Hi Byron:
I did look at this briefly. It looks like a potentially interesting work that seems to confront many of my long standing issues with Orthodox Christianity. Whether it resolves them or not, I don't know as I have not ordered the book. Just to synopsize the 19 main "sticking points", I have listed the downloadable "teaser page" below.
In His Love, John
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The modern gospel states:
• All people, having sinned, are unrighteous. Hence, due to God’s perfect sense of justice, no one is naturally qualifed for heaven.
• To address this, God sent Jesus as a sacriVce to grant forgiveness of sins to all believers.
• Those who have faith in Christ, and only those who believe in Christ, can thus enter heaven as their sins have been forgiven.
• God has no choice but to consign all others to hell for their unforgiven sin.
David Rudel discusses 19 reasons why the above is biblically unacceptable. Many of these 19 "problems" seem to be right out of the UR camp. A summary of these points is listed below:
1. It presupposes the Judgment has the format of a court of law where only our offenses are relevant. Christs’ teachings on the Judgment indicate godly deeds (which Jesus and others say can be done even by those who have no knowledge of Christ are as relevant as our failings.
2. The Bible depicts many people, including those who never knew of Jesus, as righteous. The idea that a single sin makes someone unrighteous in God’s eyes is thoroughly destroyed by any reasonable reading of scripture.
3. The modern gospel claims faith in Christ is the only means by which sins can be forgiven, but scripture gives at least six dfferent routes to forgiveness, most available to non-believers.
4. It fails to make any sense of why the original apostles only spread the gospel of Christ to other Jews during the decade after Christ’s death. These men were full of the Holy Spirit and had been given a complete teaching of God’s work through Jesus [Luke 24:27]. To suggest they believed Christ’s purpose was to save believers from hell would indicate they wanted all non-Jews to be consigned to eternal torment.
5. It indicates God holds every person to the same standard of conduct, a claim without any biblical support. Dozens of passages demonstrate the opposite.
6. It fails to show the relevance of Christ’s life and resurrection in God’s salvic plan. If we are saved through Christ’s sacrifice, then the resurrection itself is rather unneeded. Yet the early apostles and church fathers based their theories of salvation squarely upon the resurrection rather than the sacrifcial aspect of Christ’s death. Jesus is never referred to as a sacrifice or propitiation anywhere in all the evangelism captured in Acts (the most comprehensive repository of the apostle’s actual teachings
to unbelievers), and very rarely is He so described elsewhere.
7. It declares Jesus’ sacrifice grants forgiveness of all sins to believers when the Bible speciffically says otherwise.
8. It is not consistent with the context and purpose of the Messiah as found in the later prophets.
9. Jesus’ own disciples did not know of His coming death and resurrection even though He attempted to tell them privately about it. Thus, it is impossible for the modern gospel to have had any real place in the general message Jesus and His apostles proclaimed to the crowds during Christ’s earthly ministry.
10. Jesus, Paul, and many others indicate believers and unbelievers are both in danger of hell due to their sins.
11. The modern gospel cannot explain how Enoch and Elijah were allowed to ascend to God’s presence before Christ’s sacrffice. Suggesting God forgave people before Jesus by looking forward to Christ’s sacrifice would render nonsensical much of the Old Testament.
12. It is impossible to read Matthew, Mark, or Luke in isolation and come away with any semblance of the modern Gospel. Thus, we must reject the modern gospel or else claim these writers cruelly and willfully misled their readers, for they could not assume their audience had access to any other specific commentary on Christ’s purpose.
13. It violates Jesus’ own teachings regarding how those who came before Him are judged. In particular, it fails to explain how those who never knew of a coming Christ (much less that Jesus was He) could possibly be saved from hell.
14. It claims forgiveness of sins is the prevailing aspect of the Judgment while most descriptions of the Judgment found in the Bible make no mention of forgiveness at all.
15. It does not explain how the entire creation, including animals and God’s angels, were reconciled to God through Christ’s blood, for we do not generally believe either these creatures are guilty of sin.
16. Jesus was sent to mediate the New Covenant, so it is unnatural to suggest His sacrffice was aimed at the Judgment (which transcends the covenant, for all are judged).
17. The Bible proclaims the entire world and all people have been saved through Christ. If salvation is derived from forgiveness of individuals’ sins, such would imply that all have been forgiven of their sins, not just those who believe in Christ.
18. All the original apostles, and all Jewish Christians of the First century, continued to obey the cultural Jewish laws. The modern gospel has trouble explaining why Peter, nine years after Christ’s death, still believed he could not enter a Gentile’s house. It also leaves one bewildered as to why Paul was just as ardent about keeping the Mosaic laws after his conversion as before.
19. It does not respect the Jewish understanding of salvation, a rather serious issue given that all the books of the Bible were written by Jews, the original Christian church was entirely Jewish, and the gospels relate Jesus’ interactions with the Jews.
©David I Rudel 2 Draft: February 12, 2009
