How do agnostics live? (Introduction)

by Mark , Thursday, June 19, 2008, 16:27 (5784 days ago) @ dhw

Part 2 of Reply to dhw post of Monday, June 16, 2008, 08:39

dhw: "Are Christians superhuman? If you did something of which you thought God disapproved, would you be happy?..."
I am not saying that there is no reward or satisfaction from loving God. I am saying that our love for God is not what elicits God's love for us. A child should not feel that his parents' love depends on how much he pleases them. A good parent will love a child whether or not that child behaves in a way that pleases. Christians are not superhuman, but they believe that the path to becoming fully human is the way of the cross: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, and the gospel's will save it." Mark 8:34,35 - dhw: "Will he love us even if we break his moral code and fail to repent of our sins?..."
God loves us ... full stop. However, the basic human problem is self-centredness, or sin. God offers us the way out of this, through Jesus Christ. However, since his way with us is love, he cannot force us. If he did then it would not be love, either from God to us, or from us to God, and we would be a very different kind of being, certainly not made in the image of God. There is therefore not an inevitable contradiction between God's judgement and his love. Judgement is what we bring on ourselves if we continue to refuse God. Alongside that must be put God's infinite patience. - You refer to the stories of Noah, Sodom & Gomorrah and John 3:18. This raises the issue of how to read the Bible, which could itself fill several threads. I'll just make a few points. 
1. For a Christian, the Old Testament can be taken as only a partial and preliminary revelation of God. It still stands as Scripture, but it is not the whole story. 
2. I do not take all such OT stories as historical fact. The Bible doesn't claim to be an inerrant piece of history in the sense in which we now understand history. The literature of the Bible has to be understood with sensitivity to its genre and provenance. 
3. The Bible is a collection of writings upheld as Scripture in the sense that uniquely through them God is able to speak today to the church. The faith cannot be understood by studying the Bible in isolation from the church and its traditions of interpretation. The church existed before the Bible. 
4. Different parts of the Bible emphasise different things and can sometimes contradict. Doctrine cannot be and has not been developed by giving full weight to each passage in isolation. The stories of Noah and Sodom & Gomorrah are consistent with the sense of God's holiness pervading the Bible, but not the last word on how to understand disasters. John's style is to be black and white. He doesn't do caveats and qualifications, so he presents starkly the challenge which Jesus brings. He is not there discussing the issue of those who have not heard of Jesus, so the church at its wisest does not force his words to apply to contexts which were not considered. If that were done with John, then one would have to say that everyone BC is lost, and it is absurd to believe that John thought this.