itchy said:
I have to say that I do have trouble with the idea that people who don’t believe in Jesus go to hell as I have Sikh and Muslim friends. Fear of hell is a horrible thing and I find some of the theological technicalities of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell a little overwhelming sometimes for my little brain! (i.e. children, baptisms, repentance, people born before Jesus, etc).
The problem I have is, how do you define Jesus? How do you know who believes in Him and who doesn't? Take this quote: "Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 7:21)
Then He goes on to say that He 'never knew' certain people who did miracles in His name. To do miracles, you must have faith that they'll work. So in what way were they 'unbelievers?' According to at least one gospel, Jesus describes God as 'good'. Perhaps, you must believe in what's good? We can't achieve goodness ourselves once we've chosen evil, but we can believe in it, love it and strive for it.
There are many examples of Jesus telling people to repent to be saved. This is also a feature of the Old Testament. To repent is to change your mindset, to decide not to do something again and to be truly sorry for it and
humble. This I think is what the message really was. When you are truly humble, it won't be so difficult to do what's right, because you stop seeing yourself as the centre of the Universe. Does anyone not, in at least one sense, see their own feelings as all-important? That's what we must strive not to do.
Jesus existed before the world, and there were rituals given to the Jews symbolic of what was to happen. These people, then, could have believed in what Jesus was, if Jesus is the sacrificial part of God, and God is defined as 'good' and 'love'. Jesus was present then as He is now, only now we know something about what happened that those people didn't. The form He took on Earth doesn't define Him, does it? If it did, why isn't every miracle-doer accepted, and how come Abraham
was? And wouldn't that mean that if anything had happened slightly differently, He wouldn't be Jesus anymore? :? If I believe His name was Harry, when it wasn't, or that He actually lived in China, born 2300 years before He really was, do I still believe in Jesus? If I believe all the conventional things, except the crucifiction part, am I still a believer?
He never said, 'you must believe that I did this then and that another time and that it happened like this... in order to be saved.'
He said 'believe in me' and 'love me'. What's this 'me'?
OK, so He implied, pretty strongly it seems, that He was God's son. Most say that this is what you must believe to be saved. What does 'God's son' mean? In what way was He different to Adam? Jesus quotes the Torah when He mentions that God called us all 'sons'. There are going to be different understandings of what 'God's son' means in the minds of different people, especially the minds of people with no education in reproduction who will have to guess exactly what happens when anyone is conceived, and therefore what human parenthood really means. People used to think that the baby recieved all of its characteristics from its father, the mother merely being vehicle until its birth. I've gone on at this too much... is it clear what I'm driving at?
I do believe that we should share the 'historical Jesus', as some Quakers put it, with the world, but is its purpose to save us from Hell? Can believing some historical facts and even trying to live by them be what saves us? That's not a hypothetical question... please answer me someone, I'm not decided yet...
