"Progressive Crristianity and the conspiracy to reinvent Jesus"
Now I should say that I am feeling a little in the spiritual doldrums at the moment and so having observed that various members of our congregation had been sufficiently enthused by the advertisment for the talk to fire off a few emails, I figured I would go and have a look.
Now I have to say that I went along blissfully ignorant of all the history here and listened to a somewhat negative talk presented by a somewhat un dynamic speaker. The jist of the talk was to bring up claims by a mob called the "Jesus Seminar" and to refute those claims. As I say somewhat negative. OK so far and actually some of the points and the refutation (is that a word) were in themselves quite interesting.
However in the end it seemed we had one group of very dedicated people wound up about another small group of equally dedicated people.
And nobody else really cares.
Perhaps we the people, God and the Church would be better served if they expended their energy preaching the gospel, caring for the needy and praying and giving thanks for a wonderful world.
OK so what were they on about.
Well it seems that "The Jesus Seminar" attempted some kind of psudo sceintific analysis of the bible to try to identify text that was a direct quote of Jesus or text that was sort of what Jesus may have said and text that someone else had written and passed it off as coming from Jesus. OK sounds good to me. I could really get into a good discussion on this over a glass of wine or coffee or round a camp fire but do we really need a whole organisation dedicated to this?
But what was their sin?
Well it appears that these guys have tried to deny the spiritual aspect of Jesus. I understand that their claim is that Jesus was just a itinerant teacher and that he was not also God. Our Chrstian belief is that Jesus is wholly human and wholly God at the same time. (post a correction if you wish). I understand that they claim he was not crucified, and did not rise again. Ooh on slippery ground there.
But who were the group hosting the talk you may ask. Well so you might. Turns out they are ACC.
Not the Australian Crime Comission http://www.crimecommission.gov.au/ (although that does sound approproiate given the gravity of the sin in question)
nor is it the Australian Christian Channel http://www.acctv.com.au/ (Although a little TV traction might make it all the more intersting)
Nor is it http://www.acc.org.au/ (Some kind of penecostal coordination body.)
The ACC it appears is a group formed in responde to a resolution that was debated by the UC on the issue of homo thexuals (said with emphasis) a while back. Resolution 84?. The problem being that whether or not said issue was biblical depended on how one interpreted the bible and the "Jesus Seminar" don't interpret it the right way.
So if you wish to discuss interpreting the bible, invite our family over for dinner, entertain the kids and we will work through all the issues over a glass of red.
and tim tams of course.
btw, the bad guys are at
http://tcpc.org/template/index.cfm
If you distill out every word that is recorded that Einstein actually originally said in his life, you'd probably find that the Theory of Relativity is not supportable on the basis of that evidence.
ReplyDeleteIf you even read only his written work, you could argue that this Theory of Relativity is riddled with assumptions and axions that are not provable by his textual works alone.
If you take all of what Einstein said and wrote, and all of the knowledge that contributed to the axions and proposals of science and human language up to that date, a cantankerous person could still say that's it's all poppycock. (As evidence, the lady within the quote "It's turtles all the way down." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down )
But if you had a mind amenable to the concepts of science, mathematics and logic, and you take in all of the knowledge that built up to Einstein's time and then read his work, and comprehended it, you'd more than likely say: "Aha! This Theory of Relativity is indeed trustworthy - what a very reasonable proposal!".
Can a "Theory of Christ being Divine" (or otherwise) be credibly based on a set of data as limited as a distillation of Jesus' most probable actual words in isolation ... ?