I'd like to see your take on whether one can be a true Christian without taking everything in the bible literally
One cannot be a good Christian and take "the Bible" literally, for that would involve them not only in gross contradictions, but also in questioning the Word of God Incarnate. Jesus was fond of asking us riddles, and the biggest riddle he asked is this: while He and His disciples were everlastingly breaking the Jewish Law, especially on the matter of the Sabbath, and indeed delivering teachings that directly contradicted "Moses" word for word (e.g. the prohibition of divorce, which "Moses" allowed - in fact, Christianity is to the best of my knowledge the only religion in the world to forbid divorce altogether), at the same time He insisted that "not a comma or an accent of the Law will be changed". Unless you deal with these issues, and with hundreds like those which the Scriptures ask us every day of the week, you are not a Christian, but an idiot who is trying to believe two contradictory things. When St.Paul said that "all Scripture is inspired by God," he immediately underlined the limits of this statement by saying "and is useful for refuting error, guiding people's lives and teaching them to be upright." This does not suggest that "Scripture" is, as Muslims regard the Qur'an or Hindus the Vedas, the literal word of God existing in God's own form of existence, and revealed to men; indeed, in Christian thought, it cannot be, for we have another Word of God revealed to us - not a book, but a Person. The very word "inspired" should be translated, in my view, roughly like this: "All our sacred writings testify to the impact of the Divine Presence on living human minds". That is, they are not dictated by God, but the result of human reaction to the presence of God; as indeed is the whole New Testament. In our religion, the Word of God never wrote a line that is preserved as He would have written it; the only time we read of His writing anything, it is in the story of the woman caught in adultery, and there He was writing in the sand - nor does the text tell us what He wrote. And this too, if you will, is a paradox; another one of those riddles that Jesus asks of us, and that demand the use of our minds to answer.
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Date: 2005-05-17 09:00 am (UTC)One cannot be a good Christian and take "the Bible" literally, for that would involve them not only in gross contradictions, but also in questioning the Word of God Incarnate. Jesus was fond of asking us riddles, and the biggest riddle he asked is this: while He and His disciples were everlastingly breaking the Jewish Law, especially on the matter of the Sabbath, and indeed delivering teachings that directly contradicted "Moses" word for word (e.g. the prohibition of divorce, which "Moses" allowed - in fact, Christianity is to the best of my knowledge the only religion in the world to forbid divorce altogether), at the same time He insisted that "not a comma or an accent of the Law will be changed". Unless you deal with these issues, and with hundreds like those which the Scriptures ask us every day of the week, you are not a Christian, but an idiot who is trying to believe two contradictory things. When St.Paul said that "all Scripture is inspired by God," he immediately underlined the limits of this statement by saying "and is useful for refuting error, guiding people's lives and teaching them to be upright." This does not suggest that "Scripture" is, as Muslims regard the Qur'an or Hindus the Vedas, the literal word of God existing in God's own form of existence, and revealed to men; indeed, in Christian thought, it cannot be, for we have another Word of God revealed to us - not a book, but a Person. The very word "inspired" should be translated, in my view, roughly like this: "All our sacred writings testify to the impact of the Divine Presence on living human minds". That is, they are not dictated by God, but the result of human reaction to the presence of God; as indeed is the whole New Testament. In our religion, the Word of God never wrote a line that is preserved as He would have written it; the only time we read of His writing anything, it is in the story of the woman caught in adultery, and there He was writing in the sand - nor does the text tell us what He wrote. And this too, if you will, is a paradox; another one of those riddles that Jesus asks of us, and that demand the use of our minds to answer.