Christianity Explained
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Here’s an interesting image with an interesting perspective from http://satanspace.com:
336554-Christianity1.jpg (JPEG Image, 600×507 pixels).
The hate letters the site gets is quite interesting as well.
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Ok, so to be fair, often this is what Christianity is percieved as being by Christians and non-Christians alike. However, I have some issues that I’d like to respond theologically to:
1.) Jesus wasn’t a Zombie: The classic definition of Resurrection is not that the dead body of Jesus was simply brought back to the same life. Resurrection is a different kind of physical existence, not a return to the same body. To use the word “Zombie” is just to invite the mockery the poster is intended to draw out by way of appealing to modern science fiction imagery (ie. picture Jesus with red eyeballs and lesions all over his body limping towards you saying “I am the way, the truth, and the life”). Also, to mock the fact that “he was his own father” is to miss the beauty of the doctrine of the trinity, a doctrine that has evolved out of the Church’s worship experience as they try to understand God — for more on this, I point you to Kim Fabricius’ “10 Propositions on the Trinity” found here:
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2006/02/ten-propositions-on-trinity.html
Proposition 8 is especially helpful in light of this poster:
2.) Jesus never claimed that the ritual act itself (the Eucharist/communion) of symbolically eating his flesh (Jn. 6:53-55
) is what leads to “living forever”. What the Eucharist does is prepares us to open ourselves to the God who is ultimately the source of all life. To say that we are to eat of Christ’s blood and flesh is simply a symbolic way of saying we are to understand TRUE nourishment to not simply be bread or wine (foodstuff) in themselves, but bread and wine as they are in relationship to the source of all life — This God, who is obviously much larger than modern science, cannot simply “make sense” the way that this poster mockingly states God should. Also, coming from a site where “horror” is clearly understood to be a venue through which people express their conceptions of reality through at times absurd and disturbing images, its any wonder that the gospel is somehow offensive to the “sensical” mind of the creator of this picture.
3.) The scriptural witness, when not read through the lens of modern day fundamentalist literalism, does not claim that an “evil-force” from a “rib-woman” is the source of sin. For one, the whole concept of the rib-woman, if read through a modern evolutionary lens, should not be all that strange. The point of the rib is not to point out that all women ultimately originated from a rib of a man, but to say that a human partner was formed from and for “Adam” from the already present body (DNA and tissue) of the human being. In other words, God created humans (or God, as the source of all life, allowed his created freedom to bring forth humans — ie. evolution) to be together in community, not alone. It is my thinking that this charachterization of the “fall” story in the Garden of Eden is simply the negative corrolory to fundamentalist literalism: reading the mythical narrative as if it were a literal recounting of the “advent” of sin instead of a mythical account meant to help us understand the human tendency to allow our pride to get in the way of living the way God intended. And of course, when the story is understood this way, the whole “talking snake” and “magical tree” becomes no more problematic.
So, in sum: Gross misrepresentation and oversimplification of biblical themes that have much more depth to them than has been “shown” above.
Z
Good points Zac. Ya, I think he’s confusing reanimation with resurrection.
Ultimately I feel it’s an inaccurate oversimplification that parties on the other side of the fence are just as guilty of on a regular basis (including myself). There’s plenty of blame to go around.
But at the same time I feel there is value to looked at it from this perspective. I feel we can betray ourselves by not seeing through the eyes of others. If we can work towards an understanding of the motive for this perspective just as we should work toward understanding the motive for our own perspective, I think we are all better off in the long run.
This is where Glenn (one of our former guests) might say… “Don’t worry so much about the motive!”
Just joking Glenn.
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