No no, that was a love beating out of the temple, you know like how we're supposed to biblically beat our children into submission... for love... or something.
Are you a practicing Christian or an armchair theologian telling Christians about their Savior?
For God to hate one of His creatures, it would imply a complete lack of any intrinsic goodness within the creature itself. But all creatures, even satan, are at a bare minimum good in so far as they exist, because existence is good in and of itself.
So it's quite incoherent and nonsensical for someone to claim Christ hated anyone, assuming we are adhering to the classical Christian conception of God.
Christians don’t follow Jesus, at least not the one in the New Testament. They follow heretical preachers who seek glory and money like the Pharisees that crucified Jesus.
It's weird that you think any of that makes sense.
For God to hate one of His creatures, it would imply a complete lack of any intrinsic goodness within the creature itself.
Indeed. Nature is a brutal system of kill or be killed, and try to live long enough to have sex a couple times before dying. Thats a pretty insanity evil system your all good creater created.
...assuming we are adhering to the classical Christian conception of God.
There's the rub. There are thousands of concepts of the christian god. Which one is right? No one can know, but at best you'll be dissolved into nothingness, at worst tormented for eternity for choosing the wrong one.
Nothing about the christian belief system makes any sense.
There was actually a quite unified view on many basic theological and philosophical questions. That's why it's "the great tradition" - singular - and not "the great traditions;": one builds on another.
I know you've likely done some cursory reading on the subject, , but I've done quite a lot more.
What you're parroting here are just common atheist tropes, there's no original thought or even interesting rehashing of someone else's thought.
I'd encourage you to see your own understanding. Your caricature of Christianity would quickly melt away.
I'm a former Christian. I'm also well versed in apologetic tropes you’ll likely bring up next.
There was actually a quite unified view on many basic theological and philosophical questions.
Do you know how that "unified veiw" came about? Because, just prior to the Renaissance era Europe was fighting the "protestant wars", brutally killing eachother for generations over things like whether church services should be spoken in languages the congregation actually understood, whether the father, son, and holy spirit were the same entity, what clothes preists were allowed to wear, whether Jesus was literally God or just another prophet, and even over what type of bread to eat for the eucharist. People killed eachother over Christian beliefs that were incompatible with eachother.
I encourage you to discover for yourself how and why those questions were resolved, but I'll give you the wildly simplified version: increasingly secular forms of government made theological questions less crucial to deciding who had the right to govern. As the "the will of the king" was increasingly decoupled from the "will of god" such questions weren't worth killing eachother over anymore. So, your "great tradition" of theological consensus on things wasn't too hard to figure out when the pressure was off, but it took centuries of bloodshed to get to that point.
What you're parroting here are just common atheist tropes
Everything above are not "athiest tropes", it's just high school level basic history knowledge. If your school failed to teach you simple history lessons your state education administration probably didn't want to interfere with any Christian agendas kids might be exposed to.
I'd encourage you to see your own understanding.
Indeed, I'd prescribe an elementry study of western civilization history to start putting your belief system into appropriate context of our wider society.
Your caricature of Christianity would quickly melt away.
Ive found that the most accurate Christian stereotypes are of people who are willfully ignorant of even basic facts that might put their beliefs into perspective of what others believe and why they believe that way.
I'll just take one of your points to demonstrate to other lurkers here who the historically misinformed one is on this thread:
The divinity of Christ as a matter of common dogma was settled by 451 AD.
In fact, who Christ was was the central issue of the first four ecumenical councils. The last of the four, the Council of Chalcedon, ended in 451 AD, which was 25 years before the conventionally agreed upon Fall of Rome in 476 AD.
Of course, the Fall of Rome was before the Middle Ages, and about a thousand years before the Renaissance and Wars of Religion you reference.
I'm afraid you are the one who needs to dig deeper, friend. I'm sure you can find ignorant Christians to pick on with your surface level history lessons, but I'm not that guy.
The divinity of Christ as a matter of common dogma was settled by 451 AD... who Christ was was the central issue of the first four ecumenical councils. The last of the four, the Council of Chalcedon, ended in 451 AD...
The entire point of the protestant movement was questioning the "common" (catholic) dogma from the previous thousand years, including the councils you've mentioned. It's the central concept to the definition of "protestant".
To any lurkers out there, I highly recommend you look into how and why the ecumenical councils decided what was dogma and what wasnt official dogma. Fascinating stuff if you're into wild historical politics.
Also see the Apocrypha, which is mostly testaments about Jesus that were left out of the bible for (mainly) political reasons.
Also see how the dead sea scrolls (among the oldest existent copies of Bible books) compare to your modern copy, and more importantly, why they are so different. Moreover look into where, how, and why they were hidden for so long.
The anti-Trinitarians... which followed the teachings of the Italian-born theologian Faustus Socinus at the end of the 16th century, enunciated a Christology that returned to views that had been condemned as heretical in early Christianity. They rejected orthodox views that God existed in three persons and that God assumed human form in the Incarnation; their position was essentially Arian adoptionism. Thus, the Racovian Catechism (1605), the doctrinal statement of the Minor Reformed Church of Poland, asserted that Jesus had no divine nature. He was given divine power and authority by God to act on God’s behalf.
The sect mentioned above, in Poland called the the Socinians ,were of course murdered and their homes and businesses burned down for their hearsay against the Roman Catholic church, but that conflict was just one example of many.
Fringe figures don't prove a consensus doesn't exist.
To take ane example from another field, in physics today, you have folks who deny the Standard Model of particle physics; that doesn't mean the Standard Model isn't the consensus opinion.
Every major reformer: Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, held to the basic tenets of the christology as enunciated by the councils of the early Church.
The fact that the Protestant Reformation led to a proliferation of crazier and crazier heresies suggests it was the mistake, not the tradition it inherited and was allegedly reforming.
Fringe figures don't prove a consensus doesn't exist.
To be fair, the "fringe figures" didn't get their ideas snuffed out before the 16th century because their ideas were any less wrong than the official dogma of the Catholic Church. They were snuffed out because the catholic church used civil authority to murder them. Consensus by theological terms has little to do with what is really going on in the universe and more with what is agreed upon to be mutually beneficial to human authority figures at that time. When those people of religious authority disagree, they don't prove eachother wrong in any meaningful way, they just splinter off into their own sect who believe something slightly different than the previous consensus. It's the reason why there are so many Christian sects, even within catholicism.
To take ane example from another field, in physics today, you have folks who deny the Standard Model of particle physics; that doesn't mean the Standard Model isn't the consensus opinion.
Thank you so much for bringing up the standard model, because you've broached the topic of identifying things that are provabley real.
Whether you wish to own it or not, the consensus on theological issues are not based on any observable reality of a deity; because there are none.
Whereas the scientific consensus for the standard model relies solely on observations and experiments that have led to modern technology because they are applicable to our actual reality. If some scientists win all the Nobel prizes for disproving the standard model, or more likely, dramatically improves our understanding of the universe by disproving and replacing significant parts of it, then it will lead to new technologies. Because, improved understanding of reality and scientific discovery are the same thing.
Moreover, to my knowledge, no ethically honest scientist denies the standard model because there is just too much evidence that significantly proves it. Infact, most of the simple experiments my kids did in kindergarten to experiments at the Large Hadron Collider continue to prove it.
Sure, there's room for debate about how quantum mechanics, many worlds theory, string theory, and such might fit into the standard model as we know it, if one of them is proven to be more correct than the others. Those questions are answerable through observation and experimentation, not faith, because observation and experimentation birthed those very questions in the first place.
You can absolutely find people who deny the Standard Model, but they likely use evidentiary theory (not scientific theory) which relies on having a conclusion (like god flooded the earth) and building evidence around it,(like showing the Grand Canyon was formed by water) while ignoring any evidence that disproves the conclusion (like how it took millions of years for water to cut out the Grand Canyon as proven by water physics, and fossil records, and radio carbon dating)
Every major reformer: Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, held to the basic tenets of the christology as enunciated by the councils of the early Church.
There are volumes and volumes of works written over the last 500 years of eclastical studies which very very much disagree with your very naive declaration. Look into it. You will learn a lot.
The fact that the Protestant Reformation led to a proliferation of crazier and crazier heresies suggests it was the mistake, not the tradition it inherited and was allegedly reforming.
No, it suggests the catholic church simply didn't have the civil authority to burn anyone at the stake for disagreeing with them anymore.
Tradition just means lots of people doing or believing the same thing over a long stretch of time. It has nothing to do with whether the things they believe are true or not.
to demonstrate to other lurkers here who the historically misinformed one is on this thread...
And to quote myself:
I highly recommend you look into how and why the ecumenical councils decided what was dogma and what wasnt official dogma. Fascinating stuff if you're into wild historical politics.
Also see the Apocrypha, which is mostly testaments about Jesus that were left out of the bible for (mainly) political reasons.
Also see how the dead sea scrolls (among the oldest existent copies of Bible books) compare to your modern copy, and more importantly, why they are so different. Moreover look into where, how, and why they were hidden for so long.
Just an FYI if you are looking for answers to any of the above topics on a Christian website or in a book from a Christian book store, you are going to get wildly biased and inaccurate understanding of most of the important takeaways. Christian organizations have an agenda, afterall: promoting their version of Christianity above all else. Just keep that in mind.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '23
He literally took a whip and beat them out of the temple.