10-31-2020, 09:34 AM
This is cross posted from my blog here: Two Ways Christianity Could Be Better.
1. Removing delineations between the Old and New Testaments.
A good reason for the removal of the Old and New Testaments as categories or delineations has two parts. The first is superficial: God’s revelation and dealings with men are neither old nor new, but looking at the writings from a high level, those dealings are spotty but continuous throughout history. Calling these two related sections of writing “old” and “new” in most cases primes the mind towards regarding them as such, and whatever adjectives we normally ascribe to things that are “old” or “new” could erroneously spill over into the view of scripture.
I won’t get into the details here, but most people reading this could think of them. The results of abandoning the “old” and “new” descriptions aren’t so superficial, but it’s the second part of the reason. Thinking of whatever Jesus did as being “new” very heavily implies (and primes us, as I’ve stated) that His words and actions were separated improvement upon the “old” stuff. Though, Jesus was, in a very meaningful way, an embodiment of everything that came before, in those “old” parts of the Bible. Think of it this way: Jesus would have fit right in with the ancient Hebrew culture of the Old Testament, yet He very much did not fit in the New Testament culture, neither the pagan Roman empire nor the Jewish religious scholars of His day.
If the Bible really needs a bifurcation, another suggestion is to simply rename the two testaments: the Testament of Moses and the Israelites, and the Testament of Jesus and the Church. Not nearly as compact as the original names, but the “old” versus “new” is avoided.
At the very least, the gospels could be moved over to the Old Testament, with the Book of Acts starting off the New Testament. Bonus points if you rename the Bible as the “The Bible Collection” or some such, as the Bible is not really one book but a collection of 66 (73 in the Catholic version), of varying characters, events, themes, intentions, and audiences.
2. Ease up on the forgiveness talk.
It’s not that forgiveness itself is bad; we’re offered forgiveness straight from God Himself as a blessing as a result of repentance. The “repentance” spoken of in scripture uses the act of turning around to face the opposite way. The actual word was also used in the sense of changing the orientation of your attention about something. In either use of the word, it fits: repentance involves changing the direction of our lives and making a move towards God, and this flipping of one’s life script is the requirement for receiving forgiveness. The idea here is that we are unable to receive that forgiveness without facing God in the first place.
Consider the context when the Bible talks so much about forgiveness. That God forgives us was an answer to a question on the mind of Jesus’ contemporaries, and for some time after: how are we, as gentiles who cannot access God in the same way in the times of Moses or Levite priests, going to get right with God? His—and Paul’s answer—was to not worry so much about it. God had already built that bridge. We just need to simply walk across, where the real battle starts on the other end of the bridge. The psychology of folks who are perpetually thinking they require new waves of forgiveness is really in question, though I realize that’s the philosophical heritage under which we in the religious west live. If there’s going to be talk of “progress” as a whole within the church, this is the type to address. We’re not going to graduate from milk to meat if we’re still holding onto the bottle.
1. Removing delineations between the Old and New Testaments.
A good reason for the removal of the Old and New Testaments as categories or delineations has two parts. The first is superficial: God’s revelation and dealings with men are neither old nor new, but looking at the writings from a high level, those dealings are spotty but continuous throughout history. Calling these two related sections of writing “old” and “new” in most cases primes the mind towards regarding them as such, and whatever adjectives we normally ascribe to things that are “old” or “new” could erroneously spill over into the view of scripture.
I won’t get into the details here, but most people reading this could think of them. The results of abandoning the “old” and “new” descriptions aren’t so superficial, but it’s the second part of the reason. Thinking of whatever Jesus did as being “new” very heavily implies (and primes us, as I’ve stated) that His words and actions were separated improvement upon the “old” stuff. Though, Jesus was, in a very meaningful way, an embodiment of everything that came before, in those “old” parts of the Bible. Think of it this way: Jesus would have fit right in with the ancient Hebrew culture of the Old Testament, yet He very much did not fit in the New Testament culture, neither the pagan Roman empire nor the Jewish religious scholars of His day.
If the Bible really needs a bifurcation, another suggestion is to simply rename the two testaments: the Testament of Moses and the Israelites, and the Testament of Jesus and the Church. Not nearly as compact as the original names, but the “old” versus “new” is avoided.
At the very least, the gospels could be moved over to the Old Testament, with the Book of Acts starting off the New Testament. Bonus points if you rename the Bible as the “The Bible Collection” or some such, as the Bible is not really one book but a collection of 66 (73 in the Catholic version), of varying characters, events, themes, intentions, and audiences.
2. Ease up on the forgiveness talk.
It’s not that forgiveness itself is bad; we’re offered forgiveness straight from God Himself as a blessing as a result of repentance. The “repentance” spoken of in scripture uses the act of turning around to face the opposite way. The actual word was also used in the sense of changing the orientation of your attention about something. In either use of the word, it fits: repentance involves changing the direction of our lives and making a move towards God, and this flipping of one’s life script is the requirement for receiving forgiveness. The idea here is that we are unable to receive that forgiveness without facing God in the first place.
Consider the context when the Bible talks so much about forgiveness. That God forgives us was an answer to a question on the mind of Jesus’ contemporaries, and for some time after: how are we, as gentiles who cannot access God in the same way in the times of Moses or Levite priests, going to get right with God? His—and Paul’s answer—was to not worry so much about it. God had already built that bridge. We just need to simply walk across, where the real battle starts on the other end of the bridge. The psychology of folks who are perpetually thinking they require new waves of forgiveness is really in question, though I realize that’s the philosophical heritage under which we in the religious west live. If there’s going to be talk of “progress” as a whole within the church, this is the type to address. We’re not going to graduate from milk to meat if we’re still holding onto the bottle.
