and Son of God, none of which implied divinity.
I may as well confess here that I am strongly considering looking into conversion to Judaism, because it make a lot more sense to me.
Definitely this.
The point of John 13-17 (as I referred to it) is that there you have Jesus talking, with great clarity, about the Father (throughout the passage); about the Spirit (14-16); and about himself, and all three are treated as God, and as one (see for example John 14:9-11, and how much clearer can he get?)
The whole thing is full of the interrelationship of the three Persons; and you set against this, what? One verse, "If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I." ? (John 14:28b) Has it not occurred to you that he might be discussing position/status, and not essence when he says "greater"? Or if you find that impossible to believe, Jesus can call himself lesser purely on the basis of his humanity, which is created. There's no need to throw out the entire doctrine of the Trinity, which has been believed from the beginning, on the basis of this one verse. Really, I'm a bit distressed by this!
Jesus is continually applying the Divine Name "I am" to himself, all through the four Gospels, and it's clearly intentional because the Greek does not require the pronoun, unlike English. He could easily get away with saying "eimi," "am" and not "ego eimi", "I am" because that's actually the more common construction--but he doesn't. And it gets him in trouble so many times. People try to stone him...
He's doing things like forgiving sins. He's accepting worship. He's saying things like "Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes," (Matthew 23:34), which is a thing that only God does, for who else sends prophets? And he goes on to pronounce judgement on those who reject and harm them, very much in the style of God most high! He says things like "It is written..." but I say to you," which is a bit of cheek if he's not the God who wrote the Scriptures to begin with. He repeats the Shema as the most important commandment, and yet he does all these things. And so forth and so on.
But okay, let's look at the Old Testament. What are we going to do with the Spirit of God, who shows up in the first verses of Genesis and never leaves the stage for very long at all? What about the Angel of the Lord, who accepts sacrifices and speaks first person in the voice of God? Quite a few times, too.... What about that divine plural "elohim", which is decidedly odd if God has no plurality in him? What about Isaiah 6:8, "And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Or for that matter, Genesis 1:26, with "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness' " ?
I mean, nobody HAS to believe in the Trinity, or that Jesus is God, or any of this stuff. But claiming that there is no textual support for any of these incredibly early and deep-rooted doctrines is just ... distressing.
Go and look, please.
I would emphasise, however, that such monism isn't part of mainstream Judaism. What eventually put me off is that, throughout all of this, they seem to be sure they are really spiritually superior to the rest of the human race, having an extra "divine soul" missing from the goyim. I could never subscribe to the view that any special privileges can come from being born to a certain race or within a certain religion. I so love many aspects of Judaism especially the immediacy of their relationship with God, but I could never convert.
I'm also struck by how 'sola scriptura' pablito1954's arguments sound. Ok, he does cite The Didache.
If pablito1954 doesn't trust the nasty, wicked Church to come up with a 'correct' view of God - the Trinity, deity of Christ, the deity of the Holy Spirit then why quote the NT scriptures at all as it was the Church which canonised the books which he's now quoting.
We could go so far as to say that the Church wrote the NT - insofar that all the writers were part of the nascent Christian Church.
I don't think anyone here would argue that the doctrine of the Trinity dropped down ready made. It developed and was thrashed out as the Church tried to make sense of the documents it came to regard as inspired scripture.
I would say this, of course, as an Orthodox Christian but you can't go disaggregating the Church from the Bible and the Bible from the Church.
There's a saying: 'The Church through the Bible and the Bible through the Church.'
It's one of these both/and things.
As for what the Lord 'requires' of us, well the sources @pablito54 lists put that very eloquently. But as @Lamb Chopped rightly points out, salvation is a gift.
I don't think it's a case of finding what the bare minimum is or what the maximum is either. That's all too reductionist.
Nor do I see it as some kind of heavenly tick-box list. We'll all be judged according to the light we have received and how we have responded to that.
Forgive me, but it all sounds so juridical. How much do we have to do to obtain and maintain a 'state of grace.'
It doesn't work like that.
'If you love me you will keep my commandments.'
Love. Love is all you need as someone once sang.
'Love God and do as you will,' as St Augustine of Hippo put it.
If we love God we will do as he wills. By his grace.
Immediately preceded by Jesus saying that he personally gives eternal life to his sheep.
Time for a nap.
Well, he did come straight out and say some pretty startling things. 'I and the Father are one.'
What are you expecting? To open Matthew, Mark, Luke or John and part way through find Jesus reciting the Nicene Creed?
Christ was (is) his own 'message' as it were.
The scriptures weren't dictated by an angel or inscribed on tablets which dropped down from heaven ready made.
People wrestled with the meaning. They debated and discussed. That's how the Jews do theology. It's how the Christian churches do theology.
It isn't a case of Christ going 'Tada!' like a game show host. 'And the winner is ...'
To some extent what we are doing know is part of the same process. We are discussing, debating, turning texts over and examining what they might mean.
It's always been like that.
That's how these things work.
Likewise Matthew 23.9, "Call no one your Father on earth, for you have one Father in heaven. I'm quite prepared to accept that Jesus said he had no human father in that context, and it got interpreted as him having no biological father. He emphasises, many times, that we are all children of God, and our spiritual journey is to recognise this. It's only on these terms that I believe in his divinity and Incarnation.
My first thought, only slightly facetious, is to wonder just how many things we could ask “why didn’t Jesus just come out and say it” about. I mean this is someone who taught in parables and said things like, “let those with ears to hear, hear.”
My second and third thoughts are related, but they boil down to I don’t think Jesus thought the concept was that revolutionary. I think he saw it all as working with and consistent with understanding and paradigms that were familiar in Second Temple Judaism, and I think within that context, he was coming out and saying it. Our challenge is that we’re not Second Temple Jews, and we don’t necessarily pick up on things or hear things the way Jesus’s contemporaries would have. And I think that’s why we get things from him like “Have you been with me this long and you still don’t get it?”
Like I said, that may not carry any weight with you, and that’s okay by me. I’m not trying to convince anyone of the Trinity; I’m just saying where and how I see it supported. And I’m saying that we all bring assumptions and prior understandings to the text. Those assumptions and understandings—such as what we think Paul meant by calling Jesus “Lord,” and Paul saying Jesus was worthy of worship—come into play in how we think Paul did or didn’t reflect something of a Trinitarian understanding.
Of course. I'd suggest that even if we interpret scripture according to our wits, we are still doing so in the context of some form of 'tradition' - small 't'.
The fact that we have scriptures to consider and interpret in the first place is the result of tradition (or Tradition if we are going to be Orthodox or RC about it).
Even if we think our own 'take' is innovative and unique the chances are other people have thought or think along similar lines.
I'm sure you wouldn't claim that the interpretations you derive from those verses you cite above from John's and Matthew's Gospels are unique. FWIW, I agree with those interpretations - we are all children of God - but would say, to borrow the title of a vintage British comedy show, would say, 'Not Only But Also.'
It's another of my inveterate both/and things, I'm afraid.
I'm happy to accept an understanding of those passages in the way you interpret them, but would say, 'Yes, that's certainly true, but there's more to it ...'
This may be scope for another thread but there have been discussions before about the Orthodox tendency to 'maximise' whilst some Protestant traditions have the opposite tendency. To reduce things to the bare minimum, whether that be in creedal or liturgical terms (as per our friends the Quakers) or to ask what's the 'minimum' we have to do to 'be saved.'
Hence - at the risk of caricature - the kind of 'Four Spiritual Laws' or reductionist sound-bite approach to the proclamation of the Gospel.
Repeat the 'sinner's prayer' and everything will be OK.
I'm sorry, but I detect an element of this kind of reductionism - not the 'easy-believism' aspect I hasten to add - in the OP.
What's the bare minimum we can believe about Christ?
What is the essence of what God requires of us? What can we reduce it down to? Love of God and love of neighbour?
Yes, of course we can boil things down to that level. And practicing both is easier said than done.
I'm not saying you are looking for loopholes and cop-outs. Nor am I saying that St Peter will be stood at the Pearly Gates with a Nicene/Chalcedonian checklist to test everyone before they can go in.
But to quote the well-known Isaac Watts hymn, 'Love so amazing, so divine / Demands my soul, my life, my all.'
I don't live up to that. Far from it.
None of us do.
'But he gives more grace.'
I grew up in an evangelical, fundamentalist community, and was assured, at the age of 15, that I was joining Satan in the lake of fire for my doubts/unbelief. Looking back, I would call that psychological abuse.
So I've never been willing or able to believe in eternal damnation, nor in a God who judges us on anything as superficial as what we may or may not believe about what is in the Bible, nor how it has been interpreted in Christian history. That is the source of my minimalism.
Given my ecclesial affiliation I'm inevitably going to be more 'maximalist' and put far more emphasis on particular Creedal formularies. But that doesn't mean I take a reductionist approach to what we mean by judgement or 'damnation' or God determining people's eternal destiny simply on the basis of intellectual consent to a set of propositions.
I come from a Protestant evangelical-charismatic background, although probably not as fundamentalist as yours. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, I've found a 'maximalist' approach an antidote to all that in a similar or parallel way to how you - and others - have found a 'minimalist' one to be the remedy.
Am I making any sense?
Because at bottom, this isn't an intellectual matter.
What it winds up as, in the end, is a kind of indwelling (inter-dwelling? Not sure about that one, Jesus keeps going on about "Abide in me, and I in you") which is characterized by love on both sides. And certainly love involves a growing understanding of the person loved. But you can get a long, long way down the road to your ultimate end without having either warm fuzzy feelings about God, OR a strong understanding of Christian doctrine.
I'm beginning to suspect a lot of the beginning steps involve simple consent--"Yes, I will let You do this thing to me." "Yes, I will follow you in this small action." and so forth.
Our life in God grows as we surrender ourselves, but God has no need of this. We need that. That is our home, our goal. Our "original sin" or whatever one wants to call it, is the desire to do absolutely anything and everything other than that.
I would agree that God doesn’t need anything from us, but I think God can require things from us.
There's a line towards the end of the Orthodox Liturgy which talks about our 'rational worship.'
It's not as if we all go into some kind of hypnotic trance or leave our brains in the narthex.
Thanks for pointing out our irrationality, @Martin54. Now you've called us out on it I'll join the National Secular Society later today. Oh wait, I'll do it now ...
😉
Seriously though, I can understand how and why believers come across as recalcitrant and odd.
It's none of my business but a PM exchange with @NicoleMR sounds like a very good and positive thing.
Yikes! I didn't mean that to sound as patronising as it could appear.
Go for it guys!
And maybe for some Christians too?