The Christian Theology Education Thread

[coprolite]

In which @CarrbridgeSaintee explains what we don't understand.

The basic proposition from @Salt n Vinegar and myself is that there's so much contradictory stuff in the Bible that Christians can pick and choose what bits they like.  This is "not understanding Christian Theology" 

I would like to understand. 

Where would you like to start CS? The usual starting place would be the Council if Nicea i guess, although maybe some background from the Alexandrian Gnostic controversies could be interesting? 

 

 

[Florentine_Pogen]

 

[AUcal]

This is going to go well

[scottsdad]

I've read up quite a bit on medieval Scotland recenty. The thing I take from this is that (pre-Reformation) the Catholic church was not just a single, homogenous entity teaching the same stuff everywhere. You had religious orders moving about such as the Blackfriars, Whitefriars, Cistercians, Benedictines and so on. Add to this, each local church had its own local cults and saints. Dunfermline, for example, is strongly tied to the cult of St. Margaret. Elgin and Thomas Becket.

I have been examining pieces from churches that were damaged/destroyed in the Reformation (trying to see how they have degraded). Some timbers survived really very well, others not so much.

 

[tamthebam]

[welshbairn]

 

[Wee-Bey]

Richard Dawkins is currently logging on right now.

[MazzyStar]

[Melanius Mullarkey]

1 minute ago, Bodie said:

Richard Dawkins is currently logging on right now.

I hope he sprays afterwards and leaves the window open. 

[Melanius Mullarkey]

2 hours ago, scottsdad said:

I've read up quite a bit on medieval Scotland recenty. The thing I take from this is that (pre-Reformation) the Catholic church was not just a single, homogenous entity teaching the same stuff everywhere. You had religious orders moving about such as the Blackfriars, Whitefriars, Cistercians, Benedictines and so on. Add to this, each local church had its own local cults and saints. Dunfermline, for example, is strongly tied to the cult of St. Margaret. Elgin and Thomas Becket.

I have been examining pieces from churches that were damaged/destroyed in the Reformation (trying to see how they have degraded). Some timbers survived really very well, others not so much.

 

Plenty cults from Elgin tbf.

And Dunfermline. 

[MazzyStar]

4 minutes ago, Bodie said:

Richard Dawkins is currently logging on right now.

Close associate of a Mr J. Epstein, as were a number of “New Atheists”.  

[Florentine_Pogen]

3 minutes ago, MazzyStar said:

Close associate of a Mr J. Epstein, as were a number of “New Atheists”.  

One of my fave sculptors, 'Rock Drill' in particular............

[Aim Here]

3 hours ago, coprolite said:

In which @CarrbridgeSaintee explains what we don't understand.

The basic proposition from @Salt n Vinegar and myself is that there's so much contradictory stuff in the Bible that Christians can pick and choose what bits they like.  This is "not understanding Christian Theology"

I'd say that CarrbridgeSaintee might be right here. Christianity isn't a bible-based doctrine; rather the bible is a product of Christianity. Even the hardcore fundamentalist fractions that will swear blind that the bible is the inerrant word of God and claim that the bible is the sole source of theological authority have to surreptitiously add a bunch of dogma to their bible to make the ideas tenable even to themselves (like that Trinity nonsense, and the notion of sola scriptura or sola fide, and all sorts of bonkers rationalizations to the plainly contradictory stuff in there).

Besides, theology is as much determined by contemporaneous political considerations as anything, so bothering to "understand" it at a metaphysical level is is largely silly.

The Trinity is the dominant doctrine because it was the idea that Eastern Roman Christians supported, and the council of Nicaea took place in the Eastern Roman Empire, not because it makes any sense at all. The Arians tended to be in the west or outwith the empire entirely, so it was too much hassle to show up at the council where they hashed this stuff out. Protestant ideas of Sola Fide and Sola scriptura are just doctrines that allowed illiterate Northern European peasants to tell highly-educated Latin-speaking Catholic priests to go f**k themselves without fear of going to hell. The last two Scottish Presbyterian church schisms (they still have one about every 30 years on average) have been about petty micropolitical squabbles, not matters of actual doctrine.

 

 

[coprolite]

17 minutes ago, Florentine_Pogen said:

One of my fave sculptors, 'Rock Drill' in particular............

At a tangent to thos thread, i've been meaning to pop into Landaff Cathedral to look at his crucifixion for some time, but I'm a bit concerned about bursting into flames on entering the Church. 

[TxRover]

It’s fun to be reasonably knowledgeable on the Bible, because most zealots are not. Knocking them about on their own ground can be quite fun, but don’t make the mistake of trying this with certain groups that are pretty well up to speed. Best to generally focus on the Protestants, the Evangelicals and the Mormons (although you have to learn about the Book of Mormon to have fun there, because that’s a whole mess of contradictions). Catholics are, interestingly, usually pretty well informed, and the Jehovahs Witnesses are nearly universally knowledgeable.

Read a story on “Not Always Right”, a posting blog for customer service stories, and am posting it below:

“A while back, there was a religious anti-gay hate group that organized a protest at a queer-focused event near where I live. This group was less known than the one that likely sprang to your mind, but they had a rather similar MO. I was part of a counter-protest basically trying to keep the anti-gay folks from upsetting anyone at the event. I’m proud to say we outnumbered the anti-gay idiots by a decent amount.

At one point, a girl who I’ll guess was somewhere around fourteen or fifteen — though I’m terrible with judging kids’ ages, and at first, I thought her younger until I heard her speaking — showed up. She went up to the folks in the anti-gay group, all happy and cheerful at first, offering them something to eat and appearing to be quite kind to them. Then, she went and got a basket of smooth stones from an older woman, presumably her mother, and offered them to the protestors with great enthusiasm. Most appeared to turn her down, but one or two took the stones even as they looked confused as to why she was so insistent on their taking them.

I couldn’t hear their earlier conversation and could only see her interacting with them, but eventually, her voice got much louder, doing an admirable job projecting so we could hear her. She finally explained she was giving them the stones since they would need them to stone her to death!

Even with her projecting her voice, I struggled to make everything out until I got closer, and the crowd around me quieted down some to listen, so I missed out on some of the specifics of her early explanation.

From what I could piece together, she explained that as a younger girl she was repeatedly raped by someone which means, according to the Bible, she was supposed to be stoned to death. She stressed repeatedly that she was raped in a city since, apparently, that affects how she was supposed to be punished.

When the folks from the anti-gay protest balked at the suggestion that they were supposed to stone this tiny girl to death, she got in their face, daring them to do it.

Girl: “If you have to hate gays due to the Bible, then you have to hate and stone me, too. Any other choice would show that you’re using the Bible as an excuse to justify your hatred rather than hating because the Bible told you to.”

Protestor: “Well… it’s illegal to stone people.”

Girl: “You’re all just too cowardly to do what you think God wants from you out of fear of mortal authorities, unlike people in the Bible who would rather be thrown to the lions than renounce God.”

She then went back to her mother and came back with papers which she tried to hand to the protestors.

Girl: “These are invitations to my birthday party coming up so you can come to protest it and tell everyone how much God hates me like He supposedly hates gays. You can also tell them all how I’m destroying America if you aren’t pious enough to stone me properly as you should.”

I’m not all that religious, and some of the arguing about what the Bible actually said went out of my depth, to the point that I’m afraid I’ll likely remember part of this wrong, but I still need to stress that the girl came prepared with what seemed an intimate knowledge of the Bible and wasn’t afraid to cite it. For example, she quoted stuff about Latin being translated wrong, argued that a mere letter written by an apostle shouldn’t count as being a decree from God, and listed numerous examples of Jesus teaching forgiveness and how the pious should befriend sinners so they can be saved rather than ostracize them.

At one point, the protestors tried to claim that the stoning laws no longer applied, and the girl went into an even more intricate tangent about what Biblical laws, if any, stopped applying. I couldn’t possibly remember all of what she said, but the main point was that if the law supposedly saying you had to stone gay people applied, then the laws about stoning rape victims applied, too.

She went on like this for a while, and I wish I could remember the conversation well enough to repeat it because I feel like this little description is utterly failing to do her justice. She was fierce, never backed down, wasn’t afraid to talk bluntly about how she was raped and what it was like when they tried to talk around the subject, and constantly confronted them with the hypocrisy of their action by singling out only gay people to hate and ignoring all the other parts of the Bible while daring them to hate her for being raped “as they should”.

Despite all that, she didn’t say she hated them. She stressed she wanted to help them because, after all, Jesus taught her to try to befriend sinners like them so they could be saved. She was polite, despite never backing down, and constantly stressed that they could leave this group and find churches that understood Jesus’s message and weren’t “limited to only teaching the Old Testament”.

The part I remember most, though, was one of the folks who had accepted a stone from the girl before she explained why she was giving them. I could see him holding the stone as if it was a hot ember burning him. He was always looking around as if trying to figure out how to get rid of that stone in some way that wouldn’t be a clear admission of defeat to the fierce girl who had cornered him. It would have been comical if not for how serious the topics being discussed were.

I’m sorry for what happened to that girl as a child, but I can say that she, somehow, came through it still strong and apparently committed to taking the horrible experience and getting something good out of it. Frankly, despite not even knowing her name, I can’t tell you how much I admire that girl.”

[coprolite]

13 minutes ago, Aim Here said:

I'd say that CarrbridgeSaintee might be right here. Christianity isn't a bible-based doctrine; rather the bible is a product of Christianity. Even the hardcore fundamentalist fractions that will swear blind that the bible is the inerrant word of God and claim that the bible is the sole source of theological authority have to surreptitiously add a bunch of dogma to their bible to make the ideas tenable even to themselves (like that Trinity nonsense, and the notion of sola scriptura or sola fide, and all sorts of bonkers rationalizations to the plainly contradictory stuff in there).

Besides, theology is as much determined by contemporaneous political considerations as anything, so bothering to "understand" it at a metaphysical level is is largely silly.

The Trinity is the dominant doctrine because it was the idea that Eastern Roman Christians supported, and the council of Nicaea took place in the Eastern Roman Empire, not because it makes any sense at all. The Arians tended to be in the west or outwith the empire entirely, so it was too much hassle to show up at the council where they hashed this stuff out. Protestant ideas of Sola Fide and Sola scriptura are just doctrines that allowed illiterate Northern European peasants to tell highly-educated Latin-speaking Catholic priests to go f**k themselves without fear of going to hell. The last two Scottish Presbyterian church schisms (they still have one about every 30 years on average) have been about petty micropolitical squabbles, not matters of actual doctrine.

 

 

If i understand you correctly, you're saying it's not the bible that lets Christians make it up as they go along, it's the fact that the whole thing is made up with only a nod to the Bible? Is that right? 

[Aim Here]

2 minutes ago, coprolite said:

If i understand you correctly, you're saying it's not the bible that lets Christians make it up as they go along, it's the fact that the whole thing is made up with only a nod to the Bible? Is that right? 

Sortof. Christianity predates the bible, and various Christians have various ideas as to where their authority comes from. The major Christian sects go with the notion of apostolic authority and tradition - all those bishops and popes and patriarchs have been appointed by bishops who were appointed by people who go all the way back to Jesus and his disciples, and this has as much authority as the bible. There's a ton of other extra-biblical doctrines that go into what Christianity is, and most Christians belong to factions that don't even claim the bible is necessarily wholly true. It's merely 'divinely inspired' via (possibly) fallible human beings. It's a lot more complicated than 'the bible says X therefore that's Christian Theology'. Muslims and Mormons DO base their theology on a book that's written by God, but not so for Christians.

(And between the various Judeo-Christian canons, and the variations in the manuscript record, particularly for the New Testament, and then the errors in translation from the  original languages, 'what the bible says' is a huge can of worms in itself).

[coprolite]

2 minutes ago, Aim Here said:

Sortof. Christianity predates the bible, and various Christians have various ideas as to where their authority comes from. The major Christian sects go with the notion of apostolic authority and tradition - all those bishops and popes and patriarchs have been appointed by bishops who were appointed by people who go all the way back to Jesus and his disciples, and this has as much authority as the bible. There's a ton of other extra-biblical doctrines that go into what Christianity is, and most Christians belong to factions that don't even claim the bible is necessarily wholly true. It's merely 'divinely inspired' via (possibly) fallible human beings. It's a lot more complicated than 'the bible says X therefore that's Christian Theology'. Muslims and Mormons DO base their theology on a book that's written by God, but not so for Christians.

(And between the various Judeo-Christian canons, and the variations in the manuscript record, particularly for the New Testament, and then the errors in translation from the  original languages, 'what the bible says' is a huge can of worms in itself).

Right, with you. 

I'm not an expert on the various schisms but was one of the main points of presbyterianism (which is what was originally being discussed) that the Bible is a source of authority? 

When someone claims that they are prejudiced against a particular group because of their faith, is that simply an appeal to tradition? 

[TxRover]

10 minutes ago, Aim Here said:

Muslims and Mormons DO base their theology on a book that's written by God, but not so for Christians.

The fun bit for Muslims is the large number of "authorities" who can issue interpretations of what in meant or intended by the Koran. There is also the problem of mission creep in these fatwas. For instance, the original requirement that women outside the home be accompanied by an adult male relative goes back to a time of strife and banditry, so it wasnt as strange as it seems. However, this slowly expanded to anywhere outside the home vice when travelling away from home, and then became an active impediment.

[Billy Jean King]

1 hour ago, TxRover said:

It’s fun to be reasonably knowledgeable on the Bible, because most zealots are not. Knocking them about on their own ground can be quite fun, but don’t make the mistake of trying this with certain groups that are pretty well up to speed. Best to generally focus on the Protestants, the Evangelicals and the Mormons (although you have to learn about the Book of Mormon to have fun there, because that’s a whole mess of contradictions). Catholics are, interestingly, usually pretty well informed, and the Jehovahs Witnesses are nearly universally knowledgeable.

Read a story on “Not Always Right”, a posting blog for customer service stories, and am posting it below:

“A while back, there was a religious anti-gay hate group that organized a protest at a queer-focused event near where I live. This group was less known than the one that likely sprang to your mind, but they had a rather similar MO. I was part of a counter-protest basically trying to keep the anti-gay folks from upsetting anyone at the event. I’m proud to say we outnumbered the anti-gay idiots by a decent amount.

At one point, a girl who I’ll guess was somewhere around fourteen or fifteen — though I’m terrible with judging kids’ ages, and at first, I thought her younger until I heard her speaking — showed up. She went up to the folks in the anti-gay group, all happy and cheerful at first, offering them something to eat and appearing to be quite kind to them. Then, she went and got a basket of smooth stones from an older woman, presumably her mother, and offered them to the protestors with great enthusiasm. Most appeared to turn her down, but one or two took the stones even as they looked confused as to why she was so insistent on their taking them.

I couldn’t hear their earlier conversation and could only see her interacting with them, but eventually, her voice got much louder, doing an admirable job projecting so we could hear her. She finally explained she was giving them the stones since they would need them to stone her to death!

Even with her projecting her voice, I struggled to make everything out until I got closer, and the crowd around me quieted down some to listen, so I missed out on some of the specifics of her early explanation.

From what I could piece together, she explained that as a younger girl she was repeatedly raped by someone which means, according to the Bible, she was supposed to be stoned to death. She stressed repeatedly that she was raped in a city since, apparently, that affects how she was supposed to be punished.

When the folks from the anti-gay protest balked at the suggestion that they were supposed to stone this tiny girl to death, she got in their face, daring them to do it.

Girl: “If you have to hate gays due to the Bible, then you have to hate and stone me, too. Any other choice would show that you’re using the Bible as an excuse to justify your hatred rather than hating because the Bible told you to.”

Protestor: “Well… it’s illegal to stone people.”

Girl: “You’re all just too cowardly to do what you think God wants from you out of fear of mortal authorities, unlike people in the Bible who would rather be thrown to the lions than renounce God.”

She then went back to her mother and came back with papers which she tried to hand to the protestors.

Girl: “These are invitations to my birthday party coming up so you can come to protest it and tell everyone how much God hates me like He supposedly hates gays. You can also tell them all how I’m destroying America if you aren’t pious enough to stone me properly as you should.”

I’m not all that religious, and some of the arguing about what the Bible actually said went out of my depth, to the point that I’m afraid I’ll likely remember part of this wrong, but I still need to stress that the girl came prepared with what seemed an intimate knowledge of the Bible and wasn’t afraid to cite it. For example, she quoted stuff about Latin being translated wrong, argued that a mere letter written by an apostle shouldn’t count as being a decree from God, and listed numerous examples of Jesus teaching forgiveness and how the pious should befriend sinners so they can be saved rather than ostracize them.

At one point, the protestors tried to claim that the stoning laws no longer applied, and the girl went into an even more intricate tangent about what Biblical laws, if any, stopped applying. I couldn’t possibly remember all of what she said, but the main point was that if the law supposedly saying you had to stone gay people applied, then the laws about stoning rape victims applied, too.

She went on like this for a while, and I wish I could remember the conversation well enough to repeat it because I feel like this little description is utterly failing to do her justice. She was fierce, never backed down, wasn’t afraid to talk bluntly about how she was raped and what it was like when they tried to talk around the subject, and constantly confronted them with the hypocrisy of their action by singling out only gay people to hate and ignoring all the other parts of the Bible while daring them to hate her for being raped “as they should”.

Despite all that, she didn’t say she hated them. She stressed she wanted to help them because, after all, Jesus taught her to try to befriend sinners like them so they could be saved. She was polite, despite never backing down, and constantly stressed that they could leave this group and find churches that understood Jesus’s message and weren’t “limited to only teaching the Old Testament”.

The part I remember most, though, was one of the folks who had accepted a stone from the girl before she explained why she was giving them. I could see him holding the stone as if it was a hot ember burning him. He was always looking around as if trying to figure out how to get rid of that stone in some way that wouldn’t be a clear admission of defeat to the fierce girl who had cornered him. It would have been comical if not for how serious the topics being discussed were.

I’m sorry for what happened to that girl as a child, but I can say that she, somehow, came through it still strong and apparently committed to taking the horrible experience and getting something good out of it. Frankly, despite not even knowing her name, I can’t tell you how much I admire that girl.”

The city ? I always thought Kate came from the Islands