Mark 4:10-12

I have for a long time struggled to comprehend the meaning of these verses, which follow the parable of the sower and read, in the words of the ESV: "And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that 'they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.'"
Matthew 13:10-17 expands on this and, to a certain extent, provides an interpretation. Yet in both gospels, the meaning seems to be that speaking in parables is intended to obfuscate the truth from those who will never understand. Can this be the case? If so, am I one who will never understand?

There are several possibilities. I'm reminded of Psalm 115:

4 Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.
5 They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see.
6 They have ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell.
7 They have hands but do not feel, feet but do not walk, and no sound rises from their throats.
8 Their makers shall be like them, all who trust in them.

That is, those who see but don't understand are those whose idolatry has blinded them, which includes me sometimes.

In another passage, Jesus notes that the simple understand him while the learned don't. The thing about parables is that if you are sophisticated, you may be tempted to twist them to justify oneself. In the parables, Jesus doesn't hammer away at his points, forcing us to agree with him. Instead, he invites those "with ears to hear" to listen and follow him....

re 1

Well, Jesus explained most of His parables to his disciples. Therefore, you have an immediate interpretation and don't have to wander in the dark.

However, the Bible has held its ground on the premise that it is the Inspired Word of God. Therefore, it requires inspiration to be understood.

Approaching the Bible prayerfully with the expectation of illuminating revelation, yields, in my experience, a much greater benefit from reading the Bible than many other approaches.

It depends on if you are one of "those outside" being referred to here.

But just by virtue of your sharing Mark 4:10-12 in this thread alone, you have already "shed some light" rather than hid it under a basket as is cautioned against in Mark 4:21-25, and so per 4:24 are promised more spiritual knowledge and perception. I found Ada R. Habershon's book The Study of the Parables to be helpful (though I don't agree with every single interpretation).

Forgive me for not citing chapter and verse, I will hunt them up if you would like, but there are many places in the Bible where it says if you seek God, He will be found. Which can be interpreted He will put himself in front of you, like a parent playing hide n seek with a toddler.
I've understood it that He is there, He has put all the truth before mankind and if they will seek to know Him, He will give them that which they need to understand. However, there will always be those who will not seek and do not wish to know, they will not be able to see Him because of their hardness of heart.
I assume that since He created us, He knows our hearts better than ourselves.

Proverbs 8:17
The Scriptures say: I love those who love me; and those who diligently seek me will find me.

Luke 11:10
For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it shall be opened.

Isaiah 55:6
Seek the Lord while He may be found; Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; And let him return to the Lord, And He will have compassion on him; And to our God, For he will abundantly pardon.

It is those who really don't wish to look for God who will be confused and not understand the parables. Those who really don't want to find God are blinded by their own choice. God allows them to be blinded because of the hardness of their hearts.
The original verse comes from Isaish 6:10 where God has commissioned Isaiah to preach to Israel to come back to God repent, but God knows they will not, He still asks Isaiah to go warn the people and ask them to come back to him--avoiding the punishment to come.

God wants all to come to repentance, (2 Peter 3:9) but He also knows that very few will obey His calling to come to Him (Matt 7:13 and 14)--receiving the blessings He has to offer.

Truth is not a right but a privilege.

Man flagrantly chose to believe and follow a lie in Eden (Gen 2:17; 3:1-6). Foolishness is bound in our hearts as children and needs corrective action (Pro 22:15). We have deceitful hearts which are desperately wicked (Jer 17:9-10). And even God's children are born into this world following the teachings of the greatest liar (Eph 2:1-3).

Good and wise men are thankful to the Lord for what He has revealed to them (Gen 32:10). But wicked and foolish men ask, "Who is the LORD, that I should serve him?" (Ex 7:13; 14:8). And because of that, the Lord sends strong delusion so that some men will believe the lies which they would rather have (2Thes 2:9-12). Unthankful rebells who reject the knowledge which He has given them He turns over to reprobate minds (Rom 1:28).

>8 ittai: "Truth is not a right but a privilege."

Whoa, there Nelly! Truth is an obligation. We are obliged to seek the truth. Anything other than an honest search for truth flies in the face of God. Any position willingly taken from outside the truth is a lie. Is God a liar?

#8: "Man flagrantly chose to believe and follow a lie in Eden"

You're twisting the text a bit there! Eve refused to believe the lie that she and Adam would die "in the day that thou eatest thereof". She tested the assertion by eating, and by not dying she showed that it was a lie. As Paul later advised, "prove all things, hold fast to that which is good".

#11 "Interesting. God lied!"
Surely this isn't the first time you met this view? (Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!)

And it's relevant to the thread (not just random trolling :) ). The OP is looking for ways to wriggle out of Jesus's policy, that "speaking in parables is intended to obfuscate the truth". Isn't it more honest and consistent to accept that God misleads and lies on occasion? To face up to the hard sayings and reject the sugar coated popular Jesus who follows the moral principles developed by deists and atheists in the last few centuries?

Re: Paul in Thessalonians. Not everything in the Bible is bad.

#10 I don't think you are following the biblical usage of the word death in your description of the results of Adam & Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden.

Death is not the cessation of bodily functions in much of the Bible.

Ephesians 2:1, 5; Colossians 2:13; and Revelation 20:14 all utilized death as a description of separation from God resulting from sin. In that sense Adam & Eve died instantly as they were separated from God by their sins. This is illustrated by their hiding from God and God's banishing them from the Garden.

As for the original post, Mark 4:10-12 teaches the same thing as 1 Corinthians 2:14--"But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." Without the Holy Spirit's guidance no man can understand fully the doctrines taught in the Bible. God has made the sinfulness of man and the righteousness of God clearly understandable and when people reject that truth and reject salvation through the person of the Lord Jesus Christ then according to Romans 1:21 their thoughts become vain and their hearts are darkened just as refusing to learn the alphabets would hide the clear contents of any written document from us so refusing to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ hides the remaining truths of the Scriptures from us.

It is simple our refusal to see and hear what God has required us to hear and see about the Lord Jesus Christ has like Israel in Zechariah 7 left us blind and deaf to the things we would like to hear and see. Zechariah 7:11-14 But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the LORD of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets: therefore came a great wrath from the LORD of hosts. Therefore it is come to pass, that as he cried, and they would not hear; so they cried, and I would not hear, saith the LORD of hosts: But I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations whom they knew not. Thus the land was desolate after them, that no man passed through nor returned: for they laid the pleasant land desolate.

Who is Zechariah talking about here? Those who hear the word of man saying "God is mighty and powerful and will punish those who disobey Him. Live in fear lest the Lord find you not acceptable", or those who hear the word of God saying "Love one another as I have loved you"?

What constitutes sin? What are the things God abhors? What does God require of us? Why did God devastate Israel? Why is God devastating the US now? (A hint: For the same reason He devastated Israel and scattered them to the four winds.)

RE: #10

God did not lie to Eve, He stated the truth. And the account in Genesis proves that. As stated above, physical death was not mentioned. But Adam & Eve's reaction (hiding from God, then blame shifting over who was responsible for the sin) shows that there was a radical change in their fidelity to God and obedience to His word. Their desire to obey God and to seek fellowship with Him died as soon as they partook of the fruit.

Check out Paul's commentary on the event in 1Tim 2:14. Adam was not deceived. He willfully chose to disobey. And we, as his children, have been feeling the consequences of that choice ever since.

1Kings 22 will help shed light on our consideration. A remarkable account of a godly king of Judah, Jehoshaphat, going to battle against the king of Syria with Ahab, a wicked king of Israel. Ahab brings out his prophets of Baal & the groves to show support for their coming battle. Jehoshaphat asks for confirmation from a prophet of Jehovah. Ahab replies, "There is yet one man, Micaiah the son of Imlah, by whom we may enquire of the LORD: but I hate him; for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil." (vs. 8) They call Micaiah and ask his view of their enterprise. He knows that Ahab does not want to obey Jehovah's ways, so he tells him to go and prosper. Ahab hears the sarcasm and commands him by Jehovah to tell him the truth. And here is the result:

17 And he said, I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no master: let them return every man to his house in peace. 18 And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil? 19 And he said, Hear thou therefore the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left. 20 And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramothgilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner. 21 And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. 22 And the LORD said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so. 23 Now therefore, behold, the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the LORD hath spoken evil concerning thee.

To those who reject His truth, God accommodates their desire. If a man wants to believe a lie, the Lord will give him all the evidence he wants to do so.

That is why I stated initially that truth is not something that men have a right to. It is a priviledge granted by God which He can remove if they are not willing to receive, obey and be thankful for it. Parables do just that. It confuses proud, arrogant men who don't want to do God's will. But those who will humble themselves and come to the LORD asking for wisdom, He will reveal it to them and explain the parable, proverb and dark saying.

If we love the truth (and Jesus is truth (John 14:6)) then God will reveal truth to us. Matthew 11:25 says At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.

2 Thessalonians 2:10-11 says They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.

I agree with MrsLee.

But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul. Deuteronomy 4:29

If you seek God, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever. 1 Chronicles 28:9

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13

jburlinson,

I'm glad you've noticed these verses and taken them seriously: I've never seen anyone outside professional scholarship raise the problem. I, too, have struggled with the same issue for many years, and have devoted much thought and study to this and related problems in the New Testament. First, I'll note some general points. This incident is related in all 3 of the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), a fact that has major implications. The first is that such "multiple attestation" indicates that Jesus A) almost certainly said it and B) thought that it was very important to his message. Also, it is reported very consistently and clearly in all three books; thus, there is little room for misinterpretation, as would more likely occur if there were significant discrepancies between the reports. In this case, the import of what Jesus says in answer to the private inquiry about the parable, after he has deliberately not only wasted the time of "the crowds" with it but also consigned them to eternal torture through no fault of their own (after all, they had come to hear him preach), is remarkably similar, the only differences being in inconsequential lexical details.

I have much to say about this Biblical incident in particular, and that discussion would naturally lead to an examination of the Gospels in general, and perhaps of the NT as a whole. First, I'll say this. The most important thing to do before considering any question in the synoptic Gospels is to read those Gospels consecutively, from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Luke. I mention the synoptics only in this context because those are the books that are most concerned with the actual life and teaching of Jesus himself. (Afterward, it will be clear, when you go on to read John, how different a thing it is from the synoptics.) Reading those books consecutively, and thus in their intended context--which, after all, is how books are supposed to be read--is the only way to understand them yourself for what they actually say. Almost everyone has been inculcated with many falsehoods about the Bible, and takes those contorted, tendentious, and quite non-Biblical doctrines for the essence of the Bible itself. As with any other book, ancient or modern, you have to read Matthew, Mark, and Luke for yourself, with the determination to set aside what you have been taught they mean and to open your mind to ascertaining for yourself the meaning of what they actually say. When one does so, the remarkable fact is that the passage that you have cited in your original post is not quite out of character with Jesus' general message, which everyone would find appalling, vicious, and impossible to live by if he / she took it seriously. I can amply demonstrate that fact if need be. Many professed "Christians" are in the inveterate habit of selecting isolated verses from disparate parts of the Bible, shorn from their context, patched artificially together, and manipulated in the most sophistic ways to deny the obvious meaning of perfectly straightforward Biblical teachings that they are unwilling to accept as such. It is exceedingly ironic that some Christians reflexively, without even thinking about what they are saying, accuse those who disagree with them of "taking" verses "out of context" or "cherry-picking" in citing the Bible to demonstrate their points. The truth is the exact opposite: the Christians who practice this procedure, not their unbelieving interlocutors, who are the masters of the unfortunate craft of "cherry-picking." You can, in fact, see some excellent examples of Christian "cherry picking" within this thread; they are easy to identify if you try. (I emphasize that I do not by any means intend to imply anything at all about the personal characteristics of any authors on this post: the criticisms that I have stated about "some Christians"' attitudes refer exclusively to Christians with whom I have relevant personal experience and who do show these tendencies. My only criticism about any authors on this thread is that some of them are in fact using this cherry-picking to avoid a point that it obvious in the Biblical text. With those people, I am interested only in discussing and corroborating my points with Biblical evidence.) I, unlike they, advocate reading the Bible in the natural way, i.e. from beginning to end, and without thinking one knows in advance what it says. If we already know what it says, and could rely on our preachers or other religious authorities or families or whomever to tell us what we need to know about it, then we could simply consign it to the trash heap, or else regard it merely as an odd work of literature or as an antiquarian curiosity, but certainly not as a book that has anything to do with our lives, much less as the infinitely important Word that God demands that we know. I say with perfect earnestness that the best, and an extremely potent, antidote to Christianity is to read the Bible--or, at the very least, the New Testament, and most importantly the synoptic Gospels--from beginning to end.

Now I'll simply answer your questions straightforwardly and without elaboration; then I'll try to come back soon to corroborate my answers and address any questions or challenges to them.

"I have for a long time struggled to comprehend the meaning of these verses, which follow the parable of the sower and read, in the words of the ESV: 'And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, 'To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that 'they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.'"

I, too, struggled mightily with this passage and the ones just like it in the other synoptics; but there is no need for struggle about the meaning. Jesus means exactly what he says, and there is nothing unclear about it. Its clarity is confirmed by the extremely close repetition of the same saying in the other synoptics: there is nothing to suggest any other interpretation than what he manifestly says, which is exactly the meaning you took from it. Jesus is saying that he is hiding his message from the crowds who came to listen to him, precisely so that they will not understand it and will not be saved. Trying to make this mean anything else than this--what it clearly says-- requires mental contortions that are really preposterous and obviously special pleading and really preposterous if you listen to it. (Sorry; that's what I think of the "cherry-picking" method. Again, it isn't a personal matter, just a statement that the method of reasoning is faulty. Many people of the highest excellence and intelligence have often practiced, and still practice, some extraordinarily preposterous ways of thinking; it isn't even very uncommon.) My struggle with the passage was never about its sense, but rather about my belief that it must be true because Jesus said it. Jesus said it and meant it; but that does nothing to make it less reprehensible than it obviously is, no matter how many passages anyone quotes about God's ways not being our ways, etc. Saying that God's ways are not our ways, and the other dicta related to it, is merely a desperate refuge of last resort, a simple way to end consideration of questions, almost always about theodicy, for which no acceptable answer is possible, and to insist on belief and trust in God despite every reason against so believing and trusting. Its end is, by all possible means, to maintain the profound benefits and meaning in life, whether real or imagined, that they fear to their core would be impossible without belief in their god. That is what it was when it was used in the Hebrew Scriptures, when it was used by Paul in his letters, and when it used now and will continue to be used in the future in the face of the most terrible events of life. It is how many Christians maintain such pleasant claims as the loving nature of God when it is clear that if there is a God, so far from being loving, he the most hateful being imaginable.

Now, back from my digression; here is what one traditional Christian commentator on the Greek text of the New Testament, W.R. Niccol, was reduced to saying about the parallel version of Jesus' saying in Matthew The Expositor's Greek Testament:

"A . . . serious question arises in Christ's answer to their question, which seems to say that He adopted the parabolic method in order to hide the truths of the kingdom from unspiritual minds. (My note: But, as he indicates when he says "in order to", that is what the text says: the Greek word employed is oti 'in order that' . . . (they may . . .not, etc.; end of my note; I wish the bracket characters served their standard function in punctuation on LT) Nothing is more certain that Jesus neither did nor could adopt any such policy, and that if the evangelists ascribed it to Him, we should have no alternative but to agree with those who, like citations given, maintain that the evangelists all 3 of them? have mistaken His meaning, reading *intention* in light of *result*. It is much better to impute a mistake to them than an inhuman purpose to Christ."

Niccols gives no reason for supposing that the text merely "seems to mean" what it does in fact mean, and has nothing but his personal bias to support his entirely unfounded claim that Jesus could not have said, or at least meant, what the author says he said. This carries no weight whatever in supporting his judgment about the passage or what Jesus did or would or would not do. The best we can do to determine what Jesus said he did or would do is to see what the evangelists said that he uttered about those matters. There is no reason why a person as distant in time and culture from us as Jesus should have taught only what we, with our radically different post-Enlightenment values, would like him to have taught. There is no textual or historical, or any other plausible, reason here for positing any error in the Gospels' reporting of Jesus statement except that Niccols finds it absolutely unacceptable and fundamentally incompatible with the view that he (understandably) insists on taking of Jesus.

Nicoll is desperate here, and is obviously reaching. He is admitting the meaning of the text (though trying to seem not to by saying it "seems to mean" what it in fact says), and stating that the best case is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke misunderstood Jesus and unanimously recorded an erroneous version of what he said, and that that is what stands in our text as we have it.

When Nicoll comes to the passage that you cite, Mark 4.10-12, he again states what the passage "seems to say" i.e., obviously says about Jesus' intention of concealing his message so that "they" will not . . . be forgiven. He gives no reason for arguing that the text as it stands means something other than what he says it "seems to say"; rather, his unwarranted softening of the appropriate diction merely rhetorically insinuates that there may be a real problem of interpretation where none exists. He concludes, ab oraculo, "This cannot really have been the intention of Jesus." Well, I guess that settles that, then.

"If so, am I one who will never understand?"

You can understand what the text says well enough by reading it, since the text gives us the explanation that he gave those who privately asked the question. You can understand it even better if you study it within its context of first-century apocalyptic Judaism (of which Jesus was hardly the only prophet of his kind) located on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire. I don't know what other kind "understanding" could be available. I can tell you, however, that those who think they understand it, and think that its fundamental meaning is something other than the straightforward one that we have noted, certainly do not understand; indeed, they are determined not to do so, and that is an essential characteristic of "faith."

I'll leave you one almost random other passage among many that indicate that Jesus' interest in hiding his message is consistent with his overall teaching. Since I am exhausted and it is extremely late, I'll ask you to look it up rather than type it here; it's Luke 10.21-24. As he does with the parallel passages about explaining the parables, he repeats this one elsewhere, once in a far more interesting context than here.

#20: criels
Thank you for your long, thoughtful and scholarly post.
The repetition of the message of Luke 10.21-24 in Matt 11 is indeed very interesting.

I have a very minor quibble. To read each of the synoptics completely from beginning to end is certainly to read it as its author intended. But surely the order Matt Mar Luke is merely traditional, there is no real reason to read them in that order?

#21

Many (most?) believe that Mark was written before Matthew. I have read Mark through, but not for analysis, just to get the sweep of the story.

Most, but of course that doesn't get to the "age" of the story underlying it. As someone said with respect to Alexander, there are no good sources, only good stories.

It's a very interesting story for how it cuts across assumptions and methods.

The multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment—why we're all talking about it—are good evidence it's Jesus, not the church "processing" the meaning of Jesus. But other contexts, however, that the story explains a central problem of early Christianity--namely that Jesus didn't loudly and generally proclaim himself to be what his posthumous adherents said he was--and would cause many suspect the story is a later invention.

Two other thoughts occur to me:

1. Someone who knows the genre of parables better should answer this—it's not really a Greek genre, so I'm out of my depths. My sense is that parables are not for obfuscation, but for explaining things easily and, perhaps secondarily, to give them a certain contemplative polyvalence (compare poetry).

2. The passage reminds me of the interior/exterior knowledge dichotomy that is in so much Greek culture. Hermetic knowledge. Plato's secret teachings. Etc. Is this useful at all?

jimroberts and vpfluke,

You are quite right about the relative chronology of Mark: virtually all scholars agree that it is the oldest of the Gospels. What I should have urged is reading the Gospels together and in their entirety, since they are all actual narrative texts in themselves--not sources for cutting and pasting according to the theological preferences of the user--that are explicitly concerned with relating the life and teaching of Jesus, and thus share the same essential purpose (although the emphasis of each within that basic framework is distinct). It makes perfect sense--and is probably best--to read Mark first.

Tim,

I think, with some scholarly support, that the general claim about parables is that they ordinarily convey a relatively abstract principle in terms of imagery that is familiar and easily understandable to their audience. Thus, it is supposed to make the principle easier, not harder, for the hearers to comprehend (much like the homely illustrations I used to give to illustrate the difference between ablative of accompaniment and ablative of means). In other words, when it is employed well, a parable is an effective device for advancing the learning of the principle by the student (much like Aesop's fables, perhaps, the morals of which he makes about as clear as anything can be). In keeping with this principle, as at least one commentator has written, Jesus in this parable uses agricultural imagery that would have been familiar to farmers in first century Palestine, who had sown and monitored the progress of their crops. But here comes the startling twist: although the imagery is homely enough, the moral, to say nothing of how to live by it, is entirely unexplained; and Jesus is aware of the fact, for he told us that he meant it not to be understood. And that point is dramatically reinforced by Jesus' consternation at the disciples' not understanding the parable even after he interprets it for them. But, although not understanding the parables would result in damnation in the case of "the crowds", it is quite all right that his disciples, as he often repeats don't understand the parables any more than the "crowd" does. Why? The only reason is that to them "has been given" secret ('mysteries') of the kingdom of God; but to those outside, everything comes in parables, so that:

"They may indeed look but not perceive,
And may indeed listen, but not understand,
So that they might not turn again, and be forgiven


The "crowd" didn't know about Jesus' "Word" or how it was supposed to work in the human soul; Jesus had ostensibly come in part to teach such things, precisely because folks would not have known them otherwise. Thus, if the commentators I mentioned above are correct about the usual function of parables, Jesus is turning the point of a parable on its head, for the strange but explicit motive of fulfilling his understanding of a prophecy melded from two verses from different books from the Hebrew Scripture. Nothing could be clearer than that Jesus is in fact using the parables to obfuscate, for that is exactly what he says in all three synoptics. And, as I can easily demonstrate, that is perfectly consistent with Jesus' teaching as a whole (except in the isolated passages that contradict this one). For just one indication of this fact, notice this quotation from Jesus:

"All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." (Luke 10.22) In keeping with this, and with the parables that Jesus said he used to prevent "the crowds" from learning his meaning and thus being forgiven, we find in the Gospels a lot of Jesus' "choosing" some and rejecting others on entirely arbitrary grounds.

The NT is eat up with Jesus saying not everyone will get it. That's how Calvin got his ideas. Jesus as much as says God has selected His own. His sheep heed his voice. Others don't. This statement out of Mark is just one of a double handful of statements to the same effect. They will hear Him, or He will harden their hearts.

#26

Yes, people don't notice what that says: God "hardens their hearts". It doesn't help anything if God himself "hardens" your "heart" for you. Makes it extra hard to get it.

And, as you indicated, Calvin didn't come up with the doctrine of predestination in a fit of fringe speculation: he got it straight from the message of Jesus as recorded in the Bible, and went so far as to take that particular doctrine seriously, as reprehensible as it is to any humane or compassionate sensibility.

oakesspalding,

1. I don't know what your definition of "standard works" is, but it is true that I have not encountered the two books you mentioned. On the other hand, I am aware of many books that I surmise are similar to those two; but since I don't know what your idea of "standard" works is, I don't know whether they count: but I surmise that they do. I'm thinking of stuff like Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell, I believe. I have not been impressed with such efforts, and, if you care to give me putatively satisfactory defenses of these "Hard Sayings", I think I can reply with obvious facts that tell strongly against the attempted explanation in these "standard works." It doesn't even matter that I haven't seen these books: I've traveled this now boring path for a long time, am intimately familiar with the territory, and have studied the Bible. In order to counter the explanations of these "standard works," that will provide more than enough to demonstrate the vacuity of these vain, desperate, absurd attempts to defend the indefensible. Thus, it is probably not critical that I be aware of all the "standard works." That horse died a long time ago; and yet it is still beaten perpetually.

2. The point is not debatable at all. It happens throughout the synoptics, and it is quite clear that that is what is happening.

Now to your main points. However much defense one may find for God in this single verse, there are two reasons why it does nothing to exculpate God's ultimate and capricious cruelty. If anyone who likes picking out verses should try this: put beside this isolated quote all the ones about God's mercy toward people who don't deserve it, and then consider what this amounts to. Where is all that mercy? It is nonsense. And you're conveniently omitting the second half of the verse--that is, its main point--in your citation. It is perverse to use anything from this passage to try to excuse Jesus when he is deliberately hiding his message from most people. And even if this half-verse did have any extenuating value, it would simply exemplify a point that I have freely admitted before: that you will find some kinder sayings--though this hardly counts as one of them--that contradict the hideous ones. And some points should be made about this. It is to be noted emphatically that when we have so many unaccountably harsh and cruel passages, the existence of more pleasant ones that contradict those many cruel ones does nothing whatsoever to justify us in pretending that all those cruel passages--almost all of which are multiply attested in the synoptics--do not mean what they clearly do mean. It only means that the Jesus' message is contradictory; and that, too, is absolutely despicable when people's eternal fate depends on understanding and obeying his message. That is an extremely important point and it cannot be over-emphasized.

As I have noted, the overall tenor of the Gospels is extremely harsh: full of threats, predictions of imminent doom, obfuscation that leads to damnation, burning Hell, weeping and gnashing of teeth, etc. And I'll set anyone this challenge: give me any coherent presentation from the synoptic Gospels--that is, from the sayings that have the best claim to report Jesus' personal teachings--that tells me (or anyone else) how to know I'm saved from this fate (which is part of the OP's question). You will find that there is precious little there, and what there is demonstrably contradicts what Jesus--not to mention other teachers of the NT--says somewhere else. If Jesus wanted people to understand his message and be saved, and that is the most important thing in human life, then he did an inexcusably negligent job of explaining that message, with the result that we poor, weak, stupid human creatures are consigned to eternal torture. Isn't really reasonable that we should be eternally damned for not understanding the opaque message of an enigmatic itinerant prophet? That is a really stupid reason for sending us to eternal torture, oakesspalding, and it is why I have become quite impatient with people doing all manner of sophistic acrobatics to defend a god and Christ who allegedly are concerned to perform such abominations; there is nothing praiseworthy or defensible about this; it sets the standard for God's mercy and forgiveness pretty low. Trying to defend God on the possible grounds that, well, maybe half a verse in a context that says the opposite indicates that the people closed their own ears, rather than God: that is a strange kind of excuse for the behavior of a god who is supposed to be infinitely merciful and loving. If this god wants us to love him and admire him for his goodness, he certainly has gone out of his way to provoke us not to. The best you can say is that he is just jerking us around like playthings, because it humors him and no one can stop him; which, again, is totally consistent with his Biblical character.

But I confess, oaksspalding, that you did score point on me: when I said "anyone outside of scholarship", I was thinking of preachers and ordinary laypersons. I wasn't thinking of the "standard works" that you mentioned, although I'm quite conversant in the genre. My complaint about the authors of those "standard works" is not that they have ignored the problems, but that they have offered the kind of answers to which I have objected throughout.

oakesspalding,

I don't appreciate your sinister implication about the "mask". Show me where I posed as something I turned out not to be, or took pains to conceal what I ended up saying. I had just been discussing facts about what the passage said.

Does Evidence That Demands a Verdict count in your mind as a "standard work" that defuses the evident cruelty of the "hard sayings?" If not, why does it fall short of that criterion. If it does count as a "standard work", why is it that McDowell did such an incomplete or inadequate job of refuting the complaints about the "hard sayings" that this other guy had to write another "standard work" claiming to do the same thing?

In any case, I'll do this: if you would like discuss the "Hard Sayings", I'll read the book if you can help me see that its arguments in toto or any passages you select from it overcome contrary Biblical evidence that I will present. (I really don't see why I have to know this book as well as, e.g., McDowell, but ok.; we'll suppose that this author came up with some amazingly successful new explanation, and I missed the news.) But whether you think I'm conversant in this apologetic genre or not, what difference does it make if I can refute the arguments in whatever book you please within it? Thus, I am willing to read the book, but only if you can help me see why I should see that it contradicts my criticisms.

As for the two sentences that constitute your third paragraph ("And not to pile on," etc.). Your basic understanding of common discourse seems to have failed you. I said that mercy is what you are saying it is, namely that mercy is "giving people a break who do not. . .deserve it." And I said that God is decidedly not showing this quality when he condemns people to Hell for not understanding an obscure message. It is not my reasoning that is "strange"; it is God's action.

Yes, in one post I was taking my lead from the poster, approving what he said. That is in post #27. I said it didn't help people's prospects of "getting it"--that is, understanding the message without which they cannot be saved--that God "hardens their hearts." Instead of showing mercy to the people from whom he hides the Word--and by "mercy" I mean exactly what you do--and going the extra mile to help them understand even if the ear-shutting was in part their own fault, he forecloses any prospect of their getting the Word by "hardening their hearts" to make the result certain. In contrast, he saves others with worse faults, thus arbitrarily showing them mercy, just because he feels like it. (I have already quoted at least one apposite text above.) Thus, if I made an error in my original statement, in was a minor one relative to its overall truth about God's cruelty, although I'm willing to quibble with you about it if that is what you think is needed. So far as I can tell, this is the only "particular passage" of which you could be accusing me of having given a "crabbed" interpretation, but if you had another one in mind, please tell me so that I can correct the problem.

I will never be legitimately be accused of "cherry-picking" and let it lie. If it is false, it is a particularly offensive cheap shot with me. Show me wherein I cherry picked, for I am eager to correct the error.

I see that the book that #31 so heartily recommends, though intended to be popular, does mention The Teaching of Jesus's theory that ἵνα should really be ὅι as the proper translation of Aramaic de in 12; and The Parables of Jesus (though Jeremias is apparently not mentioned by name) that משל and so παραβολή (as in LXX and here in opposition to μυστήριον) might also mean 'riddle'.

> 23 Hermetic knowledge.

There is (was?) a reasonably robust school of interpretation that there really was a secret. For example, The Messianic Secret (Messiasgeheimnis) and Genesis of Secrecy come to mind.

Some possible parallel between Mark 4:11-12 and Corpus Hermeticum 13:13 has also been pointed out.

But these are somewhat away from the usual poles of Conservative Protestant apologetics and extreme skepticism that we almost always get here.

Hmm. My copy of the Corpus Hermeticum doesn't seem to line up. Probably there's a bunch of numbering systems.

> 34

I'm sure you're right; my sincere apologies.

Hermetica translates:

through this discourse on being born again that I have noted down for you alone to avoid casting it all before the mob but [to give it] to those whom god himself wishes.

The text:

διὰ τὸν λόγον τοῦτον τὸν περὶ τῆς παλιγγενεσίας εἰς ὃν ὑπεμνηματισάμην ἵνα μὴ ὦμεν διάβολοι τοῦ παντὸς εἰς τοὺς πολλούς, εἰς οὓς ὁ θεὸς αὐτὸς θέλει.

is not without its problems, but the general meaning that there is a logos that is not for the hoi polloi is there (in so many words).

See Corpus Hermeticum XIII and Early Christian Literature, particularly p. 64.

36: oakesspalding: "... verse from Matthew that I actually quoted? Matthew goes on to state: But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear."

You quoted the first part of Matthew 13:15: "For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed . . . ", and gave us the reference. That looked like cherry picking, since the verse goes on "lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them." It is true that the first half of the verse, taken by itself, leaves open the question of who, if anybody, was responsible. The second half, however, gives a clear indication that that the waxing gross was caused for a purpose, and the purpose seems to be God's.
Since you still skip the second half of verse 15 and go on to 16, it looks like quote mining.

oakesspalding,

I want to say emphatically that I admire your readiness to admit error when someone makes it clear to you. Also, in all of your posts, you regularly notice how your interlocutor could have arrived at the statements with which you disagree; that's a graceful thing to do.

Now I have a definite correction to make in something I said: I was quite unjustified in making much of the language of "hardening of heart", and I saw that after we finished corresponding last night. I was discussing the language of the synoptic Gospels, and there is nothing there to justify what I was making of the term. I knew about the emphasis on explicit "heart-hardening" quotations in the OT, and was transposed it improperly to Jesus' statement to those around him in private that he spoke in parables so that the crowds would not understand and be forgiven. You were right to call me on that.

However, everything I said concerning the cruelty and lack of mercy in the parallel passages about Jesus' hiding his message through parables so that the crowds would not understand and be forgiven is still thoroughly correct. Jesus / God certainly doesn't show any mercy here--i.e., save even individuals in "the crowd" who don't deserve it--but he actually acts to ensure that they won't "turn and be forgiven." He's actively depriving them of that chance. That negates at least much of the force of the absence of the explicit "hardening of heart" language in what Jesus says here. And it is certainly the case that salvation comes only to a few--those to whom the Son wishes to reveal the Father, as Jesus puts it in one place; "the elect" in several places; and other individuals according to his whim, from whose cases we can derive no principle by which we can know that we ourselves are saved.

Incidentally, I've prepared a lecture (twice) about this, and know my evidence pretty well, and have thought a lot about it--from the level of individual passages of the synoptic Gospels, to each synoptic Gospel as a whole, to all the synoptics taken together. I've had a special interest in it, because in my mind, it was not merely an academic study; I had to study the Bible to settle the issue whether Christianity was true so that I could be sure whether I was going to Hell. (That kind of concern can engender great seriousness and assiduousness; and I'm a naturally serious person anyway.) This kind of intensive study is one reason I can say confidently that I could answer any of the arguments about the "hard passages." And, with a graduate degree in Greek and Latin, I'm confident that I can handle primary and learned scholarly resources as well as the author can. And I have the further advantage of having taken the believing and unbelieving point of view with equal seriousness. I suspect I won't be far off in surmising that the author of Hard Questions has thought about the unbelieving side primarily with a view to disproving it. All these consideration leads me to the conclusion that I won't meet any great, baffling surprises in the book. I don't think it's expecting readers quite like me. But maybe I'm wrong; I can't honestly dismiss that possibility completely. I wouldn't expect you to put all, or most, of the book's challenges to me. Would you be willing to take maybe one or two?

Concerning the alleged "mask": I think that if you look back at my earlier posts, you'll find plenty of signs of my attitude about Jesus' hiding his meaning and thus consigning the crowd to damnation. It's pretty hard for me to describe that text, knowing that so many people think that Jesus is far the best moral example for us all, and people ask "What would Jesus do", and think that Christianity is the only refuge from evil, while such hatefulness is right there in his teachings for any reader to see. It's shocking, and surely confusing to the development of more advanced moral sensibilities. It's astounding that I and other critics of such a hateful character--who readily consigns so many people to eternal torture and loves to talk about it repeatedly--are considered the "sinister" ones. Unaccountable. As John Stuart Mill wrote:

"Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness."

John Stuart Mill Autobiography, Chapter II

As for the whole Bible mitigating the impression of cruelty given by individual passages from the synoptics, our views are exactly the opposite, for the reasons I have indicated above. Invent a place of eternal torture knowing that most of your human creatures will go to for the most dubious of reasons, and that alone is enough for me. And then claim to be all-loving and all-merciful. Are we supposed to take that seriously; really? That is evil beyond description. Nothing can "mitigate" it. And there is more than that, but, as I say, that is quite sufficient to make the point.

The message of everlasting torment in Hell has been an important part of the Christian tradition, but I think without very strong biblical support. In the OT death is generally taken to be real death rather than transition to a new life of pleasure or pain, as in Psalm 115:17, "The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence." and Ecclesiastes 9:10, "For there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.". Job said similar things.

My memory may be at fault here, so if you more knowledgeable people want to say more on the subject of Hell, I will read it with interest.

oakesspalding,

I appreciate your remarkably objective description of the problem that Hell poses for Christians. As I've said before, you think about the other side's strengths rather than just attacking in an uninformed manner, as so many ordinary Christians do; and that is a substantial merit on your part. Any quibble I might try to make with the descriptive part of your analysis of the problem--and I don't know that I could find one--would be merely pedantic. Of course, the controversial part of your presentation is found mostly in the following two paragraphs:

"On the other hand, I think you are much too severe in your analysis of those particular passages. It’s quite a stretch to go from “not be forgiven”/”not be healed” or some similar (though perhaps subtly different) Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek phrase to “condemning people to Hell for ever and ever,” or whatever. I really don’t think that’s what Jesus is talking about here. Among other things, he is consciously echoing those words of Isaiah, which were not about Hell at all. So, he doesn’t say, “I’m going to hide things from people so they can go to Hell.” You may claim that’s the logical consequence of his words, but I think that goes way too far."

It strikes me that you’re guilty, so to speak, of the same mistake as the Calvinists (as you, perhaps, indirectly confirmed—without calling it a “mistake”, of course). You take this passage and a few others and blow them up into a whole theology about how salvation and eternal damnation are utterly arbitrary, or whatever. Jesus said all sorts of things about the afterlife, most of which, I would say, are much more morally plausible than the above. A better criticism might be that Jesus said many completely contradictory things about the issue, as one might expect from a half-mad, charismatic cult-leader with a head filled with Old Testament scripture—pretty much what you have to think about Jesus if he wasn’t who he said he was. That you yourself seem to imply this and claim that his overall theology of salvation is hateful and arbitrary, etc., perhaps betrays your at least semi-ambivalence on the question."

I just want to let you know that I'm not ignoring this post. I'll be spending some time examining the synoptic Gospels with a view to addressing your claims here with precision, based on careful consideration of what it seems to say. Your evaluations demand both close reading of individual key passages and and a constant eye toward how they fit into the particular Gospel in which they occur and the synoptics as a whole. Obviously, I'll need to do this within a limited amount of time and without neglecting all other activity, but within those restraints, I'll do it carefully, precisely, and, I hope, reasonably well.

Hi, oakesspalding,

It is indeed true that most talk of religion on all sides is uninformed and vacuous. There are many factors involved in this, and I'll have to point out just a few here.

Some people who call themselves Christians actually do not embrace the distinctively Christian doctrines found in the NT. I try to point out that this is an abuse of the word "Christian." Then other people, who make no pretense of being Christians, accuse me of "telling" what the so-called "Christian" has to believe and insisting that my version of "Christianity" has to be right; while all I'm doing is pointing out the undeniably non-negotiable tenets in Jesus' teaching. For doing this, often everyone else in a group, however disparate the members are from each other--be they Wiccan, agnostic, indifferent, what have you--all form solidarity to attack me on the grounds that I do not "respect" the belief of someone who claims to be a Christian but clearly is not. The assumption--which my detractors often state explicitly and emphatically--is that there is no "objective truth" in religion. To me, this is absurd. The idea that no proposition about religion--say, that Jesus rose from the dead--is neither true nor false seems preposterous to me: either he did or he didn't, and one or the other of these contraries is a historical fact. It is also a matter of fact that we will or will not survive to perpetual bliss or perpetual torture when we die; what could be subjective about this? If we should find ourselves in Heaven or Hell, it would be quite something to say that there is a Heaven for you but not for me, or that Heaven is a state of mind, or whatever other relativist statement anyone cares to make about the matter. Such relativism about religion is one of my greatest sources of frustration in discussing the subject with others. It is similar to astonishingly foolish claims that I have heard about literature among pseudo-intellectuals, who either are not truly educated despite their university degrees or have somehow radically misunderstood what reading is, despite the fact that they read all the time on a daily basis. Such people tell me that a text has no inherent meaning, so that, e.g., if someone reads the Iliad and takes it to be a cookbook, then a cookbook it is for that reader. Likewise, if it strikes me as an introductory Spanish textbook it is equally that: for me. That is the pitch of absurdity to which education has come in our time. So that helps put our statements and concepts regarding religion into clearer light.

And, of course, philosophy necessarily involves sustained, minute attention to the details and implications of a problem. Most people neither are educated for this habit, or at least for doing it well, nor have time to do it under stress and constraints of time imposed by work and the myriad other distractions of everyday life.

Thus, many who argue against Christianity have quite unimpressive and often just silly things to say in opposition to Christianity. It seems to me that the main reason for this is that Christianity's ultimate source is the NT, and most people who comments on Christianity have not read the NT, and therefore make objections to Christianity that entirely miss the point. This is a waste of everyone's time and energy. To criticize Christianity, as well as to argue in its favor, requires knowing its contents and taking them seriously. It is in keeping with this fact that I have committed to the project I described in the last paragraph of post #42 above.

Now a fundamental point about knowledge and belief made here to be made here, and it is one that is infrequently noted in discussions like this one. The proposition that Christianity is true is not equal in epistemological status with the proposition that it is not. Christians urge their audience to believe certain specific tenets that are, a priori, unlikely in the extreme. Those doctrines, on account of their highly improbable nature, require a correspondingly enormous amount of evidence to make them credible. So far as I can see, there is nothing in the world that we can find, when we explore our surroundings, that suggests the truth of Christianity's essential tenets--and thus of Christianity--except some enormously problematic texts from the ancient world, based on orally transmitted accounts that had certainly been modified in the telling by many thousands of people before they were written down in the Gospels, copied and sometimes redacted by fallible human hands countless numbers of times. These texts would need to be strikingly and obviously true, it seems to be, not just more or less defensible, to carry the burden that Christians are absolutely required to place upon them. Thus, the presumption is hugely in favor of a lack of Christianity's truth, because it is the Christians who want others to believe extremely improbable things on the most dubious evidence, rather than its truth.

>44 criels:: It seems to me that the main reason for this is that Christianity's ultimate source is the NT, and most people who comments on Christianity have not read the NT, and therefore make objections to Christianity that entirely miss the point.

This is just plainly false. Christianity's ultimate source is either God, if one believes in God, or a bunch of (crazy?) people in the 1st century C.E. if one doesn't. The books didn't come until later.

As for how a modern orthodox Christian (heterodox Christians are still Christian, though, just heterodox--NTTATWWT) discerns what is true religously speaking, pretty much everyone except those (vocal but not, I believe, the majority) Protestants who hold to sola scriptura believes that the NT (read alongside the OT) is one important source of truth alongside important correctives: tradition, reason, experience, whatever. This is sound and clear doctrine, embraced as firmly by foundational Protestant theologians like John Wesley (founder of the Methodist denomination) as it is by the Anglican and Roman churches.

The idea that no proposition about religion--say, that Jesus rose from the dead--is neither true nor false seems preposterous to me: either he did or he didn't, and one or the other of these contraries is a historical fact.

Agreed, that the historical Jesus of Nazarth, if he existed, either did or did not rise from the dead. If we had a time machine, we could go back and check. (Although, since we have no such time machine, such claims are practically unfalsifiable, even if they aren't theoretically so, and so even though they're technically a species of supernaturalism, I'm not going to get too upset about it. They're not actually inherently supernaturalist--there's nothing in the creeds about Jesus' resurrection happening through a process intrinsicably unexplainable through any scientific process now understood or to be understandable in the future. Still, I accept your point that this item of faith is either true or false, with no wiggle room.)

But this isn't true of the question of whether God is one or three persons, or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether the essence of the bread and wine changes upon consecration. And answers about the afterlife, although they might look like falsifiable propositions about the empirical world, really aren't. These are statements about the mystical.

Some versions of Christianity make a whole lot of claims of the first sort: the world is 4,000 years old, was created in 7 days, there was a guy named Adam who ate an apple, there was a big flood, etc.

Other, more mainstream versions of Christianity restrict themselves (wisely, IMO) to a much more modest and restricted set of claims of the first sort.

Versions of Christianity which avoid making any falsifiable empirical propositions are clearly heterodox, although I would object to labelling them as non-Christian.

>47 oakes:

Is the consciousness (the ego, this thing I experience as "I") the same thing as the soul? I never managed to get a clear answer on that one.

. . .

On the subject of the OP, the thing I always find fascinating is that the secrets being hid aren't exactly hard to figure out--what else could those specific parables be interpreted to mean?

Alixtii,

None of what you've said in 48 is new information for me; I know it all by rote. I'm not relying on an uninformed "fundamentalist" perspective, ignorant of the origins of Christianity or of other putatively Christian doctrines or the source of Christian doctrine. I've just thought very carefully through the matter and concluded what I said: that the NT is the ultimate source of Christianity. (I also agree with oakesspalding's view that Christians are "stuck with the Old Testament as well, but I don't wish to press the point, just because it brings in another problem that would distract from the ones we're trying to bring to the fore.) In what follows, I'll give you a brief, and probably partial, indication of my reasons in favor of this conclusion.

The words Christian and Christianity are obviously formed from the title Christ, the Anointed One, the Greek word translating the Hebrew word Messiah. That Christ is Jesus of Nazareth, who taught certain concrete doctrines and died about 30 CE. It seems to me that a religion called Christianity should embrace and scrupulously observe the doctrines of the Christ, namely Jesus of Nazareth. (It was at his own time and place, in the form of a human being, that he pronounced those doctrines.) The documents that are concerned to relate Jesus' wonderful life and teachings are the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These sources, of course, are very imperfect representations of the life and teachings of Jesus: but they are the only documents we have that even purport to be handed down by eyewitnesses of Jesus. Thus, I am thoroughly aware of the defects of the synoptics as perfectly reliable sources for Christ's (Jesus') teachings: but they are, nevertheless, the closest accounts we have of what Jesus taught. The deficiencies in the accounts of Jesus' teachings are not a problem for opponents of Christianity, but rather for Christians: their religion, for the reasons I have adumbrated, stands or falls with the correctness or other of the teachings of Jesus as attested in the synoptic Gospels.

Of course the synoptic gospels are deficient, and nobody wants to rely on them as they stand. But it is hardly an advantage to Christian apologists to point out that they are riddled with defects, and that "correctives" have been applied to them (and to the Bible in general). There is no alternative to the synoptics as the source of doctrines that could plausibly claim to emanate (albeit indirectly) from Jesus, the Christ, himself. Any other claims of authentic Christian doctrine will either depend upon the admittedly unreliable New Testament or amount to the divinely unsubstantiated pronouncements of fallible human beings who have no plausible claim to authority from God, particularly the Christian one. These putative doctrinal "correctives" to the Bible include the traditions and other pronouncements of popes, bishops, reformers, and all such accepted authorities, all of whom are as unreliable as sources from God of authentically Christian doctrines as are the gospels. These dogmas of these "authorities'" (who are made such by entirely human procedures like votes) are manifestly replete with demonstrable falsehoods, incomprehensible utterances, and contradictions within themselves: such traditional church doctrines are often directly reversed at the stroke of a pen when they are well known and become too embarrassing or patently inhumane to maintain. (Many of our contemporaries, including many members of the Roman Church themselves, object to and defy the active and recently strongly reaffirmed, supposedly God-derived, prohibition of all forms of artificial birth control). This obviously fallible process of forming, accepting, and ultimately objecting to, ignoring, or overturning putatively God-derived traditions looks like anything but the work of God; but tradition it is.

It need hardly be repeated that for many centuries church traditions and clerical pronouncements demanded the torture and killing of heterodox believers and proponents of once "heretical" general knowledge that is now accepted, even promoted, by the Roman Church itself. Further, there are various Christian traditions which also contradict each other. Thus tradition does nothing to make Christianity more reliable or useful. If God speaks through tradition, he changes his mind frequently, makes many errors, and is generally highly confused. Furthermore, tradition, in addition to perennially and thoroughly contradicting itself, obviously contradicts the Bible, which contradicts itself. If authoritative and authentic Christian doctrine is not to be found in the synoptic Gospels, which is the closest source we have to the teaching of Jesus the Christ, then it is not to be found--at the very least confirmed to be found-- anywhere at all.

Furthermore--and this is a crucial point--if a good and perfect God wanted us imperfect human beings to receive his eternally momentous message, he could and should have vouchsafed it to us in a clear manner and a reliable form. He deplorably failed us if he did not do so: we should not have to speculate as to the source and, even more importantly, the content of the holy message that is of the ultimate importance to us.

With regard to experience and reason, your mere mention of them in a series is too vague for me to remark on in any detail. But here are a couple of general considerations. Experience and reason, taken together or separately, and whether they are my own or those of others about which I have learned, strongly tend to reveal A) that those doctrines that really are as Christian as we can get--namely, those closest to the accounts of eyewitnesses of Jesus' teaching, i.e. the synoptic Gospels--are, among their other demerits, profoundly morally objectionable, obfuscating, and / or impossible to live by and B) that those "correctives" that have been promulgated over the past 1, 800 years or so have no plausible claim to being authenticated by God and are also manifestly riddled with human defects, just as the synoptics are. Experience and reason further reveal that it is impossible to live by the teachings--to the extent to which they are practical and comprehensible--of Jesus as found in the synoptic Gospels, which--as the earliest and only accounts, although indirect, of Jesus' teachings--are the only source with any plausible claim of divine authority to propound Christian doctrine. If you doubt my last statement, read the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke--or even one of them--and try to see what Jesus is actually saying, putting aside whatever you may have been told he said. I can almost guarantee that the discrepancy between what you may have been told he said and what he actually said, as best we know it, is a product of the "corrective" process that we have been discussing. It is an invention of human beings who want to think they are Christians, while, out of practical necessity, denying and abandoning Christ's evident pronouncements.

And there is another important point about the role of experience and reason in revealing any truths about Christianity. It may be pointed out that some traditions of the churches are commendable, and thus escape some of the criticisms that I have registered here. But there is absolutely no reason to think that God is the source of those humane pronouncements or conclusions that are, indeed, derived from reason and experience. The teachings of Jesus, about which a substantial amount is now known to Biblical scholarship, are mainly bereft of the more advanced, post-Enlightenment moral sensibilities that we assume as if they have always been evident to everyone (although we know that they are not evident even today to some persons and in some parts of the world). When prelates and other authorities dictate more humane and advanced moral doctrines than they have in the past (which were also allegedly revealed by God at the time, whether their warrant was a false interpretation of the Bible, reason, experience, tradition, or whatever: in fact, such doctrines were usually claimed to be derived and provable from all these sources), it is overwhelmingly unlikely that those advanced moral rules are revealed by God: the same God, that is, who has revealed all those infernal dogmas and commandments over all these miserable centuries. It is far more likely that the "Christians"--including the Christian authorities--who reverse and reject their religion's old moral and epistemological doctrines have come around to accepting the fact that the newer, secular ones are far preferable. Then, after "Christians" have adopted more humane and intellectually sound principles that actually are derived from the reason and experience of thinkers and doers who defied or ignored the principles that Christians have finally been forced to abandon, often claim that these purely secular principles are part and parcel of their faith. So much for the force of tradition, reason, and experience as "correctives" to the NT or as plausible sources of authentic Christian doctrine emanating from God.

So much to say, but I'd like to poke you a bit on this part:

"If a good and perfect God wanted us imperfect human beings to receive his eternally momentous message, he could and should have vouchsafed it to us in a clear manner and a reliable form. He deplorably failed us if he did not do so: we should not have to speculate as to the source and, even more importantly, the content of the holy message that is of the ultimate importance to us."

I think you put your finger on something important. It's hard to maintain that either OT or NT presents an absolutely clear, complete and unifocal view of their subject. They are, rather, from various authors with various perspectives, extensively polyvalent, not complete on every topic that might be of interest, and open to development and interpretation. Imperfect humans are by necessity involved in their dissemination—God could have written their contents on the sky, on our palms, or put them on the PA system at 12:00pm like shuffleboard on the Lido deck, and skipped all the bother. If that's what you want, God failed or isn't God, right?

It was at his own time and place, in the form of a human being, that he pronounced those doctrines.)

And He continues to pronounces these and new doctrines, and to clarify the old ones, through His Church.

There is no alternative to the synoptics as the source of doctrines that could plausibly claim to emanate (albeit indirectly) from Jesus, the Christ, himself.

There's this thing Christians (or at least Trinitarian Christians) believe in called the Holy Spirit. It's kind of really important.

Furthermore--and this is a crucial point--if a good and perfect God wanted us imperfect human beings to receive his eternally momentous message, he could and should have vouchsafed it to us in a clear manner and a reliable form.

Hmm. I'm not sure I would claim this about what God "wants." It's a little more anthropomorphic then I am comfortable being. And if God does want, I'm actually fairly certain he doesn't want this. This conflicts with his perfect justice only if there is one unique "eternally momentous message," which I don't believe (although admittedly many Christians do).

It need hardly be repeated that for many centuries church traditions and clerical pronouncements demanded the torture and killing of heterodox believers and proponents of once "heretical" general knowledge that is now accepted, even promoted, by the Roman Church itself. Further, there are various Christian traditions which also contradict each other. Thus tradition does nothing to make Christianity more reliable or useful.

The evolving of Mother Church away from these practices doesn't make Christianity more reliable or useful? That's part of the tradition, too.

those "correctives" that have been promulgated over the past 1, 800 years or so have no plausible claim to being authenticated by God and are also manifestly riddled with human defects, just as the synoptics are.

We're talking about religion here. Nothing here is "plausible"; that's sort of the point, and I'm not sure what you're doing in bringing it up. That doesn't change that mainstream Christians accept that these correctives are authenticated by God.

If you doubt my last statement, read the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke--or even one of them--and try to see what Jesus is actually saying, putting aside whatever you may have been told he said.

Again, if I "put aside whatever I may have been told He said," then I'm not receiving God's message in its fullest. It'd be like reading the first six chapters of a book after skipping the preface, and then just not reading the last two or the afterward.

But there is absolutely no reason to think that God is the source of those humane pronouncements or conclusions that are, indeed, derived from reason and experience.

Regardless of whether there is a reason to think these things (is there a reason to think Jesus rose from the dead?), most Christians do think this. At least, I certainly do.

When prelates and other authorities dictate more humane and advanced moral doctrines than they have in the past (which were also allegedly revealed by God at the time, whether their warrant was a false interpretation of the Bible, reason, experience, tradition, or whatever: in fact, such doctrines were usually claimed to be derived and provable from all these sources), it is overwhelmingly unlikely that those advanced moral rules are revealed by God: the same God, that is, who has revealed all those infernal dogmas and commandments over all these miserable centuries. It is far more likely that the "Christians"--including the Christian authorities--who reverse and reject their religion's old moral and epistemological doctrines have come around to accepting the fact that the newer, secular ones are far preferable.

I don't see these two processes as mutually exclusive.

Then, after "Christians" have adopted more humane and intellectually sound principles that actually are derived from the reason and experience of thinkers and doers who defied or ignored the principles that Christians have finally been forced to abandon, often claim that these purely secular principles are part and parcel of their faith.

If religious believers don't get to define what is part and parcel of their faith, then who does?

So much for the force of tradition, reason, and experience as "correctives" to the NT or as plausible sources of authentic Christian doctrine emanating from God.

There's that word again: "plausible." I never claimed it was plausible; I claimed it was true.

All I read out of this is that you don't believe God is/was behind tradition, reason, and experience. Okay, that's fine; I'm not evangelizing, and I'm certainly not denying that these have material explanations. (But then, so does Scripture.) You think it seems silly and wacky. Again, fine; as a Christian I believe a lot of silly and wacky things.

But how difficult is it to understand that I and millions of other Christians do believe this? Thus I see >44 criels: as very much a straw man.

Tim,

Of course, I've heard this criticism countless times. And maybe all the uncertainty and confusion (or, as some people would have it, richness) of Christianity would arguably be all right, except for the greatest imaginable problem. If there is no Hell, God at least left us in an understandable position to think that his Christian religion included one, and that knowing and obeying Christian doctrines is absolutely prerequisite to avoiding it. With that being the consequence, clarity about the doctrines that we should believe and obey is eternally paramount: we don't have the luxury of groping in the dark through fallible means to get things right. That being the case, and having imposed the threat of Hell upon us, knowing that we were fallible, then, yes, he failed in not putting his message to us clearly, when he knew how urgently we needed it. If he is good, merciful, loving, etc., and he exists, then he would not have cast us into this position of having to divine his meaning on our own. This academic game as he set it up might be intriguing, but the consequence--eternal torture--in the event that we fail is far too great to justify the game in this matter. Maybe he could have set up a separate big game or academic test without the consequence of everlasting hellfire.

This claim that God didn't intend to give us his message straightforwardly and left us with inscrutable and flawed materials to figure it out on our own--when we have good reason for thinking, or at least fearing, that we will go to eternal torture if we fail to do so--strikes me as a patent human attempt to salvage a false and incoherent set of teachings from its namesake: Jesus of Nazareth, who expected the world to end during the lifetime of some of the people who heard him speak in first century Roman Palestine (I don't have time to argue this last point now; I'll just refer the interested reader to the most easily accessible book on the topic, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart D. Ehrman. Jesus had to be "corrected" (as Alixtii puts it) if anyone was going to accept his cruel, other-worldly message with its warped morality warranted only by claims of post-mortem torture or bliss, and "Christianity" tries to make a virtue of having to "correct" it! That necessity tells forcefully against Christianity, not in favor of it; that seems perfectly obvious to me. We can easily see the human activity involved in this process; but who can show the activity of God in it?

There's a basic question whether you think God works through people and through history or not. If you do, I agree you need a theology that understands that both are wiggly and fallible. If God did not reveal X clearly to all, then it seems unlikely X is the sole criterion by which God decides to punish people to external damnation (if such a thing exists).

What I think you have mapped out is a pretty good objection to all religion other, perhaps, than Scientology. If your sense of what's "obvious" requires perfect clarity, historical and individual contingency are a bitch for sure. Maybe you could only believe in a sky-writing God, who makes everything clear to all everywhere and for all time. I understand that, but on some level I think it's infantile—like spelling reform or picking your spouse according to statistics. If we know anything about the "world," it is that it's complex, uncertain and subject to interpretation. This does not, I think, preclude a God.

What I wonder is how you know so much about Jesus' message only at the points you disagree with. You regard it as certain Jesus' theology involved eternal damnation on frivolous grounds and that Jesus (rather than his hearers) was predicting the end of the world in the very, very near term. On other points, however, you have grave doubts about the sources and the underlying message. The amounts to a sort of queer fundamentalism.

Alixtii,

As I hope you can see, none of what you say here has any force against my arguments, because all your affirmative statements just ignore the import of what I've painstakingly written and repeat faith claims that have nothing but faith itself. And your faith is just belief, or a commitment to believe, without regard for considerations against believing. This carries no weight whatever with anyone who doesn't already believe your faith claims. In response to real objections to your beliefs, you're simply affirming divine sanction for what strongly seems to be merely human activity. In no way can you show that such activity is divine, and it would take a lot to counteract the strong impression that they are not. Again, you are simply asserting, with no reason other than the doctrines that you have been taught when and where you lived, faith claims with no substance in their favor, and pretending that these overwhelm real, rigorous objections to Christianity.

I'll take the trouble to give some examples, starting with your first statement in post 51:

Quotation from me: It was at his own time and place, in the form of a human being, that he pronounced those doctrines.

You: "And He continues to pronounces these and new doctrines, and to clarify the old ones, through His Church."

You're giving me a mere dogma, i.e., an article of faith. Not only do I have no reason to believe it, but I had, in a previous post, argued forcefully against it. You have simply ignored my arguments and met them with a dogma devoid of any support other than your own articles of faith, which I, along with many others, do not happen to share. I say, and have carefully argued, that this is clearly a human process, not a divine one. Seeing it as divine seems to me to be an extreme case of special pleading.

Quotation from me: There is no alternative to the synoptics as the source of doctrines that could plausibly claim to emanate (albeit indirectly) from Jesus, the Christ, himself.

You: "There's this thing Christians (or at least Trinitarian Christians) believe in called the Holy Spirit. It's kind of really important."

Quotation from me: Thank you for reminding me. This Holy Spirit is the putative messenger from Jesus of the pronouncements that church authorities promulgate, given the inadequacy of the Gospels and the Bible as a whole. Then the Holy Spirit has demanded and taught all the kinds of horrors and errors of which I have given examples in post 49. The problem of the Holy Spirit as the deus ex machina in the service of rescuing Christianity from these fatal problems is especially clear if you consider the following: We have been discussing gross errors and horrors claimed by church authorities to have been revealed to them by God. Presumably, God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit always, or at least most of the time, agree with each other. If such is the case, it makes no appreciable difference whether the messenger of the divine revelations propounded through the authority of churches is God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. Therefore, all the arguments that I have presented against God, through tradition or continued revelation, independent of the NT, as the source of Christian doctrine, equally apply in the case of the Holy Spirit: Just substitute the term "Holy Spirit" for "God" in the relevant statements. And, like God (which amounts to the same thing), the Holy Spirit has allegedly revealed an absurdly wide range of conflicting messages not only to different churches but also to different members within the same church. And overwhelmingly many of those dogmas allegedly revealed to churchmen and to a countless number of individuals--by the Holy Spirit have been disastrously inimical to human welfare and flourishing; and, in response to the obvious superiority of more humane aspects of secular, post-Enlightenment ethics, the churches have had to change those previous pronouncements of the Holy Spirit, often by new alleged pronouncements of the Holy Spirit. So much for the Holy Spirit as a reliable source of Christian doctrine.

Quotation from me: Furthermore--and this is a crucial point--if a good and perfect God wanted us imperfect human beings to receive his eternally momentous message, he could and should have vouchsafed it to us in a clear manner and a reliable form.

You: "Hmm. I'm not sure I would claim this about what God "wants." It's a little more anthropomorphic then I am comfortable being. And if God does want, I'm actually fairly certain he doesn't want this. This conflicts with his perfect justice only if there is one unique "eternally momentous message," which I don't believe (although admittedly many Christians do)."

Well, if God threatens us with eternal damnation as the consequence of not knowing and doing what he says, and shows any sign at all of trying to say it to us, it is an odd state of affairs if he does not want us to know it. And with Hell involved, he certainly should want us to know it. At least, even if he were, as Aristotle would have it, the totally indifferent self-thinking thought (as the Christian god cannot be, since he turned his attention outward sufficiently to bother with creating us), he obligated himself to want us to know his intentions for us when he created us with the idea that we would have any kind of purpose. And if you say it's too anthropomorphic for him to want things, and you care what churches or "most Christians" think, I think you are probably on the wrong side of this issue. Most Christians, I hazard, would find it strange that God sent Jesus (i.e., himself, if you accept the Trinity) to live an uncomfortable life and die naked and in agony on a Roman cross reserved for the worst criminals, in order to save people from their sins, if he did not want people to be saved. Furthermore almost all forms of Christianity, as well as the Bible itself, represent God as wanting things. I think you'd have some apologetics to do in order to defend your bold, counter-intuitive, contrary proposition here.

I would like clarification of one of your statements here: namely, that God's having one eternally momentous message would be contrary to his justice. Why is that the case, exactly? You seem to imply that all this error ostensibly revealed to the church through the Holy Spirit, which is often appalling and false and the source of many enormities against humanity, and which has to be overturned when its inferiority to secular morality becomes too patent, is better than one eternally momentous message. That does not seem self evident to me. We might further ask why many Christians do contradict you in believing that there is an eternally momentous message? Why is God leaving the matter, which is a significant one, so debatable? There is the further point that in what I can tell about the Christian God, his notion of "justice" looks nothing like justice from any humane or decent perspective.

Quotation from me: It need hardly be repeated that for many centuries church traditions and clerical pronouncements demanded the torture and killing of heterodox believers and proponents of once "heretical" general knowledge that is now accepted, even promoted, by the Roman Church itself. Further, there are various Christian traditions which also contradict each other. Thus tradition does nothing to make Christianity more reliable or useful.

You: "The evolving of Mother Church away from these practices doesn't make Christianity more reliable or useful? That's part of the tradition, too."

I have argued against this point carefully and potently in this post. You have simply ignored my assiduous work and thought you overturned it by an entirely unjustified dogma of your religion, contrived, as I have indicated, by human beings by a human process.

Partial quotation from me:

those "correctives" that have been promulgated over the past 1, 800 years or so have no plausible claim to being authenticated by God and are also manifestly riddled with human defects, just as the synoptics are.

You: "We're talking about religion here. Nothing here is "plausible"; that's sort of the point, and I'm not sure what you're doing in bringing it up. That doesn't change that mainstream Christians accept that these correctives are authenticated by God."

Three points here. Do you understand the force of what you just said: "Nothing here i.e. in Christian doctrines with the Holy Spirit / God as their putative source is plausible. By telling me that your dogmas are not plausible, you are admitting that I have no justification for accepting them. And you don't understand why I brought up the issue of plausibility? I do not know that your (or your church's) doctrines are true, and you admit that they are not even plausible. This decisively means that not only should I not believe or accept or try to live according to them, but that I should positively abandon any consideration of doing so. The fact that any set of dogmas--particularly one so patently and thoroughly problematic as the innumerable mass of absurdities, contradictions, horrors, and errors of what is called Christianity--is not even plausible is to say that it would be the height of error for anyone to believe it. You have nothing, except the humanly pronounced dogmas of your faith, to support your claim that the humanly pronounced dogmas of your faith are messages from God, or the Holy Spirit. (For that matter, how do you know that they aren't false doctrines with the Devil as their author?) What warrant do you, or does anyone, have to believe and embrace your body of dogmas if it is not plausible that it is true, as you baldly state that it is true? Telling me that people ought to believe in doctrine that is called Christian just because it is implausible is obviously preposterous in the extreme, as anyone who looks at this claim sensibly can see.

Another point: To repeat, you say that religious truths positively should not be plausible. If your religious dogmas are implausible, and somebody else presents dogmas that are similarly implausible, and implausibility is an important criterion for deciding what is true, how do you know which religion's doctrines are true?

A third point about which I have already said plenty, but about which will say more both here and below: It is clearly null to say that "mainstream Christians accept that these correctives are authenticated by God." If people don't already believe that the "corrective" dogmas in question are authenticated by God, what help is it to them, if they are to come to see their truth, to say that a group of Christians in fact believe that they are authenticated by God?

Me: But there is absolutely no reason to think that God is the source of those humane pronouncements or conclusions that are, indeed, derived from reason and experience.

You: "Regardless of whether there is a reason to think these things (is there a reason to think Jesus rose from the dead?), most Christians do think this. At least, I certainly do."

If I do not already believe in church dogma, as you already do on the basis that they are implausible, what force do you think it has to tell me that most Christians do in fact believe it? By telling me that a group of people believes a set of improbable doctrines, the matter of whether there are reasons for believing it being irrelevant, is of absolutely no value in claiming that it is true. As to your idea that the Roman Church does not consider reason as a source of its truths, I submit against your case Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor", as Exhibit A.

You: "You think it seems silly and wacky.
Again, fine; as a Christian I believe a lot of silly and wacky things. But how difficult is it to understand that I and millions of other Christians do believe this? Thus I see >44 criels: as very much a straw man.

I challenge you to show that this is a straw man. Go ahead, try.

I'm not going to spend anymore of my day on this. What I have said here and had already said sufficiently elsewhere equally applies and should suffice. I'll just end with this: Your statements in this post that I have not specifically addressed, and that you think defend your religion in some way, demonstrate nothing more than either a radical failure in your reasoning or a determination not to treat my case fairly.

Have I lost track of the dialectic here? I ask this not so much of criels as anyone else who might be following this, because there seems to be some major talking-past going on here and I'm unsure of the source of it.

My understanding of the dialectic:

1. criels argues that changing revelation poses a particular problem for religion (>44 criels:). Conclusion: Christianity is incoherent.

2. I argue that mainstream Christianity has ways of coping with the problem (>48 Alixtii:). Conclusion: Christianity is coherent.

3. criels responds that these methods rely on inadequately demonstrated claims. Conclusion: ???

Am I insane in seeing this as a shifting of the terms of debate away from whether Christianity is coherent to whether Christianity is (demonstrably) true--something neither I nor anyone else in this thread was arguing? AFAICT, the dialectical burden on me is only to respond to the objection--to refute the positive claim made contra religion--not to convince anyone that the resulting schema is true by advancing any positive claims of my own.

But maybe I just seriously misunderstood what was going on.

I would like clarification of one of your statements here: namely, that God's having one eternally momentous message would be contrary to his justice. Why is that the case, exactly?

I understood it to be your argument that God's justice would be incompatible with an unclearly transmitted single eternally momentous message. I was willing to concede the point. But if you don't believe that, then I un-concede it.

By telling me that your dogmas are not plausible, you are admitting that I have no justification for accepting them.

You might have some other justification, but from the sound of it, that doesn't seem to be the case. That's fine by me.

This decisively means that not only should I not believe or accept or try to live according to them, but that I should positively abandon any consideration of doing so.

If that's how you feel, then by all means do so.

What warrant do you, or does anyone, have to believe and embrace your body of dogmas if it is not plausible that it is true, as you baldly state that it is true?

I'm not sure what warrant one requires to believe something not clearly in contradiction with reality. If I want to believe in invisible unicorns, why shouldn't I? I'm not arguing that you should adopt my belief, just that there isn't anything intrinsically incoherent about it.

Telling me that people ought to believe in doctrine that is called Christian just because it is implausible is obviously preposterous in the extreme, as anyone who looks at this claim sensibly can see.

When did I say that you or anyone else ought to believe anything? I don't care what you believe. I'm just responding to your objection as to what I believe.

And, like God (which amounts to the same thing), the Holy Spirit

They don't just "amount to the same thing." The Holy Spirit is a Person of the Triune God.

The fact that any set of dogmas--particularly one so patently and thoroughly problematic as the innumerable mass of absurdities, contradictions, horrors, and errors of what is called Christianity--is not even plausible is to say that it would be the height of error for anyone to believe it.

Your words, not mine. Perhaps we mean different thing by plausible. Just because something isn't the most parsimonious explanation doesn't, IMO, mean that it would be "the height of error" to believe it. I don't think a lack of parsimony is in and of itself pernicious, although specific non-parsimonious beliefs can certainly be harmful.

If I do not already believe in church dogma, as you already do on the basis that they are implausible, what force do you think it has to tell me that most Christians do in fact believe it?

Absolutely none. Why do you keep casting me in the role of the evangelist?

As to your idea that the Roman Church does not consider reason as a source of its truths,

Wait. When did I ever say that?

Tim,

I've just exhausted my energy and time on post 54. I can say just the following for now.

I am the first to admit that the world is messy, complex, contingent, and all the rest. My outlook would indeed be "infantile" if I didn't know that; I'm as keenly aware of it as anyone. Part of this terrestrial mess and contingency is the horrible and evidently senseless suffering--both natural and human-inflicted--that affects most of us to some extent, and in many cases, and for many people, almost constantly and sometimes spectacularly. To pass over the problem of evil while viewing a photo of the results of some of these events, and make a blanket statement about God working through people and through history, is dubious from both a factual and a moral point of view. On the contrary, it tells strongly against it. Such "work," if that is how it should be characterized, hardly indicates or even vaguely adumbrates that Christianity, whatever that may be (unless it's a Gnostic form according to which the world was created to be a place of suffering that exists only to be escaped by means of esoteric knowledge), is true. It certainly doesn't put its god into a favorable light, in the unlikely case that he exists. What do you think it tells you about Jesus' message or however you want to think about the Christian God's "working through people and through history?" And does his "working in history" not include the enormities, ordered and perpetrated by those prelates and countless other groups and individuals who thought or claimed they knew what Christian doctrine was? Is Christianity more or less a matter of watching God inscrutably "work through people and through history" and somehow divining through that what, if anything, we are supposed to do and believe as Christians? I don't see any other means by which you think to ascertain Christian doctrines, and that is not because I am unaware of arguments by theologians. You give me no idea of any means of knowing what what Christian doctrine is. And it seems to me that if it has no source that is ultimately plausibly derived from something revealed in some at least indeterminate way by the Christ, for whom the religion, after all, is named, then what warrant in the world do you have for calling it "Christian?" (It's plenty problematic to call it "divine" at all.) This seems as preposterous to me as my allegedly "queer fundamentalist" arguments seem "infantile" to you. To me, it says nothing in support of any purposive, intelligent God of any religion, to say nothing of Christianity. Of course this may not entirely preclude a god, but it doesn't do anything to indicate him either; at least not one who merits our admiration or love. Christians often overlook this basic question: why should we believe anything on the ground that we can't preclude it, especially when it's the God of a particular religion, namely Christianity (and few people, according to you, even know what Christianity is, and think that state of affairs to be quite in order)? People seem to think that the fact that Christianity, whatever they take that to be, is not entirely precluded is an excellent reason for actively believing in it. You are evidently one of those; but how do you justify that? I think it is preposterous, as will be clear if you use the same criterion as a warrant for believing anything else.

"Maybe you could only believe in a sky-writing God, who makes everything clear to all everywhere and for all time. I understand that, but on some level I think it's infantile—like spelling reform or picking your spouse according to statistics."

Guess how many times I've had this stale line, with only the diction varying, used on me. The Christian God, if he exists, gave us good reason to believe that we are going to Hell if we do not learn, believe, and live by his message. Maybe only we dolts of the earth fall for that joke, or, to be more objective about it, make the mistake of believing that, but doesn't God care about our and our children's psychological welfare too? By the way, Christian idiots teach their children what they think is right, too; and lots of them are what you would call "fundamentalists", and many are, in fact, fundamentalists. And they think that their "fundamentalist" beliefs are true, and have some excuse for so doing, especially if they are infantile and can't help that. Why are real or imagined fundamentalists brought up in discussions like this only to be dismissed as if they were non-existent, hypothetical beings who had no part in any conversation about Christianity? I know they're wrong. But they are real, living, breathing, suffering people, who have to take their Christian doctrines where they can get it. And although I know that their beliefs are wrong, I do not know that any other putatively Christian beliefs are right, either; and not being told what those beliefs are, which Christians of your apparent type seem to think makes Christianity so powerful, does nothing to help the matter.)

I can direct you to plenty of websites where people talk how they are consumed all day by their doubts about Christianity. Argue for me that God, by neglecting to give those people a clear message, along with any grounds for the misunderstanding that Hell was in any way connected with it (even if it isn't), bears none of the responsibility for the senseless and pitiful agony and waste of life that those people are experiencing, just because they want evidence for belief in Christianity, and to know what God's truth is for them, and can't attain it. Is God right to punish people for this misunderstanding? In view of this, and many other reasons, your cavalier attitude about Christian truth seems rather callous to me. God can't expect all of us to be divines, prophets, authoritative church leaders, or advanced literary critics, as would be appropriate if the doctrines are as unclear as you vaguely suggest. Yes, I repeat with no less confidence, that with Hell in the mix, the Christian God's message should be clear and discernible even to us uninitiated types. (After all, Jesus is reported as saying that his Father has hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them unto babes.) You accomplish nothing in respect of truth by merely dismissing my arguments as "fundamentalist"; they deserve real responses.

As for your comment on my use of the word "obvious." What I said was, in fact, obvious to anyone who faces the facts. That Jesus taught Hell and damnation you have no reason to speak of as controversial. He never tires of talking about in any of the synoptics. And before you say that the synoptics don't matter or don't necessarily reflect the teaching of Jesus, consider this. You know perfectly well, and have brought into discussion on LT, the fact that multiple attestation of Jesus' doctrines in the synoptic Gospels--the importance and reliability of which you are denying--is a strong criterion (in mainstream, not "queerly fundamentalist") Biblical scholarship that the historical Jesus actually taught the multiply attested doctrines. You know the same about Jesus' equally multiply attested teaching that the Son of Man would return within the lifetime of some of his listeners. You should also know that such is the overwhelmingly prevalent consensus among Biblical scholars; and any lay reader who wants to know why can read the book Jesus:Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart D. Ehrman. The fact that these doctrines are multiply attested and that the versions of them are substantially the same in each of the synoptics in which they occur makes it highly that any synoptic author misrepresented or misunderstood the words or import of Jesus' teaching Again, you know that the status of these doctrines as Jesus' own is corroborated by the further criterion of what you have well called "embarassment." They are uncomfortable for the cause of Christianity, so that their inclusion and continued presence in the texts is a strong indication that Jesus himself probably said them; no Christian would likely have otherwise recorded them. Thus, you know that you have no justification whatsoever--and every reason not--to cast these doctrines as problematic. Doing so just seemed to serve your argument, and the cause of any form of Christianity, well: particularly to those readers--i.e. most of them--who didn't know these facts about Biblical scholarship.

"On other points, however, you have grave doubts about the sources and the underlying message."

Apparently you mean I have grave doubts that messages propounded by church officials and many others really are truths revealed to them by the Christian God. Of course, I've expressed those doubts clearly and at length. But what is important is that, unlike you, I gave forceful reasons for those doubts by amply supplied reason and evidence. I have argued very forcefully, as you will see if you read without preconceived bias my previous posts addressing the subject, that I have explained with tremendous force why I have those doubts. You have not done me the favor of supporting anything you've said. Instead, you've just dismissed my arguments on the grounds that they're all (and yes, you are implying or insinuating all by your rhetoric) "infantile" and "fundamentalist." Of course these unsubstantiated, cheap, and easy characterizations of everything I say play well with people who disagree with me, at least one or two of whom have not read my posts with an open, or else not very acute, mind.

Again, what credible account of sources for Christianity--that my arguments so far fail to answer adequately--do you propose ? Are there no sources of Christian truths? Or does God not care to relate them to us? If you have such an account, then I really am lacking in intelligence for not having gotten it before. You would do me a great favor to teach me what I have heretofore failed to understand.

>58 oakes:: I happen to think the moral strictures, at least, of the Bible are on the whole pretty darn clear, as opposed to being, you know, valent,

In one sense, I agree with you, in that I'm distrustful of the project which claims we can apply a conservative hermeneutic to Scripture and still get liberal conclusions--the What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality project, where it seems to be conceded that the Bible could condemn homosexuality, but it's a contingent fact that it doesn't. Whew! What a relief.

But I'm not sure that "clear" and "multivalent" are actually mutually exclusive. It seems to me possible that a certain reading could be clear and at the same time God could be using it to say or do something completely different than the "clear" reading suggests. If one finds criels' position persuasive, then the fact that God seemingly eschews being clear could be problematic. But since my faith commitments (which are fairly orthodox in this respect at least) don't lead me to do so, the problem disappears.

It seems to me "clear" and "multivalent" measure different things; the former measures plausibility (which, as I made clear above, I think the religionist by virtue of being a religionist has already abandoned) and the latter possibility (which is the space in which religion thrives).

1. This is a useful clarification, but I don't think it alters my thesis. I don't think multivalence requires the multiple possible meanings to be equally true, or equally possibly true, or equally plausible, or equally intuitive, or equally able to be gleamed on the first reading of the text.

2. I'll take that as a compliment, too.

3. And that Spong endorses the argument does not help.

AFAICT, Spong endorsing an argument never helps--does anybody take Spong seriously?

But he does not subscribe to my view (as far as I know). The good bishop does have, I think, a sense of appreciation for the mystical and the mythical, but so deeply buried under Jesus Seminar materialism that I rarely find what he has to say particularly useful.

Come on, do you really think that the Bible does not condemn male homosexuality? Seriously?

Leviticus is pretty explicit on male homosexuality: "don't do it." But as liberal apolgists are probably too prone to point out, it's in a list that also forbids wearing polyester. Is the doctrine of dispensationalism which supposedly frees us from the polyester rule something read into the Bible, or a direct exegesis of the New Testament? I don't pretend to know. Is the division between ethical and non-ethical rules that exempts the homosexuality clause from dispensationalism exegetical or eisegetical? Again, I don't know. I don't think there's a right answer. (Well, actually, I'm fond of "It's all eisegetical.")

But what I'm left with is that the Bible never says anything simply; interpretation is always required. We don't get very far before my "obvious" reading and your "obvious" reading no longer line up very well.

I don't want to deny that the "condemnation of homosexuality" reading is the most intuitive one. I don't know if this fact says more about us (and what we find intuitive) or Scripture, but to deny it would be disingenous. All I'm trying to claim is that alternate readings are valid. Which reading we choose will say a lot about who we are as Christians, obviously.

Now, it may be that there are texts that, as modern thinking Christians, we might decide are so inherently problematic that they can't possibly be part of God's Word. I won't rule it out completely. But such a move should only be made as a last possible resort, I think; as long as there are ways to constructively re-vision our understanding of a passage, that should be the preferable route.

Scripture, as compiled under the watchful eye of Mother Church, is important because it is, not solely but nonetheless very importantly, what we as Christians draw on and look back to as part of what defines us. But this is a wrestling with God, not a list of directives. Penuel, not Sinai.

I think we need to be honest about this, and admit that our interpretations are born as much from our moral commitments (both personal and communal--and we cannot forget that Mother Church, fractured and divided as she is, is guided by the Holy Spirit) as they are from any type of straight, direct exegesis. (These commitments are not prior to our interpretation of Scripture, but rather in constant unending dialect with it.) But I also believe that that's the only game in town.

Forget whether or not the authors were homophobic, or whatever. We're talking about what the text (whomever wrote it) actually says.

I think this may be an overly narrow view of how a text can "say." Contrast a novel with an unreliable narrator: is it just saying what the narrator says, or is it sometimes "actually" saying the complete opposite, too?

You're helping criels

That's what happens from debating with criels on the left and you on the right. (Or is it the other way 'round?) I'm a crap apologist; I'm too intellectually honest and my little (and not-so-little) heterodoxies always come out eventually, no matter how much I try to begin the conversation by arguing from Augustine and Aquinas and holding my peculiar beliefs to the side.

It's true that you and I, and probably the vast majority of Christians, don't see perfectly eye-to-eye on how exactly to make sense of evolving revelation, what our truth criteria should be. I don't find this particularly surprising or troubling, though.

#59: Alixtii "It seems to me "clear" and "multivalent" measure different things; the former measures plausibility ..."

So if I tell you, as clearly as I can, "The only reason that people in Australia don't fall off the Earth is that they always wear magnetic boots", its clarity makes it plausible to you?

#58: oakesspalding "Can we talk about what Jesus actually has to say about Hell in the New Testament yet?"

Yes, would somebody please come to this? Both oakesspalding and criels have asserted Jesus's support for a doctrine of eternal torment, but I would still like to see some detailed discussion. Was my one-sided argument in #41 not provocative enough?

>62 jimroberts:: So if I tell you, as clearly as I can, "The only reason that people in Australia don't fall off the Earth is that they always wear magnetic boots", its clarity makes it plausible to you?

It seems we have just a plain case of homonymy here. It seems clear to me that oakesspalding was using the word "clear" in its " obvious" sense rather than the "with perfect enunciation" sense. I could be wrong, but oakesspalding's response really doesn't give me any reason to doubt my reading.

#64: Alixtii

Sorry, I didn't notice the ambiguity. I didn't mean "with perfect enunciation", but "using plain words to convey my meaning". It seems to me that an implausible claim becomes even less plausible, the more clearly it is expressed. Did you in fact mean to assert a negative correlation between clarity and plausibility?

By popular demand, I'm going to spend much of my day today writing about Hell, after I've spent the last week or so writing everything else I have here, almost entirely to see easy pot shots taken at all my efforts. I haven't minded the effort, because I think it's a public service that I can and should offer; but I do mind it when my work is easily passed off without any serious consideration. The value in my addressing all these issues subsides greatly when nobody listens to me. I'm still waiting for somebody else to argue something rather than just throw up simple dogmas against what I say and pretend that procedure accomplishes something.

Before I get on to today's main event, I need to get one item from oakesspalding out of the way: I am aware of the Misquoting Truth book which you recommend. In the first place, I never cited Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, to which Misquoting Truth is an attempted reply, in support of anything I've said: I didn't need to, because nothing I said depended on it; and further, because, as I've said, I don't think it's a very strong production myself. Thus, you're accomplishing nothing by directing readers to Misquoting Truth--which is a (very poor) attack on a book I have not depended on--as any evidence against anything I've said. But I do encourage you to go back and see what books I did cite. One thing those who do use the book should consider is that the author is a preacher in Tennessee with a doctorate in education from one of the Baptist Bible seminaries. He has no training in Biblical scholarship, and is no match for Ehrman's expertise. For those who don't know, Bart Ehrman is one of the leading scholars of the NT text, Christian origins, and Early Christian thought (www.bartdehrman.com) He was a well-established scholar of Christianity and the NT before he ever wrote a book for a general audience. You can see some of his scholarly publications listed together with his popular ones at his CV on the site I just named.

Both liberals and conservatives alike take pot shots at Ehrman, too, as they do at me. He espouses the same "queer fundamentalism" that I do, as follows: On the one hand, he takes the synoptic Gospels--as the closest reports we have of the teachings of Jesus--seriously as founding documents of Christianity. On the other hand, having learned, in his case at the highest level, what those teachings are, he has concluded that Christianity is false. I fail to see that procedure as infantile; it makes gloriously good sense to me, but then, Ehrman and I are kind of dull-witted.

#66 "The value in my addressing all these issues subsides greatly when nobody listens to me."

Please be reassured that at least one person is following the thread and trying to understand the discussion - though as Oakes points out in #63, I do sometimes fail to understand. I'm sure there are lots of others quietly following the thread too.

>65 jimroberts:

As far as I know, oakesspalding and I were focusing on the plausibility of meanings, not on the plausibility of propositions. If you say "The only reason that people in Australia don't fall off the Earth is that they always wear magnetic boots" using plain words to convey your meaning, then it's plausible that you mean that the only reason that people in Australia don't fall off the Earth is that they always wear magnetic boots and not that cabbages are green. It's possible that you meant the latter, though. This doesn't have to be (although it can be) an appeal to your psychology as a speaker; there could be a code book out there that makes clear that the statement about Australia is code for the one about cabbages, for example.

"Clear" meaning "using plain words to convey meaning" is a property of utterances; "clear" meaning "obvious" is a property of interpretations. Utterances which use plain words to convey meaning will have particularly plausible interpretations, but that doesn't mean what they assert will be particularly plausible.

jimroberts,

I do certainly owe you, and the other readers you mention, an apology for my regrettable choice of the word "nobody". I had tried scrupulously to avoid using that categorical word and others like it because I knew there were exceptions; my frustration got the better of me. Thank you for pointing out my error so that I could put my apology on the record.

I also regret to report that, due to the distracted and preoccupied state of my mind, I just inadvertently took most of my bedtime soporific medications rather than the correct ones. Therefore, there is little chance that I'll be able to address the question on Hell today, as I was about to do. I'm pressed for time until Monday, but I'll contribute what I can on the topic when I can. I'll start with the Gospel of Mark, for two reasons: first, a passage from that book was the original topic of this thread; and second, it is the earliest of the Gospels to be written (some 30-40 years after the death of Jesus). Mark is the shortest of the Gospels, and would be the most convenient for interested followers of this discussion to read in the meantime.

I'll be interested to read your disquisition on Hell. I was struck, reading this thread, by how generally it was assumed that eternal damnation was an essential Christian doctrine. I was once told by an otherwise quite orthodox evangelical clergyman that his reading of Scripture was that the damned were not eternally punished but annihilated. In the pit of Gehenna, the fire burns perpetually, but anything thrown into it is consumed.

Here's one. It's from Mark, a passage from which was the initial topic of this thread. Notice not only that this passage poses a serious problem for those who want to excise Hell from the teaching of Jesus, but also the duration of the fire, which has just been discussed. If this passage is not to be taken "literally," then I'd like somebody to explain 1) why not? and 2) how is it to be interpreted? What are we supposed to make of it? Why would Jesus have said something like this (and he almost certainly did, as Biblical scholars know)? If Christianity does not include an eternal Hell, surely we can see why some people erroneously think that it does:

"If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. Mark 10.43-48

The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Here's a parallel to the Mark passage I cited in #72, this one from Matthew. Jesus' command to maim one's body, when one is in danger of committing some sin, in order to avoid Hell is almost identical in its diction to the Mark passage, but you will see that the sin in this situation is different. Notice that the sin is not committing adultery, as it first appears to be, but doing something much harder for almost any heterosexual male to refrain from doing:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell. Matthew 5.27-30

(The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.)

I'll refrain from speculating about the function of the "right hand" in this context.

Here is the consecutive continuation of this passage, which proceeds to inform us of another very numerous group of people who have committed and will commit adultery (in Jesus' rather extended use of the word):

“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery."

I surmise that many people guilty of this type of "adultery" have committed the type described in the previous verses as well. This raises the interesting question: are the two types of adultery punished in Hell as two separate sentences, or is the punishment equal whether one has committed one type or both? Also, I wonder whether it matters how many times one has committed one or more of these adulteries.

Another parallel passage in Matthew, set in the same context as the Markan one. I have consulted 3 commentaries at my immediate disposal and they seem to be general agreement on two things. (I neither endorse nor reject these points; I'm just reporting.) First, that the "little ones" in the first verse are not literal children but rather fellow believers of some sort, presumably of low social status. Second, that the word "stumbling block" is, to quote the note in the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha Third Edition, "an image for causing someone to sin".

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the hell of fire."

Matthew 18.6-9

oakesspalding, I'm tempted to respond reasonably to the ridiculous things you said in your last post, but I just can't do it anymore. It's clearly an exercise in futility, and I don't have enough time or energy to waste on it. I hope that the absurdity of what you just wrote will be evident to most readers.

I do need to add this point, however, in an effort to correct a misunderstanding that some people get when I discuss the themes and and cite the passages in the Bible like the ones in question here. When I cite absurd or appalling texts from the Gospels (the texts that apply in this thread), people seem to think that I am somehow responsible for what those texts say. But I am not the author of any of those passage, and I very emphatically am not endorsing those passages. I am trying to show people that those texts are there whether Christians like the fact that they're there or not. And the fact that those texts are unpleasant is no reasonable justification for denying that they say what they mean, or that Jesus couldn't have taught the doctrines that they report, or for performing any other such manifest special pleading tactics or bizarre mental contortions that they would never apply to any text other than the NT. to render them inconsequential. At least one or two people on this post are content to ridicule and / or largely ignore my quite reasonable, well-considered, and well-informed criticisms of texts that look to at least some of us as pretty objectionable. Something I have not seen is something that I think would be a basic principle of fairness, considering all the effort, energy, and time I've put into this thread. As I have asked, I want somebody who easily dismisses what I have said, probably without having read it without any honest attempt to receive any legitimate point from it, to do the following.

1) Explain reasonably and with relevant evidence why my criticisms are false. (I've done a lot of work here, and no one has given any reasonable refutation of any of it, unless my memory is failing me at present, which may well be the case. At any rate, all I remember are irrational dogmas, the application of knee-jerk, opprobrious labels, and, once or twice, general random abuse in response to my work.) Do something serious and substantial to honestly defend Christ's message in these texts from the discredit that they actually--whether you like it or not--do to Christianity. There are about two people from whom I don't need a reply, because I would expect nothing but trash therefrom. But from others, who are interested in having a reasonable discussion and do know how and have the openness to step back from the usual obfuscations--the motives of which are not difficult to guess, as I have noted before--and look at argument and evidence produced by honest, hard, conscientious, intellectual work. Abuse and easy denial in response to the work I've done here is not the real thinker's way.

2) Explain credibly, preferably that texts usually are supposed to convey some kind of comprehensible meaning or other, what you think the passages mean, if I am criticizing or interpreting them incorrectly.

Okay, I don't have a horse in this race, because its mechanism for interpreting Scripture is completely foreign to me (because it a) treats interpretation as a value-neutral process, and b) ignores the traditional teaching of the Church).

But, trying to work under the hermeneutic being used as an intellectual exercise, it seems to me important for one to ask how much of the difference between the OT and NT visions of Hell (if there are differences) originates with Jesus and how much is a difference between the cultural mythology of Jews in the time of the OT and those in NT times. Was Jesus introducing a radical new concept or speaking to the people in a language they already understood?

I don't know the answer to that.

>77 oakes:

Is there anyone you don't think is strange?

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire." Matthew 5.21-22

(The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.)

This passage precedes the "adultery" passage in the same Gospel.

The following mention of Hell occurs in an apocalyptic context. Jesus commands his disciples to take his Gospel "nowhere among the Gentiles. . . but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He tells them that anyone who,--because of fear of being tortured, otherwise gravely injured, or killed--is reluctant to preach his message loudly and conspicuously, will go to Hell:

"These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.
See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves (my note: Yes, he's calling the Jews "wolves". Matthew is known in Biblical scholarship for his strong anti-Jew bias); so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. (My note: in other texts, the Gospel is preached to all the peoples before the end comes.) A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10.5-28)

(The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.)

But, as you see, Jesus doesn't expect the disciples to have to undergo such trials for very long (v. 21-23); compare the spectacular apocalyptic passage at chapter 24.3-34, a teaching that Christ emphatically repeats very often throughout the synoptics:

"When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Jesus answered them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birthpangs. Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come. “So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; the one on the housetop must not go down to take what is in the house; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath. For at that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. And if those days had not been cut short, no one would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short. Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ or ‘There he is!’ —do not believe it. For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. Take note, I have told you beforehand. So, if they say to you, ‘Look! He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look! He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven’ with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place." (Matthew 24.3-34)

"These things" include such distinctive phenomena as the sun and moon not giving light and the stars collapsing from heaven, after which "all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will 'see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. (v.29-31). Notice this word "elect", which occurs also at v. 24. It means nothing more or less than 'those who have been chosen' (i.e. by God / Jesus to be saved). This idea that Jesus / God chooses whom to save and whom not to save is a strong and repeated theme in Jesus' teaching; the Calvinists did not invent it. Jesus speaks elsewhere, for example, of those who have been chosen from before the foundation of the world; and consider this prayer of his, which is multiply attested in the synoptics. In Mark 13.20, Jesus goes so far as to repeat the "chosen" idea by renaming it for emphasis: "the elect, whom he chose." Again, Matthew 11.25-27:

"At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him"

and its parallel at Luke 10.22:

"At that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (Both preceding passages from New Revised Standard Version, 3rd. ed.)

Perhaps some of this will suggest the motivation of the OP's question.

(Incidentally, if you want to know something about Jesus' work as "the Prince of Peace" and about his "family values," see 10.34-39.)

In Luke chapter 12.4-11, the situation is similar to that in Matthew 10.5-28.

‘I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority (the translation 'power' is more accurate translation from the Greek than 'authority') to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God. And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven." Luke 12.4-11

Anyone who wants to appeal to the kind-sounding piece in here about the sparrows not worrying, etc., will be disappointed by its role in Jesus' belief in the imminent end of the world, which I will explain and substantiate upon request.

(It will be noticed that we learn here of another, very bizarre sort of sin, the one that will never be forgiven: namely, blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. Many people have imagined that they have blasphemed against the Holy Spirit and therefore would never be forgiven.)

#78: Alixtii "... its mechanism for interpreting Scripture is completely foreign to me (because it a) treats interpretation as a value-neutral process, and b) ignores the traditional teaching of the Church."

I think Alixtii has a good point in bringing in "the traditional teaching of the Church". It may be possible to explain away the implication of eternal torment in various passages, but in fact this was not often attempted until recent times, when people started to be less willing to accept a cruel and capricious god. There is a similarity in this respect to passages which are no longer taken literally because we now know more about how the world functions, such as the story of Noah's flood. Some Bible passages are no longer taken literally because physically or historically implausible, some because they are morally repugnant in modern eyes. But the traditional teaching of the church tends to indicate that the obvious interpretation is more reasonable.

oakesspalding,

You are right that in this particular verse, Jesus does say "destroy" in Hell. I was aware of that. (I have a have an educated guess as to why, which is based on a well-established principle of rhetoric, but you'd never give it an iota of credit; so I won't bother stating it.) This particular citation contradicts the many others that strongly suggest that punishment in Hell is indeed eternal. The occurrence of one passage strongly suggesting annihilation in Hell, as this one admittedly does, cannot cancel the force of the much greater number of passages that strongly seem, on the contrary, to indicate eternal torture. Passages suggesting that the punishment is eternal occur even within this same book (Matthew) that uses the anomalous "destroy" language. And in the synoptics as a whole, it is this version that suggests annihilation that is the anomalous one, and the many others that suggest eternal punishment that are overwhelmingly predominant. I have cited several of these passages in full in earlier posts. Here is some of the relevant language:

Mark 9:

43. ". . . it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. (see note below from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha Third Edition) (parallel is at Matthew 18.8.)

47. ". . . than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48. where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched."

It is hard to see the point of emphasizing the unquenchability of the fire and the immortality of the worm on the body if the body is not there to experience the everlasting fire and worms. If the body were annihilated, what would be the interest for the sufferer in how long the fire lasts or the worm eats after he has long been annihilated and is thus incapable of experiencing the horror? In fact, what would "their" immortal "worm" have to do if not eternally eat them? It seems to me that the most natural reading here is that the fire and worm here are eternal because the body and the punishment are eternal. If the body were annihilated by the fire, then there would be no discernible point in the eternal existence of the fire or the existence in the first place of the worm.

The scholarly note on Mark 9.43 in the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha Third Edition endorses this interpretation: "Hell, lit. Gehenna," the valley of the son of Hinnom (2 Kings 23:10; Jer. 7.31), symbolizing the place of eternal punishment by fire."

Matthew 25.46:

"And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." Eternal punishment. Clear enough?

Thank you for the credit for my work, oakesspalding. I appreciate it.

>84 oakes:: it is difficult to know what she (sic) was referring to there

I 'd clarify, but I'm not sure what "there" is referring to.

And actually, I had not noticed your point that Mark 9:48:

"where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched"

almost certainly does not belong in the text. Furthermore, there is no other verse that echoes this one anywhere else in the synoptics. There is no excuse for my overlooking that fact. I do note that I would never have based any point in favor of my case on that spurious verse if I had recognized my oversight. I thank you for the correction, because I am interested in truth. In none of what I've said have I tried to base any point on any falsehood (not that you implied that I did; I just wanted to make that clear to everybody).

> 78 ... difference between the cultural mythology of Jews in the time of the OT and those in NT times. Was Jesus introducing a radical new concept or speaking to the people in a language they already understood?

I think you mean your question to be applied to Jews of that time, since "the time of the OT" stretches out rather far.

The reference to Gehenna would have been unambiguously understood as the place of punishment for sinners. It has that sense throughout the Talmud. A key difference, though, is that time there is not eternal. So, Shab. 33b. Except in extreme cases, and that may be a rhetorical device (and so relevant to this case), e.g. B. M. 58b. As the footnote there points, see the popular treatment in Judaism as Creed and Life (GB).

I should also mention that Wikipedia does have an article on Annihilationism. In addition to the more modern references given there, see the mid-19th century debate, one side of which is Life and Death Eternal: A Refutation of the Theory of Annihilation (Internet Archive).

Getting back to the topic that started this thread:

One of the biggest problems in modern Christianity (actually, in nearly all Christianity after 130 AD or so), is the ignoring of the prophets.

If one goes back to the prophetic books that Jesus cites, we see that part of God's punishment upon Israel was that they were partially hardened (which Paul refers to in Romans 11:25), that not everyone would repent and come back to God.

This does not mean it was impossible for the Jews to understand Jesus, nor does it mean that no one did, nor does it mean that Jesus always spoke in parables. In fact, several parables are pretty clear on their face, and the reaction of the Jews show they understood them (see, for example, the parable of the tenants: Matthew 21:45).

It would be foolish to suspect that Jesus meant for all or even most of His teachings to be purposefully misunderstood. The Sermon on the Mount, for example, is about as clear as one could hope. In the end, John 7:17 gives the clearest explanation of why Jesus was not recognized. It was not that the Pharisees "did not believe" (in the sense we would use the term today). Nor is it that they were looking for a political (rather than a spiritual) savior. By that logic, Jesus' own disciples (who likewise misunderstood Jesus' point: see Luke 24:20-21) would also not have believed.

Those who did not believe Jesus failed to recognize Him because they did not like the commandments He gave, and they did not like the commandments He gave because they did not want to do "the will of the father." (See Luke 7:17).

See chapter 9 of The Gospel You've Never Heard, but some of this is covered in the excerpt: http://www.biblicalheresy.com/GospelNGospel.pdf

#91

Due to limitations of time and energy, I am unable to continue the intensive, meticulous work I've done on this thread so far. Thus, I can now take only a few moments to make some general comments in reply to your points.

First, there is the simple point that we have limited our discussions to the synoptic gospels--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--because our inquiry involved the teachings attributed to Jesus himself. Paul's teachings are not altogether consistent with Jesus', and John is of a very different character than the synoptics; thus, their documents are outside the proper bounds of this discussion.

Second, I am aware that both Jesus and Paul regularly interpret the Hebrew Scriptures messianically; but they often have to interpret those scriptures in ways so violent as to pass all bounds of credulity when you compare the plain meanings and contexts of the original texts with the ways in which Jesus and Paul cite them. The Hebrew texts were written for the Israelites who lived around the time of the texts in question. When you come to think of it, it's strange to think that God would be revealing all these texts to his Chosen People that were about a Messiah of the first century CE rather than directed at their own contemporary needs.

Third, I'm not denying that there are several parables that are clear on their face, but I can't think offhand of which ones you have in mind. What I am certain of, however, is that the passage cited in the original post is something that Jesus empasized repeatedly in the synoptic Gospels. It is, according not only to Biblical scholarship but also to common sense that is virtually certain that the historical Jesus said what he says there; the passage occurs in much the same words and with identical import in the other synoptics. It won't do any good to try to dismiss what Jesus plainly says in the OP's citation and in those other passages by finding individual verses elsewhere that might seem to contradict this plain, repeated, and emphatic teaching of Jesus. And if you find out that other verses do contradict the teaching cited in the OP, all that means is that you have New Testament passages that contradict each other; not a few passages that overturn the importance of a major teaching of Jesus. You certainly won't find me, or any real Biblical scholar, claiming that there are no contradictions in the quite divergent teachings of the New Testament.

"It would be foolish to suspect that Jesus meant for all or even most of His teachings to be purposefully misunderstood."

I never said "all", though I've never done the relevant study to determine whether "most" is correct. But that he meant for the message of his parables not to be understood by "the crowds" is perfectly clear if you simply read the OP's text and the parallel texts, which I think I've already cited on this thread. You are simply denying the plain teaching of Jesus on this point because you don't want to deal with it; and you are far from alone in that reaction. (See, for example, the pious commentary on these passages I've cited above from The Expositor's Greek Testament).

"The Sermon on the Mount, for example, is about as clear as one could hope."

The Sermon on the Mount is not a parable. So much for that.

"By that logic, Jesus' own disciples (who likewise misunderstood Jesus' point: see Luke 24:20-21) would also not have believed."

I can't make out what "logic" you're talking about, but you put your finger on a very significant point that I believe I have made earlier in this thread: Jesus arbitrarily decided who could understand his message and who could be saved, while deliberately hiding his message from many others. This is simply unaccountable: no hint is given by way of explanation for this behavior. He hides his message from "the crowd" through impenetrable parables, and explains them to his disciples and a few others "around him", telling these select few that "to you it is given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God" (quotation may not be exact; I'm not checking). We are vouchsafed not the slightest hint as to why these few people are selected for that privilege. And here's the best part: After he does the great favor of explaining the meaning of the parables to his favorites, they still don't understand them any more than "the crowd" did without any explanation! But that is quite all right, because "it has been given to them"! By any standard of basic and decent fairness, this is despicable, but that is exactly what we are told explicitly that he does: in all three synoptics! I can't take seriously any attempt to deny that (which is what you have done outright) or to explain that away. The response of Christian editor of the Greek New Testament I've cited above is a case worth noting: his agony is manifest, because he knows that there is no honest interpretive way to escape the problem.

You seem to have construed my post, which was a response to the creator of this thread, as a direct attack or response to your own work.

You also seem not to have read my post in other ways very well, since you claim you cannot think offhand of what parables I refer to when I give one by name and citation and you claim you don't understand what logic I refer to when I state it outright {that the Pharisees rejected Christ because they were looking for a political savior. Were "because we are looking for a political savior" sufficient cause for rejecting Christ, his own disciples would have done the same, for they (like all the Jews of Jesus' day) were looking for exactly that. To "save us from the hand of our enemies, and from all who hate us" (Luke 1:71)}

There is nothing difficult or unclear about Jesus basic message; Repent for the Kingdom is at hand. And if you have a beef with the notion that God exhibits a certain degree of control over the ease of being called to repent, then your beef does not originate with Jesus but rather in the later prophets Isaiah 6:10 among others

I wasn't overlooking the fact that Matthew 21:45 says that the Pharisees "knew he (i.e. Jesus) was talking about them." I never saw the parable of the tenants as perfectly clear, but I think you're right in suggesting that this particular parable would have been substantially more comprehensible to the Pharisees than the ones that Jesus intentionally--by his own admission--used to keep his message from "the crowds." I would add that the Pharasees' understanding that this parable is "about them" can't be used to counter the point Jesus was making in the OP's citation: it is said repeatedly that he was hiding his message from "the crowds"; but the Pharisees hardly count as "crowds." Thus, this passage does nothing whatsoever to affect the force of the citation in the OP.

It still seems to me that you are trying to use select Biblical passages from other contexts that suggest the correctness of whatever you're trying to argue (and I'm not quite sure what that is) with the intention of seriously downplaying the saying of Jesus cited in the OP. On this, I'll just paste here something I wrote in my previous post:

It won't do any good to try to dismiss what Jesus plainly says in the OP's citation and in its parallel passages by finding passages or individual verses in other contexts that might seem to contradict this plain, repeated, and emphatic teaching of Jesus. And if you find out that other verses do in fact contradict the teaching cited in the OP, all that means is that you have an instance of two New Testament passages contradicting each other: that is no reason to think that the force of the teaching in a passage that you don't like (in this case the citation in the OP)--especially one as important to Jesus as this one, which he repeats--can be discarded. You certainly won't find me, or any real Biblical scholar, claiming that there are no contradictions in the quite divergent teachings of the New Testament.

"And if you have a beef with the notion that God exhibits a certain degree of control over the ease of being called to repent, then your beef does not originate with Jesus but rather in the later prophets. . . ."

1) Not only does God / Jesus exert a certain amount of control over who is saved, he positively chooses who will be saved. That is stated clearly and repeatedly both by Jesus himself in the synoptics and in other parts of the New Testament. I think I have noted this to some extent earlier in this thread. 2) It is irrelevant whether my "beef" originates with Jesus or the later prophets. I will say that none of the Israelite prophets said a word about Jesus: they were addressing their own people in their own situations. It took contorted interpretation on the part of Jesus and his movement, and then the Christians, to get anything about Jesus as the Christ out of the Hebrew Scriptures, as you will find if you read any elementary book on the history of biblical interpretation. But again, the origin of my "beef" is beside the point: For God to create us fallible, struggling human creatures, who never asked to be put into this world in the first place, and create a place of eternal torture that he evidently knew that most of us would be consigned to, and then put any hindrance at all in our way to obtaining escape from it; this can only be the behavior of a perfectly hideous, brutal, damnable being who, by moral right, has far more reason to undergo eternal punishment than any of us. He rules not by his infinite excellence, or love, or worthiness: he imposes his arbitrary reign of terror through sheer force of irresistible power. This should be as clear as anything can be. I have said much about this throughout this thread. I urge you to avail yourself of it, taking special care not to miss my points about mercy.