LILY ROSE:
Thank you for a very thoughful response.
It's funny you bring up Bart Ehrman. A close friend of mine was a classmate of Bart's at Princeton Theological Seminary, and witnessed some of the transitions he was undergoing back then, from being an 'on-fire' Evangelical Christian, to what is now either an agnostic or atheist (can't remember which)--the very thing JRS warned about from the pulpit on more than one occasion. In fact, our friendship began over a two-hour discussion about how he was able to go to seminary and NOT lose his faith, which at this point, is very progressive with regards to fundamentalist ideology.
The unfortunate result of Bart's transition is that his discoveries caused him to lose his way, where with myself, helped me to find mine. Bart's big 'problem with God' is the issue of suffering, and how could a loving God allow so much suffering if he was loving. If he only understood what Jesus was really saying in the Prodigal Parable, where the onus for this experience is in our court, not GOD's, he would see himself clear of the problem entirely. With all of the material he has written over the years, I did not find him to give much credence to the Gospel of Thomas, which I found very ironic. There are statements in that Gospel that even quantum physics finally caught up with, e.g. "You have mirages for your rulers.", or as Einstein so aptly stated, our experience of the universe is nothing more than a 'convincing, collective, optical delusion'.
All that said, Christianity has a long way to go to catch up with what Jesus was actually teaching. It is no surprise that the ignorant and unlearned disciples had to repeatedly hear, "I have many things to tell you, but you are not yet able to bear them."
Thank you for a very thoughful response.
It's funny you bring up Bart Ehrman. A close friend of mine was a classmate of Bart's at Princeton Theological Seminary, and witnessed some of the transitions he was undergoing back then, from being an 'on-fire' Evangelical Christian, to what is now either an agnostic or atheist (can't remember which)--the very thing JRS warned about from the pulpit on more than one occasion. In fact, our friendship began over a two-hour discussion about how he was able to go to seminary and NOT lose his faith, which at this point, is very progressive with regards to fundamentalist ideology.
The unfortunate result of Bart's transition is that his discoveries caused him to lose his way, where with myself, helped me to find mine. Bart's big 'problem with God' is the issue of suffering, and how could a loving God allow so much suffering if he was loving. If he only understood what Jesus was really saying in the Prodigal Parable, where the onus for this experience is in our court, not GOD's, he would see himself clear of the problem entirely. With all of the material he has written over the years, I did not find him to give much credence to the Gospel of Thomas, which I found very ironic. There are statements in that Gospel that even quantum physics finally caught up with, e.g. "You have mirages for your rulers.", or as Einstein so aptly stated, our experience of the universe is nothing more than a 'convincing, collective, optical delusion'.
All that said, Christianity has a long way to go to catch up with what Jesus was actually teaching. It is no surprise that the ignorant and unlearned disciples had to repeatedly hear, "I have many things to tell you, but you are not yet able to bear them."