Stephen said
We simply don’t understand what was meant by many things.
Agreed, but to me that sounds like the exact opposite of a revelation.
As I see it – the revelation is of Jesus as the Christ. The Book of Revelations is about as obscure as it gets. Of note – I read today the last chapter of John’s Gospel where he is asked about Judas. John points out that what Jesus said was not understood by his disciples. Clearly Jesus could speak in ambiguous or symbolic language. And often people were afraid to ask him what this meant – that suggests something about the man’s authoritative personality. This forced people to examine, at a private level, what he was saying.
But what to make of a revelation that has to be interpreted?
Stephen said
Stephen said
We simply don’t understand what was meant by many things.Agreed, but to me that sounds like the exact opposite of a revelation.
As I see it – the revelation is of Jesus as the Christ. The Book of Revelations is about as obscure as it gets. Of note – I read today the last chapter of John’s Gospel where he is asked about Judas. John points out that what Jesus said was not understood by his disciples. Clearly Jesus could speak in ambiguous or symbolic language. And often people were afraid to ask him what this meant – that suggests something about the man’s authoritative personality. This forced people to examine, at a private level, what he was saying.
But what to make of a revelation that has to be interpreted?
It reveals a mystery. Jesus celebrated this mystery – publicly thanking God “that these things are hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed unto babes” if I recall. Think it says he “rejoiced.”
And when some of the wise pointed out that the Messiah must come from Bethlehem and not the abominable Galilee (of which Nazareth was especially degenerate) it does not say Jesus put forward an explanation – they weren’t rejecting his place of birth, they were rejecting him.
Poohbear said
It reveals a mystery. Jesus celebrated this mystery – publicly thanking God “that these things are hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed unto babes” if I recall. Think it says he “rejoiced.”
It is a mystery why a 4-Omni deity would create humanity to mock them for not understanding something that is intended as a mystery.
Mystery is an intriguing literary formula, but a terrible method of communication if the stakes are as high as claimed.
Mystery = we don’t know. When monumental claims about existence and eternity are built atop mystery that is reveled in, that is not a grounding that confers reliability.
Poohbear said
It would make no sense that Jesus came to the Redeemer for the whole world, and the world would end in the lifetime of those who witnessed him.
Putting aside whether he came to be said redeemer, I’m not sure why the world stopping at that point wouldn’t make sense. Future generations (post-30ishCE) wouldn’t yet have come into existence, so the ‘whole world’ wouldn’t need account for them. If the world were to have stopped in say 57CE (to pick a random year within which some of Jesus’s hearers were probably still around), he still could have been the redeemer of the ‘whole world‘, just that version of the whole world would entail a smaller number of people.
And the age of whatever (Gentiles, etc.) would necessarily come to an end if the world stopped. That the world necessarily needed to continue to our present day for these things to make sense – that’s not clicking into place in my head. It seems to me the world could have stopped at 57CE and the same concepts would have held just fine.
Is there some temporality packed into the meaning of ‘redeemer of the whole world’ and ‘age if the Gentiles’ that I’m missing?
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