JenellYB

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I disagree with your assertion about his self doubt. There was a wide variety of views about exactly who he was after he was crucified. Bart Ehrman discusses this in great detail in Lost Christianities. However, any lack of clarity by Matthew, or any other Gospel writers, does not mean that Jesus had doubt about who he was.

George

Most people, even Christians, are entirely unaware, uneducated, about how any of the forms of Christianity or Christian doctrine came about, to come to us as we have them today. They are unaware that what got carried down was through the sifting and sorting and preferences of the few most politically/socially powerful and influential.

When I took Religious studies courses that got into history and development of Christianity and Christian doctrine, the professor's first lecture was to the effect that those in the class that are Christian are going to have every thing they'd been told about the origins and history of our religion and the church will be challenged, and explains their choice...stick with the course, and at the end of it, know more about Christianity, it's origins and the history of doctines and theology of the religion than 99.9% of their fellow Christians, including most of their pastors, or, head right on over to the admin office at the end of the class and drop the course.

Jenell

Oh, I feel so honored! You chose my favorite!

Jenell

The "anti" position on most anything is the weaker and most error-prone position, for reasons inherent in that position itself.

Logic does not allow prooving the negative. It's a position that in and of itself offers no positive alternatives. The "anti" position is often left with nothing more than unsound reasoning, fallacies of logic, and irrational emotionalism, usually quickly deteriorating into pettiness and even absurdity, on which to begin, proceed, or stand.

Imo, we can just look at the aparant present strategies of GOP party and candidates for a pretty obvious example of that.

Jenell

I didn't mean to imply that this single verse would represent a theology or there was some universal agreement on the meaning. However, I suspect that this has been examined and explained by theologians and I am curious as to how it has been interpreted. I can see where this could be used to justify a focus on personal salvation with the plight of the poor not a high priority.

 

George

I think you hit a good point here....one's accepted theology on larger matters, the oversall scheme, certainly colors and filters how one interprets smaller points within the text...in the case you mention, a focus on personal salvation as a basic element of theology is going to interpret smaller matters in way consistent with and complimentary to that.

Jenell

In considering the question of what the theology is pertaining to anything in the bible, Jesus's words or otherwise, I think on a lot ofit, there couldn't be said to be 'a' theology, in sense of being even fairly universally accepted. one can find any number of ways people have interpreted and thought to apply something from something like this, but I don't think we could call any of that, a theology.

I think its natural for human thought to often have difficulty discerning between such concepts as understanding, meaning, and interpretation, opinion.

This is especially so with what are sometimes called 'the hard sayings'. Early reference to Jesus' sayings often called them 'the secret sayings of Jesus', not that they were kept secret, people not allowed to hear them, but that it was understood there were levels of deeper meaning below the obvious.

That Jesus didn't always say the same thing, seems to have said different even opposing things at different times....some of that, I think might be understood in the observation, Jesus didn't say the same thing to everyone. (this a point relevant to other scripture as well). I think it is common to miss, misunderstand, or misinterpret points when we neglect to consider who is speaking to whom and under what circumstance and conditions. I think there's a great deal of that in common Christian intepretation, assuming something said to someone in one sitiduation is taken to be applicable to any and everyone in all situations.

For some of what might be called 'the hard sayings', ones either no one seems to make 'fit' just right, that one can often find as many different interpretations as you have people in a room, yet none of them 'feel right', I have come to feel these are the sayings we might find most productive to mind for hidden gold. Now it may be so that some of these things in the text really weren't as Jesus said them, added by others, but, before assuming that, I've found it good to consider, maybe what is reallyt here just hasn't hit me yet. Or many of us. There are several such things in NT scripture especially I have been ready to snip out, throw away, as it made no sense to meand none else seemed to have a good interpretation either, but at some point something emerged fromwithin it that snapped the lightbulb on...I saw, understood something, that upon further reasonable test, held up well.

Jenell

Read through some of the threads on this board awhile...we have a hard time even explaining it to ourselves and each other, lol!

Jenell

ROFL @ Norm....I wonder if some bright, young research student could publish a scholarly study on the decline of RCC authority and disappearance of the full size passenger van.

Jenell

Norm, "withdrawal method" fits "interruptupting" natural consequences of the 'act'.....rythym "works" by not engaging in the "act" at certain times. Ie the farmer can choose not to plow the field, but once he's started plowing the field, he's gotta go ahead and plant the crop and tend the harvest,not waste the seed. and I see a signfificant 'if 'technical' difference there.

Jenell

Definitely! It was into a nerve and had been pretty rough this past week while I took antibiotics to prepare..It had been filled some years ago, some serious deterioration had gone on deep inside under the filling, not evident since I'd not had xrays in some years, until it broke through on one side, and hit the nerve, bringing on the immediate crisis..he was a bit concerned it bould break up, collapse, when he tried to pull it, for being pretty badly hollowed out inside, but it came out okay.. couple more I'd hoped he'd take care of, just need to come out, not far from crisis, but dentist didn't like that much trauma at once...And I think his was the best judgement, because by the time he got this one out, i was starting to have a pretty bad adrenaline/ephedra-like reaction as my body processed the anesthetic...either my body had changed or the anesthetic has over the years, never experienced anything like that..very unpleasant, and even now, 13 hours later, still feeling it....awful feeling. Muscles tensing up, bouts of hard shivering as if very cold, tho don't feel real cold, and just quivering inside.....painful, and I know I'm going to have some soreness in my muscles for a few days. And a sore tongue, lol, where I bit the side of it pretty hard a few times after, before I wised upand shoved gauze between the side of my tongue and my teeth until the numb wore off! But I know it uphill from here! i am thankfulI I have a real sweetheart of a dentist, very gentle and kind as well as efficient. And very considerate and understanding working with me having to try to manage these kinds of things as I can on a very limited income and budget.

Went well. Really feel so much better now...one was badly into a nerve....Pretty wiped out though. Headed for early bed time....nap, anyway.

Jenell

About to be off for to the dentist...can't put if off any longer...been on anti-biotics a week to get ready for today...at least 2 are going to have to come out. Mixed, ready to get it over and done, and dread....

Jenell

I can sure understand that.

Jenell

Paul, in your comments in the last post, response to Joseph, I'm just kind of thinking, perhaps this IS a matter you are, within yourself, personally ,struggling with at this point...no one else can give you,YOUR answers, that are the ones you seek, want, need.

Jenell

Thank you, Bill, for having walked a ways along the path with me. You've helped me learn and grow, been I feel a friend, and hope I've helped serve the same for you.

Godspeed on the next stretch of your path, the next leg of your journey! I trust the next place for you is ready and waiting for you now....

Jenell

And please, I hope none take me as criticizing, judging others, how others live and make choices. Just trying to honestly work toward the core, the heart of it. I know some of what I'm saying is to hit hard, not pulling the punch, but I have and am trying to hit myself as well as any other. Maybe more than any other.

Jenell

Joseph, understood, and agree. It is only ourselves, each of us, that we must address our judgments and efforts.

Yet also, do we each make up one of the cells of the entire body. As each cell does, is the whole body's well-being affected. That is at a different level of perception, perspective, we might say. Yet both interact and effect the other.

Jenell

I lived as a monk and had to renunciate family, name and all wordly possessions. It was a great experience, but others had to take care of me, I only had to concentrate on the spiritual. Now, I am comfortable with family and more than I need. I now have to manage the spiritual and matierial, which has helped me see the physical as spiritual or as science says everything is energy. I lived without anything in North Africa, Europe, Middle East and Asia. My heart was twisted when I had to beg in India for a week and poor people gave me half of their daily ration of food. The Muslims in Iran during their revolution protected me and in Morrocco during Ramadan fed and gave me shelter. I feel without money I communicated with a certain population and now with possessions I can reach a different population, but I feel with or without I must use my resources to expand love, service and understanding................so I may expand also in those domains.

And yet, as you say, others took care of you. Your needs WERE met through others. Even those poor, for whom, unlike yourself, it wasn't by their volunatry choice, shared what little they had with you. You were cared for. Made it. Even when without money, you had resources. Options.

That many do not. And do not survive. Your own experience did not take you to where they are, and where they live every day, without choice or option.

Jenell

George wrote: We have a different worldview. I think there is a moral imperative, whether Jesus said it or not, for the comfortable to help the distressed.

But out of what does that moral imperative arise? From whence does it come? And what really IS that "moral imperative" we speak of?

Is it that we are supposed to accumulate the abundance that we can, even when it is coming to us at the expence of others, and then should be willing to dole back to those at whose expense it came, some small portion of it that they might at least survive?

Jenell

Joseph wrote: The world to me is not broken. Yes, it is evolving as are we all, and even in the hunger and lack that appears present, it is to me as designed a perfect self regulating system. Now that is hard to accept when you look at pictures such as you have posted but nevertheless that is the way it is.

Maybe it's not broken, but functioning just as intended for our learning what we need to learn.

As (sorry, can't recall the SA Catholic preist (?) that said it, but..."Why is it that when I feed the poor, I'm called a saint. But when I ask why they are poor, I'm called a Communist?"

Jenell

"By the way, while we are on this subject, I don't think anyone has brought up the fish metaphor: "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime."

That assumes there is a place to fish available, and that all the fish haven't been killed off by others' greed or carelessness.

That's a whole lot of the problem trying to apply it to the difficult situations many are in. Talking about better job training doesn't do dip-poop when there's still fewer jobs available than people seeking and willing to work them. What kind of new fishing trick do you teach people that have become too sick and disabled to work, often from the effects of the very work they've appliied themselves to most of their lives, in a system in which health care access in through work at gainful employment and an above median average income? What kind of new fishing trick do you teach people who live in such as sub-Saharan Africa, where climate change is being felt as the Sarahan desert is at an unprecedented rate swallowing up the once pastoral lands that once supported the people's simple subsistance lifestyle?

I'm also really hanging up on this "should" thing.....I don't think that's really "where it is" in these matters. Or, where it "should" be, lol.

Why is it that I never catch my spelling/grammar errors and typos when I go over my post before submitting it, and have to come back and edit it? Usually, multiple times?

And maybe the key to the answers in all of the questions above are to be found in the answer to that very last question I posed, just above this....that we are all so caught up in getting all done with what we are trying to get done before we forget what it is we are supposed to be doing that we don't pay enough attention to the little details until after we sit back and look at what we've done.

Jenell

Btw, "giving money away" isn't the only way wealth can be used to help others, make the world better. Using it ways that create jobs, or ust make things a little better for everybody or some people...that, too, I think is giving, or using that power, in positive ways.

Yvonne, I agree. Also, I know I am quite hesitant, even cynical, about how much of money donated really goes to benefit those the giver intended it for. Bluntly, "Charities" provide a comfortable income and lifestyle for a lot of people that operate them. And a lot of the money and goods poured into poverty and disaster stricken regions ends up in the hands of political and military leaders' pockets, even funding armies that are killing the people, instead of ever getting to the people intended.

Jenell

Maybe it is a question of power. Perhaps what schindler was confronting wasn't compassion, or just compassion, but his feeling of failing a test of his power? He held that choice, to choose pardon, and didn't? The Emporor was 'justified' in having the thief killed. Schindler was 'justified', but the condtions in Germany, to do as most did, don't get involved, don't risk trouble, don't give away the "power" of all you wealth, to save people seen as worthless....in the end, as he looked around at what he still had, and at the people he had saved,he was realizing he had placed others he had not saved as worth less than the material wealth he had hung onto.

Our culture, our society, "good responsible economic sense", tell us it is justified, right, to build ever more barns to store our wealth, where moth and rust destroy (how many lost so much in stock market crash, corporate bankrupcies, investment managment schemes and scandals?) rather than use more to do more that would benefit many more? But we are not only justified in valuing stored wealth more than other humans, we are "irresponsible" if we don't!

We've even stopped calling greed, greed. To strive to have as much more than you need or can even ever use has become a measure of personal worth, respected and admired, not only in cruel dictatorships but our own corporate capitalists system and society.

I don't know where, or even if there is any, 'right balance' in accumulated wealth vs using wealth as a power, a tool, for some better cause. I have also seen, personally known, people so obsessed with accumulating wealth, they lived in a self imposed poverty, and, of course, thoswe that live extravagantly that are miserable. I do think there is, I guess the word is virtue, in being thnakfyll, letting oneself enjoy the good that they have. I don't think it 'bad' for someone to enjoy more expensive things, like expensive restaurants, vacations to Hawaii. I don't think they should feel 'guilty' about it. Not at all.

But then I see people that have spent and spent so much nothing is enjoyed anymore....its never enough. Maybe that's part of the lessons of wealth, to learn what is important by finding out you can't buy it? Some of the wealthiest people I've known that were very happy actually lived very simply.

In our world, money IS power. Wealth IS power. Power itself is neither good nor bad. It's just power. For whatever purpose it is turned toward.

jenell

THANKS!

Do you also see the connection, the relationship, to what Schindler confront in himself in that final scene? He had the power to save lives, to grant them that pardon, and didn't use it? At least, as fully as he felt he could have?

Jenell

And Paul, some of us are on different roads in another sense...again, we have different things to learn in different ways...it may be that not everyone is going to travel the road to compassion. Whether at this point in their life, or even ever in their life. Maybe theirs is something else. Humility. Acceptance. Courage. Faithfulness. Maybe wealth offers us some very different opportunities to learn something than poverty. That can only be learned on that road.

There was also another deeply impacting scene earlier in Schindler's List, that it took a awhile for me to realize its connection to that final scene. When the cruel comandant was told, I can't remember the exact words, but along the line of, the greatest challenge of power one could meet was told hold the power of life or death over others, and not use it. At the time it was said, it seemed to mean, to have the power to choose to kill others, but not kill them, was the challenge. And of course the slimey comandant laughed it off, promptly ordered some more to be killed or something like that.

But in the final scene, Schindler was confronting he had the power of life and death over others, to save more lives, and didn't use it.

i truly think Schindler's List marked a point of a rather dramtic 'enlightenment' that Steven Speilburg had experienced.

Jenell