Heresy, Part II

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Okay, I am probably not gonna have another ‘to be continued…’ blogpost. The pressure was horrible. Plus, thinking about Part II made me wonder if Part I sucked. It was totally different from posting and forgetting about it. Not good. And fair warning, BTW. This is a post on theology. It may be boring… and is contrary to what I have been taught in Church.

So, to recap Part I (actually, this will be much easier to follow, with a couple points I forgot to mention.)

1. Much Church doctrine comes out of the epistles.
2. I believe this is a bad Idea.
3. The Apostolic Writer’s Alliance (Peter, John, James, The Unknown Author of Hebrews, and of course, Paul) are surely special, and men to be taken seriously, but they should not be confused with Jesus.
4. The Bible, in many ways idolized by mainstream evangelicals and put on a higher plane than Jesus himself, makes clear that even Church Fathers are capable of grave misjudgment. This is a clear distinction from Jesus, who never botched it.
5. Jesus was God. They weren’t. Why in the hell would somebody view their words with equal authority?

In Acts chapter 15, when Peter and the Boys hold palaver on the Issue of Making Gentiles Cut Off Pieces of Their Penises, they draft a letter for Paul’s posse to carry back to the newbies explaining it was a false alarm. Which is all good. Nobody today seriously thinks you have to be circumcised to Go to Heaven.

But there is verse that catches my eye.

For it seemed best to the Holy Spirit and to us ⁸⁸ not to place any greater burden on you than these necessary rules: ⁸⁹ 15:29 that you abstain from meat that has been sacrificed to idols ⁹⁰ and from blood and from what has been strangled ⁹¹ and from sexual immorality. ⁹² If you keep yourselves from doing these things, ⁹³ you will do well. Farewell.

Now, as they saying goes “Did it ever occur to you, that nothing occurs to God?”

Think about it. You’re Peter. This means you are :

1. Headstrong, and Transparent, and prone to making sure your ass is covered.
2. A good Jew.
3. You’re also The Pope. Yeah. A Jewish Pope.

You are a Jerusalem Rock Star. A redneck fisherman, you hung with Jesus, and You have healed people miraculously in public. More then once, the bible portrays you as having a defective filter between your brain and your mouth. Now if this man hears audible direction from God, in an environment where such things were known to happen, He says “God told me that was WRONG.” he doesn’t use the word “seems”.

It is from the Epistles that we get much of the doctrine regarding marriage, sexual morality, treatment of divorcees, treatment of homosexuals, and what to tell people about about the Good News That You Go To Hell If You Don’t Believe What We Believe. If we rank scripture hierarchically, placing the speech of Jesus at the top, followed by His canon (The Old Testament), then the epistles, we can construct and entirely different set of protocols for how the church should behave about these matters. My point is that getting doctrine from the pulpit, is contrary to Jesus’ directive in Matthew:

23:1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 23:2 “The ¹ experts in the law ² and the Pharisees ³ sit on Moses’ seat. 23:3 Therefore pay attention to what they tell you and do it. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they teach. ⁴ 23:4 They ⁵ tie up heavy loads, hard to carry, and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing even to lift a finger to move them. 23:5 They ⁶ do all their deeds to be seen by people, for they make their phylacteries ⁷ wide and their tassels ⁸ long. 23:6 They ⁹ love the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues ¹⁰ 23:7 and elaborate greetings ¹¹ in the marketplaces, and to have people call them ‘Rabbi.’ 23:8 But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher and you are all brothers. 23:9 And call no one your ‘father’ on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. 23:10 Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one teacher, the Christ. ¹² 23:11 The ¹³ greatest among you will be your servant. 23:12 And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

23:13 “But woe to you, experts in the law ¹⁴ and you Pharisees, hypocrites! ¹⁵ You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven! ¹⁶ For you neither enter nor permit those trying to enter to go in.

I think a good argument can be made, that we should read for ourselves, and never think we are in a position to decide people should be denied things we have because their moral performance is lower than ours.

SATANIC-2

I no longer believe that Satan’s every action is taken with Divine permission. Satan may quite possibly be a free agent, acting on his own agenda beneath Divine soveriegnity, like most of us humans. The Idea that Satan does only what is permitted comes from passages in Job1;12, and Job2:6 where the God sets boundaries for the Satanic Torment of Job, and in Luke 22;31 where Jesus Informs Peter that Satan has asked for the right to “sift” him. Now, the Job thing looks to us, like a very civil discussion/debate. A wager. (“Job holds you in reverence and respect, but only because you take care of him. I’ll bet if you let me kick his ass for a while, he will become bitter enough toward you to lose his temper”) now the content here is so interesting, perhaps the greatest challenge is not to get off the subject, but anytime two parties with differing opinions agree to an experiment to see who is right, it is common to lay out some boundaries.

Mother says to Dad, “I’ll bet junior will eat up the Haagen Daz Macadamia Brittle you have been hoarding within 2 days if you move it from the garage freezer and put in in the kitchen, next to the Mayfield vanilla.

Dad replies ” You’re on! but you must not remove the Mayfield nor withhold meals from junior.”

What we see here is agreement on boundaries, not Mother being incapable of moving ice cream. To be sure, the average dad has the physical power to prevent mom from moving the Mayfield, but saying that is not the same thing as saying Mom takes no action without permission.

I am thinking that Satan has at least as much autonomy as we do. Choice is a prerequisite for evil, as well as love.

Satanic Autonomy

I was told early in my Christian Walk( I’ve always thought that term was cheesy, wish we would get a new one.), that Satan did only what he was permitted to. A baptist pastor told me this, and I was reminded of it last Tuesday.

My Current Pastor has been showing up bi-monthly for a Q&A, though, to be sure very few questions are answered (we just get more and better ones!), However, He actually did allow me to pin him down- (He was possibly thrown off balance by my lightning-fast change of subject.) When I asked him if he believed in Satanic Autonomy. He answered No. This is not a rare stance, and I one that I held myself until recently… I don’t know if he has taken that opinion out of his doctrinal library and placed it on the table for reexamination or not, but I certainly have.

I think constantly. Most of us do. Occaisionally, when reading, or just being aware of the stream of conciousness flowing through my brain, a thought/concept kinda “jumps” up a little… pops into bas-relief and I will either give it closer consideration or slam my open mind shut in discomfort. (There’s a post there, I think.), But I think that these instances, and any thought, for that matter, have three possibly origins: Divine, Demonic, Or ME.

Anyway to get off the rabbit trail, I jumped to this common conclusion as well, after reading the Bible. The Passage in Job where Satan is told what he can do to ruin Job’s life, a ” you can go this far, but no farther” sort of thing is perhaps the most noted scriptural instance where a first read would let a man think that Satan is a puppet… another little blurb is when Simon Peter has blustered about how tight he is with Jesus, but the Light of the World responds by informing Rocky, that the shallowness of his loyalty will be exposed before the rooster crows. I think this is in Luke. Just prior to this, Jesus tells Peter that Satan asked to sift him “like wheat”.

To me, this is deep stuff. I ponder this from the intellectual shallows of my 9th grade education, and I wonder if this/these passage are sufficient to support the doctrine of Satanic Dis-Autonomy (is that a word?). I don’t think so. For reasons I will detail in my next post, I will explain why I no longer believe this is Chiseled in Stone, and that Satan may quite possibly be a free agent, acting on his own agenda. 😀  

Satanic Autonomy

I was told early in my Christian Walk( I’ve always thought that term was cheesy, wish we would get a new one.), that Satan did only what he was permitted to. A baptist pastor told me this, and I was reminded of it last Tuesday.

My Current Pastor has been showing up bi-monthly for a Q&A, though, to be sure very few questions are answered (we just get more and better ones!), However, He actually did allow me to pin him down- (He was possibly thrown off balance by my lightning-fast change of subject.) When I asked him if he believed in Satanic Autonomy. He answered No. This is not a rare stance, and I one that I held myself until recently… I don’t know if he has taken that opinion out of his doctrinal library and placed it on the table for reexamination or not, but I certainly have.

I think constantly. Most of us do. Occaisionally, when reading, or just being aware of the stream of conciousness flowing through my brain, a thought/concept kinda “jumps” up a little… pops into bas-relief and I will either give it closer consideration or slam my open mind shut in discomfort. (There’s a post there, I think.), But I think that these instances, and any thought, for that matter, have three possibly origins: Divine, Demonic, Or ME.

Anyway to get off the rabbit trail, I jumped to this common conclusion as well, after reading the Bible. The Passage in Job where Satan is told what he can do to ruin Job’s life, a ” you can go this far, but no farther” sort of thing is perhaps the most noted scriptural instance where a first read would let a man think that Satan is a puppet… another little blurb is when Simon Peter has blustered about how tight he is with Jesus, but the Light of the World responds by informing Rocky, that the shallowness of his loyalty will be exposed before the rooster crows. I think this is in Luke. Just prior to this, Jesus tells Peter that Satan asked to sift him “like wheat”.

To me, this is deep stuff. I ponder this from the intellectual shallows of my 9th grade education, and I wonder if this/these passage are sufficient to support the doctrine of Satanic Dis-Autonomy (is that a word?). I don’t think so. For reasons I will detail in my next post, I will explain why I no longer believe this is Chiseled in Stone, and that Satan may quite possibly be a free agent, acting on his own agenda. 😀