thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-11, TonyLB wrote:
Sydney, let me echo Emily about how awesome it is to be able to have this conversation, and offer my gratitude and recognition that you're bearing the main effort (both logistically and, I suspect, emotionally) of making it possible for everyone. So many thanks for the response. It strikes me as being slightly non-parallel with the questions that are in my heart, if not the questions that were in my words. So, attempting (for once!) to be non-confrontational I'm going to try to set the stage for followups.
1. I think I get the idea that death was painful for Jesus-God. I can even accept that it was an infinitely more excruciating type of pain than even the human pain that a human being would have felt in his place. But it's not the human pain, and that distances me from the story.
Which would be the end of my questions if that were a necessary distance, if the divinity were the only way you could tell that story. But, to my mind, it's not. I'm going to pull out one of the touchstones of my own, personal, Holy Writ. On April 3rd, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King gave a speech in Memphis, Tennessee. He recapped the epic struggle, to that date, for civil rights. He told people what was coming next, what challenges lay on the road ahead, and what strengths they would need to find within themselves to rise to those challenges. And then he closed by saying:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
The next day, at 6:01 p.m., Dr. Martin Luther King was shot through the throat. One hour and four minutes later he was pronounced dead.
If you want to tell me a story that will make me know that there is a power over which death can have no dominion, you don't have to look further than that. I don't need to roll back the boulder and find the cave empty. I don't want an angel to announce the blessed news. One good man, leaving a legacy that endures forever ... for me, that's the story.
I get that the resurrection story gives you something that this mundane story does not. But I still don't feel that I know what it is.
2) This one ... I don't get. I totally accept that it is absolute gospel truth. I immediately grant that everything you have said about your own life is objectively, unquestionably accurate and complete. I just don't get it, and I'd seriously be thrilled if someone could explain it to me.
If I grant every supernatural tenet and every doctrine, it looks to me as if we have this: Jesus is inside you. He's God, God is omnipresent, etc. So if you're looking inside of yourself, Jesus is there to be found. How can you say that the strength to try again is not in you to be found? Or is that a short-hand for "I was looking inside myself in the wrong way"?
I mean, I know religions that preach salvation and purification from without ... ones that say "No, actually, that power isn't inside you to be found," but Christianity explicitly isn't one of those religions, right? This inability (entirely on my part) to reconcile deeply held conviction in practice with equally deeply held conviction in theory fascinates and frustrates the heck out of me. I want to understand it. Can you help?
