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Archibald

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  1. I am a biblical Christian. I was brought up Presbyterian and remain so. I taught Bible in a Christian university in Japan. In the course of my teaching and experience, I became convinced that the basic message of the Bible is the Oneness of God. The biblical concept of God began in the midst of a polytheistic culture as one among many, with the presupposition that God is defined by power, my (our) God can beat up your God. In an evolutionary historical process the people of Israel's conception of God (at least that of the minority elites) came to define deity more in terms of compassion and mercy than sheer power. The ethno- centric view gave way, in the minds of some at least, to the concept that Israel's God, though the One only Creator, and special deity of Israel, was nevertheless concerned for the nations. Jesus as a Jew started with the concept of exclusivism, sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but a Canaanite mother of a sick daughter helped him to an attitude adjustment. Jesus had a deep sense of being son of God (a title applied to all Israel in the OT), and told his disciples they also were children of this "father" who provided sun and rain for good and bad equally. Jesus was egalitarian, undiscriminating, and self giving for others. Paul interpreted the death of Jesus as Christ as the weakness of God, which overcomes worldly "power" and the foolishness of God, which is wiser than the wisdom of the world. The cross demonstrates that self-giving, inner persuasing rather than imposition of power from outside, is of the essence of Deity. Through the Bible and especially through Jesus I know God as compassionate, with a divine plan of reconciliation that embraces all creation. I am a universalist in the B. B. Warfield sense of the term, that "salvation" (whatever that means) is a gift of grace, and (unlike Warfield) that God embraces all within that grace, and not just those specially predestined. I'm a bible-believing Christian. I want to placard "Christian" and "Bible" in the sense I understand these terms, and join with as many others as possible to let it be known that there is another way to be a Bible Beliving Christian than that trumpeted by the war-mongering fundamentalist Christian Zionists who unconditionally support the state of Israel and urge the US establishment to prepare for Armageddon with nuclear weapons.
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