jbernier

It will perhaps explain Catholic and Protestant faith. It will not explain Eastern Orthodox or Jewish faith because, quite simply, the idea is largely absent from the first and completely absent from the second. There is also the small point that you were not, in fact, talking about the idea of original sin but about the need for redemption in Christ (which leads to my comment about Jewish thought: since there is no doctrine of redemption in Christ to say that Jewish thought gives any reason for the necessity for redemption in Christ came is simply wrong).

Huh? Your post (not 'posts' - I only responded to one) 'failed' because you made statements that are incorrect. I notice, btw, that you have not taken my challenge to show that it is a major theme in the Hebrew scriptures, as you claimed. I'm giving you the chance to demonstrate that you are correct and I am wrong - why not take it?

What are you talking about, disregard your messages? I responded to your post by saying that it was wrong. That is not disregarding - that is disagreeing. You made a factual claim, I countered it. That is what one does in debates and discussions.

jbernier

Yes, we are, but you are holding dogmatically to an Augustinian (even more precisely, an Anselmian Augustinian) reading of said book. For those of us who think that Augustine was full of shit (including pretty much anyone in the Eastern Orthodox world and any and all Jewish people since Augustine was a Christian thinker) these ideas are hardly characteristic of our beliefs.

That leads to an important point: There are many Christians other than me who have read the scriptures and not come to an Augustinian conclusion. The mere fact that Christianity was 400 years old before Augustine showed up on the scene points to that fact. I would hold to the much older Christian theology (present in Origen of Alexandria's scriptural commentaries a full two-and-a-half centuries before Augustine) that the 'fall' account is really an allegory for the general human condition (I would, however, object to Origen's attempt to fit this allegory into a Platonic framework - an attempt which Origen himself admitted was speculative). In short, I object to the Augustinian reading because I consider him and his idea of original sin to be theological new-comers that never made their case over and against earlier forms of theology and (more to the point) anthropology.

Crowley

I will attempt to explain the sacrifice of Jesus as bet I can, recalling my days of Christianity. In order to fully grasp the Christian concept of this sacrifice I must do a bit of history.

To begin, there have been three Convenants. The first was between God and Adam. Simply stated, you will live forever in paradise as long as you do not partake of the of Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This fruit could either be literal or metaphorical depending on your own view. The church tends to waffle on this point. The serpent tempted Eve and Adam and they fell from grace. To them was given pain and woe (the wages of sin) and they were cast out from the Garden of Eden. In many Christian faiths this is were we get the concept of Original Sin, meaning that we are all separated from God because we have from that point on the "nature of man" instead of the "nature of God".

It is after this time that we see the need for a blood sacrifice, which is first examplified by Cain and Abel. Abel offered the sacrifice of a lamb and it was good in the eyes of the Lord, whereas Cain's sacrifice of fruit and wheat was insufficient. Blood became the only currency that God would accept as an offering and later evolved in the practice of the scapegoat, which was to take a perfect beast and imbue it will all the sins of the people and then to take the animal outside of town and sacrifice it to God.

The Second Convenant was between God and Moses embodied in the stone tablets known as the Ten Commandments. Here God set down laws that man must follow to be free from sin and to attain grace in the eyes of the Lord. Like the First Convenant, man was incapable of keeping the Law and the Second Convenant was broken at the base of the very mountain where the laws were written.

From this era, however, we see the rise of the Levites, decendants of Moses' brother, who became the High Priests of the Jews. They were entrusted to keep the Holiest of Holies (pre-temple), to make the sacrifices of God, and to ensure that the Law was upheld. The problem remained, however, that the Second Convenant was already broken.

Man could not keep faith with God. And so, Jesus was born of Man, a Man-God, homoousus, meaning of the same substance as God. Jesus was a perfect sacrifice, wholly without sin, without blame. He is the Lamb, the ultimate scapegoat. He took on the sins of all mankind past and present and created the Unbreakable Convenant, the Third Convenant. It is unbreakable because it was a Convenant, a promise that God made, essentially, with Himself.

The previous Convenants were flawed because Man was flawed. But now Man has the promise of Salvation, freedom from sin, and the hope of Grace because God will not forsake his beloved Children as they have forsaken him. He washed the sins of Man not in the blood of a beast but in the blood of the Son of God. He is the symbol of the Convenant, his blood the cleansing flood that hides our sin from the perfect eyes of our Father who is in Heaven.

Therefore, Jesus' death was necessary seal the deal. The only one capable of ensuring Man's salvation. And now we live under the Third Convenant, that whoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

no_rain

For a non-Christian your attempt at the Christian story is amazingly good.

jbernier

The idea that God and Adam entered into a covenantal arrangement is a fairly marginal interpretation of the Genesis story. Many dispensationalists hold to it but dispensationalism is a scant 200 years old (even saying that it is 200 years old is generous). You will not find the idea of an Adamic covenant anywhere in the Biblical texts or the Patristic writings.

This is very different from the Noachic, Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. In each of those God makes a promise. Without obligations on both sides it, by definition, is not covenantal. If we look closely at Genesis 2 God makes no promise; he merely says "Don't eat this because you die as a result." He does not say "This is what I will do if you uphold your end of the bargain." It is more accurate to say that he makes a cause-and-effect statement: if you do X, Y will follow.

You have forgotten the arguably more important covenant between God and Abraham: you know, the one in which God promised to make Abraham's descendants into a mighty nation (aka Israel). There would be no Mosaic covenant if there had not been an Abrahamic.

This is not the New Testament understanding of the Mosaic law. Read Galatians, for instance. Paul argues that the Law was never the mechanism of salvation but that rather it was always by faith that one was justified (note that he refers back to the Abrahamic covenant to make his case).

There was no "Law" in the putative Adamic covenant (leaving aside the fact that the 'Adamic covenant' was no covenant at all). By convention, capitalized "Law" is a reference to Torah and one cannot talk about Torah prior to the Mosaic covenant as the Mosaic covenant and Torah are identical theologically.

Reread Exodus 32-34:1. Moses breaks the tablets in anger over the Golden Calf before he gives it to the people (the 'breaking' to which you refer). Then he destroys the Golden Calf. Then he is given a new set of tablets through which the Torah (actually the Decalogue) is introduced to the people. Thus the introduction of the Torah to the people takes place subsequent rather than prior to Golden Calf incident. This is not insignificant, as it means that the Israelites 'broke the Law' before the Law was introduced - that is, before the covenant was made! If we look at the story, then, are the Israelites actually breaking the covenant if the covenant was not yet made?

Herein lies the problem with this theology. It assumes that the Mosaic Law was meant to bring salvation but did not because of Israel's failure to live up to its demands right from the very beginning. However, again, this is not New Testament theology. Paul argues that the law was never meant to bring salvation in the first place. Thus, showing that its failure to bring salvation was necessary for Christ's ministry misses the entire point of what Paul is on about in Galatians; quite simply, if it was never meant to bring salvation than how could it fail to bring salvation? How can one fail to do something that one is not attempting to do?

Crowley

The OP requested an explanation of John 3:16 from a Christian perspective. And that is what I gave him. Recalling the "Story" I was taught as a Christian I retold it here on the boards. I realize it is easy to pick apart, but the Southern Baptist Church I grew up in firmly believed that a Convenant existed between Adam and God.

Either I have completely forgotten or I was not taught the significance of the Abrahamic Convenant. I am willing to believe either is likely. It has been years since I have read a Bible and claim to be no expert on its contents. I leave that to others.

The whole point of my post was to establish that the "New" Convenant needed to be between two parties who would not, could not break it: Jesus and God. And to show that the past Convenants, however many there were, had been broken.