Random Ramblings About Religion and Stuff

Belief in Jesus

2009-04-18T12:37:30Z

So I just discovered a MAJOR difference between the NC and evangelical Christianity--it seems so obvious I can't believe I didn't think of it before! I think that to most Christians, believing in Jesus means believing that He died on the cross to save us from our sins. When I talk about belief in Jesus, though, I mean believing that He is God--that He is Jehovah, our eternal Lord and Savior. I don't know why I didn't notice this before, but it seems pretty important! Hopefully I'll blog more about it this summer.

God is love

2009-02-19T02:27:52Z

God is love. This is one of the core bases of my belief in the New Church. Since God is love, He could not possibly have treated Jesus the way most Christians believe He did. So my question is, how could he condemn thousands of innocent people to death, including babies, by telling the Children of Israel to slaughter them? I know it all has good correspondences, but still, wasn't He ordering the Children of Israel to do something evil?! I've sort of justified this before with the argument that those were different times and that war and death were just part of life back then, so it's not as bad as it sounds to us now -- He was accommodating to the Children of Israel's culture--they wouldn't have accepted a God who didn't behave to some degree how they expected one to. But killing babies was still evil, wasn't it? I know when the Old Testament talks about Him being an angry God, it's just an appearance of truth, but it seems like a fact that he ordered innocent people to be murdered just because of their bad correspondence. I know I've wrestled with this before, and feel like I somehow got to a point where I was ok with it, but I don't remember how. Hopefully it'll come to me later.

Islam

2009-02-14T15:14:49Z

So turns out I'm pretty easily distracted by school work. This journal might end up being a place for me to keep track of confusing concepts I come across, so that later I can come back and think about them when I have time (maybe this summer?)

So anyway, note to future self: Think about the statement in TCR 137:12 that "the two dogmas of nature-worship and Mohammedanism [...] are criminal lies cunningly invented, and two lethal blows designed to lead men's wills astray and repel them from the holy worship of the Lord." I thought there was something later on about Islam being created to reestablish the idea of one God. Maybe it was just permitted because that was one of its side effects?

Oh, and while I'm telling you things to think about, have you gotten around to asking anyone about the idea of angels as dead people in popular culture yet? You should do that if you haven't.

-- present Anna (well, past Anna by now I guess)

nun-sin-aleph

2008-11-05T13:02:15Z

One of the reasons I came back to that stuff I wrote about Isaiah is that in church this past Sunday Scott said that [nun-sin-aleph] is the Hebrew word for "to forgive." That's also the word used for "to bear" when the Bible talks about Ezekiel bearing the iniquities of the children of Israel! I'm not sure where this fits in yet, but I think it's important.

So, recap:

In Isaiah: Jesus will bear [samekh-beth-lamed] the iniquities of many.

In Ezekiel: Ezekiel bore [nin-sin-aleph] the iniquities of the children of Israel.
Writings' explanation: Ezekiel "represented and demonstrated" the iniquities of the children of Israel, but did not take them away.

In Lamentations: The scepegoat bears [nun-sin-aleph] the iniquities of the children of Israel into the wilderness.
Writings' explantation: Truth of faith (the goat) removes iniquities and casts them into hell.

Well, I have to go get ready for class now, but I wanted to write this down so I wouldn't forget about it. Hopefully I'll come back to it later and think about how it all fits together.

An email I started writing to Coleman once upon a time (a few weeks ago)

2008-11-03T04:39:14Z

Here's my first rambling post about something I've been thinking about. It started out as an email to Coleman, but then I started trying to puzzle through it on my own, and then I got distracted by other things and didn't come back to it until today.

So here it is:

Hi Coleman,

I have a theological question for you. I've been trying to explain to a friend of mine what I believe about Jesus' death on the cross, and she just emailed me asking how I would explain Isaiah 53 (esp. 5-6, 8-12) and 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 (esp. 21). Here are some of the parts of Isaiah 53 that sound very old-churchy to me:

the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. (5)

and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (6)

the LORD makes his life a guilt offering (10) (Litereally: If Thou shouldst make His soul guilt…)

by his knowledge [or knowledge of Him] my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. (11)

For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (12)

I remembered reading about the Isaiah chapter in Doctrine of the Lord, so I went back to the passage (16[4]) and discovered I'd penciled in a big question mark next to it and underlined the word "justified" in verse 11.

What does it mean to bear iniquities? Here's this impression I'd gotten from Doctrine of the Lord:

Jesus and the prophets represent the Word, and therefore the state of the Church (or in Jesus' case the Church itself). "Bearing iniquities" means serving as a symbol for what the people were doing to the Word (and therefore to the Church). Jesus and the prophets did this by suffering representations of those things. The Christian doctrine that Jesus took our sins upon Himself and carried them away was due to a misunderstanding/mistranslation of the word "bear”—what it really means hear is closer to "endure". Jesus endured the evils the people inflicted upon Him/the Word (i.e. He suffered evils at their hands). (Note: the Hebrew words for “to bear” are different in the Isaiah passage about Jesus and the Ezekiel passage about Ezekiel—samekh-beth-lamed/5445 and nun-sin-aleph/5375 respectively—but Swedenborg uses “porto” in both cases).

When I looked at this passage again, I decided a better understanding of “He bore their sins” might be “He suffered as a consequence of their sins,” instead of “He suffered evils at their hands.” This fits in nicely with one of only 8 other instances of the Hebrew word s-b-l, where it says the children of Israel bore (s-b-l) the sins of their fathers, who were no more (Lamentations 5:7). The Israelites were not suffering at the hands of their fathers, but were being punished for things their fathers had done. However, I feel like this line of reasoning would naturally lead to the conclusion that Jesus was being punished for the people’s sins. Or is it that the Israelites weren’t actually being punished, but that their situation was the natural outcome of their fathers’ evil actions? Paralleling this, Jesus’ situation would be the natural outcome of the peoples’ evil actions. They mistreated the Word, and therefore Jesus (because He represented the Word) had to be mistreated? Or maybe they mistreated the Word, and therefore hell got lots of power and was able to tempt Jesus?

Anyway, my bigger issue is that I still don’t see where the idea of bearing sins away fits in. Re-examining the Isaiah passage yet again, it seems like I must have been wrong in both my earlier interpretations (the “suffering evils at the peoples’ hands” idea and the “suffering as a result of their sins” idea). The word s-b-l (and definitely porto) can simply mean carry. I poked around a bit and found a few interesting passages about carrying iniquities—most notably one from Leviticus about the ritual of the he-goat carrying Israel’s sins into the wilderness. (Note: the word used for this passage is n-s-a instead of s-b-l, but since Swedenborg translates them the same way in comparing Ezekiel to Isaiah, I think it’s legitimate to do the same here).

Based on my findings, here’s the next explanation I came up with: (1) Jesus represents the Word, and therefore truth. (2) Truth is what allows us to repent, reform, and be regenerated, so by means of it God removes our sins. (3) Like the he-goat that bore the sins of the children of Israel into the wilderness (see AC 9937:8; Lev.16:21-22), Jesus represents truth carrying our sins off into hell. (4) So, just as the he-goat doesn't literally remove the entire congregation's sin but merely represents the process that takes place on an individual level, Jesus didn't literally remove the sins of the world when He died on the cross.

I really liked this explanation, until I remembered that I still had to incorporate the passage from Doctrine of the Lord (the one about bearing sins meaning representing them). Did Jesus’ temptations leading up to the passion on the cross represent removal of sins by Divine truth? That doesn’t seem to make any sense. Especially since the parallel Old Testament passages about prophets certainly don’t seem to involve any removal of sins. In fact, some of the things Ezekiel does represent sins the children of Israel are just about to be punished for. Doctrine of the Lord 16[3] says “the prophet, by thus bearing the iniquities of the house of Israel and the house of Judah, did not take them away and so expiate them, but only represented and demonstrated them.”

So I guess what my question comes down to is this: when Isaiah 53 says “He hath born their iniquities” does it mean that He represented and demonstrated them? If so, how does this lead to their justification? On the other hand, if it means that Divine truth removes our evils by allowing us to repent, then why doesn’t Swedenborg say that? And why doesn’t that fit in with the passages about prophets?

First entry!

2008-11-03T02:20:15Z

Wow, my first livejournal post. So anyway, I think I'm going to use this journal to write random thoughts and questions I have about religious stuff, and to explore ideas about them. Probably most of what I write will be wrong, but sometimes I need to write stuff down in order to get it sorted out so that I can see it's wrong, and maybe figure out what's right. Really I'm writing this for my own personal benefit, but if anyone comes across it and wants to leave comments, feel free.