So what made you pick the 'Christian' explanation?
Partly familiarity. I explored a number of other options, especially Baha'i, Buddhism and non-belief. Non-belief absolutely did not work for me. It quickly led to burnout. I have been deeply enriched by familiarity with other faiths, but in the long run I did not find they offered me anything that was not also to be found in Christian spirituality. (A Buddhist or Baha'i might react to Christianity the same way.) So it wasn't that I found them wrong or misguided or inadequate, but rather that even seen positively, it seemed I could get to where I was headed as easily on a Christian path as on any other, so why not stay with the path I knew best. It is a bit like having the option of working in a foreign language or working in one's mother tongue. Learning a foreign language is always a plus and opens one's eyes to a whole new culture and way of thinking about things. And for some people the advantages of that outweigh everything else. But it is also wonderful when one can come back to the familiarity of home and mother tongue.
I am very interested in the overlap that is developing in some areas between Christianity and Buddhism. As Buddhism is a non-theist faith, it is possible to bring many Buddhist practices into a Christian framework a la Thomas Merton.
So why is a covenant required to do that?
Every social relationship is a tacit covenant. This is no different. If Israel was to be God's people, then Israel had to acknowledge Yahweh as their God and learn how to be a people of God. They could not be God's people if they continued to worship the gods of Egypt.
I don't know about you, but it isn't the threat of the police that keeps me from murdering and pillaging. Like I said, it's a mutual system of cooperation, even in the most tyrannical of societies.
No, but it is the threat of the police that you count on to keep others from injuring you with impunity.
The 'society' would self-destruct, and a non-anarchistic one would rise out of the ashes.
Why would it self-destruct? btw, have you looked into anarchist political theory. There are both socialists and capitalists who favor anarchy. The Marxist ideal was not socialism (which in Marxist terms requires dictatorship) but communism ( in which there was no need for a state.) At the opposite extreme, you have the libertarian anarcho-capitalists who favour placing everything under the aegis of the market rather than a government.
Why do the fringes of both the left and the right believe an anarchic society would not self-destruct? Why do you think such self-destruction is inevitable?
(btw, I suspect your thinking and mine is much alike on this point. I just want to hear what you have to say.)
Because there would be people who didn't believe this.
No, that is the point. There would not be, because all would be of like mind with God. The spirit of generosity, mercy and love for others would be universal.
There was a time when all of England thought like that, but social progress and greater scientific understand has opened our eyes to new ways of thinking.
What people would think is less important than the way they deal with conflicts in thinking. Does it require violence to resolve differences of opinion? Or can they be talked out? Where all know the LORD from least to greatest, would they solve differences by fighting it out?
Could you be more specific? The Egyptian and Roman empires were phenomenal accomplishments in human history, and I'm not sure how the tower of Babel can be considered an empire unto itself.
Quite well, if my Ancient Egyptian history serves. The only people who suffered were, I think, the slaves.
Exactly. And empire requires overseers with whips to get the bricks made,or the cotton picked, or whatever economic imperative drives its ambitions. The Tower of Babel is symbolic of empire, because it is the first biblical indication of the sort of social organization that is capable of a major work like this: one in which labour is conscripted to serve the ambitions of an elite. Theologically, empire in general refers to the forced requisition of economic resources and human labour in this way. It is found in all ancient empires, in the colonial empires of the 19th century, in the 20th century Soviet empire, and in the current American empire. And it is replicated on a smaller scale in many lesser jurisdictions.
By contrast, the kingdom of heaven is marked by an equitable sharing of resources such that everyone can sit beneath their own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. (Micah 4:4)
But how was this ensured by the covenant?
You are asking for at least a six-session bible study on the social and economic provisions of the Mosaic law. I can recommend some good resources on Jubilee economics if you like.
I can't quite remember, but I think I was using it in the same way you were:
And it is observed in the integrity of human relationships of freedom from bondage. By the same token it is violated in relationships of repression and exploitation.
And is any human society free of such violations?
Well, if we are all saved, what's the point of the Gospel?
Why? If we are all saved, what purpose does this serve besides frivolous ceremony?
Well, let us assume that all are saved. Do you know that you are saved?
Every so often, in the decades after WWII, a Japanese soldier was found in the jungles of a South Pacific island who had not yet heard the war was over. Would it not be good news to him, even though it came 10-15 or more years after the fact, that the war was over and he could go home? Was the war over for him before he learned the news? The "frivolous ceremony" is the equivalent of such a soldier finally laying down his arms and accepting the peace that in fact was already there.
Which means that he wants the damned to be damned. Why?
We can only speculate. It does come down to how far God is willing to press omnipotence vs. the integrity of human will. You remember the incident from the Vietnam war in which a US army unit testified that it had to destroy a village in order to save it. Is damnation God's refusal to destroy a person as a person in order to save them?
We might use a scientific analogy. Some people point to the "fine-tuning" of the universe that makes life possible as an indication that it was created for the purpose of supporting life. On the other hand, some YECs claim massive differences in the laws of nature before and after the fall (and/or flood) such that we cannot know the physical laws that prevailed before that event.
I have sometimes noted that you cannot logically subscribe to both of these opinions at the same time. If God has created a fine-tuned universe, it must have been the same fine-tuning from creation on, no matter what happened with the fall. If the fine-tuning is that delicate, it cannot be altered without altering the very nature of the universe, and a universe of a different nature would most probably not be hospitable to life. (Most analysis of YEC scenarios indicate that had the events they propose taken place, the earth would have been fried/melted/evaported by the heat produced.)
So, if we begin with the premises:
1. God created with the purpose of creating life, and especially humanity.
2. God fine-tuned the universe to the narrow physical parameters that allow the fulfilment of 1.
we must conclude that even in light of the fall, even in light of the flood, if it is God's purpose that (human) life on earth continue, the fine-tuning which permits it must also continue. One does not save creation by uncreating it.
So although omnipotence offers the technical possibility of uncreating the universe, God's purposes contravene the implementation of that action.
Something along the same line may be applicable to the salvation of individuals. What is it that would be saved if God overrode the soul's choice of damnation? Would anything worth saving be saved? Or would that which one wanted to save be, in fact, destroyed?
Only his mathematics, and his eponymous 'Pascal's Wager'.
Theologically, Pascal was a Jansenist, which was a Catholic equivalent of Calvinism later condemned by the Catholic church as heresy. He was planning a theological work that was never completed due to his untimely death. But his friends prepared a posthumous publication from his notes called
Pensees ("Thoughts") The wager is one of the longer paragraphs. Much of it is in the form of aphorisms some of which are widely quoted. Here is a taste:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Blaise_Pascal/
I thought it was God who sought humans, not the other way around?
It is both. A Jewish commentator, whose name escapes me at the moment, once said that the signal difference in Christianity is that it has God making the first move. In Jewish tradition it is said that if you make one step toward God, God makes two toward you, and much the same is said in other faiths. Christianity places the initiative with God. The lost sheep does not need to ask to be found. And, as Pascal (and Calvin and Augustine, etc.) intimate, we cannot make that first step toward God unless God has first given us the grace/strength to start out.
So, yes, God has sought and found us first, yet we seek God, not perceiving that we have already found him until we realize that he has found us.
So works expressing one's faith are unnecessary, they're simply a by-product.
I would say a product, not a by-product. A by-product is something produced in addition to what one purposes to produce. But according to Paul, good works are a principal purpose of salvation. Ephesians 2:10, 2 Timothy 3:17, Titus 2;14.)
So what is it? I must have missed it.
And that is...?
Stop asking what you must do and accept that all that must be done has been done for you.
And how does one attain this realisation, and/or being this learning process?
It follows along from the above. Once in a sermon, I used the analogy of children's familiarity with their parents. Live with a person long enough and you know without asking what they will think of something.
Not really: the insistence of one person is irrelevant to the omnipotence of God. If God wants us to have eternal life heaven, we will have eternal life in heaven, regardless of any 'insistence'.
Possibly. But we don't know how God is using his omnipotence vis-a-vis human insistence on damnation.
That said, I'm curious as to how someone can insist on perishing in the Christian sense, especially since they aren't Christian in the first place.
By insisting that salvation must be granted to themselves and to others on terms they have set, not on God's terms. Ever hear the story of the Russian peasant and the onion? Seems this selfish old woman found herself in hell, but her guardian angel was still hopeful for her salvation. Well is there anything you can say on her behalf? the other angels asked. The guardian angel thought and thought and thought and remembered: she once gave an onion to someone without demanding payment. Find the onion and throw it to her. She can be pulled out of hell. So the angel did. The woman grabbed the onion and the angel began to pull her out of the fiery lake. Others of the damned seeing what was happening also grabbed the onion, or the woman's skirts, clung to her knees and ankles and they were all being pulled slowly but surely out. But the woman screamed at them: Let go! It's
my onion. And the onion broke and she fell back into hell.
