Thread for non-MAGA Christians

HandsonFire said:
So I don’t have a lot of time this morning but I’ll chime in. I’m a pretty conservative Christian , believe Jesus is the Som of God, lived on earth, died on the Cross and was Resurrected. He is the only way to heaven. I believe abortion to be a sin, also believe homosexuality to be a sin (yeah I’m expecting lots of ridicule for this) so I have some pretty unpopular beliefs.

However where I differ from Maga and maybe a lot of Conservatives you know is these are my religious beliefs. I think it’s pretty clear our founding fathers advocated for a separation is church and state and they got it. So I believe that people have the right to be married if they are gay interracial whatever. I can sum it up with what I’ve said on here before , I don’t want to force you to live by my beliefs, and I don’t want you to force me to live to yours.
I am disgusted by MAGA and really any form of Christianity that is tied to politics. Politics are flawed and human, not righteous by any means, and to tie Jesus to either party is a grave mistake.
And I vote straight Democrat in a total rejection of all things MAGA.

Ducks for the hate.
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I can't ridicule you for believing that homosexuality is a sin. Like others on this thread, I recognize why we should have freedom of conscience. As long as matters of conscience remain matters of conscience and not matters of public policy, reasonable discussion is possible. Well, sort of reasonable. Religious discussion tends to resist "reason" as we think of it in other contexts, because the discourse is itself founded on something other than reason.

I was/am a big fan of the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. He wrote about the three levels of human experience: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Aesthetics = pleasure seekers. By ethical, he means what we today would call "reason." The religious experience, he wrote, was a teleological suspension of the ethical, as illustrated in the parable of Abraham and Isaac. Given that hierarchy, faith can't be talked about in the same was as, say, ontology. But it can be discussed without acrimony.

Note that the religious experience was not described as akin to unreason. It was, rather, a celebration of the absurd - a theme that would later get picked up by French atheists like Sartre and Camus. You've got to admire a guy who was able to reach those hip existentialist even though he was almost a monk. I think he was probably closeted, but that's another story.
 
05C40 said:
Sounds sort of like a quote from Billy Graham, "I used to believe that pagans in far-off countries were lost – were going to hell – if they did not have the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached to them. I no longer believe that. – I believe that there are other ways of recognizing the existence of God – through nature, for instance – and plenty of other opportunities, therefore, of saying 'yes' to God."
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Yes that was definitely one of Billy Graham's better moments and certainly a far cry from where his son Franklin stands. Franklin was leading a group in Raleigh a few years ago and in his speech was referring to a group of what he called "atheists" gathered nearby. Those "atheists" were a group of Christians demonstrating as part of the moral Monday movement and listening to a speech by Reverend William Barber.
 
Simultaneous to the importance of freedom of conscience and separation of church and state, I I do think we as Christians have a strong responsibility to be mindful of our voting choices in particular as to how they lead impact policies that could be harmful for certain segments of our society. If you believe as I do that throughout the Bible there's the common thread of God having a preference for the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, the stranger/foreigner, the sick, the imprisoned, the marginalized across society, then that mindset should have a significant impact on how you vote.
 
fourheels said:
Yes that was definitely one of Billy Graham's better moments and certainly a far cry from where his son Franklin stands. Franklin was leading a group in Raleigh a few years ago and in his speech was referring to a group of what he called "atheists" gathered nearby. Those "atheists" were a group of Christians demonstrating as part of the moral Monday movement and listening to a speech by Reverend William Barber.
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My grandfather was a Baptist minister who helped Billy Graham spread his ministry from the Charlotte area into western South Carolina. My aunt has a picture of my grandfather with Reverend Graham on a stage in an auditorium on Anderson, South Carolina. Reverend Graham is the only television preacher (I’m using that term because nothing else comes to mind right now) that I have respect for. I truly believe his main focus was to spread the Word of Christ. I don’t believe you can say that about any of the others, including his son.
 
TarSpiel said:
So, this is something I think about a lot. I grew up in a conservative evangelical household in a conservative town, and fell in love with Jesus at a really early age. I entrusted my life to the Lord when I was in elementary school, and never ever forgot my surrender to His will. To this day, it is the central reality of my life.

As I grew and developed, I lost a lot of the Christian dogma that those around me told me I needed to believe in. Things like the inerrancy of scripture, the existence of hell, and the numinous divine approbation that suffused American and Western history. I learned that Jews also believed that God is Love, and so did Muslims. That Buddhist meditation merged with the Tao te Ching can make eating a spoonful of Cheeri-Os a divine epiphany, even without marijuana. That ethics wasn't a religious issue, it was a survival one. That religion could bring a black person and a white one together under one roof, and might in fact have developed specifically for that sort of reason, to unite tribes under one banner.

Anyway, I retained my love of Jesus and his gospel, and my trust in God's will, even while I lost a lot of standard Christian dogma. Then I went to UNC and became Bart Ehrman's grad student for 6 or 7 years, and really deepened my knowledge of the Bible - old and new - and the cultural and historical contexts that produced it. Bart was and is a pretty strongly atheist-leaning agnostic, and I'm a pretty strongly theist-leaning agnostic, but we got along famously, and never really discussed theology at all anyway. He's wicked smart, and has one of my favorite senses of humor I've ever come across. He's also in his own way extremely humble, and a genuine spiritual seeker. I just feel extremely blessed to have gotten to meet him and know him, and have him be my teacher in so many ways, on so many topics.

All that intellectual study really rammed home for me the major defining point not only of Jesus and Christianity, but also of the Judaism that produced it. And that is a deep, abiding, and selfless commitment to the physical, emotional and spiritual well being of five classes of people: the poor, the sick, foster kids, elderly women living alone, and immigrants. Those categories of people are mentioned all over in the Bible, in the Old and New Testaments, and are the ground bass for the entire Biblical tradition: make sure everyone is taken care of, and don't exclude anyone ever.

The modern American republican party perverts this gospel into a "Christianity" that is about abortion (not in the Bible), homosexuality (hardly in the Bible), or immigration (in the Bible, but as an injunction to welcome immigrants and provide for them). I don't believe in Satan or dark powers, but it's absolutely true that Christianity has been corrupted into a kind of American nationalism that would have been bewildering not only to Jesus, but also to the majority of Christian theologians until about 1500.

And money? Donald Trump wants to make us all rich? If there's one teaching that runs all throughout Jesus' ministry, it's that wealth is neutral at best, but most often actively spiritually destructive.

I don't mind atheists, because at least they're honest. MAGA "Christians" though? Lord help us.

Donald Trump and MAGA are an active cancer on my religion. I know there are a lot of Christians who feel the same way. Maybe not the majority, but a lot.
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Are you familiar with Diane Lipsett? I believe she did her PhD under Ehrman and was teaching NT at Wake Div when I arrived. Unfortunately she was up for tenure and did not get it so she moved on to other things and I did not have the pleasure of having her for NT at Wake.
 
Great thread. I am an anti-MAGA Christian, but that is redundant. To keep it short, I'm 56, and grew up pretty fundamentalist in upstate SC. Post college, I got more serious about my faith and started thinking for myself, and realized how strikingly different Jesus' teachings were from fundamentalists' teachings. It strikes me that he preached about love instead apathy, grace instead of grudges, generosity instead of selfishness, giving instead of keeping, welcoming instead of refusing. He hung out with the outcasts, the dirty people, the smelly people, the poor people. Heck, the only people who seemed piss Him off were the people who used their religion for power and the people who tried to make a buck off of God. Hmm, sound familiar?

I just can't reconcile Jesus' words and deeds with those of our so called "Christian leaders". They are a perversion. So here I am, a non-MAGA Christian. God help me, I may be becoming one of those "progressive" Christians!
 
fourheels said:
If you believe as I do that throughout the Bible there's the common thread of God having a preference for the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, the stranger/foreigner, the sick, the imprisoned, the marginalized across society, then that mindset should have a significant impact on how you vote.
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100
 
superrific said:
I didn't know your teaching degree was in religious studies. You've always come across as quite knowledgeable about world religions, but I don't think I appreciated the angle you were coming from.
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My graduate work was in Ancient Mediterranean Religion, centered on early Christianity. I left the PhD program in Chapel Hill after 6 or 7 years with a Masters Degree, and came home (to California) to teach at community college. My teaching load out here has basically consisted of the history, art, mythology, and religion of humanity all over the world from the time we left Africa until last Tuesday.

Eventually I got tenure here, and given such a wide scope in these survey classes, I've been allowed to focus on and teach the things that are most interesting to me personally. It's really pretty much a dream job.
 
Batt Boy said:
I'd like for Don or others to help me with John 14:6 so that I can understand it better in context. It's used as one of the clobber verses and I think it's out of context. I don't even really like John at all compared to the other 3 Gospels. I know Erhman doesn't care for it either. Anyway, anything that can help me with a more progressive reading and understanding would be welcome. I just don't like or believe the verse.
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Your guy for John is probably going to be the Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, if you want to read some serious scholarship on it.

I don't know for sure, but I'm betting Brown says that these were words put into Jesus' mouth by the Johannine community about 60 years after Jesus himself died, and reflect the concerns and experiences of that community, specifically their arguments with a local Jewish synagogue who argued that the idea of an executed Messiah was in evidence in the Hebrew Bible in exactly zero places.

Theologically, Brown would say something along the lines of even though Jesus didn't say it, it accurately reflects the outworking of the Holy Spirit in an early community of believers.
 
fourheels said:
Are you familiar with Diane Lipsett? I believe she did her PhD under Ehrman and was teaching NT at Wake Div when I arrived. Unfortunately she was up for tenure and did not get it so she moved on to other things and I did not have the pleasure of having her for NT at Wake.
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I think I knew her has Diane Wudel (I think that's the same person)...she was one of Bart's early PhD students, and currently partners with Ehrman to run his blog (which is fantastic, by the way - www.ehrmanblog.org - all proceeds go to charity). She came by often to sit in on stuff at UNC while I was there...I thought she was just incredibly sweet, smart and kind. Bart adores her.
 
TarSpiel said:
I think I knew her has Diane Wudel (I think that's the same person)...she was one of Bart's early PhD students, and currently partners with Ehrman to run his blog (which is fantastic, by the way - www.ehrmanblog.org - all proceeds go to charity). She came by often to sit in on stuff at UNC while I was there...I thought she was just incredibly sweet, smart and kind. Bart adores her.
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That's her. Her son married one of my Wake Div classmates. She was beloved by the students at Wake and there was major backlash when she didn't get tenure.
 
fourheels said:
That's her. Her son married one of my Wake Div classmates. She was beloved by the students at Wake and there was major backlash when she didn't get tenure.
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Yea, that is really surprising that she didn't get tenure. I don't know her scholarship too well, but I assume it's at least passable for a faculty teaching position. And yea, she truly is one of the sweetest people I ever met in academia.

Like I said, she basically runs the ehrman blog these days, so she's very accessible. I don't read it too much myself - a lot of those bible discussions bore me to death these days - but it seems like every time I check in she's got the lead post.
 
TarSpiel said:
Your guy for John is probably going to be the Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, if you want to read some serious scholarship on it.

I don't know for sure, but I'm betting Brown says that these were words put into Jesus' mouth by the Johannine community about 60 years after Jesus himself died, and reflect the concerns and experiences of that community, specifically their arguments with a local Jewish synagogue who argued that the idea of an executed Messiah was in evidence in the Hebrew Bible in exactly zero places.

Theologically, Brown would say something along the lines of even though Jesus didn't say it, it accurately reflects the outworking of the Holy Spirit in an early community of believers.
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Thanks. I don't know Brown but will look into it. That's my limited understanding as well. So many parts of John are unique compared to other Gospels and the two professors who lead my very progressive Bible Study Group assert it was written mainly for theologic purposes. Thanks again.
 
Batt Boy said:
Thanks. I don't know Brown but will look into it. That's my limited understanding as well. So many parts of John are unique compared to other Gospels and the two professors who lead my very progressive Bible Study Group assert it was written mainly for theologic purposes. Thanks again.
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Yes, very unique in contrast to the other synoptic gospels with the intent to clearly establish the divinity of Christ. My Div school dean (Dr. Gail O'Day) was also a Johannine scholar. Sadly she passed away a few years a go from a brain tumor. You might be interested in her writing as well. She had been at Candler (Emory) before coming to Wake and was from a UCC background.
 
Just thought I would take advantage of today’s top headline to point out that Tim Walz attends Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St Paul, a congregation belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). For those not familiar with the Lutheran Church in this country, the ELCA is the most progressive branch of the denomination. It was the ELCA that voted to allow gay clergy in 2009, setting off a MAGA type disinformation campaign in the church that resulted in many ELCA member churches (mostly rural) leaving the ELCA to form a new Lutheran branch (NALC) or join the more conservative Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Synod, or another of which I can’t recall the name. I was a member of a congregation that had a contentious debate regarding the ELCA vote, and the disinformation campaign won out over my and others more progressive arguments. My wife and I eventually left the congregation to join one that remained in the ELCA.

The Lutheran church is “Jesus-centered” - in fact, it was a Lutheran that coined the term WWJD (what would Jesus do?). The last Lutheran in a Presidential ticket was VP Hubert Humphrey, so it’s been a while.
 
TarSpiel said:
Your guy for John is probably going to be the Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, if you want to read some serious scholarship on it.

I don't know for sure, but I'm betting Brown says that these were words put into Jesus' mouth by the Johannine community about 60 years after Jesus himself died, and reflect the concerns and experiences of that community, specifically their arguments with a local Jewish synagogue who argued that the idea of an executed Messiah was in evidence in the Hebrew Bible in exactly zero places.

Theologically, Brown would say something along the lines of even though Jesus didn't say it, it accurately reflects the outworking of the Holy Spirit in an early community of believers.
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I’m sure Brown’s book is very informative, but recent scholarship (Robyn Faith Walsh, among others) has begun to regard the idea of a Johannine community as an artifact of Romantic historiography.

ETA: If memory serves, Walsh situates the gospels within the wider literary culture of the Greco-Roman world. When we talk Seneca (or whoever), we do not have to make an appeal to a "Senecan community," but instead understand his writings as participating in a certain generic milieu. So too with the gospels, which have some astonishing parallels in Greco-Roman literary genres.

More generally, though, I think the very existence of this thread bears out David Hollinger's thesis in After Cloven Tongues of Fire, which argued that mainline, liberal Christianity waned precisely because it so successfully infused secular culture.
 
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