In Him, all the requirements of the Torah have been fully met. The Torah was never intended to be only external rules and regulations. The Lord said that he would write His Torah on our hearts cf. Jeremiah Only through faith in Jesus do we receive his Spirit to make his word a living reality in our lives. The rabbis have instead made the Torah into a set of external rules and regulations.
Rabbinical Judaism has become a religion following the opinions and traditions of men and accommodates its adherents despite the multitude of different opinions and interpretations of the Torah, yet the rabbis will excommunicate any Jew who dares to put their faith in Jesus, the word of God. This perversion of the true faith of Israel was foretold by the prophet Isaiah:. For it is: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there.
So then, the Word of the Lord to them will become: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there— so that they will go and fall backward, be injured and snared and captured Isaiah The writer to the Hebrews makes it clear that Jesus is the full and final revelation of God to man:.
To those who receive him he is the very word of life by which we live. For example, evidence suggests that the only place that the so-called supernatural realm has ever existed has been in the minds and hearts and speech of human beings -- and only quite recently. As Benson Saler revealed in his landmark American Anthropological Association's Ethos paper, " Supernatural As a Western Category ," the very notion of supernatural, in opposition to the natural, is a Western invention.
The "supernatural realm" came into being as a thought form after we began to understand things in a natural, scientific way. Only when the concept of "the natural" emerged was it deemed necessary by some to speak of "the supernatural": that which was imagined to be above or outside of nature.
Prior to this, people all over the world used a blend of day and night language reflecting their daytime and nighttime experiences to speak about the nature of reality.
But as we all know, when we fly in our dreams we're not having a super natural or miraculous experience; we're having an experience common to the dream-state. As we have collectively learned ever more about the natural, the supernatural has become ever less. Supernatural and unnatural are, after all, synonyms. Anything supposedly supernatural is, by definition, unnatural.
And most people find unnatural relatively uninspiring when they really stop and think about it. It should not surprise us that young people are turning their backs on religion by the millions and that the New Atheists are riding bestseller lists when "the Gospel," God's supposed Good News for all of humanity, is reduced to this:. An unnatural king who occasionally engages in unnatural acts sends his unnatural son to Earth in an unnatural way. He's born through an unnatural birth, lives an unnatural life, performs all sorts of unnatural deeds, and is killed, naturally.
He then unnaturally rises from the dead in order to redeem humanity from an unnatural curse brought about by an unnaturally talking snake. After forty days of unnatural appearances to some of his followers he unnaturally zooms off to heaven to return to his unnatural father, sit on an unnatural throne, and unnaturally judge the living and the dead. And if you profess to believe in all this unnatural activity, you and your fellow believers get to go to an unnaturally boring place for an unnaturally long period of time while everyone else suffers an unnatural, torturous hell forever.
If we imagine God as an otherworldly person, for example, then we may be contributing -- albeit unintentionally -- to our species' demise. As renowned systems thinker Gregory Bateson warned:. If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation, and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.
And as you claim all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your people against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables. If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate or simply of overpopulation and overgrazing.
Thomas Berry , my mentor, expressed a similar prophetic sentiment when he said:. The world we live in is an honorable world. To refuse this deepest instinct of our being, to deny honor where honor is due, to withdraw reverence from divine manifestation, is to place ourselves on a head-on collision course with the ultimate forces of the Universe.
This question of honor must be dealt with before any other question. We miss both the intrinsic nature and the magnitude of the issue if we place our response to the present crises of our planet on any other basis.
It is not ultimately a political or economic or scientific or psychological issue. It is ultimately a question of honor. Only the sense of the violated honor of Earth and the need to restore this honor can evoke the understanding as well as the energy needed to carry out the renewal of the planet in any effective manner.
Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, wrote an important essay in titled, " The Crisis of Faith. Moreover, he claims that such a seemingly modern and liberal view of God was actually the norm for peoples everywhere in pre-modern times. The essence of Bultmann's argument is that faith has virtually nothing to do with beliefs.
Beliefs are actually the antithesis of faith. Beliefs tend to be attachments of the mind to something being a certain way. In contrast, faith is synonymous with trust -- trusting what is beyond one's comprehension or control. These are all human traits. The war in Heaven is based off wars on Earth.
Humans have sons, deities live forever and always were and always will be, so how can they give birth to a divine child? These are ancient stories told to explain what was unexplainable. Now science can explain much of what was unexplainable and so now God is forced to fill the gaps.
A deity is no longer even needed to fill the gaps as long as we are mature enough to accept the gaps and curious enough to attempt to fill those gaps through the continued exploration of science and philosophy.
0コメント