Loading...This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure.
The following is drawn from my old chapter 7.
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I first began to have serious doubts about my faith when I was in graduate school. After I had graduated from Moody Bible Institute I had gone off to finish my undergraduate degree at Wheaton College, a strongly evangelical liberal arts college and the alma mater for Billy Graham. For me this was a step toward liberalism. I was a very hard core evangelical in those years. But even though the liberal arts education at Wheaton did expand my horizons significantly, they did not make me particularly liberal theologically. I came to graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary firmly convinced that the Bible was without error in any of its teachings and that the doctrines I accepted as a conservative Christian were given by God himself.
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Thanks Bart for sharing your cuttings. While they are very interesting, I agree with your decision to take them out – personal anecdotes tend to detract I think from a “serious” book.
I presume you will cover Paul’s writings in the book? It seems to me that Paul really started the concept of original sin, which makes all of us in need of a saviour, which appears to rationalize why Jesus had to die. Am I right in saying Jews at the time (and today?) did not have this view of original sin, and therefore it wouldn’t have been something that the disciples were thinking about? I am not aware that Jesus ever explained it in the gospels, except perhaps vaguely in the lamb metaphor. Maybe labeling Jesus God and Saviour are two different things, and so this is not a subject for the book? If you have already discussed this angle in another book that I have missed please let me know.
I will certainly be talking about Paul, but only about his Christology, not his idea of what “sin” is. The latter is very complicated. I do not think that Paul had a doctrine of “original sin” if you mean that in the Augustinian sense. That was a later development. Maybe I’ll make a post or two on Paul’s views of sin — I think they were apocalyptic Jewish (not Augustinian).
Thanks. I thought Augustine took it from Paul’s writings (Romans 5:19 – For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous), but I am in way over my head here.
I would be very interested in a post or two on Paul’s views of sin, and I look forward to the book. Thanks again.
Yes, Augustine certainly based his views on his interpretation of Paul; but he was living centuries later and had a very different philosophical perspective from Paul’s….
I find it interesting that the main tenets of Christianity are based of the Gospel of John that was believed to have been written in classic Greek by an 80-90 year old iilleterate fisherman from Galilee and which is at odds with the other Gospels as well as Paul’s writings, all of which were closer to the source. I hope your book will explain how this came to be.
Yes indeed. But I don’t think the Gospel of John was written by John the son of Zebedee. (I guess you don’t either, from the way you phrased your comment). Those who *do* think so maintain that John had special insight into Jesus as one of his closest companions, and the only one to write a Gospel. But to my mind that’s completely untenable. (He couldn’t write!)
My struggle with inconsistencies in the Gospels, and how it affected my views, is very similar to your quest except for the cleaning of the tennis courts and the sauna time. Although I did not think I was going to burn in Hell so much, my quest resulted in my being completely ostracized by my Christian friends and I did, and still do, ponder whether or not I could just be plain wrong. . Ron
“If these views are different from one another, which ones am I supposed to believe? And what if instead of one of these views being right and the others being wrong, they were all wrong?”
This is what I will never understand about fundamentalists. All views about God ARE wrong, especially if one really believes in God, who cannot possibly be some measly concept that can be grasped by the finite human mind.
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However, Paul shares in a way the same “incarnation christology” of John, and Paul’s writings are the earliest Christian testimony we have today. And Paul also borrowed some of his stuff from even older Christian sources. Therefore it’s hard to conclude that “earliest Christians had exaltation Christologies” when the oldest witness of Christology is “incarnation Christology”. Moreover, I see no evidence of Christological disputes between Paul and the “Jerusalem Church” so – again – to me there is no reason to think that they had necessarily different views on this matter.
I don’t want to conclude that Jesus ever said what we read in John’s Gospel, of course!! But the two kind of Christologies may have well developed in parallel, since “exaltation” and “incarnation” are just two speculative sides of the same post-resurrection coin.. 🙂
You will clearly need to read my book! (Paul and John do both have incarnation christologies: but they are different at a very important point. And there are ways to get *behind* our earliest sources to yet earlier views, as I will show/argue) (my views on that latter point are not at all novel, but extremely common among critical scholars)
I am amazed that after 18 years of moving away from fundamentalism (to where I would now define myself as an atheist) I can still have moments of fear when I wonder, “What if I’m wrong and there is a hell?” The fear of hell is a powerful force — especially when it’s instilled in early childhood. I don’t know if I would label it child abuse, but it’s certainly pernicious. I’ve often thought that fundamentalism hurts most those who take it most seriously, as I did for 35 years (even to the point of being a staff member for Campus Crusade for Christ for 3 years and a Baptist pastor for another 10).