Roller

Howdy!

I'm having hard time reconciling what I know (FWIW) with religious belief. For example, it seems to me that the current prevailing consensus in scholarly community is that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher that believed how The Big End is coming during his life. That message gets muted in later gospels. How can you then believe Jesus was God? Or take Documentary Hypothesis for example. How can anyone believe in God of Old Testament if such person subscribes to DH?

Am I just mistaken and majority of scholars do not subscribe to these two examples?

Malachi151

We talked about this last night a little bit as a Darwin Day presentation. There was a study that showed that the beliefs about God and Jesus are radically different among non congregation leading theologians congregation leading theologians, and also among congregation leaders and the congregation.

The non-congregation leading theologians have the most diminished view of Jesus, then the congregation leaders, then the congregation.

Obviously, church leaders themselves are not passing on even their own views and beliefs and knowledge about the religion to the congregation.

They present the congregation with some different view or some small subset of their own view. Most of all, it seems that congregation leader do this by choosing what to focus on and what to leave out.

They focus on "the message" and leave out other details or discussion of "reality" and just leave that up to the imagination of the congregation.

How and why these people do this I'm not exactly sure.

I think that many Catholic theological scholars do become atheists.

I have often thought that all of the highest ranking Catholics must be atheists in reality. They would know better than anyone just how shaky this whole business is.

With all that I guess I didn't answer your question, and I myself don't know either.

John Kesler

You may be interested in the exchanges between Ben C. Smith and me in this thread.

This seems like a non sequitur. What's the correlation between Mosaic authorship of the Torah and the existence of God? :huh:

S.C.Carlson

As best I can tell, there is no scholarly consensus that "Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher that believed how The Big End is coming during his life." Though I think there is much to commend the apocalyptic view of Jesus, the Jesus Seminar is a big dissenter, perhaps because of over-reliance on Thomas and the earliest layer of Q, both of which are non-eschatological.

As for the DH, I'll leave it for others to discuss. I personally don't see the incompatibility unless one subscribes to certain traditional views of Mosaic authorship for the entire Torah.

See above.

To answer the thread's titular question, I would suggest that the incompatibility is more with certain forms of fundamentalism than with being religious per se (e.g., a scholar who is UU can be both "religious" and still hold to those positions).

Roller

Hence the "God of Old Testament" in my sentence. Stories are contradictory, some are borrowed from other cultures, edited and then edited some more. One way, I suppose, would be to consider that God had no influence on Torah's composition. Any believers believe this?

Roller

Thanks for you answer. I hoped you would be one of the people replying to this thread. I'm not sure if early Q was non-eschatological. It sure seems to me that the early congregations (at least ones founded by Paul, including himself) were apocalyptic. But that’s a discussion for some other time.

Say a believer scholar thinks Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher. How such scholar reconciles his belief in Jesus as God with this? I'm sure there are warying degrees of "religiousity" that allow for such reconciliation. I don't see how you can reconcile it with a definition of a Christian as a believer in Nicene Creed.

gstafleu

Sounds interesting. Is the study available online somewhere?

Gerard Stafleu

Sheshbazzar

The question is oxymoronic, any "believer" that disbelieves the influence of YHWH upon reality, including the composition of ha'Torah, is defacto an "unbeliever", with both heart and lips betraying the doublemindeness, such one is unstable in all his ways.

Roller

Thanks! That was a good read. If I generalize Ben's answer (which I shouldn't but nevertheless will) to the rest of the scholars, their belief is very different from the Nicene Creed type of belief? At least it seems so to me.

Loren Rosson III

You have a rather anorexic view of Christian believers. Dale Allison is an example of a believer who believes that Jesus was mistaken about the end:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Alliso...nar/message/41

"From one point of view, Jesus was wrong, because he took apocalyptic language literally and expected a near end. But he wasn't, from my Christian point of view, wrong in hoping for God to defeat evil, redeem the world, and hold us responsible. I continue to be amazed that we can't do with the end what we do with the beginning. We have become very sophisticated in our understanding of Genesis as mythology. It still serves us homiletically and theologically even after we've given up the literal sense. Why can't we do the same with eschatology? We can say that the writer of Genesis was mistaken about the beginning of the world -- it didn't take place a few thousand years ago, there was no Garden of Eden, etc -- but he wasn't wrong -- God made the world, the world is good, but responsible human beings wreck things. I just want to do this with eschatology. I emphasize Jesus was wrong so that I can get to what he was right about."