City Of God 2

I wouldn't exactly call myself an ex-fundamentalist, even if at one time I held a rather literalist view of the Bible. I was taught by my early mentors to respect scripture as authoritative and to believe that every word written had somehow come from the mouth of God. But I also had doubts about certain passages, and by the time I was in my early twenties was already revising some cherished earlier positions I had taken. I was finding some of Paul's writings increasingly hard to swallow, as well as the genocidal passages of the Old Testament. I was becoming increasingly puzzled about the eschatological and apocalyptic teachings. We had based so much of our zeal when I was a teenage Jesus freak, on the anticipated second coming of Christ, and we all believed that this was going to happen in our lifetime. Israel was once again a nation (no one seemed to give a second's thought to Palestinians languishing in refugee camps) and Jesus said, according to a very twisted and distorted understanding of a line ascribed to him in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew that within a generation of the refounding of Israel, the rapture would occur and we would be taken up into glory and Jesus would return in power and glory and so would be established the New Jerusalem. None of us believed that we would reach an old age. We were dead-certain that there would be in our lifetime, likely before the year 2000, a nuclear confrontation in Israel over the rebuilding of the new Jewish temple where now stands the Muslim Dome of the Rock mosque, Christ would descend to earth with his heavenly armies in the midst of the destruction, slay all his enemies, and we would live in the paradise of heaven and earth united while skipping and dancing along streets of burnished gold and surrounded by walls of precious stones and diamonds. Christies and Sotheby's would have it so good! We are now in 2018, and not much has changed really. Things do get scary at times, with the monsters inhabiting Washington, Moscow and Beijing, but things have always been scary. please tell me, Gentle Reader, when we haven't been mostly frightened like chickens. Even with the looming threat of climate change the earth goes on spinning in its orbit, the sun goes on shining and now, in my time zone, another day is beginning to dawn. Will things always go on like this? Well, who knows? What about Biblical prophecy? Isn't Jesus coming back? Was he mistaken? Was Paul wrong? Are we being led about by a farce? I can only answer this with one lame little effort of mine: no one has ever really known. Not even Jesus. But surely I believe he was (and is) divine? Well, yes. I also accept that when Jesus lived and walked among his fellow Jews that he also was subject to the same limitations as his comrades. His knowledge was limited to what was commonly held in Palestine during the Roman occupation. Being divine did not make him omniscient, at least not during his earthly life. He was born a human child and grew and was educated as a human child. Yes, it is reported that at the age of twelve he showed remarkable insight and wisdom, at least insofar as holy matters are concerned, but he still lived within the same limitations as his peers. That was part of the price of incarnation. How could God possibly have fully identified with us, but to also begin life the way we do: a helpless, weltering and crying vulnerability weighing between five and ten pounds, completely dependent upon his parents for everything. Which means that he would spend his first year or two suckling from his mother's breast, needing his nappies changed, learning to walk, talk, explore his surroundings, ask questions, fall down, cry, get up again and keep learning. We know precious little about the childhood of Jesus, but likely he developed quite normally, although was probably exceptionally bright and precocious in some ways, and yes, he also had to experience puberty and his awakening sexuality, and all of this while living within the limits of life in the Middle East two thousand years ago. It is unreasonable to expect that he was going to be factually correct about everything. Even being God in human form, he was still in human form. This isn't to suggest that there is no meaningful essence in the prophecies he spoke in Matthew 24, and to this day, Biblical scholars wrestle and lose sleep over these things. We have though these two promises: he is coming again; and he is with us always. How, or when, or whether he comes again, really is none of our business, which perhaps is why he was being, maybe, intentionally obscure when he spoke of those things. But we have now the assurance that he is with us always, and this truly must reassure us as we move forward, manifesting in our lives the kingdom of God on earth.