thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-11, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Ian, I'll look for the Weill books. Thanks.
Raven, I'm with you all the way on there being plenty of pre-Christian stories of gods dying and being reborn, of gods walking among us, even of gods being born as human beings so that they can save us—Krishna comes to mind. As I've said elsewhere in these discussions, there is truth in all the world's great faiths, and any of them can be a way to "come to the Father through me." I just think that Christianity is by a considerable margin the least imperfect of many imperfect human understandings of God and the easiest path, especially for those "weak in spirit" like myself.
Raven, Tony, Joel, I see your point about "don't try this at home" being an unproductive message, absolutely. And we humans do have a tendency to insist that potential role models are incomparable prodigies (even in as small a thing as trying to get organized for the next GenCon...) as a way of getting out of doing the work ourselves. Here's the thing, though, or rather two things:
1.
That Jesus Christ is God—not merely a really good person, but an incarnation of the driving force of the cosmos—did not make life, suffering, and death easy for Him. It's fairly clear from the Gospels that He somehow set aside His omniscience, for example—e.g. Luke 8:44-45: "She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. 'Who touched me?' Jesus asked."
In fact, except for the rather ambiguous incident of the 12-year-old Jesus talking to the priests in the temple, we hear nothing that indicates He actually knew who He himself was until His baptism by John, when "At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, 'This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased'" (Matthew 3:16-7, for example)—which is such a shock that He immediately goes into the desert to think and only then begins preaching and healing. In His prayers the night before His death, it's clear He knows He's going to die, but it's also clear He is afraid: "Take this cup from me" (Mark 14:36). On the Cross, He apparently despaired: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). It strikes me that Jesus was no more certain that God existed than you or I—and that He perservered even unto death in spite of that uncertainty. He didn't cheat death: He died for real.
Jesus's being God doesn't make His life and death any easier for him; what it does is make His resurrection possible at all. Instead of looking at the life of Jesus and saying, "another good man murdered and defeated," Christians can say, "death and evil didn't win for a change!" That thought should give us courage to act in the world.
2.
I did "try it at home." From age 13 to age 18, I tried tremendously hard to be a good person, as I understood it, on my own power, without God (of course my understanding of what "good person" really means is limited now and was even more limited as a teenager). I actually resorted to practicing a kind of Pavlovian conditioning on myself to reinforce positive behaviors and discourage negative behaviors. It didn't work. All I did was make myself miserable, and by the way pretty unpleasant to be around.
Now, maybe I'm just tremendously fucked up. Maybe everyone else reading these posts is so much better at being human than I am that they can do the right thing, consistently, all the time, and never fail and fall and need a hand to reach out to them to offer forgiveness and the strength to try again. Maybe that's just me. I doubt it.
