Gay Species: A Kind of Psychosis?
Here's an interesting analysis of gays and religion by Gay Species who frequently comments on my posts. It certainly make a great case as to why taking the Bible literally is foolishness. I also like his take on St. Paul, who in my view, did extreme damage to the Gospels of Christ due to his inability to let go of the Jewish holiness code and its legalism which totally contradicted Jesus' rejection of legalism in favor of the spirit of the two great commandments.
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If one removes the Pauline-authored epistles (Hebrews is not Pauline), Jude's, and maybe Revelation, a rather vividly different picture emerges as you suggest. The catholic epistles of James, John, and Peter (all apostles' names, by the way) comport with not only the synoptic Evangelists, but even the Johanine. In fact, the former "implement" the latter. (This division is still done by Coptic Christians, who think Paul is merely "useful.")
Yet, a legalistic and Platonic Jew has a vision of the post-ascension Risen Christ, not any of the "earlier Christological individual," and by his missions secures the largest number of converts, mostly, rather almost entirely, in Greece, where Platonism was well understood. It requires one to ask: Was Saul's Platonism using the "Christ Event" for his Platonic purposes, or vice versa?
Paul makes Plato appear materialistic. No one in history before him so denigrated all matter, much less considered all humans totally depraved and incapable of any good. Even Plato was not that spiritual. And, since only the Risen (spiritual) Christ is Paul's Exemplar, not the Teacher, not the Messiah, not the Incarnate One, but the disembodied Risen One as the New Adam, it radically shifts the "appeals" of Jesus to adopts a spiritual sensibility to an ABSOLUTE necessity and precondition to live ONLY in the spirit by denying all things of the world, including human flesh, which Jude even claims contaminates fabrics!
If Jesus is God Incarnate (the Word made FLESH), a major disconnect is more than obvious. If the flesh is so filthy, so contaminated, do depraved, how could a god have chosen to assume a life in that flesh? New Wine in corrupt Bottles? Just does not gel, comport, and reconcile. Something more than a "vision" has distorted the Gospel and the catholic epistles with Paul's Hyper-Platonic epistles!
With such a clear and obvious dissonance, why did the Church add Paul's writings to the Canon of Scripture -- finally, in the 16th century? Now that is the real enigma. Was it Paul's waxing philosophically about the CHURCH, while undermining the Incarnation? Was it because the Greeks were so successfully converted? Who knows. But many Catholic scholars have done more than scratch their heads over this dissonance, often doing the same dissimulation as Queer Christian Theorists. (Non-Catholics rarely have a clue of scriptural aetiology, use, and hermenteutics, besides which, the CHURCH, not its scriptures, is divinely instituted at Peter's Confession and divinely animated at Pentecost to perpetuate the apostolic ministry, and IT wrote and interprets ITS writings, not every Tom, Dick, and Harry -- or Robertson, Falwell, or biblical fanatic.)
Since Catholics do not regard the scriptures as either literal or inerrant, and merely PART of the revealed Word of God, complemented by the Fathers and Faith-lived arbitrated by episcopal collegiality in ecumenical council, they are not tied to Calvin's idiocy of "the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God which alone is sufficient for salvation" (which cannot be found in the Bible, which certainly makes the "sufficiency" criterion highly dubious) and thus can change its interpretative stance by its plethora of sources. But not so anyone who takes the Bible itself as a revelation of the Yahweh/God/Christ/Spirit connection.
But good Christian FOLK love to quarrel over precisely these issues, sometimes war over them, while the Son of Peace is where in this picture?
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