>700 pages trying to make sense of the Bible
>Still just end up saying God works in mysterious ways
>Also unbaptized babies burn in hell
>And predestination is a thing, so what you do doesn’t matter anyways
Is this what passes as a “Church Father”
>700 pages
This nigga reading the abridged version
>the bible in simple and self-evidently true
You’re underselling how much theology is created by having assumed that what you now think “christianity” is about can be found in the bible itself. It can’t. If you genuinely try to strip away later theological additions and return to monkey the theology in the bible is almost alien to us. Virtually all “staples” of belief are later additions from virgin birth (based on a made up prophecy from an OT chapter that mistranslated young woman to virgin) to trinity.
Just trying to fuse “christianity” with the OT was a major obstacle and the discrepancy between the two was so stark one of the earliest heresies was the logical conclusion that there were at least two separate gods in the Bible. The psychotic vengeful israeli god and the later forgiving god. They got really stuck on how there might be three (no not a trinity) the third being Jesus. Trying to tease out in what way he was also God was a centuries long headache. Did he exist concurrent with the creator god? Then how were they the same? Was he created? Then how is he not subservient to the real god? How do they split power? Did they mean he was just a man who was adopted (adopted fatherhood being a lot more normal for that time, being adopted by the gods was another normal trope).
Point is it’s really fucking hard to re-enter the theological discussion assuming complete naïveté. You are preprogrammed with answers thousands of years in the making, a lot of them really quite new.
Good post. Not dogmatic, kind, and very well put. Have a (You) kind stranger
interdasting. where can i read more about this
Not op but its a vast field. Check out the factions of the early church, the ecumenical councils, and all the heresies of antiquity. Christianity is as unified as it is due to a long history of violence.
The Bible is a starting place.
Read any gnostic/heretic you'll find plenty more of this crap
Jung = Young in German
Frau = Woman
Jungfrau = Virgin
They’re interchangeable in many languages.
It’s just that the Talmudic rabbis’ entire theology is just a big reactionary cope against Jesus being the mosiach.
That's a whole lot of words to say "I fell for the midwit gnosticism meme"
>virgin birth
Luke 1:34
>trinity
John 14:20, John 14:26
You haven’t read a single text critical book on christianity. You can’t even understand what I said about the virgin birth meme. It’s a made up story meant to validate a “prediction” from the OT. The problem is that “prediction” isn’t talking about a future messiah in context and it’s based on a mistranslation. That is, they made up a confirmation of a prediction that didn’t exist because they were using a translated source text.
Nothing I’m talking about has to do with gnosticism and all of it is covered by a university level course on theology. It’s not controversial in the slightest.
Isiah 7:14 is more in contention than you imply, but it doesn't matter. You are right that Luke and especially Matthew clearly try to retrofit the life of Jesus as much as possible to any preexisting prophecy they identified. It is constant throughout. Luke even tries to trace Jesus back to Adam, which we all know is bull. At least with Matthew there is a thin degree of plausibility tracing it back to David.
>Nothing I’m talking about has to do with gnosticism
>"Yahweh is a vengeful evil deity and there is a purer God behind him"
That's literally Gnosticism.
There is a very intentional effort to link Jesus to the Messianic prophecies of the OT but a lot of it seems very indirect to me. Any reference to the most obvious parallel (Isaiah 53) is indirect and thematic whereas Mark bends backwards to say how John the Baptist "made the paths straight"? That seems like a very throwaway line and not something I would otherwise associate with the character of John if not explicitly spelled out.
The thing is I don't even see the God of the Old Testament being more vengeful as a huge issue. The bigger issue is that we know the Old Testament is largely bullshit, and the gospels are too strongly linked to the Old Testament to really stand separately. It's weird because imo, there is actually a lot of interesting and good evidence to support the veracity of the gospels, despite some real issues. But even Marcion couldn't cut his gospel completely from a fictitious old testament.
Really good post, anon.
>Just trying to fuse “christianity” with the OT was a major obstacle
No it wasn't. There are constant types and antitypes linking the OT and NT.
I just listened to a podcast on his other book
>Abridged for modern readers
Oh come on
read also his other books and apologetics works
Great book. For me, it was the details of the late roman religion, and the insight into the atmosphere after the fall of Rome. He's got one foot in antiquity and the other in the middle ages