The Best Thing About Jesus

Originally posted by lucifershammer
If you're going to simply quote the citations BDP gave, at least give him credit for finding them.

And yes, my response would be the same -- read the whole passage.

WTF?????? Why? I think people can read the posts; I just figured that someone might want to see the actual passages.

So much for your "straight answer" BS. Here's the question that you're dodging:

Why would a God who loves you unconditionally want you to fear him?

Originally posted by lucifershammer
Nothing as exotic as that. Simply a recognition of the fact that few people read the Bible in the original languages with the original socio-cultural and literary context in mind.

And even in a continuing, expanding hermeneutical “literary” project such as midrash...

Unfortunately, those who do have the learning do not always communicate it to the people “in the pews”—and some pretty basic stuff at that, stuff that goes to the very heart of the theological project. And so much can be gained without being fluent in Hebrew or Greek, say: a basic understanding of how the Hebrew works, for example, and a couple of dozen key words (with their full range of definitions, not just the narrow, single-word conventional translations into English) can make a pretty big difference in the depth of one’s theological understandings.

How many adult Christians, of any denomination, who grew up in the faith, went to catechetical classes, Sunday school, listened to a priest/pastor’s sermon every Sunday, etc. know the word YHVH? That it is a verb? What it means? (I would venture that nary a 13-year-old bar/bat mitzvah kid doesn’t know.) Even if someone has been led to believe that Judaism is (and was at the time of Jesus) the “religion of the ‘old testament’”—which it isn’t and wasn’t—how can they grasp the fundamental theology of that without knowing what YHVH means?

How about hatah (Hebrew) or hamartia (Greek)—or, for that matter, the original meaning of the English translation “sin”? How about aphiemi and apoluo (aside from their conventional translations “forgiveness” )? How about soterias? Or logos (the whole Christology of the gospel of John rests on that word—conventionally translated as “word,” my Greek dictionary has 50-odd additional definitions: it’s a “big” word—and the unusual phrase ego eimi)? Or pistis, which does not mean “belief” in the general contemporary sense of a conclusion, or an assent to a proposition, or what one thinks...?

It’s not the fault of the people in the pews, nor of the university scholars: it’s the fault of the folks who go to seminary, and then don’t teach what they learned. How many priests/pastors didn’t learn something about historical criticism, form criticism, literary criticism, textual criticism? How many of them pass it on? Just a little bit?

You’re right, LH—and I don’t know how much of a problem it is within Catholicism, compared with Protestantism—it’s not about either “secret decoder rings” or the notion that we all have to have master’s degrees in theology: it’s about the failure to pass on knowledge, at a basic high-school level, that affects how people understand their faith. And when one comes to that realization rather late, as I did, and then has to study on one’s own (if one is interested, and I don’t blame anyone who just isn’t—life is short), one can feel a bit betrayed by the institutions that claimed responsibility for communicating that knowledge...