Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ncar!gatech!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: brown@cs.utk.edu (Lance A. Brown) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: A Question Message-ID: Date: 27 Nov 90 08:34:34 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Tenn., Knoxville, Dept. of Computer Science Lines: 127 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu The following is something I need to talk about, but am not sure which newsgroup it is appropriate for. Therefore I am posting it to a number of different groups. I am NOT trying to start a flame war on christianity, nor am I trying to degrade it in any way. I just need to get some different viewpoints on this. Please be cognizant of which groups your follow-ups may end up in. Thanks. I had a funny thought while listening to the sermon this morning during the Lutheran service my wife and I went to. The pastor was talking about Christ the King Sunday, and Jesus Christ's role on Judgement Day. He said some things that may have surprised some of the people at the service. Specifically the pastor spoke about how Jesus would "separate the sheep from the goats" and that the criteria Jesus will use is one of works, and not faith. Thinking about it, this would mean that many people who have never stepped into a christian church would be among the sheep and many who went to church each Sunday and gave 5% of the income yearly, etc. would be set among the goats. This led me to what I believe is a possible contradiction (just one?!?!) in the christian doctrine. It seems really weird to me that "God" would create the human race with free will, punish us for dis-obeying him, offer salvation if we "choose" to return to him, and then basically discard everyone else. This seems really arrogant and callous to me. Also, what happens to the people who are NOT explicitly christian, but still live lives that "qualify" them for salvation on judgement day? Are they also relegated to damnation because they did not "choose" God and Christ? I know the above has not been stated as well as it could be, but I am not very much of a writer and cannot do any better. Lance -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lance A. Brown brown@cs.utk.edu 3500 Sutherland Avenue, Apt. L-303 Graduate Student in Computer Science Knoxville, TN 37919 Sun SparcStations are Neat! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [The question of the "fairness" of damning people is an interesting one. People seem to have different reactions to the concept of judgement. As far as I can tell, until relatively recently, most people thought it was completely appropriate for God to take vengeance on evil people. Apparently it did not bother them that God created people free and put them into a situation that was dangerous to their eternal future. Part of the reason is probably that Christians felt God had done his best to push people in the right direction, and thus that you'd have to be pretty rotten to refuse God's grace. Yet in both this group and talk.religion.misc it seems clear that for many people in our audience, God's supposed actions are looking more and more capricious and ill-tempered. I think two things have combined to make this change: (1) There is now more contact with non-Christians. Until the 20th Cent. most of the people you knew were Christians. For much of Christian history, non-Christians were either the evil Moslems or the money-grubbing Jews [sorry - we're talking about stereotypes here, not reality or even competent theology]. Now we all know agnostics or atheists who seem to be people of good will, and adherents of non-Christian religions that seem to have some real spiritual insight. The old idea that non-Christian religions were counterfeits of Christianity created by the devil just doesn't seem plausible to many. (2) The concept of predestination had been around since Augustine, but only became dominant in a large part of Christianity in the Reformation. This caused God's judgement to take on a more capricious appearance. The Reformers took a darker view of human will. We are such hopeless cases that God must not only offer us redemption, but make us accept it. Thus the only ones who are saved are those that God chooses. While most Christians now do not accept predestination in its original form, this genie has proven very difficult to put back in the bottle. Predestination in its original form has been replaced by a sort of psychological equivalent. I believe most 20th Cent. Christians have in the back of their minds some sort of model that says a person's character -- and thus the response they make to God -- is the result of heredity and environment, i.e. forces out of their control. So even if God does not decide who is saved and who is not, the decision is still determined from the outside. It seems clear that to the NT authors -- and also to the Reformers -- the Gospel was indeed Good News. It may still be good news on an individual level. Christianity retains the power to free people from bondage to many different kinds of oppression. But when you look at the larger context, to many people Christianity no longer sounds like a message of hope for mankind as a whole. It sounds like a claim that those who are brought up Christian and have the "God bit" on are saved, and by and large the rest of the world is damned. There are several responses to this. First, many Christians now believe it is possible for non-Christians to be saved. One concept is that God finds a way to confront everyone. If they aren't in a Christian country, he may come to them in some form other than Christ. I would not want to say that all religions are equally true, but until we see him face to face in the next life we cannot expect to have a completely accurate view of God, and God may be willing to be accepted in forms that are varying distances from his true form. The term "anonymous Christian" has been used to refer to those who have a relationship with Christ without knowing his name. (By the way, I would *not* say that they are saved simply by doing good works. Good works have religious signifiance only when they are done as a response to God.) However this idea (even if you accept it) does not completely solve the problem. Many Christians would probably like to believe in some form of universalism (the belief that eventually God will find a way to save everyone), but the NT is clear enough about the existence of hell that few are willing to commit to this concept. It is possible to make Biblical arguments for it, but none of the arguments have been widely accepted. Probably the best argument is to take I Cor 3:15 as saying that everyone will come through the fire of judgement ultimately as saved, but that for some much of their being will have to be destroyed and rebuilt. However the more traditional view of judgement is so widespread throughout the NT that few Christians are prepared to take seriously hints of other things that appear in passages such as this one and Rom 11:32. --clh]