Burl

Please explain your conception of God so I can answer.

Burl's easy-peasy church reform program: 1) Eliminate the corporate church and give divide the assets between the congregations. 2) Eliminate appointments and have each congregation select their own leadership. 3) Leave everything else up to God.

Dude! These are awesome! I was only familiar with the cheap plastic ones, and I have to buy a wedding gift for an old friend who is getting married at 66 and lives in a Brooklyn apartment. These are perfect!

". . . his and like minded reformations . . . is exactly what I meant by Spongishness. Not Spong personally, but his general direction. Personally, I find rejection of traditional Christianity to be divisive and lazy. It is simply modernized iconoclasm, and throws the baby out with the bathwater. I prefer restoring misplaced meaning to symbols, rites and rituals. That leads to a deepening of faith and understanding between denominations and sects. Read Baylor's Phillip Jenkins for background on world christianity. His classic 'The Next Christendom' is becoming dated, though.

Absolutely. It's more than just learning from each other. Prayerfully done it is worship. I think you are right that Spongishness is generally positive, but this really impacts only educated, high IQ Western Christians with an interest in systematic theology. An elite minority. It often feeds an intellectual class which looks down on everyday Christians as superstitious and ignorant. The vast majority of growth in Christianity is in the southern hemisphere and is pentecostal in orientation. I venture that 98% of world Christianity could not describe the differences between a Spong and a spork.

You were sort of wrong. You clearly stated self-identification and not theological correctness. Begging the True Scotsman fallacy is not even wrong. It does not apply to hypocrisy.

No. I clearly referenced theological Islam, which is not the same thing as self-identifying as muslim.

I thought I might have been wrong once, but I was mistaken.

Correct. The point is that warfare such as this is NOT fair and reasonable anymore, and has not been for millenia. It is a direct refutation of the "God is on our side" justification.

Job is wisdom literature. A fictional morality tale. Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes is fictional, but it is also true. True, but not factual. Literature is often like that. You should read it. Considering how the story is so widely referred to in Western culture a familiarity with Job should be part of every educated person's basic fund of knowledge.

Welcome!

Yes, lovely. Reminded me of when I went to the MLK museum and saw his worn and annotated bible next to his preaching robe. It's amazing what one small man wielding a bible can do.

The Book of Job makes it clear that we will never think of God correctly. We can visualize some woo woo concept or visualize an old man named Howard. We are going to be wrong whatever visualization we pick.

I'm pretty sure Joshua was the only person to have engaged in holy war in the academic biblical sense of the term. Yahweh did approve and assist in many battles, but they were not holy war. I think it is well evidenced that ISIS are mercenaries who are not adverse to murdering muslims. This alone puts them well outside of theological Islam.

Welcome!

Slaves are spoils, and that was not allowed. They could take captives as wives, but the women must agree and be given time to mourn their dead. Generally the rule in holy war was complete destruction. PS: I am hitting my max posts/day quota again so I may have to take a day off.

Interesting essay on holy war http://reannotated.blogspot.com/2007/11/thou-shalt-utterly-destroy-them-joshua.html

http://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionaries/bakers-evangelical-dictionary/war-holy-war.html

Holy War describes war declared by God through a prophet and not by a tribal leader or priest. Today we have wars, police actions, green revolutions, coups, civil wars, etc. This the same logic. I'll try to look into it a little deeper over the weekend. Maybe you could be more like Tariki and do some research on your own to bring to the discussion too.

Good one. One needs to be careful not to bring in our modern humanist ideas to ancient culture. Ethics were centered around the tribe and not the individual.

It's not a stretch. It is technical jargon. There were no "peaceful" people in those days, and warfare was the standard relationship between peoples. The idea of "peaceful coexistence" didn't really exist until the Romans came and established a professional soldering class. Reference: Waltke, Bruce K., Yu, Charles. "An Old Testament Theology". Zondervan:Michigan. 2007

Did that ever happen?

Correct. Kindle does not let you type a colon or semicolon followed by a right paren? I think we may need to declare a holy war on Amazon!

'Holy War' is a specific term used by Bible scholars. If booty is allowed, it is not Holy War in the biblical sense.

Good catch. Sometimes I get a bit sloppy in my posts.