Truth
Faith or Works?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Ethics of Judgement
Henry Cadbury, better known for his book on Luke and Acts, wrote another on the peril of modernizing Jesus. He meant that the ethical teaching of Jesus was strictly limited:
Nowhere do I find unmistakeable appeal to the rights or needs of the other party, or even to society in general.H Cadbury, cited by J Sanders
One reason was that Jesus was expecting an early end to the existing world. The whole of Jesus’s outlook was conditioned by his expectation of the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. That was Albert Schweitzer’s view, and he most clearly revealed this obvious truth in his book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, explaining that when Jesus is wrenched from his eschatological roots, his worldview must inevitably cease to apply. More recently, Dr Jack Sanders (Ethics in the New Testament) has agreed.
The Jesus who called John the Baptist the greatest man on earth (Mt 11:11) and who saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven (Lk 10:8) was convinced that God’s final action in world history was beginning.J T Sanders, Ethics in the New Testament
There is no doubt that Jesus endorsed the teaching of John the Baptist, and even commended him as the greatest man that had ever lived, and nor did Jesus exclude himself, since he specifically says “of all children born of women”. It was a terrible embarrassment to the early Church which had to fight a rearguard action to relegate John to the mere herald of Jesus, and try to expunge the baptizing role of Jesus himself. It was difficult because the Church of Christ did baptize because baptism was the outer symbol of inner repentance. God knew, if no one human did, when you accepted baptism without sincerely repenting!
The immediately following verses of Jesus’s commendation of John declare “from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom has been coming violently”. The country was in constant upheaval against the rule of the Romans. The constant rebellion of the Palestinians against the Jews of Israel, and of the Iraqis against the occupying “coalition”, really the USA—the modern equivalent of Rome—are apt parallels today. Jesus was fully aware of the situation, and was no pacifist, despite the selective storytelling of Christian authors and editors. Christians can ignore it all, as they do, but can then hardly claim to be seeking “The Truth”.
So, Jesus’s central message was that of John the Baptist:
Repent for the kingdom is nigh!
Because the kingdom was indeed nigh, any Jew who wanted to have a place in it had to repent, thus cancelling out their earlier sins, but then had to behave so as not to sin afresh before the coming of the kingdom, for any sin, even the slightest, could mean their exclusion when the kingdom came. That is why he taught those who had repented how they should live what remained of their lives in the corrupt world before the heavenly one arrived. This lesson was the Sermon on the Mount.
People are not made perfect in heaven. They have to be perfect to get in! Jesus taught what the repentant should do to make sure they remained perfect until they were admitted to God’s kingdom. It was urgent and possibly drastic. Rather than risk a sin and losing eternal life, they ought to cut off the limb or cast out the eye that led them into this sin. It was not an ethic that was expected to have to last long. It was an interim ethic. Norman Perrin (Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus) was another who realized that Jesus’s sayings showed an undeniable immediacy. No one knew, certainly not Jesus, when the kingdom would arrive, but it could be at any time soon.
Jesus’s ethical outlook was therefore an interim one, meant to ensure that those who heard him and acted on his teaching would have the best chance of entering the kingom he expected soon even then! The earliest gospel, Mark, has the same expectation. The aim of the gospel is to reassure the faithful in enduring with patience until the End of the World. It seemed to be taking awhile but it would still be soon. Matthew and Luke are having to cope with the fact that the End of the World is overdue, but they are still assuring the faithful, and urging them to remain perfect, any hint of sin being sufficient to put an impenetrable barrier across the gate of heaven. Paul too is expecting the coming of the kingdom, and John, the last gospel, comes to terms with the failure of it to arrive. Modern Christians have no concern about having to stay perfect while the kingdom is a long time a-coming. They have been deluded into thinking they are already saved whatever they do.
How can the view that the perfect kingdom was imminent then be carried into a continuing corrupt world? Is it because it cannot that few Christians are willing to do what their incarnated God told them, and instead do what a former persecutor of Christians says? Is it an excuse for not following Christ, or, being inapplicable, does it trash Christianity all together as an ethical force?
Ernst Käseman tried to save the received opinion about Christianity by arguing Jesus was pleading that God was always close at hand. Yet, before Jesus, John the Baptist had indeed looked to an imminent Judgement, and, after Jesus, the evangelists and apostles had the same view! In short, even if it is necessary to preserve the traditional ideas of Christianity, it is absurd speacial pleading that Jesus took a different view from his immediate predecessor and his immediate successors. That Christians prefer this disjunctive view simply shows they cannot be objective about evidence. They believe despite any evidence against them. No evidence can be allowed to shake their belief. Nothing can prove Christianity false because no Christian will accept any such proof.
The prominent theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, according to Sanders, though a defender of the notion that the ethics taught by Jesus condensed down to doing the will of God, recognized that, when Jesus did give orders, his commands were based on his belief that the kingdom was coming soon. His commands were urgent. There was no time to lose. And after the crucifixion, Jesus’s followers still believed the kingdom would come soon, and that, now, Jesus himself would bring it. The early Church still believed it, and eventually had to find excuses for it not coming, or to explain that it had come but nobody had noticed. Christians, of course, accepted whatever they were told. That is faith!
The Perfect Scam
Thereafter, Christianity had to base itself on the continuity of the world with the kingdom of God relevant to the individual Christian only at death. It had become the perfect scam. Material life is irrelevant, so just put up with whatever it throws at you. Only the spiritual life after you have died matters! The Christian churches guarantee you an endless spiritual life after death, as long as you do not complain, and give any of the spare useless material wealth you have to them. The reward seems a snip, and it is impossible to prove there is not one, even if it is impossible to prove there is one. “Better be safe than sorry, eh? Oh! That’s ten bucks. Put it in that platter with the rest.” It is the perfect confidence trick, the perfect fraud, but no one arrests the perpetrators. The few governments that have ever done it are villified for attacking freedom—the freedom to be robbed!
If the teaching of Jesus depended on the imminent coming of the kingdom, then it cannot be relevant to ordinary human existence in a world that is not soon going to end. The main call was for sinners to repent because the end of the world was nigh. Those who were not sinners but had led virtuous lives had no need of repentence, notionally, though even Jesus had to be baptized, implying that he had repented of his worldly sin, because all Jews had sinned in allowing God’s country to be occupied by a Pagan enemy, Rome. Having repented, they had to take care not to lapse back into sin in the hiatus between the act of repentance and the coming of God’s kingdom. Again, this was a problem for those whose lives had been led in sin, the “publicans and sinners”, whose livelihood had depended on sin, and who could not survive for long without employment. They would be forced back into sin, if the kingdom took too long in coming. They were the ones who had the problem remaining righteous after repenting. Once the prospect of the kingdom coming had receded, there was little chance that previously unrighteous people could remain righteous for an indefinitely long time.
An ethical teaching cannot be separated from its situation, in this case, the imminent Judgement of God, so that exhortations to pluck out an eye rather than to sin with it become impractical. Most Christians agree. They do not follow most of the teachings of their incarnated God as being impractical in the modern world. They prefer to believe that all that is needed is to have a mystical friendship with Jesus, and that is it. Let them believe it, but it is not at all what their God taught, and so it is merely an arbitrary choice of belief. The ones who did not need repentance were those who had been righteous in the first place. Those able to live righteous lives are righteous people, just as they were before Jesus ever uttered a world of teaching. Today there are many Christians who freely admit that most Christians are not Christians at all—they are not righteous. Conversely, they describe righteous people who are not Christians as being Christians really!
It shows two important things:
- Christianity is irrelevant. Good people lead good lives and wicked ones lead wicked lives, whether they call themselves Christians or not.
- Those who call themselves Christians but think that salvation involves nothing more than faith, are, sadly for them, utterly wrong. Christians always had to do something to be saved. They had to be righteous people, and if they were not, they had to repent sincerely their previous sins, and then lead righteous lives forever after that. “Faith is useless without good deeds” (Jas 2:20), and it is senseless to think otherwise. The brother of the Lord declares most modern Christians to be senseless.
Ignoring Christ’s Teachings
Christians in practice have never followed the teachings of Christ, barring the odd saint and anchorite. The mass of Christians, smugly confident they are saved in professing Christianity, ignore most of Christ’s teaching on the grounds that they are ideals or no longer matter. They arbitrarily ignore the direct commands and the exemplary life of God, if He really did incarnate as a man called Jesus, but put great store on certain aspects of the Mosaic law that Jesus was said to have abrogated. In short, they pick and chose from the bible what they want to do and what is too hard for them. They admit the ethics taught by their God are too hard for them to undertake to follow, and fool themselves that something much easier will do instead! All you need is Faith! Faith!
Yet, if faith is sufficient, particularly faith in Jesus Christ, how can those who claim this faith in him substantiate the claim before God when they have ignored many or even most of his teachings? When a man specifically asked Jesus how he could inherit eternal life (Mt 10:17), Jesus did not answer, “It’s a piece of cake. Just have faith in me.” He told him what he had to do! Wealth made it quite impossible to be saved, so he had to give away his wealth. Today, no one in the US thinks it at all peculiar that a Texan millionaire, whose wealth, at least in part, comes from gambling casinos, can say he is a Christian, and he uses his wealth to propagate the insanity of creationism. Christians ought to be outraged at such hypocrisy, but they admire men like this. How can any man whose source of wealth ruins the lives of others claim to “love” them? Yet this is supposed to be the core of Christianity.
Then Christians seem not to understand love at all. They bandy the word about out of form and habit. They say they love others because their god, Christ, told them to, but what sort of love is it that can be commanded, that can be turned on because you are told to? Whatever it is, it cannot be love. It is hardly surprising then that a follower of the God of love who happens to be the president of the USA has no love for the tens of thousands of people he does not know at all but has ordered to be murdered in revenge for someone else’s wicked act. He cannot bring the guilty to book, so instead he kills a lot of innocent bystanders. That is the love of the most famous and powerful Christian alive today. Does this murdering Christian think he will end up in heaven ahead of John the Baptist, and if he is not ahead of John the Baptist in heaven, then where will he end up? Even John the Baptist was the least in the kingdom of heaven! Bush cocks a very large snook at his God, but sixty million fellow US Christian voters think he is wonderful, and they all think they are saved, even so. They take God to be a fool.
They seem to take their faith in Christ to mean that any loving of enemies necessary was done by Christ and now they have no need of it. Professing Christianity just becomes a lot of excuses for doing nothing at all in practice that could match with the criteria given by Christ. Going to church seems to be what they consider the commitment of Christianity, though there is no obvious commandment from God that they should go to church. The incarnated god, if that is what Jesus was, wanted people to be perfect, and said so, and in saying so, he reiterated the law of Moses, considered by Jews to be a sacred, God-given law. Being perfect like God is too hard, of course, so no Christian even wants to try. Instead they do as they like so long as they proclaim Christian faith in a loud voice! It really is pathetic that anyone should believe such self-serving rubbish.
Is the Kingdom Just Death?
One resolution of the eschatological belief of Jesus was that he got it wrong, or we did. The coming of the kingdom is then explained simply as death which comes soon enough to all of us. Jesus certainly expected to die soon, almost certainly in history as opposed to sacred history because he was fighting the Roman occupiers of the land God had promised the Jews, not the Romans. In fact, he survived the fighting but was caught afterwards when on the run, and crucified as a traitor to Rome. So, for him, the kingdom of God, by this theory, had come. It will similarly come soon to us all, and so there is an urgency that we should live righteous lives, or should repent and live righteously from then on until we die. Christian converts from Paganism like the emperor Constantine thought this is what Jesus meant, because he and many others like him refused baptism, the sign of repentance, until they were dying. Then they had little chance of sinning after they had repented and before they had died. If Constantine thought this in the fourth century, it must have been taught by the Church for the previous 300 years, or was a deliberate distortion to make it easier to recruit converts. Even then, they did not bother that such a cynical attitude could hardly have met with God’s approval. You lead a life of sin, only repenting at the last moment, and will be saved anyway. Christians truly think God is a moron!
Even if it is assumed that the coming kingdom is the result simply of death—an assumption that makes Christ an idiot too, because it was not what he seemed to think, and if he did, he could have made it a lot clearer—the ethic of Christ has to apply in life for the Christian. They have to be righteous people, perfect in life, or they have to sincerely repent and be baptized to prove it, and thereafter live perfectly. They have to do something to earn salvation. Even then they have no need to be smug. The Pharisees were smug. Christ called them hypocrites. More importantly, Christ warned his own followers that many will be called but few would be received. There is only one reason why that should be so. The calling is insufficient because the Christian, though called to the faith, has to be perfect to be saved.
Dancing to Easy Tunes
Christians base this idea not on the teachings of their incarnated god. They mainly reject what he taught as too hard for them. They base it on the teaching of a man, one who is the chief saint of the Church perhaps, but still a man and not a god, or God, as Christ is supposed to be. It is Paul. Since he seems to be denying what Christ—God!—taught, why do no Christians suspect that Satan has mimicked God, reincarnated himself as a man—Paul—and taught a lie, a “Christianity” that negates everything that God tried to impress on His people. Satan allegedly has all the best tunes, one would imagine a warning, but Christians will not be warned. The best tunes are the easy ones, and Christians like easy tunes and detest hard ones. Pauline “Christianity” is easy. Or so modern Christians have convinced themselves.
The original Christianity, real Christianity taught by Christ himself, is hard. The Pauline gate is broad, the proper Christian one is narrow. Christ told them, but Paul’s simpler melody sounds sweeter. “We piped to you and you did not dance”, Jesus is reported to have said, and Christians have never liked his tune since. They just do not get it! Faith is not sufficient, and the bible is repeatedly clear that it is not, but few Christians will even try to dance to Christ’s hard tune. They cannot therefore be Christians. The man called the brother of Christ wrote an “epistle of straw”, according to the founder of Protestantism. It refutes the idea that faith suffices for salvation. To be a Christian means to do the will of God. Christians have to do something. Just having faith in an imagined personal buddy called Christ is doing nothing. That is why this “Christianity” is so popular.
Love Thy Neighbour
What the Christian has to do to do the will of God is to love their neighbour. “Their neighbour” is not the guy next door who goes to the same church. Anyone in the world might be a neighbour, at some time or another, so neighbour means anyone at all—any other human being. Just in case the Christian could not understand that, Christ clearly said that any wrong done to another was done to him personally—the man Christians consider as God! Any wrong to any human being was a wrong committed against God. So, to love your neighbour, to love other human beings as if they were yourself, is to love God. We meet God daily when we meet our fellow human beings. Maybe it is hard to follow, but it is not hard to understand this principle of Christ’s, even for president Bush and his cabinet.
Bush and the whole congregation of US Christians might think it is proper to carpet bomb parts of Iraq in revenge for 9/11 but every Arab killed is a wound in the flesh of God, as all Christians who follow the teachings of Christ must know. Even if some of the Arabs killed are terrorists, the rest are innocent of it, and in any case, Christ told his followers not to judge. Jesus believed the world was about to end, and then everyone would be judged by God, so his warning had an immediacy it no longer has, but anyone who believes in a coming Judgement Day must realize the danger of judging others, especially when death is the punishment. “Judge not lest you be judged” (Mt 7:1) really means “condemn not lest you be condemned”, yet boastful Christians like Bush, throughout history, have never ceased to condemn others to the most terrible of tortures and deaths, and still they never ceased to think they were saved! If it is so, who can doubt that Saul was the Devil, and remained it when he renamed himself Paul—the first modern Christian.
With the judgement you pronounce, you will be judged.
Here is the practical adage of Christian Christians. When dealing with other human beings, your neighbours, according to Jesus, you should imagine you are dealing with yourself. Bush and Blair, the leading practical Christians of the world, do not have the imagination to see themselves in the dock, instead the terrorists they think they can easily recognize, being judged by themselves. Nor can they have the imagination to see themselves being judged by God. Yet the minimal criterion of Christianity is that you should do unto others as you would be done by them. Anyone unable to do that cannot be a Christian however much worthless faith they have. Bush is singularly pious about a discarded human egg that can be used to save lives, but does not give a hoot about bombing living and conscious human beings half a world away. They are not US voters. It is hypocrisy but Bush thinks God does not notice, or maybe the president’s Christianity is for public consumption, and he does not give a hoot about God.
Synoptic Christianity
In his gospel, Mark was still expecting the world to end and urged Christians to watch for it. S G Wilson, according to Sanders, drily observed that Luke, a few decades later, did not expect the world to last for 2000 years, but he knew it had had to last longer than anyone had anticipated, and might have to last for a good deal longer still. Luke had to answer criticism that the End had not come, but his message was that the Christian had to be patient, and meanwhile endure the jibes of the critics. But he was still expecting the End, and had the particular concern that wealthy Christians—already there were some—were still accumulating wealth, though the world would soon end. Luke deliberately has a pertinent parable about a fool amassing wealth to no purpose. He died.
Christ had extolled the spiritual virtue of poverty, and told the rich man he had to give away his riches to the poor to be saved. He could not do it. The poor man, Lazarus, licked by dogs at the rich man’s gate is the one who gets to heaven. Luke says Pharisees loved money, whereas the Essenes called themselves “The Poor” because they gave all of their private wealth to their party, and the party disbursed according to individual need, just as the apostles did. Money is of the material, physical world, and played no part in the Garden of Eden or in heaven, so determined Christians ought not to have been interested in accumulating it. The salvific duty of rich Christians, according to Luke, was to use their wealth to help destitute Christians to endure until the Parousia. It gave them some chance of getting into heaven. They should have been showing how they could do without wealth, and instead use it to do good to others. All of this is based on the expectation of the eschaton. What is the use of money when Judgement Day arrived? While enduring the delay, what was Luke’s advice to the frustrated Christian? It was to be good! The Christian had to do good works, especially giving away any money you have to the poor.
Acts too, notably at the beginning when the behaviour of the original followers of Christ are described, shows that Christians had to act in a particular way. They had to pool their possessions, and it was a mortal sin to hold any back. Paul also collected money to disburse to “The Poor Ones” in Jerusalem. In the expectation of Judgement Day, Christians living in the wider empire had to give away some at least of their wealth, and Paul relied on it to raise funds, becoming wealthy himself in the process, like any publican!
Matthew resolves the problem of the delay in the Parousia by emphasizing that Jesus was not abrogating the law, of which not a jot or tittle would ever pass away, even when the world ended. That the Christian should love his neighbour even when they were enemies, was Matthew’s view of Jesus’s summary of the law. It is the law expressed while standing on one leg, according to Hillel—the law in a nutshell, we would say. God had given the law, so it was sacred, but Pharisees did not use it properly. Jesus did! So, the law, properly used, was not abrogated as Paul insisted. The law was the way to perfection needed to enter God’s kingdom, so, as the coming of the kingdom seemed delayed, people could prepare for it by following the law, notably in treating others as one would want to be treated oneself. That was God’s will.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explains what Christians should do to be righteous, ending with loving their enemies, and then (Mt 5:48), “You will therefore be perfect”. Now in case any lazy inattentive Christian missed it, Jesus adds explicitly that the whole of the law and the prophets depend on just two commandments (Mt 22:40), to love God and to love your neighbour. Loving God while hating and plotting to harm your neighbour is quite impossible. Loving your neighbour is how you show in practice that you love God. Naturally, you love your friends, so loving your enemies is, in practice, the whole of the law of Moses!
Paul (Rom 13:9) does not dissent from this. Indeed, it is the absolute basis of his teaching that the law was abrogated. As long as this was followed, loving your enemies, then the minute detail of the law was irrelevant. It is the teaching of Hillel. The law is not abrogated so much as encapsulated in one general principle. What does it mean to love your enemies? Again, for the confused Christian, Matthew has Jesus explaining that they must forgive others their transgressions, and consequently God would forgive them (Mt 6:14f). The reward comes when Christians are themselves judged. It depends on eschatological belief. Pursuing a vendetta or killing people in revenge is not forgiveness. The Christian has to do it if God is to repay them according to their deeds (Mt 16:27), and a deed is an action or a work. Without works, God will not forgive them, so their supposed faith gets them nowhere.
Matthew had no illusions like those of modern evangelical Christians who think they are automatically saved when they declare they have been born again and so have a figmentary relationship with Christ himself. It is a case of the emperor’s new clothes—they all convince each other it is so, and not one of them dare say anything else. The delusion therefore perpetuates to the financial gain of a lot of squalid pastors of the various barmy “churches”, and, if Christ was right, the lost souls of their sad sheep. Matthew himself did not hesitate to show his Jesus as denying that simply professing Christianity is not enough:
Many are called but few are chosen,Matthew 22:14
has already been noted, but also:
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord!” will enter the kingdom of heaven.Matthew 7:21
Nope! And the reason is that they have to do something—the will of God. For Matthew, even professing Christianity does not confer salvation, without righteousness. Christians did not always build their houses on firm foundations (Mt 7:2-27), so have no reason to be smug. The storing up of material treasures on earth is disastrous, but storing up treasures in heaven will count in anyone’s favour come Judgement Day. How can this be when simply having faith is sufficient? At root the idea is Zoroastrian, as much of Christianity is. In Zoroastrianism, Judgement is plainly and unequivocally on the balance of good deeds and bad deeds in anyone’s lifetime registered in the heavenly Book of Life. The idea passed from Zoroastrianism into Judaism when the temple state was set up by Darius II, and eventually became three books in Judaism, one for good deeds, one for bad ones, and one for others. In Revelation 20:12, “books” are mentioned which record “what the dead had done in their lives by which the dead are judged”. So, the treasures stored in heaven are the good deeds stored in the books for balancing against the bad deeds also stored. The message is simply be righteous and therefore do good deeds, and these will be stored in the heavenly book and count in your favour. Treasures in heaven! The final book of the Christian bible, much admired by modern Christians, especially those on the lunatic fringe, belies their own belief that faith is all that matters to salvation. Deeds matter, and good ones had better far outweigh bad ones to be certain.
What Did Paul Really Teach?
Paul, the apostle, boasted he was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, so must have been familiar with the idea of the heavenly books even though he supposedly told his gentile flocks that only faith mattered. Actually he says categorically that certain bad deeds practised by Christians will prevent them from entering the kingdom of God! (Gal 5:19-21) In case you missed it, Paul said bad behaviour excluded Christians from entering heaven. It means that salvation is not just a matter of faith! It ought to wipe the smirks from the faces of sniggering evangelicals, though it will not. Paul himself had great faith in “the spirit” in bringing proper behaviour to Christians but he warns them that there can be no law against personal excesses, what he calls self-indulgence. Faith, or having the spirit should guard against it but he warns Christians that they cannot belong to Christ unless they “crucify all self-indulgent passions and desires” (Gal 5:24). In other words, Paul is not saying that faith automatically guarantees a free passage into heaven. Christians have to do something besides be faithful. The have to crucify self-indulgence! Moreover, Paul says absolutely that the law is not abrogated but that the whole of the law is summarised as, “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14). The reason is that:
Love does no wrong to a neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.Romans 13:10
So, all the commandments like, “Do not steal”, “Do not kill”, “Do not covet your neighbour’s goods”, and so on, are encompassed by the one command. Paul says love is the one thing that cannot hurt your neighbour, and so covers everything that matters to human beings. The Christian cannot expect to break this last remaining command and expect to be saved. The president of the USA thinks he is so important that God has given him an exemption. Not according to Paul who is sure that God is no respecter of persons. Nor are these the only places in his writings where Paul makes it perfectly clear that Christians must not do certain things. That a Christian’s faith somehow obliges God to reserve an entry into His kingdom, as some Paulists argue, still requires the Christian to act righteously as “the fruit of the spirit”. It stands to reason that anyone who does not act righteously has no fruit of the spirit, and cannot have any spirit in them. Then their faith is bogus. Christians cannot rest content that God has somehow saved up a store of righteousness to paste on to them when they enter heaven. It is love and righteousness that earns them entry:
If the Christian is one who has been accounted righteous, then the Christian should be righteous. If a Christian is one who loves, then a Christian should love.J T Sanders, The Ethics of the New Testament
It is even more difficult than it seems. It is more difficult than just doing as you are told. It has already been noted, to love, because you have been told to, is not to love. Christians who believes that faith secures a place in heaven for them must do, indeed be, what God expects of them as Christians. On this criterion, they cannot just affect to be righteous or loving, they must really be. Accepting faith as the easy road to salvation is not as easy as many born agains are led to believe by their money-grubbing and ignorant pastors.
The whole belief is fraught. Ultimately people are saved by a gift of God. By God’s own grace He proffers salvation. If God has no choice in the matter then He is subject to a constraint, and He is not almighty. To imagine that because of a declared faith in Christ anyone can be accounted as righteous and demand salvation is to enslave God. If God really is almighty, then He cannot be thus enslaved, and those who believe it have been misled.
For Paul, the characteristic of the kingdom of God is love. Christians have to love, above all, because this love carries on into the kingdom with which it is continuous. Effectively, Christians abseil into the kingdom on love. No one could be perfect until the eschaton, because the world is imperfect, but the kingdom, through love, links into the real world, and attempting to love fully, in the real world, helps to break asunder reality to let God’s kingdom in. Essenes had the same sort of idea. By aiming to be perfect, as God had commanded, though it was not fully achievable in this world, it prepared them for the world where they would be perfect. They would become angels, just as Jesus explained. Angels had no need of sex because they were immortal and did not need to reproduce, so Essenes at the highest level eschewed sexual involvement here on earth. They practised at being angels. Paul expected Christians to do the same. It is this, misunderstood by ignorant Christians, that has led Christianity always to regard sex, a God-given pleasure, as a sin.
For Paul, love was what continued from imperfect to perfect, so practising being loving to others in the imperfect world eased their passage into paradise. Needless to say, hatred did the opposite. It eased the passage into hell. The early Christians, like the Essenes, thought that a cosmic battle of good and evil was underway, and they provided God with a bridgehead or a fifth column of the good in the wicked world that would help God’s victory when the hosts of heaven arrived led by the archangel Michael, transfigured, for Christians, into Jesus. The practice of love in the wicked world is the thin end of the heavenly wedge that would soon defeat wickedness. Christians thought they lived, in a sense, in two worlds, the dying wicked one, and the emerging holy one.
The commandment to love cannot make people love, but by attempting to do it, they prove their faith, and in so doing drive in the wedge that eventually destroys wickedness. So, again, faith alone is not sufficient, it is not an unconditional guarantee of eternal salvation, even for Paul. It is calling upon the assistance of the Holy Spirit to help, but not all who call are chosen, and the reason is that they fail to love sincerely. Faith is a covenant with God that He will not gratuitously deny the faithful admission to heaven, as He could, if He were capricious, but the faithful must use the power of love to fulfil their half of the contract. Christians have to behave in, what was for long considered by some of them, as the Christian way—lovingly and mercifully—until the Parousia, which Paul also thought would be soon.
Paul in the latter half of Romans makes no bones about telling Romans what they had to do to be Christians. Christians had to aim to be perfect by doing what is good and pleasing to God. That is the point of being “born again”. It is the rebirth of an ordinary fallible, and perhaps wicked, human being into someone determined to do God’s will by loving others. Paul explains it in detail (Rom 12:9-13:10). In part it tells Christians to submit to the civil authorities, a rule that would have meant Christ would never have turned the tables in the temple for example, but it is no comfort to Bush and his cabinet of pseudo-Christians, or Blair, for it is not telling them as authorities to wield the sword—it repeats the commandment that Christians must not kill and says evil must not be repaid by evil. It simply reminds them that the authorities at the time were not Christians and were not bound by Christian ethics such as mercy.
Paul might never have thought Christians would ever be authorities in this world, because the End was nigh. And in the future world, everyone was perfect, and no authority was needed, though, if it were, it was God Himself who provided it. Moreover, Paul was wrong to say that God directly appointed the Pagan authorities of Rome. It directly contradicts the doctrine of free will, utterly absolving humanity of responsibility for national wickedness. It makes God into a monster. Perhaps He is, but Christians are supposed to think He is a god of love. Paul might have had a different agenda in making this a principle. He might have been on the Roman bankroll.
It is up to righteous people always to show how righteousness can be restored when demagogues and tyrants try to remove it. Just ignoring it, and relying on faith will not do, but, by active use of love, something can be achieved (Rom 13:8), and they had to remember that salvation was nearer than they thought (Rom 13:11)—they had to make sure they had a favourable balance of it in their account. Later on (Rom 15:2), Paul says that, if the Christian loves his neighbour, then he should want to please him, and not just want to please himself, because pleasing his neighbour would teach him the right way to behave. Christ did not please himself, as he pointed out, but took on the reproaches of the authorities to do God’s will. If Christ had simply claimed he had faith and taught a Sunday school, and nothing more, he would have made little impact. He had to show he was doing the will of God, and if that is to love others, it quite excludes bombing the intestines out of innocent people in a country you do not happen to like much.
The summary of Paul’s belief is not so much that faith is sufficient for salvation as that love is. It is love that transcends the limits of this world and takes the Christian into the next. And love is not just saying that you love everyone, Paul says you have to try to please those that you love. You have to love, but have to show that you do. Faith is simply trusting that God will keep His part of the bargain. Humanity has to keep its part by doing God’s will by loving others and showing it! Love has to be the norm of Christian life not an ideal too hard to be attained, and so not attempted. It is impossible to realise it fully in this world but without the commitment to it, the Christian is not prepared for entry to God’s world.
Christ the Example
The Christian cannot excuse a lack of love by his faith, or by the failure of the kingdom to come. Looking back on 2000 years of Christendom, what is impressive is the dirth of salvific love it reveals. The conclusion that stares at you is that Christianity has got it wrong, and God has suspended the coming of the kingdom, because Christianity is a cruel joke. Maybe God knows that the Devil is still too powerful, and will not risk the heavenly hosts while the supposed followers of his own only begotten son are steadfastly worshipping Satan in their everyday deeds. Christianity in total is now far too corrupt to do anything other than the work of the Devil. Those who consider themselves true Christians, and are frustrated by the wickedness of Christianity in general have to begin to act as true Christians would, if they are to be saved. Salvation requires the Christian to imitate God, to try to be perfect, just as the Essenes did. To enter God’s kingdom, Christians have to aspire to perfection, and have to try to bring their earthly behaviour into line with heavenly behaviour. It must be hard. How is it to be done? Well, it ought to be plain. God, Christians believe, sent His son as the perfect man, so Christ is the example of how the perfect man behaved. 1 Peter 2:21 is explicit that Christ himself is the role model for Christians:
Christ suffered for your sakes, leaving behind an example for you.
Christians therefore have to behave in a certain way, namely like Christ himself, to be Christians. The author of this epistle implies that those in subordinate positions can more easily be like Christ—they suffer necessarily. It echoes “blessed are the poor”. Jesus is not your imaginary chum, he is the example of how you should live by love. How otherwise can anyone less than perfect expect to be admitted to a perfect place. Faith alone is a Satanic delusion.
Evidence of an expectation of the eschaton is also the advice to slaves to remain obedient to their masters. Just as Christians were enjoined to obey Pagan rulers, the point was that such obedience was only interim. Good Christians would be rewarded for their patience when the world ended, and it was to be soon.
Paul was fully aware that faith was not itself an eternal guarantee of salvation unless it remained sincere. Simply to profess faith in Christ meant nothing. Such a faith was non-existent or two insincere to offer any salvation, and even the faithful Christian could still be soiled by sins of the flesh. Faith did not immunize the Christian from temptation. Many modern Christians seem to think otherwise, but Paul had to disabuse the Corinthians about any such ideas:
Do not allow freedom to become an occasion for the flesh.Gal 5:13
One might say, do not be complacent, yet that is what many modern Christians are. Their faith has ceased to mean anything other than that they are in a club of like-minded friends. They have simply failed to walk worthy of the calling to which they were called (Eph 4:1), but still think they are called because they continue to call themselves Christians! They just boast they have faith. In Ephesians, Paul seems to aver that faith is the be all and end all of salvation, despite many other passages of his that contradict it:
For by grace you are saved, through faith, and this not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, that not anyone should boast, for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God before prepared that we should walk in them.Eph 2:8-10
Christians have to ask what this really means. Already we have seen that God, if almighty, cannot be constrained, so whatever He does must be His own decision. He cannot have to do anything, or He is not God almighty. Paul, if it was he who wrote this, is simply saying that God is almighty. He is saying that even faith is no assurance of salvation, because God is not constrained! If anything is the gift of God, it can be withheld by God. God does not have to give a reason. Works cannot assure anyone of salvation. Nor can faith. But Paul says that Christians are “created in Christ on behalf of good works”, and God knows what is good because he has prepared what is good also. Once again, the implication is that faith alone is not sufficient for salvation, and that must be so. God made the Christian for good works, but conversely, if a supposed Christian does not do good works, then he has not been made by God for His purpose! The doing of goodnes is the mark of a Christian!
Bush and Blair are really dualists. They see the world as a conflict of good and evil. The Essenes saw the world that way, but it is not supposed to be the Christian view. “Christ is all and in all” (Col 3:10), and God in the bible is the author of evil. On what basis then do these demagogues take it on to themselves to wage unnecessary wars? It has to do with worldly power and greed not at all to do with what Christianity is supposed to be.
John’s Christianity
In the later books of the New Testament, the original commandments of Christ are progressively watered down until they are merely lists of good and bad behaviours that define any good citizen. The distinctive requirement of the Christian to love everyone is at best a token virtue, one of the good behaviours, not God’s law uttered while standing on one leg, and not its very essence. Now many Christians have abandoned it completely. Christian love does not exist, or does so in remote corners where it is becoming extinct. People who say they try to be a good Christian, usually mean no more than that they try to be a good citizen. They do no more than any citizen should do. But national will and God’s purpose are equated, so that Christians in the US revere a flag as much as they do God. Those who oppose an administration that sends bombers and military to interfere with other countries are accused of sympathising with terrorists when they are showing up the real terrorists, the biggest bully in the playground! Christ has become Caesar!
The Jesus of John tells his audiences they must love each other as he loved them. Christ again is explicit that his example should be their example. Moreover, John 15 leaves no doubt that faith is not an abstraction devoid of active content—faith and love are equated. Jesus says:
He who hears my word and believes him who has sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgement but has gone over from death into life.John 5:24
It is fondly cited by Christians who want to be saved with no effort of their own because all it seems to require is belief. But to “hear my word” is not merely to hear it, but to act on it, otherwise why should God’s word be anything sensible at all. It could have been sent as a nonsense word like “abracadabra”. If God in the form of the Son is uttering meaningful words, it is ridiculous to argue that these words do not matter because they merely have to be heard. To “hear my word” means to do what Christ exhorted his followers to do. To be a Christian means doing certain things that signify you are a Christian, specifically loving your neighbour as yourself. People who are not Christians might do the same, but those who are Christians cannot fail to do it. Christ washed his disciples feet. Christians are supposed to do the same, and not just to other Christians. The act is an act of love—doing what is pleasurable for your neighbour.
In John, Christians have to love “one another”, not “their neighbour”, and some Christians argue that Christ therefore did not mean love to extend to all. The immediate objection is that loving one another meaning your close friends, is what everyone does anyway. Why is there any need to command what happens quite naturally. Friends are the people whom you love, and enemies are those who hate you, and the rest are those you are indifferent towards. So we all love one another in the sense that we love those close to us, and plainly the command of God the Son must be more than that. Christians who believe that they have a duty to help to save others must want to love others not in their immediate circle of friends. Elsewhere in John, Jesus says he wants the world to believe (Jn 17:21), so loving “one another” must mean loving everyone (Jn 17:23). The Christian must practice love to be saved whichever way you try to look at it. Surely, the fact that some Christians want to deny this is proof enough that they are trying to wreck the message that Christians should be hearing, the message of the man they suppose to be God. Loving action, is doing something, and that means works! At the very least, Christians are forbidden from doing something, namely from sinning. There is no reward either for hating, as Christ himself said.
Some Christians say the raising of Lazarus is proof that belief is sufficient for salvation, for Jesus asked Martha whether she believed, and raised Lazarus only when she confirmed she did. So, if the modern Christian were the Good Samaritan, he would want to know whether the victim believed. If he did not, he would insist on converting him before he would help. If he did, he would tell him to rest assured eternal life awaited him when he died. And is faith transferrable? Here it seems that Martha’s faith saves Lazarus. No doubt those who think that they are saved by having a sort of mental illness in which instead of thinking they are Napoleon, they imagine Jesus is their best pal, think the mere illusion of the proximity of the perfect man is what saves them. The whole notion of the transferring of faith makes God into an idiot. God carefully prescribes how people should behave to be saved in the Jewish law, then sends his son to explain that loving everyone is what the law really signifies, then lets people cosy up to this son in their imaginations without doing anything at all, and they are saved because Christ’s faith has rubbed off onto them. It is beyond criticism, it is so ludicrous, but very easy to do, and so fills the crazies’ churches, no doubt.
Faith might offer a predisposition by God to grant salvation, but the Christian still has to “hear the word” and act on it to do God’s will in the world. Few Christians have because their ministers are more interested in getting their dollar bills into the collection than they are in explaining what Christ explained, that being a Christian is not a piece of cake, but is difficult, and salvation is never assured. It might not sound as comforting as the minister’s twaddle, but they only have to read the bible themselves to see that it is true. The platters are full, and the churches too, but mainly not with Christians, but with fools who have sold their souls to their devilish ministers. The author of the epistles of John makes it as clear as crystal:
Love not in word or tongue but in deed and truth.1 John 3:18
The Strawy Epistle
In Hebrews 6:10, love and works are treated in parallel, as if equal, and, indeed, in Hebrews 10:24, they are equal:
Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.
The good works are explained in Hebrews 13, introduced by the words, “Let brotherly love abide”. Having faith obviously has practical implications, and, without them, the conclusion has to be that faith is absent or is insincere and so valueless.
The expression “by faith”, J T Sanders tells us, appears only in Romans, Galatians and James in the whole of the literature of early Christianity. Paul uses it twelve times in Romans, and eight times in Galatians, James just once (Jas 2:24):
Man is justified by works and not by faith alone.
The epistle of James is a refutation of Paul’s unwarranted innovation of salvation by faith alone. In fact, Paul never uses the phrase “by faith alone”, and, since it was not used by other early Christians, it seems likely that none of them ever thought justification—salvation—was by faith alone. We have seen repeatedly above that justification cannot ever have been meant to have been by faith alone, even when Paul emphasised the importance of faith. But at some stage it was seized upon by some clergymen to fill their churches, and has been used similarly ever since in a way that Paul never intended. And the preachers that spread this falsehood have done untold damage to the souls of many people, if the Christian message is valid.
James does not deny the importance of faith, and, in that respect, he agrees with Paul. He denies that faith alone can save a soul. Always the Christian had to demonstrate his faith through works, and that is what James argues.
Paul cites Abraham as justified by faith because he could not be justified by a law that did not then exist, but, when Paul explicitly uses the phrase “works of the law”, he is not dismissing good deeds as being irrelevant to salvation. Indeed, Paul could not have been disparaging the law as works in the period after Moses brought it down. The law was God given, and required Jews to behave in a certain way. It required certain deeds to be done. Equally when God presented love of neighbours as a sufficient summary of the totality of the law, that still required certain deeds to be done. Nothing fundamentally had changed, and that is just what Christ taught—not a jot or tittle of it would pass away. If the whole of the law was expressed as love of God as shown through love of neighbours, then the law was still in force. It was simply condensed into a comprehensive principle—to love! Paul did not distinguish faith from the deeds that a Christian had to do to show it, and James felt the same way, but wanted to make the error clear. He failed! Christians ignored him because faith requires no effort, whereas works do require it. But far from being “a right strawy epistle”, as Luther thought, it is the noblest practical expression of Christianity, hardly possible to misunderstand, except wilfully. Christians should read it more often.
What is interesting is that modern psychological study of religion has found that belief and religious behaviour are intimately connected. Neither faith is sufficient nor are works, but the two grow together unless the faith is merely cosmetic. And theologians agree:
The proof of Christianity really consists in “following”.Kiekergaard
Only the doer of the word is its real hearer.Karl Barth
Who Are They Worshipping?
Not that it matters. They are happy to believe that God came to earth as a man to teach a lot of lessons that are quite irrelevant to ordinary existence, and so can be happily ignored. Christians take God to be a fool. Either that or Jesus’s teaching can be ignored because he was wrong about the eschaton, and that is why his ethic is irrelevant. But God cannot be wrong, so Jesus cannot have been God or the Son of God. Who then are they worshipping?
