Hmmmm, what does GOD say about this, through Paul?

I found this very
interesting. . .


1 Corinthians Chapter 1:
Christ the Wisdom and Power of God

********18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are
perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.**********

19 For it is written:
"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate."

20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher
of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not
know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached
to save those who believe.

22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom,

******23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and
foolishness to Gentiles,*******

*****24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ
the power of God and the wisdom of God.*****

25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the
weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

*Phar Lap* wrote:

"The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a
barbaric idea based on a primitive concept of God that must be
dismissed."--Thesis Number 6 from The Twelve Theses: A Call for a New
Reformation


In May of 1998 when I posted on the Internet Twelve Theses for debate,
drawn from my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, I could not have
imagined the intensity of the response. The debate has been welcomed and
condemned, entered and avoided by countless numbers of people. The Theses
have been preached on positively and negatively in this diocese, at St.
Paul's Cathedral in London, in Australia, Canada, South Africa and New
Zealand. The most emotional response has come to Thesis Number 6 that has
to do with the interpretation of the cross and the role of Jesus in the
drama of salvation, where I have challenged the adequacy of the phrase:
"Jesus died for my sins."

That phrase has been used so often in Christian history that it has
achieved the status of a mantra. That is, it is repeated over and over
without explanation as if its meaning is self-evident. It does not lend
itself to questions or to debate. It is simply advanced again and again.
The Eucharist assumes it, many of our hymns reflect it. Yet to the modern
mind this phrase, when analyzed, is all but nonsensical.

Sometimes this sacred phrase is expanded to include what surely can only
be described as a fetish about the blood that Jesus shed on the cross. To
that "sacred" blood incredible power has been attributed. Christians have
gone so far as to talk about the cleansing effect of being washed in this
blood. One hymn that I endured twice during Holy Week proclaims that "God
on Thee Has Bled." The death of Jesus is said to have been something God
required: a ransom, a sacrifice offered to God, a payment demanded by God
for the sins of the world, the price required to achieve atonement, which
is the experience of being at one with God.

In my studies I have come to the conclusion that this language, "Jesus
died for my sins," is a violent distortion of the meaning of Jesus. It
offers me a God who is sadistic and bloodthirsty. A God whose will is
served by a human sacrifice is not a God I would ever be drawn to worship.
It is rather a grotesque idea. Yet this concept has become so normative in
the way that our faith story is told that many people seem to feel that if
this understanding of the saving work of Jesus is not accepted, then there
is nothing of substance left to Christianity.

I am convinced, however, that exactly the opposite is true. To me it is
obvious that unless we expose the barbaric quality of this ancient
interpretation of the meaning of Jesus' death and of the God who was said
to have required it and remove this spiritual monstrosity from the
Christian enterprise then Christianity has no future. I do not believe
that modern men and women will ever find appealing a God whose will is
served by the human sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

If Christianity requires this view of the meaning of Jesus' death, I, for
one would no longer choose this household of faith. But because of its
entrenched nature, passive opposition will never be effective. Indeed,
this idea must be agressively dislodged or nothing new and more appealing
will ever emerge. That is why the Christian Church today requires, I
believe, a new and mighty reformation that must not stop until it has
examined and reformulated the most basic core doctrines of the Christian
faith. The Reformation of the 16th Century stopped short of this task and
made, we see in retrospect, only cosmetic changes. This new reformation
must shake the very foundations of traditional Christian thinking. It will
inevitably create enormous fear and anxiety in conservative religious
circles and it will elicit the kind of anger that always arises when an
ultimate threat is posed to a dying belief system. But we must nonetheless
welcome it, for it offers the only chance that the faith of our fathers
and mothers will live to be the faith of our children and grandchildren.

The view of Jesus' death as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, in my
opinion, represents bad theology designed to accommodate the bad
anthropology on which it is based.

Human life was not created good only to fall into sin, necessitating a
divine rescue that culminated on the cross of Calvary, as the traditional
Christian myth asserts. Human life rather has evolved through millions of
years of evolutionary history leaving us not just incomplete, but
distorted by that struggle to survive. We are not fallen angels, but
emerging beings. We are a work in progress, constantly victimized by the
unfinished nature of our humanity. We cannot, therefore, be rescued by a
sacrificial death of one who was making the perfect offering to an
offended Deity designed to restore us to what we have never been. We must
rather be called by the gift of love to journey into a higher
consciousness, a new and more complete humanity. The savior figure cannot
be for us one who pays the price for the sins of our life. A savior for
our understanding of humanity must instead be one who is capable of
empowering us to grow beyond our limits, to escape our distorting fears,
our blinding prejudices and our killing stereotypes and to bring us to a
place where we discover the freedom to give our lives away in love to
others. The ultimate theological question driving the new reformation is
whether or not we can strip away from Jesus this traditional interpretive
explanation without destroying the experience that people had with this
Jesus that caused them to exclaim that in him the holiness of God had been
encountered.

To do this we have to set aside the mythological framework that has
captured Jesus. Virgin births and cosmic ascensions must be seen as
nothing more than pre-modern interpretive language. Walking on water and
feeding the 5000 with five loaves cannot be literal stories. Resurrection
understood as physical resuscitation will have to be seen as the late
developing tradition that it was. But once this mythological framework is
removed, Jesus does not disappear or simply become a good teacher, as many
seem to fear. Instead a Jesus emerges as a channel for transcendence, a
person at one with the source of life, the revealer of the source of love,
a new being who makes plain the Ground of all Being. He is a God presence,
not a mythological god-man; a complete human being who becomes the life
through which the full power of God's divine reality can emerge in human
history.

Instead of looking at literalized interpretive miracles, we must begin to
look rather at the one whose wholeness called his followers beyond the
limits of their tribal identity. The Jews, who thought Gentiles were unfit
for human relationships, felt compelled by who Jesus was to go into that
Gentile world to proclaim the Gospel, and they did. The religious purists
who were convinced that the Samaritans, the primary object of their
prejudice, were rejected by God and were therefore rejectable, were
transformed by this Jesus. He taught them that when Samaritans obey the
call of the Torah to be compassionate and caring, they are more fully
children of Abraham than are a priest and a Levite who were willing to
pass the victims of life by the other side of the road.

The strict keepers of the rules about who was clean and unclean were
confronted by a Jesus who embraced the leper, allowed the touch of the
woman with the chronic menstrual flow, and refused to judge the person
taken of adultery.

God was in this Christ. That was the experience which cried out for
explanation. Yet the explanations of history were couched in assumptions
we can no longer make. These assumptions were shaped by a world view that
we no longer share. They reflected an understanding of reality that is not
ours and a worship tradition that is foreign to our own.

First century Jewish-Christians understood Jesus' death after the analogy
of the Passover lamb, slaughtered to break open the power of death. Next
they viewed him as the new lamb of Yom Kippur, sacrificed to take away the
sins of the world. They were weaving around Jesus their liturgical symbols
of antiquity, but none of these symbols will work for us. Indeed, they are
repellant. So we must be prepared to lay them aside, to treat them as the
limited and ultimately falsifying explanations that they are. Jesus did
not die for our sins! Jesus was not a sacrifice offered to God to overcome
the fall that never happened. We are emerging creatures, not fallen
creatures. Jesus was not the embodiment of the theistic deity who visited
this planet in human disguise for a brief thirty years. Jesus was the one,
in whom the God who is present in the depths of life, emerged in human
history in a dramatic and complete new way. The task of the new
reformation is to separate Jesus from this distorting material and to
recast him in new images.

But we must never lose the experience. God was in Christ. The transcendent
power of life, the eternal fountain of love, the ineffable Ground of All
Being erupted in his whole and free humanity to call us into a new
consciousness. The call of this Christ is a call to move beyond the
evolutionary limits set by our quest for survival. The Holy Spirit of God
who was so present in Jesus, that people said that the Spirit actually
conceived him, is still his gift to give to each of us. We who are in
Christ can, like Christ, become God bearers in our world, new incarnations
of the eternal divine presence. We can reveal the source of life and love,
which calls us and others into the fullness of our being.

That is an avenue through which we can speak of Christ in our time, and
that is where the coming reformation might lead us. For the Christian
Church to cling to the literalized formulas of yesterday is nothing less
than to pursue the pathway of death. Abandoning those formulas to enter
the Christ experience anew is the hope of the future.

I pray for the arrival of this reformation, even though I recognize that
it will appear to many to be destroying what they think the Christian
faith is. We must not fear that, for it will also lead us to revival and
resurrection and give us the ability to sing the Lord's song in the third
millennium.

Let the Reformation begin.

(Spong)

--
<>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< ><> ><> ><>

<> ><> ><> ><> ><> ><>

Fellowship in Christ

Join us at Growing Deeper, for fun, "food" and fellowship! Let your
lights shine before men, that all may know we are of God, through Jesus
Christ, our Savior. http://www.acc-growing-deeper.de
<>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< ><> ><> ><>

<> ><> ><> ><> ><>

On Wed, 08 Oct 2003 04:02:41 GMT, "Denis Loubet" <dloubet@io.com>
wrote:

"Truth Hunter" <hunter77099@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:e164e783.0310071847.5e351f80@posting.google.com...

Read your Bible!


From his own wrath.

Right, so the Jesus character is there to save us from the god character,
yet we're supposed to believe they're both the SAME character.

It works for Tony Soprano, "Hey you, dat's a really nice soul youse
gots dere, would be's a shame should sometin happen tose it."

Richard Smol wrote:

How can god save mankind when he died? If he did not die, what
does it matter if he got hung up on a cross? It all doesn't make
sense.

He rose again, conquering once and for all, death and the power of it in
our lives. Yes, it takes FAITH to believe that.

From his own wrath.

Scaring me into belief won't work, really.

RS

Since perfect love casts out all fear, scaring people into belief
usually DOESN'T have any lasting effect. LOVING people to the truth,
however, DOES.

I am not a prophet of God. Therefore, using the fear-inspiring tactics
doesn't work for me. I do believe in God's wrath and hell, however. I
just don't think that by telling people they're going to hell if they
don't DO something works very well. Jesus as God in the flesh came to
us, loved us enough to DIE for us, and then rose again, the "first
fruits of those who have fallen asleep," according to Scripture, that we
might someday be like Him.

What's the requirement? Belief. "For God so loved the world that He gave
His only Begotten Son, that WHOSOEVER WOULD BELIEVE IN HIM WOULD BE
SAVED. For God did not send His Son into the world to CONDEMN the world,
but that the world through Him might be saved." John 3: 16 - 17.

It's pretty simple. Believe and be saved. God will and DOES, take care
of the rest.

Love in Jesus Christ,

Feather