They do. And it’s dammed hard getting it through someone’s head how it might look to others, especially if they already think they know, and so can’t quite hear your explanation… I had to try to do this yesterday. Not sure if it worked.
Sure @KarlLB and @Lamb Chopped and I used to think along those lines myself, to the extent that I was shocked to find that there were other ways of looking at these things and reluctant to consider them - other than Christus Victor alongside PSA - lest I be doing God a disservice and compromising the Gospel in some way.
...Besides, God had to punish someone. He can't just forgive because Justice, apparently...
You might be too nice a man to need this, Karl. But I am not a nice man. People have done things to me for which (in once case, if they were not dead already) I want red f****** vengeance. I want justice. I believe in getting the bastard. I waste way more than than half of some days doing it in fantasy, in my head. Some people would like to think it makes me specifically ill - another bunch might think it makes me specifically male - they might all be right, but I don't buy it, that many people are as nice as you.
When I saw just that bloody vengeance wreaked on Jesus in Mel Gibson's much criticised, porno-violent 'Passion of the Christ' something very black and nasty inside me went 'YEAH - that's what I'm talking about!' - before whatever those parts of the personality are called which keep the lid on that murderous shit (until they don't) had time to switch on and make me ashamed that I wanted to be the man with the whip.
I thought that was the point of those scenes; but they were controversial, so perhaps there aren't so many petit-bourgeois proto-killers in the world as I thought there might be. Whatever. The point for me is that God smiles and says - 'you're right. You want justice, because otherwise that man who <I don't know how to do that 'hide' thing that people do on here these days - but anyway, I wasn't going to share 'the thing' in here anyway, because if you have one of your own, you can put it there instead and it will make my point better> will end up in heaven with you and that preacher who still just-about inspires you, and what kind of f****** shit would that be?'.
And then God says 'so, you're right, someone needs the f****** shit kicked out of them - it better be me'. That's about as far as I can get with the healing blood of Christ.
...Besides, God had to punish someone. He can't just forgive because Justice, apparently...
You might be too nice a man to need this, Karl. But I am not a nice man. People have done things to me for which (in once case, if they were not dead already) I want red f****** vengeance. I want justice. I believe in getting the bastard. I waste way more than than half of some days doing it in fantasy, in my head. Some people would like to think it makes me specifically ill - another bunch might think it makes me specifically male - they might all be right, but I don't buy it, that many people are as nice as you.
When I saw just that bloody vengeance wreaked on Jesus in Mel Gibson's much criticised, porno-violent 'Passion of the Christ' something very black and nasty inside me went 'YEAH - that's what I'm talking about!' - before whatever those parts of the personality are called which keep the lid on that murderous shit (until they don't) had time to switch on and make me ashamed that I wanted to be the man with the whip.
I thought that was the point of those scenes; but they were controversial, so perhaps there aren't so many petit-bourgeois proto-killers in the world as I thought there might be. Whatever. The point for me is that God smiles and says - 'you're right. You want justice, because otherwise that man who <I don't know how to do that 'hide' thing that people do on here these days - but anyway, I wasn't going to share 'the thing' in here anyway, because if you have one of your own, you can put it there instead and it will make my point better> will end up in heaven with you and that preacher who still just-about inspires you, and what kind of f****** shit would that be?'.
And then God says 'so, you're right, someone needs the f****** shit kicked out of them - it better be me'. That's about as far as I can get with the healing blood of Christ.
What's the point if it's someone other than the person who did it who gets the shit beaten out of them? The responsible person can still end up in heaven next to you.
If anything, your post just underlines how utterly ape-shit and sick PSA is. It resolves *nothing*.
I had that kind of temper to start with, until various events terrified me into slamming such a tight kid on it, psychologically speaking, that most people think i don’t HAVE a temper in real life. But I have. And it would easily stretch to that sort of thing if i hadn’t slammed that lid on it—which is why, now that I’m in therapy dealing with the lifetime after-effects of child abuse, I’m having a hard time prying off that lid and finding a measured response to evil—one that is neither bloodthirsty nor nonexistent.
...If anything, your post just underlines how utterly ape-shit and sick PSA is...
Yes, indeed. But it is me being apeshit and sick. God is prepared to sit there, smile, and let me kick his f****** teeth out, because I seem to 'need' 'justice'.
If you don't, then this picture is bullshit for you. Great - burn it and find something different in it which works for you. Not every picture in this needs to work for me, and not every picture needs to work for you. We are all so very different (there now, I have calmed down a bit. No more New Model Army for a week nurse, and monitor the meds).
I had that kind of temper to start with, until various events terrified me into slamming such a tight kid on it, psychologically speaking, that most people think i don’t HAVE a temper in real life. But I have. And it would easily stretch to that sort of thing if i hadn’t slammed that lid on it—which is why, now that I’m in therapy dealing with the lifetime after-effects of child abuse, I’m having a hard time prying off that lid and finding a measured response to evil—one that is neither bloodthirsty nor nonexistent.
It's a f*****. Fight, flight, fawn and freeze. Four seasons in one day!
Karl - God then says to me 'OK - are we feeling better?' He probably lisps it a bit by now. 'The man' may indeed end up is heaven with me. My 'need' for justice has been satisfied by his blood, all over my toecaps. If it hasn't, he's ready to give me another shot to get it out of my system.
I had that kind of temper to start with, until various events terrified me into slamming such a tight kid on it, psychologically speaking, that most people think i don’t HAVE a temper in real life. But I have. And it would easily stretch to that sort of thing if i hadn’t slammed that lid on it—which is why, now that I’m in therapy dealing with the lifetime after-effects of child abuse, I’m having a hard time prying off that lid and finding a measured response to evil—one that is neither bloodthirsty nor nonexistent.
I had that kind of temper to start with, until various events terrified me into slamming such a tight kid on it, psychologically speaking, that most people think i don’t HAVE a temper in real life. But I have. And it would easily stretch to that sort of thing if i hadn’t slammed that lid on it—which is why, now that I’m in therapy dealing with the lifetime after-effects of child abuse, I’m having a hard time prying off that lid and finding a measured response to evil—one that is neither bloodthirsty nor nonexistent.
It's a f*****. Fight, flight, fawn and freeze. Four seasons in one day!
Karl - God then says to me 'OK - are we feeling better?' He probably lisps it a bit by now. 'The man' may indeed end up is heaven with me. My 'need' for justice has been satisfied by his blood, all over my toecaps. If it hasn't, he's ready to give me another shot to get it out of my system.
It also posits God as some kind of Aunt Sally or whipping boy.
Sure, I 'get' the sacrificial Lamb imagery in the NT but if anything puts me off a PSA style approach it's Gibsons execrable film and what I've just read.
I don't say that to diminish our Mancunian friend's sense of outrage and injustice and it would sound all pious if I wrote, 'love your enemies, pray for those who despitefully use you,' but I think I have read that somewhere before.
Far be it from me to suggest this but I'm going to do it anyway, but rather than your toe-caps knocking God's teeth out, it could be that they are landing in thin air until such time as he'll say, 'Right. Have you finished? Now let me show you a more excellent way.'
'The wrath of man cannot achieve the righteousness of God.'
Ok, all this is easy for me to say as although I've has knockbacks and disappointments, I've not (and hopefully never will) be on the receiving end of the kind of treatment that Mark-in-Manchester appears to have suffered.
I join all those who light votive candles on his behalf and bend over for him to kick my backside if I've offended him.
But am I the only one who finds @Martin54's gleeful response distasteful? As if he takes it as vindication of his view that the atonement is proof-positive of a blood-lust at the heart of Christian faith.
I'm gradually and painfully coming to the view that the atonement subverts, absorbs and turns inside out all our notions of redemptive violence, revenge and punishment.
I get the demand for justice and I'm not sure we can keep the lid on that indefinitely but somehow zi hope and trust that 'all will be will and all will be well and all manner of thing shall be well.'
I know that sounds glib and I 'deserve' a kick up the bum or at least a reprimand for it, but I can't offer anything else at the moment.
I don't find it too much of a stretch to see how the "solution" to violence wilfully perpetrated by evil might involve violence willingly accepted by Love.
I'm sure you won't @Gamma Gamaliel. But another perception might be that I was so impressed at @mark_in_manchester's courage. The fact of the blood lust at the heart of Christian faith, that availed it, is incidental.
I was horrified by the publicity shots of (benighted genius) Gibson's The Passion and would never watch it.
As in so many areas, once one sees that a proposition is false, the retrograde loops of cognitive dissonance it effects chaotically swing like a double pendulum. Especially the more they are opposed. Attempts to reset it, make it coherent, make it worse. Unnatural. Opposed in form, not substance. I made the greatest possible effort to make reason follow faith. To deconstruct, for years on this site, Jesus' feet of Jewish clay, and reconstruct him as nonetheless the instance of the fingerpost to, of, God. Which was easy while the Pericope Adulterae held.
The proposition that a morally brilliant man, the greatest relative to his culture for all time, I easily feel, was entirely human, entirely natural, in his literal complete, self abnegating and self exalting, self sacrifice, his suicidal propagande par le fait, becomes more and more stark.
The blood lust was Jesus'.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with Love. It does not demonstrate it: there is no Love. He was trapped by the trajectory of the Passover-Messiah story underpinning his acute natural sense of social justice. There is a dreadful inevitability about his conflicted desires. There is nothing salvific about it. If Love were ground of being, it would prove it. The horror of the Passion distracts from that.
I think the answer to this thread's title, 'Can anyone tell me ..... ? is an emphatic, 'NO'. We have to find out what Jesus' means, to us, individually. And live by that. My own (for what of a better word) 'interpretation' is, I think, close to lambchopped's. I have been set free from so much and given peace, peace to have an uncomplicated relationsship with God. How? Dunno .... but there you go. Praise Him!
Hopefully it's more about the humanity, the entire naturalness, naturality, with the greatest good will, of Jesus and his sane delusion. The wholeness and purity of his humanity in his culture.
Because looking into that face in the light of the Gospels, I see no possible way of believing him wrong, or deluded, or less than Love incarnate. Which is why I surrender all doubts to him.
Because looking into that face in the light of the Gospels, I see no possible way of believing him wrong, or deluded, or less than Love incarnate. Which is why I surrender all doubts to him.
I'm glad. For you. That gladdens me. For all here that do. I wouldn't have it any other way. Iron is still sharpening iron here. Both ways.
I really hope this thread about the validity of Lewis’s trilemma is not going to devolve into a discussion of @Martin54 ’s loss of faith.
Well lots of threads seem to end that way.
This one may veer away from that, I hope.
Me too, although that loss helps me to see even more purely what I worked as hard as possible to believe. That if Love were the ground of being, Jesus, despite divine nature, struggled to transcend his Jewish feet of clay, and in fact made it worse as well as better. As it is not, and Jesus only had human nature (not in any essentialist way of course), his error is more... forgivable.
They do. And it’s dammed hard getting it through someone’s head how it might look to others, especially if they already think they know, and so can’t quite hear your explanation… I had to try to do this yesterday. Not sure if it worked.
@Lamb Chopped Since during the yesterday mentioned in this post you were schooling me, I'll try to let you know if "it" worked or not. If you've managed to get it through my thick wooden block.
I'm tired of bob and weave: "You asked the question the wrong way?" "There are other explanations that use the exact language you're using but don't mean what those words say." "You are examining the wrong thing." "You can't examine this without that." "You forgot....." "I don't like it."
I was trying to understand how other Christians make sense out of Jesus' the sacrificial nature of Jesus' death. The one that is referred to throughout the NT as a blood sacrifice in reference to the OT sacrificial system. The Lamb of God wasn't a pet. I think I found what I was looking for, just not in the way I expected.
But now we're worried about "how it might look to others." This is the basis for evaluating one's understanding of the Gospel? Or our faith? "Oh, my. What will the neighbors think?"
If I care what the neighbors think, it's regarding inconsistencies in what I say I believe and value in contrast to how I live. As an antidote to my inclination to hypocrisy. I fully expect that they think even the most sanitized version of Christianity is bizarre. They're right. It is. I'm good with that.
I am utterly confused how you think you come into this. I was thinking of an earnest orthodox traditional kind of Christian who was using language that, while familiar to him/her and comfortable for use, was nevertheless giving wrong ideas to people outside his/her community by choosing terms, verses and imagery that was likely to mislead them. And I do have a life outside the Ship, where i regularly have to give this sort of advice in the course of my job. While i cannot at the moment recall precisely who I was talking to—could have been several people—I’m quite certain you were not one of them. Or are you the sort who goes around saying things like “It’s such a blessing to be washed in the blood of the Lamb!” I hadn’t thought so…
I am utterly confused how you think you come into this. I was thinking of an earnest orthodox traditional kind of Christian who was using language that, while familiar to him/her and comfortable for use, was nevertheless giving wrong ideas to people outside his/her community by choosing terms, verses and imagery that was likely to mislead them. And I do have a life outside the Ship, where i regularly have to give this sort of advice in the course of my job. While i cannot at the moment recall precisely who I was talking to—could have been several people—I’m quite certain you were not one of them. Or are you the sort who goes around saying things like “It’s such a blessing to be washed in the blood of the Lamb!” I hadn’t thought so…
Seemed very much like you were trying to get it through my head "yesterday", and was unclear from your post that you were speaking of an encounter in person. Thanks for clarifying.
However, while I don't go around saying it, you can sure bet I value that font, its precious contents and their work.
I was trying to understand how other Christians make sense out of Jesus' the sacrificial nature of Jesus' death. The one that is referred to throughout the NT as a blood sacrifice in reference to the OT sacrificial system. The Lamb of God wasn't a pet.
The first thing to note is that Jesus's death is also referred to as a ransom. A ransom is not a sacrifice. Then in John Jesus speaks of himself as lifted up like the bronze serpent in the wilderness; again neither a sacrifice nor a ransom. Paul says that as in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive (in Romans and 1 Corinthians). We die with Jesus, and whoever has died is free of sin. (This is perhaps the very opposite of substitution.) The sacrificial imagery is perhaps the most common imagery in the New Testament but it's by no means the only imagery.
The second thing to note is that the sacrificial lamb is not being punished. There is a sacrifice in which the sacrificial animal takes on the sins of the community and punished for them: the scapegoat is cast out. But the scapegoat isn't killed. Whatever is going on in sacrifice where the animal is killed it isn't vicarious punishment.
I think one of the things that goes on in sacrifice is that the party who sacrifices is hosting God, and this repairs relationship by offering hospitality like Abraham does the three angels. I am not a scholar and cannot back that up.
The New Testament doesn't have any settled theory as to how exactly the atonement works. Not even Paul is a systematic theologian. That said, I think there are two lines that are important and that belong together. One is Paul's assertion earlier that we die with Christ and live with Christ. The other I think is the eucharist. That the eucharist is in some way linked to Christ's sacrifice seems clear. Christ is the host at the eucharist, and the meal. Well, that is to answer one mystery with another mystery. But I think any more definite attempt would fail to do justice to the variety of the New Testament witness.
(I note also that the only passage in the Bible that seems explicitly penal substitutionary is Isaiah's suffering servant. I don't think it's quoted often in the NT, as it surely would be if the NT writers thought it important - in fact I can't think of a single instance. And Isaiah is not the sort of work in which everything is a literal statement. When Isaiah says that every valley shall be exalted does he really want us to understand that God will engage in large scale landscaping?)
I was trying to understand how other Christians make sense out of Jesus' the sacrificial nature of Jesus' death. The one that is referred to throughout the NT as a blood sacrifice in reference to the OT sacrificial system. The Lamb of God wasn't a pet.
(a) The first thing to note is that Jesus's death is also referred to as a ransom. A ransom is not a sacrifice.
(b) Then in John Jesus speaks of himself as lifted up like the bronze serpent in the wilderness; again neither a sacrifice nor a ransom.
(c) Paul says that as in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive (in Romans and 1 Corinthians).
(d) We die with Jesus, and whoever has died is free of sin. (This is perhaps the very opposite of substitution.)
(e) The sacrificial imagery is perhaps the most common imagery in the New Testament but it's by no means the only imagery.
(f) The second thing to note is that the sacrificial lamb is not being punished. There is a sacrifice in which the sacrificial animal takes on the sins of the community and punished for them: the scapegoat is cast out. But the scapegoat isn't killed. Whatever is going on in sacrifice where the animal is killed it isn't vicarious punishment.
(g) I think one of the things that goes on in sacrifice is that the party who sacrifices is hosting God, and this repairs relationship by offering hospitality like Abraham does the three angels. I am not a scholar and cannot back that up.
(h) The New Testament doesn't have any settled theory as to how exactly the atonement works. Not even Paul is a systematic theologian. That said, I think there are two lines that are important and that belong together. One is Paul's assertion earlier that we die with Christ and live with Christ. The other I think is the eucharist. That the eucharist is in some way linked to Christ's sacrifice seems clear. Christ is the host at the eucharist, and the meal. Well, that is to answer one mystery with another mystery. But I think any more definite attempt would fail to do justice to the variety of the New Testament witness.
(I note also that the only passage in the Bible that seems explicitly penal substitutionary is Isaiah's suffering servant. I don't think it's quoted often in the NT, as it surely would be if the NT writers thought it important - in fact I can't think of a single instance. And Isaiah is not the sort of work in which everything is a literal statement. When Isaiah says that every valley shall be exalted does he really want us to understand that God will engage in large scale landscaping?)
(a) A ransom paid in blood. In cruellest exsanguination of life blood to death. A payment. Whether to Satan (which is contrived nonsense). Or God (which is worse, for being what it was).
(b) Lifted up on the cross of that foul death that was the Father's will.
(c) I love the universal all. And for there to be resurrection, there must be death. Yes. A spectacularly bad, horrible, unjust one helps. Yes. Irrelevant. Or at best tangential. Except in the appalling nature of suicide by institutionalized hate. That didn't actually end the hate.
(d) If that's the case, why are so many damned after death?
(e) The most common imagery is the dominant perception, the dominant reality of belief.
(f) True. And irrelevant. Tangential.
(g) I like it. But very difficult, strained to apply to Jesus. God sacrificed him to self-sacrifice. Who is hosting whom?
(h) I don't find that as a problematic at all.
If there were any evidence at all that Love were the ground of being, this would all need serious consideration. But as it stands, it's one remarkable human's honest, best intentioned attempt to transcend his bloody culture.
I am utterly confused how you think you come into this. I was thinking of an earnest orthodox traditional kind of Christian who was using language that, while familiar to him/her and comfortable for use, was nevertheless giving wrong ideas to people outside his/her community by choosing terms, verses and imagery that was likely to mislead them. And I do have a life outside the Ship, where i regularly have to give this sort of advice in the course of my job. While i cannot at the moment recall precisely who I was talking to—could have been several people—I’m quite certain you were not one of them. Or are you the sort who goes around saying things like “It’s such a blessing to be washed in the blood of the Lamb!” I hadn’t thought so…
Seemed very much like you were trying to get it through my head "yesterday", and was unclear from your post that you were speaking of an encounter in person. Thanks for clarifying.
However, while I don't go around saying it, you can sure bet I value that font, its precious contents and their work.
Look, I went back and looked, and I see a single interaction between me and one of your posts--a very low-key interaction, where I was not trying to "school" you or in any way put you down. Nor was I trying to "get it through your head"--why would I use that kind of language about someone I've had a single interaction with, which was far more focused on responding to your content than it was to you personally?--I would be far more likely to use it (the phrase "getting it through their heads") of a person who is in a long-term real life relationship with me, who is repeatedly "not getting it" and really ought to be, because I know them well and we've had that conversation repeatedly and no amount of simplification is making the issue clear.
Really, I'd like to turn the heat down on this. I have no personal issues with you--I hardly know you! My example above about "the blood of the lamb" was chosen, not as a dig at you and wherever you happen to stand with regard to the Christian faith, but as an extreme example of what we were just discussing--language that can be easily misunderstood with the result of putting non-Christians off.
This is not bobbing and weaving. This is not 'being concerned what the neighbors will think." This is me sharing a very narrowly confined aspect of my work in real life, which involves helping Christians speak about their faith in ways that don't put off the very people they are trying to speak to. None of it was a personal referendum on your faith or your modes of expression. It's a discussion board, not a chance for me or anybody to score points. I simply thought the illustration might be helpful.
Tell me, would you prefer I simply don't respond to your posts in the future? Because you seem to be taking all this uncomfortably personally, and from my side, I had to go back and review my post history to even figure out where we'd interacted. It's not all personal on my side. But I can stay out of the conversation if you'd prefer.
I am utterly confused how you think you come into this. I was thinking of an earnest orthodox traditional kind of Christian who was using language that, while familiar to him/her and comfortable for use, was nevertheless giving wrong ideas to people outside his/her community by choosing terms, verses and imagery that was likely to mislead them. And I do have a life outside the Ship, where i regularly have to give this sort of advice in the course of my job. While i cannot at the moment recall precisely who I was talking to—could have been several people—I’m quite certain you were not one of them. Or are you the sort who goes around saying things like “It’s such a blessing to be washed in the blood of the Lamb!” I hadn’t thought so…
Seemed very much like you were trying to get it through my head "yesterday", and was unclear from your post that you were speaking of an encounter in person. Thanks for clarifying.
However, while I don't go around saying it, you can sure bet I value that font, its precious contents and their work.
Look, I went back and looked, and I see a single interaction between me and one of your posts--a very low-key interaction, where I was not trying to "school" you or in any way put you down. Nor was I trying to "get it through your head"--why would I use that kind of language about someone I've had a single interaction with, which was far more focused on responding to your content than it was to you personally?--I would be far more likely to use it (the phrase "getting it through their heads") of a person who is in a long-term real life relationship with me, who is repeatedly "not getting it" and really ought to be, because I know them well and we've had that conversation repeatedly and no amount of simplification is making the issue clear.
Really, I'd like to turn the heat down on this. I have no personal issues with you--I hardly know you! My example above about "the blood of the lamb" was chosen, not as a dig at you and wherever you happen to stand with regard to the Christian faith, but as an extreme example of what we were just discussing--language that can be easily misunderstood with the result of putting non-Christians off.
This is not bobbing and weaving. This is not 'being concerned what the neighbors will think." This is me sharing a very narrowly confined aspect of my work in real life, which involves helping Christians speak about their faith in ways that don't put off the very people they are trying to speak to. None of it was a personal referendum on your faith or your modes of expression. It's a discussion board, not a chance for me or anybody to score points. I simply thought the illustration might be helpful.
Tell me, would you prefer I simply don't respond to your posts in the future? Because you seem to be taking all this uncomfortably personally, and from my side, I had to go back and review my post history to even figure out where we'd interacted. It's not all personal on my side. But I can stay out of the conversation if you'd prefer.
I'd like the heat turned off.
As you said, we barely know each other. If you don't clarify when you're talking about your personal life, I have no way of knowing. If you have some other exchange in mind that's not related to the thread, well...I can't read your mind.
When you lay into a view hypothetically, a view I hold by the way, how do I know your intent is not personal?
Many of your responses were evasive and focused on editing my questions or criticising my asking them, rather than answering them.
And you have blamed me now for not understanding the intent behind the actual words you wrote.
I would prefer that you consider the basics of clear communication and proofread for tone, context and assumptions. This is, after all, a public forum. We are strangers.
@GammaGammaliel: why does Christ's prayer in Gethsemane imply PSA?
Well, bear in mind you asked the question.
The cross was a violent punitive act instigated by mankind. Jesus set himself up for it because it was God’s will for him to become the ‘slain’ lamb. The prayer shows it was divinely required of him. We (humans) are by nature children of wrath, (Eph 2:3) and God cursed Christ on the cross, (Gal 3:13) in order to redirect that wrath from us. My sin put him there and his death there is the sole solution for my sin..(that is why the cup couldn't pass.)
“..For, if God did not punish his son in my place, I am not saved from my greatest peril, the wrath of God.” (John Piper)
Why is this relevant to the Trilemma?.. Well, it isn't, directly, but any discussion of what we make of Jesus often hits the concept of atonement.
CS Lewis was convinced that Jesus was Lord.. the 'I Am' that he claimed to be. The issue posed by his trilemma is that if that is not true, (IE he is not Lord,) then he cannot be usefully be relegated to other categories at all assuming the NT Biblical record is reliable.
Most of this discussion is rehashing what was said in the ancient thread referenced below. The disagreements turn on beliefs about the nature of God, the basis of forgiveness, the different understandings of justice and how the narratives of scripture treat these themes. Sadly, many of these voices are no longer on board. http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=11;t=000712;p=2
@Doublethink: These are more weighty issues than one person’s tragic struggle.
I note also that the only passage in the Bible that seems explicitly penal substitutionary is Isaiah's suffering servant.
And Isaiah is not the sort of work in which everything is a literal statement.
More to the point than "every valley shall be exalted":
The suffering servant passage includes lines such as "He has carried our diseases" and "by his bruises we are healed". Those aren't literally part of a penal substitution theory: penal substitution is a juridical theory, not a theory of sin as disease. If you want to use the passage as proof text for PSA you have to say the PSA parts of the passage are meant literally and the disease and healing parts are metaphorical. But there's no reason in the text to say why not the other way around?
Also, of course, Jews read the passage as not referring to Jesus or any sort of atonement.
Wow @MPaul! That was some thread. 17 years ago. When I was confirmed in the CoE. 69 pages and I doubt whether anyone realised that it doesn't describe Love. Has anyone else ever in the history of SoF? I can't be the first to evert themselves. To proclaim the Love of God, God as Love, from the life and death of Jesus is the greatest failed exercise in gaslighting, in squaring the circle, or rather circling the square, smoothing that jagged shard. Which I was engaging in at the time and most since. Beyond the mere appeasement of the Greeks calling the Furies the Graces, which is what you do. You can't even try, and declare Love in a spiteful, arbitrary, murderous, hideous, fantasy monster. The greatest in all fiction. But at least you are honest.
There have always been a minority of relatively overtly soft hearted, liberal minded, non-violent people. Empathy, compassion are human. The incidence of psychopathy is only about 1%. No wonder they had to invent, or at the very least hone and refine, the Pericope Adulterae to give the gospels some emotional intelligence.
And had to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear of the Passion.
@GammaGammaliel: why does Christ's prayer in Gethsemane imply PSA?
Well, bear in mind you asked the question.
The cross was a violent punitive act instigated by mankind. Jesus set himself up for it because it was God’s will for him to become the ‘slain’ lamb. The prayer shows it was divinely required of him. We (humans) are by nature children of wrath, (Eph 2:3) and God cursed Christ on the cross, (Gal 3:13) in order to redirect that wrath from us. My sin put him there and his death there is the sole solution for my sin..(that is why the cup couldn't pass.)
“..For, if God did not punish his son in my place, I am not saved from my greatest peril, the wrath of God.” (John Piper)
Why is this relevant to the Trilemma?.. Well, it isn't, directly, but any discussion of what we make of Jesus often hits the concept of atonement.
CS Lewis was convinced that Jesus was Lord.. the 'I Am' that he claimed to be. The issue posed by his trilemma is that if that is not true, (IE he is not Lord,) then he cannot be usefully be relegated to other categories at all assuming the NT Biblical record is reliable.
Most of this discussion is rehashing what was said in the ancient thread referenced below. The disagreements turn on beliefs about the nature of God, the basis of forgiveness, the different understandings of justice and how the narratives of scripture treat these themes. Sadly, many of these voices are no longer on board. http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=11;t=000712;p=2
@Doublethink: These are more weighty issues than one person’s tragic struggle.
Of course I'm bearing in mind that I asked the question. I could have given a similar answer to the one you gave too, as a former evangelical.
Your answer is standard evangelical fare but not the only way to understand these verses. I'm not eliding the 'curse' element or 'he who knew no sin became sin for us' aspect, but again, there are other ways to understand that.
I'm not denying that there isn't juridical and proprietorary/expiratory language in all of this, what I'm questioning is the emphasis.
You don't have to have a PSA model to explain why Christ couldn't (or wouldn't) 'let this cup pass from me.'
The risk there is that we are making God 'subject' to something bigger than himself, as it were, which is clearly impossible.
I'll attempt a fuller response when I have time.
Meanwhile, back to the trilemma. Whilst the trilemma trope did capture my attention before my conversion and as I was considering the claims of Christ - and I'm not dismissing its importance to me at the time as part of that process, it's not 'why' I believe Christ to be the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy and Undivided Trinity and the Lord and Giver of Life.
It's an interesting rhetorical device but doesn't cover all the bases.
Neither do any of the available 'atonement theories.'
You've lost your faith. We get it. I'm not minimising that. Heck, we all have spiritual struggles of one form or other and goodness knows I've got quite a few on at the moment.
What has happened to you could happen to each and everyone of us. @mousethief woke up one morning to find his faith had evaporated.
I have heard of various clergy and ministers of all stripes and persuasions to whom this has happened too.
I 'get' that this forum provides you with a sounding board and a way to 'work things out' as it were. It did so for me when I was moving from one faith position to another and I probably exasperated everyone while that was happening.
But let's try to keep things on track with the OP.
I will aim provide @MPaul with a more comprehensive response than I've given so far, not in an attempt to turn him towards my point of view, but because he's raised important questions that deserve a more comprehensive answer.
No we don't go there again. This is a different issue. A different critique. There is no Love in the Passion and any atonement theory made up on it. If Love were the ground of being, it should be pretty obvious.
@MPaul, in a nutshell, Orthodox discussion/thinking on the 'Let this cup pass from me ... nevertheless, let thy will not mine be done' (paraphrase) - tends to focus on Christ's two wills - human and divine.
His human will, quite naturally, wanted to avoid death, but in obedience he submitted to the divine will. That doesn't necessarily imply PSA in and of itself.
@MPaul, in a nutshell, Orthodox discussion/thinking on the 'Let this cup pass from me ... nevertheless, let thy will not mine be done' (paraphrase) - tends to focus on Christ's two wills - human and divine.
His human will, quite naturally, wanted to avoid death, but in obedience he submitted to the divine will. That doesn't necessarily imply PSA in and of itself.
Not to you somehow. What does it imply about Love?
Except that Guru Nanak didn't claim to be God, as far as I am aware.
Neither did the Buddha.
There are those who would argue that Christ didn't make this claim either.
The 'trilemma', if it works at all, only does so in the context of a particular Christian claim, that of Christ's divinity. To do so it makes certain presuppositions, of course. That Christ said what he is claimed to have said or meant by his claims what Christians have traditionally understood these claims to have meant.
Again, some argue that he didn't, and not just Jehovah's Witnesses and Arians either.
I don't particularly 'like' the 'trilemma' and can find all sorts of flaws and objections to it.
Nevertheless, and this is where I do agree with you, sooner or later we have to come down on one side or another on these things.
Either we accept the Church's teaching on these things and trust that the scriptures reflect what it came to hold and to ratify through the various Creeds, or we come up with alternative options.
Meanwhile, I've started a new thread on the atonement. @Martin54 may wish to debate Christ's 'delusion' there. If so, I'll try to hear him out and not go, 'Here we go again ...'
On that, if I understand him correctly, Martin seems to suggest that Christ imbibed delusions of divinity from his Mum and magnificently, but mistakenly, played that out through his ministry.
Also I read that at least some Sikhs think Guru Nanuk was an incarnation of God. from the wikipedia page
The third theory is that Guru Nanak is the incarnation of God. This has been supported by many Sikhs including Bhai Gurdas, Bhai Vir Singh, Santhok Singh and is supported by the Guru Granth Sahib.[citation needed] Bhai Gurdas says:
ਗੁਰ ਪਰਮੇਸਰੁ ਇਕੁ ਹੈ ਸਚਾ ਸਾਹੁ ਜਗਤੁ ਵਣਜਾਰਾ।
The Guru and God are one; He is the true master and the whole world craves for Him.
As I said, I'm not saying that I'm any kind of Sikh expert. But I also don't see that claiming to be divine is the only way one could be either bad/mad/truthful.
Does it though? Is it only divinity that makes a claim either bad, mad or true?
This discussion is about a specific argument (Lewis’s Trilemma) about a specific claim in a specific context—identifying oneself with the one God, in a culture where such a claim was unquestionably blasphemy.
What makes other claims bad, mad or true or whatever, or how divinity does or doesn’t play into them, seems irrelevant.
Comments
You might be too nice a man to need this, Karl. But I am not a nice man. People have done things to me for which (in once case, if they were not dead already) I want red f****** vengeance. I want justice. I believe in getting the bastard. I waste way more than than half of some days doing it in fantasy, in my head. Some people would like to think it makes me specifically ill - another bunch might think it makes me specifically male - they might all be right, but I don't buy it, that many people are as nice as you.
When I saw just that bloody vengeance wreaked on Jesus in Mel Gibson's much criticised, porno-violent 'Passion of the Christ' something very black and nasty inside me went 'YEAH - that's what I'm talking about!' - before whatever those parts of the personality are called which keep the lid on that murderous shit (until they don't) had time to switch on and make me ashamed that I wanted to be the man with the whip.
I thought that was the point of those scenes; but they were controversial, so perhaps there aren't so many petit-bourgeois proto-killers in the world as I thought there might be. Whatever. The point for me is that God smiles and says - 'you're right. You want justice, because otherwise that man who <I don't know how to do that 'hide' thing that people do on here these days - but anyway, I wasn't going to share 'the thing' in here anyway, because if you have one of your own, you can put it there instead and it will make my point better> will end up in heaven with you and that preacher who still just-about inspires you, and what kind of f****** shit would that be?'.
And then God says 'so, you're right, someone needs the f****** shit kicked out of them - it better be me'. That's about as far as I can get with the healing blood of Christ.
What's the point if it's someone other than the person who did it who gets the shit beaten out of them? The responsible person can still end up in heaven next to you.
If anything, your post just underlines how utterly ape-shit and sick PSA is. It resolves *nothing*.
Yes, indeed. But it is me being apeshit and sick. God is prepared to sit there, smile, and let me kick his f****** teeth out, because I seem to 'need' 'justice'.
If you don't, then this picture is bullshit for you. Great - burn it and find something different in it which works for you. Not every picture in this needs to work for me, and not every picture needs to work for you. We are all so very different (there now, I have calmed down a bit. No more New Model Army for a week nurse, and monitor the meds).
It's a f*****. Fight, flight, fawn and freeze. Four seasons in one day!
Karl - God then says to me 'OK - are we feeling better?' He probably lisps it a bit by now. 'The man' may indeed end up is heaven with me. My 'need' for justice has been satisfied by his blood, all over my toecaps. If it hasn't, he's ready to give me another shot to get it out of my system.
🕯
🕯
A novel? Or…?
It's a form of anthropomorphism.
It also posits God as some kind of Aunt Sally or whipping boy.
Sure, I 'get' the sacrificial Lamb imagery in the NT but if anything puts me off a PSA style approach it's Gibsons execrable film and what I've just read.
I don't say that to diminish our Mancunian friend's sense of outrage and injustice and it would sound all pious if I wrote, 'love your enemies, pray for those who despitefully use you,' but I think I have read that somewhere before.
Far be it from me to suggest this but I'm going to do it anyway, but rather than your toe-caps knocking God's teeth out, it could be that they are landing in thin air until such time as he'll say, 'Right. Have you finished? Now let me show you a more excellent way.'
'The wrath of man cannot achieve the righteousness of God.'
Ok, all this is easy for me to say as although I've has knockbacks and disappointments, I've not (and hopefully never will) be on the receiving end of the kind of treatment that Mark-in-Manchester appears to have suffered.
I join all those who light votive candles on his behalf and bend over for him to kick my backside if I've offended him.
But am I the only one who finds @Martin54's gleeful response distasteful? As if he takes it as vindication of his view that the atonement is proof-positive of a blood-lust at the heart of Christian faith.
I'm gradually and painfully coming to the view that the atonement subverts, absorbs and turns inside out all our notions of redemptive violence, revenge and punishment.
I get the demand for justice and I'm not sure we can keep the lid on that indefinitely but somehow zi hope and trust that 'all will be will and all will be well and all manner of thing shall be well.'
I know that sounds glib and I 'deserve' a kick up the bum or at least a reprimand for it, but I can't offer anything else at the moment.
Apart from the 🕯
I was horrified by the publicity shots of (benighted genius) Gibson's The Passion and would never watch it.
As in so many areas, once one sees that a proposition is false, the retrograde loops of cognitive dissonance it effects chaotically swing like a double pendulum. Especially the more they are opposed. Attempts to reset it, make it coherent, make it worse. Unnatural. Opposed in form, not substance. I made the greatest possible effort to make reason follow faith. To deconstruct, for years on this site, Jesus' feet of Jewish clay, and reconstruct him as nonetheless the instance of the fingerpost to, of, God. Which was easy while the Pericope Adulterae held.
The proposition that a morally brilliant man, the greatest relative to his culture for all time, I easily feel, was entirely human, entirely natural, in his literal complete, self abnegating and self exalting, self sacrifice, his suicidal propagande par le fait, becomes more and more stark.
The blood lust was Jesus'.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with Love. It does not demonstrate it: there is no Love. He was trapped by the trajectory of the Passover-Messiah story underpinning his acute natural sense of social justice. There is a dreadful inevitability about his conflicted desires. There is nothing salvific about it. If Love were ground of being, it would prove it. The horror of the Passion distracts from that.
And yet .... He rose again!
To meet even me! (My ?sane?) delusion?
Indeed @RockyRoger. Absolutely. All yearningly human. Beautiful.
Because looking into that face in the light of the Gospels, I see no possible way of believing him wrong, or deluded, or less than Love incarnate. Which is why I surrender all doubts to him.
I'm glad. For you. That gladdens me. For all here that do. I wouldn't have it any other way. Iron is still sharpening iron here. Both ways.
Well lots of threads seem to end that way.
This one may veer away from that, I hope.
Me too, although that loss helps me to see even more purely what I worked as hard as possible to believe. That if Love were the ground of being, Jesus, despite divine nature, struggled to transcend his Jewish feet of clay, and in fact made it worse as well as better. As it is not, and Jesus only had human nature (not in any essentialist way of course), his error is more... forgivable.
@Lamb Chopped Since during the yesterday mentioned in this post you were schooling me, I'll try to let you know if "it" worked or not. If you've managed to get it through my thick wooden block.
I'm tired of bob and weave: "You asked the question the wrong way?" "There are other explanations that use the exact language you're using but don't mean what those words say." "You are examining the wrong thing." "You can't examine this without that." "You forgot....." "I don't like it."
I was trying to understand how other Christians make sense out of Jesus' the sacrificial nature of Jesus' death. The one that is referred to throughout the NT as a blood sacrifice in reference to the OT sacrificial system. The Lamb of God wasn't a pet. I think I found what I was looking for, just not in the way I expected.
But now we're worried about "how it might look to others." This is the basis for evaluating one's understanding of the Gospel? Or our faith? "Oh, my. What will the neighbors think?"
If I care what the neighbors think, it's regarding inconsistencies in what I say I believe and value in contrast to how I live. As an antidote to my inclination to hypocrisy. I fully expect that they think even the most sanitized version of Christianity is bizarre. They're right. It is. I'm good with that.
Really. I hope I've misunderstood you.
Seemed very much like you were trying to get it through my head "yesterday", and was unclear from your post that you were speaking of an encounter in person. Thanks for clarifying.
However, while I don't go around saying it, you can sure bet I value that font, its precious contents and their work.
The second thing to note is that the sacrificial lamb is not being punished. There is a sacrifice in which the sacrificial animal takes on the sins of the community and punished for them: the scapegoat is cast out. But the scapegoat isn't killed. Whatever is going on in sacrifice where the animal is killed it isn't vicarious punishment.
I think one of the things that goes on in sacrifice is that the party who sacrifices is hosting God, and this repairs relationship by offering hospitality like Abraham does the three angels. I am not a scholar and cannot back that up.
The New Testament doesn't have any settled theory as to how exactly the atonement works. Not even Paul is a systematic theologian. That said, I think there are two lines that are important and that belong together. One is Paul's assertion earlier that we die with Christ and live with Christ. The other I think is the eucharist. That the eucharist is in some way linked to Christ's sacrifice seems clear. Christ is the host at the eucharist, and the meal. Well, that is to answer one mystery with another mystery. But I think any more definite attempt would fail to do justice to the variety of the New Testament witness.
(I note also that the only passage in the Bible that seems explicitly penal substitutionary is Isaiah's suffering servant. I don't think it's quoted often in the NT, as it surely would be if the NT writers thought it important - in fact I can't think of a single instance. And Isaiah is not the sort of work in which everything is a literal statement. When Isaiah says that every valley shall be exalted does he really want us to understand that God will engage in large scale landscaping?)
(a) A ransom paid in blood. In cruellest exsanguination of life blood to death. A payment. Whether to Satan (which is contrived nonsense). Or God (which is worse, for being what it was).
(b) Lifted up on the cross of that foul death that was the Father's will.
(c) I love the universal all. And for there to be resurrection, there must be death. Yes. A spectacularly bad, horrible, unjust one helps. Yes. Irrelevant. Or at best tangential. Except in the appalling nature of suicide by institutionalized hate. That didn't actually end the hate.
(d) If that's the case, why are so many damned after death?
(e) The most common imagery is the dominant perception, the dominant reality of belief.
(f) True. And irrelevant. Tangential.
(g) I like it. But very difficult, strained to apply to Jesus. God sacrificed him to self-sacrifice. Who is hosting whom?
(h) I don't find that as a problematic at all.
If there were any evidence at all that Love were the ground of being, this would all need serious consideration. But as it stands, it's one remarkable human's honest, best intentioned attempt to transcend his bloody culture.
Look, I went back and looked, and I see a single interaction between me and one of your posts--a very low-key interaction, where I was not trying to "school" you or in any way put you down. Nor was I trying to "get it through your head"--why would I use that kind of language about someone I've had a single interaction with, which was far more focused on responding to your content than it was to you personally?--I would be far more likely to use it (the phrase "getting it through their heads") of a person who is in a long-term real life relationship with me, who is repeatedly "not getting it" and really ought to be, because I know them well and we've had that conversation repeatedly and no amount of simplification is making the issue clear.
Really, I'd like to turn the heat down on this. I have no personal issues with you--I hardly know you! My example above about "the blood of the lamb" was chosen, not as a dig at you and wherever you happen to stand with regard to the Christian faith, but as an extreme example of what we were just discussing--language that can be easily misunderstood with the result of putting non-Christians off.
This is not bobbing and weaving. This is not 'being concerned what the neighbors will think." This is me sharing a very narrowly confined aspect of my work in real life, which involves helping Christians speak about their faith in ways that don't put off the very people they are trying to speak to. None of it was a personal referendum on your faith or your modes of expression. It's a discussion board, not a chance for me or anybody to score points. I simply thought the illustration might be helpful.
Tell me, would you prefer I simply don't respond to your posts in the future? Because you seem to be taking all this uncomfortably personally, and from my side, I had to go back and review my post history to even figure out where we'd interacted. It's not all personal on my side. But I can stay out of the conversation if you'd prefer.
I'd like the heat turned off.
As you said, we barely know each other. If you don't clarify when you're talking about your personal life, I have no way of knowing. If you have some other exchange in mind that's not related to the thread, well...I can't read your mind.
When you lay into a view hypothetically, a view I hold by the way, how do I know your intent is not personal?
Many of your responses were evasive and focused on editing my questions or criticising my asking them, rather than answering them.
And you have blamed me now for not understanding the intent behind the actual words you wrote.
I would prefer that you consider the basics of clear communication and proofread for tone, context and assumptions. This is, after all, a public forum. We are strangers.
The cross was a violent punitive act instigated by mankind. Jesus set himself up for it because it was God’s will for him to become the ‘slain’ lamb. The prayer shows it was divinely required of him. We (humans) are by nature children of wrath, (Eph 2:3) and God cursed Christ on the cross, (Gal 3:13) in order to redirect that wrath from us. My sin put him there and his death there is the sole solution for my sin..(that is why the cup couldn't pass.)
“..For, if God did not punish his son in my place, I am not saved from my greatest peril, the wrath of God.” (John Piper)
Why is this relevant to the Trilemma?.. Well, it isn't, directly, but any discussion of what we make of Jesus often hits the concept of atonement.
CS Lewis was convinced that Jesus was Lord.. the 'I Am' that he claimed to be. The issue posed by his trilemma is that if that is not true, (IE he is not Lord,) then he cannot be usefully be relegated to other categories at all assuming the NT Biblical record is reliable.
Most of this discussion is rehashing what was said in the ancient thread referenced below. The disagreements turn on beliefs about the nature of God, the basis of forgiveness, the different understandings of justice and how the narratives of scripture treat these themes. Sadly, many of these voices are no longer on board.
http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=11;t=000712;p=2
@Doublethink: These are more weighty issues than one person’s tragic struggle.
The suffering servant passage includes lines such as "He has carried our diseases" and "by his bruises we are healed". Those aren't literally part of a penal substitution theory: penal substitution is a juridical theory, not a theory of sin as disease. If you want to use the passage as proof text for PSA you have to say the PSA parts of the passage are meant literally and the disease and healing parts are metaphorical. But there's no reason in the text to say why not the other way around?
Also, of course, Jews read the passage as not referring to Jesus or any sort of atonement.
There have always been a minority of relatively overtly soft hearted, liberal minded, non-violent people. Empathy, compassion are human. The incidence of psychopathy is only about 1%. No wonder they had to invent, or at the very least hone and refine, the Pericope Adulterae to give the gospels some emotional intelligence.
And had to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear of the Passion.
@Dafyd.
To many his torturing and death are essential for their delusion of miraculous healing. Literally.
Weren't Jesus, Matthew, Mark, John, Paul and Peter Jews?
Of course I'm bearing in mind that I asked the question. I could have given a similar answer to the one you gave too, as a former evangelical.
Your answer is standard evangelical fare but not the only way to understand these verses. I'm not eliding the 'curse' element or 'he who knew no sin became sin for us' aspect, but again, there are other ways to understand that.
I'm not denying that there isn't juridical and proprietorary/expiratory language in all of this, what I'm questioning is the emphasis.
You don't have to have a PSA model to explain why Christ couldn't (or wouldn't) 'let this cup pass from me.'
The risk there is that we are making God 'subject' to something bigger than himself, as it were, which is clearly impossible.
I'll attempt a fuller response when I have time.
Meanwhile, back to the trilemma. Whilst the trilemma trope did capture my attention before my conversion and as I was considering the claims of Christ - and I'm not dismissing its importance to me at the time as part of that process, it's not 'why' I believe Christ to be the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy and Undivided Trinity and the Lord and Giver of Life.
It's an interesting rhetorical device but doesn't cover all the bases.
Neither do any of the available 'atonement theories.'
All these things can only approximate at best.
To the extent that the emperor has no clothes.
You've lost your faith. We get it. I'm not minimising that. Heck, we all have spiritual struggles of one form or other and goodness knows I've got quite a few on at the moment.
What has happened to you could happen to each and everyone of us.
@mousethief woke up one morning to find his faith had evaporated.
I have heard of various clergy and ministers of all stripes and persuasions to whom this has happened too.
I 'get' that this forum provides you with a sounding board and a way to 'work things out' as it were. It did so for me when I was moving from one faith position to another and I probably exasperated everyone while that was happening.
But let's try to keep things on track with the OP.
I will aim provide @MPaul with a more comprehensive response than I've given so far, not in an attempt to turn him towards my point of view, but because he's raised important questions that deserve a more comprehensive answer.
@MPaul, in a nutshell, Orthodox discussion/thinking on the 'Let this cup pass from me ... nevertheless, let thy will not mine be done' (paraphrase) - tends to focus on Christ's two wills - human and divine.
His human will, quite naturally, wanted to avoid death, but in obedience he submitted to the divine will. That doesn't necessarily imply PSA in and of itself.
Not to you somehow. What does it imply about Love?
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
Ma'am. One would plea that it is part of Jesus' delusion.
Could one not use the same argument for believing in the Buddha or Guru Nanuk or the Prophet?
They all made claims of divine knowledge. They all made religious claims which one either has faith to accept or one doesn't.
I'm not an expert in Sikhism, but isn't there a sense that either Guru Nanuk was bad or he was mad or he was who he said he was?
Do you see what I mean? Can't this formulation apply to pretty much any founder of a religious movement?
Neither did the Buddha.
There are those who would argue that Christ didn't make this claim either.
The 'trilemma', if it works at all, only does so in the context of a particular Christian claim, that of Christ's divinity. To do so it makes certain presuppositions, of course. That Christ said what he is claimed to have said or meant by his claims what Christians have traditionally understood these claims to have meant.
Again, some argue that he didn't, and not just Jehovah's Witnesses and Arians either.
I don't particularly 'like' the 'trilemma' and can find all sorts of flaws and objections to it.
Nevertheless, and this is where I do agree with you, sooner or later we have to come down on one side or another on these things.
Either we accept the Church's teaching on these things and trust that the scriptures reflect what it came to hold and to ratify through the various Creeds, or we come up with alternative options.
Meanwhile, I've started a new thread on the atonement. @Martin54 may wish to debate Christ's 'delusion' there. If so, I'll try to hear him out and not go, 'Here we go again ...'
On that, if I understand him correctly, Martin seems to suggest that Christ imbibed delusions of divinity from his Mum and magnificently, but mistakenly, played that out through his ministry.
Would that be a fair summary?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Nanak
As I said, I'm not saying that I'm any kind of Sikh expert. But I also don't see that claiming to be divine is the only way one could be either bad/mad/truthful.
What makes other claims bad, mad or true or whatever, or how divinity does or doesn’t play into them, seems irrelevant.