christian people, what does this mean

exodus

INTERESTING!!!

Because I had wondered if it was trying to shame lapsed christians and be like “REMEMBER JESUS!? HE’S STILL HERE!” but maybe it’s also saying to other groups “you’re doing it wrong, and jesus is part of god” or something?

Uhhh what’s the holy ghost btw, tim explained it once but I forgot.

What I find interesting about this billboard is the hubris involved in assuming people will understand it and then be shamed by it enough to do whatever it is the billboard wants them to do (which I still don’t really get - is it convert to a different christian group?)

TracyDMcGrath

exodus These churches often don’t consider rival churches to be Christian at all. They’re either too Catholic or too Methodist, and thus teach the heresy of good works, or they’re too liberal/modernist which is still a sore spot from the fracture of nearly every large Protestant sect in the 1920s over those lines.

My boyfriend’s brother joined one of these vaguely reformed small churches and they baptised him, even though he already had a Catholic baptism. The idea of “double dipping” is heretical, but since the Catholic baptism “doesn’t count” it’s considered their first and only baptism. They see it more as conversion to Christianity from an imposter religion.

As for the Holy Ghost, it’s another coequal person of the Trinity. Not mentioned all that much in the New Testament: it appears to Jesus at his baptism, and to the apostles at Pentacost, granting them the power to preach to a large crowd in their native tongues. It has some precedent in the Hebrew Bible, like in Genesis where “the Spirit of God was on the face of the waters”, but it’s equally vague in both.

Moon

what’s the holy ghost btw

Sincerely interesting question that I’d love see anyone reading this weigh in on.

Without looking up anything, I’m say the “holy ghost” is like God’s acting spirit on earth.

God is a triune being. Father stays in heaven. Son died for sins. The Holy Ghost is the intetplanar intermediary. When god works on earth he does it through the holy ghost? It’s the tool through which god works his will on earth, but calling it “gods tool” is insuffienct because it’s a part of god?

Syzygy

whatever it is the billboard wants them to do

They want you to enter into the bounty of the kingdom of Heaven.

(Assuming total good faith) it’s really that simple: 1. this is the only way to be Saved, 2. I should help others to be Saved, 3. therefore I should tell them this truth, of which they are either ignorant or agree with me already

See also all the materiel intended for distribution to atheists that assumes as first principle the Bible is the Word of God and therefore these people just must not know about it. There’s nothing contradictory about this position, earnestly held, but it also doesn’t need nor put forward any argument but that.

TracyDMcGrath

Syzygy Cornelius Van Til, an influential bloke in these circles, even argued in his Christian Apologetics that an argument other than one along those lines is in a sense blasphemous. Faith in God is a gift from God, arguing someone to it logically doesn’t work, is presumptuous on your part, and assumes common ground where none exists between the competing world views.

esper

(my religious background: grew up mostly ignorant of the concept of religion, vaguely “christian” in a suburban non-churchgoing way, went to a catholic high school and took 4 years of theology classes, took a few theology classes in college to meet a requirement, went through edgelord atheist stuff from 13-18, vague buddhist phase in college, now kinda just think religion is whatever story people want to tell themselves about a universe that by all observations Came Into Being purely through the advancement of measurable and semi-predictable cosmic/galactic/stellar/planetary/biological actions across time, and all religions are more or less fine so long as nobody is using it as a weapon against anyone else)

the father is the old testament guy
the son is the new testament guy
the holy spirit is the angel who saves the day in christmas movies

exodus

I feel some things are at odds here because if this message is meant to inspire me to get into the kingdom of heaven, but I have to ask my forums to even begin to understand it, who are they really gonna even get??

Now the holy ghost - I still don’t really get it. Is it that:

god is busy and can’t hang out
jesus is dead
so the holy ghost is god’s James Cameron avatar to talk to people on earth?

Were that the case, why wouldn’t the holy ghost come up a lot more? If that’s the one we can interface with it seems like that’d be one of the main ones.

But I guess since it was kind of like… We need one more thing, so we are better than the other christian versions, and they just kind of half-heartedly retconned it, I guess that makes sense. But it’s hard to see who they meant me to believe it to be, and it sounds like it’s not that clear to those of you who learned this stuff properly either? Hmm

BTW I should’ve addressed this thread to people with knowledge of christianity, not christians necessarily, oops!

P.S. I don’t know what the different testaments are, I assume various revisions to start new religions with (like the king james vs whatever else?) but we don’t really need to get into it

bodydouble

exodus Now the holy ghost - I still don’t really get it.

Any questions?

TracyDMcGrath

exodus It’s vague precisely because the Church didn’t invent the Holy Spirit to serve a purpose and then retcon it into the Bible. They were working with what they had and trying to systematize a lot of contradictory and antagonistic texts. The Old Testament, which is the Hebrew Bible, was written largely during the Babylonian exile, but has texts are written by different schools (Chronicles and Kings cover the same ground but have wildly different opinions of the reigns of various kings), at different points in Judaism’s development (the older Job has a whole divine council and Satan and God making bets with each other while the newer Daniel has Persian Zoroastrian apocalypticism in it), in different genres (Psalms has music, Proverbs has bourgeois etiquette, Ecclesiastes is a deeply atheistic and deeply pessimistic rant, The Song of Songs is porn) with the only thing tying them together being the reverence lent to them over a long stretch of time until a canon of texts is arrived at.

The New Testament is a similar story, we have the author of Matthew, a Jewish man writing to a Jewish audience, the author of Luke, a gentile writing to other gentiles, and Paul, who has ties to both Judaism and Rome writing to mixed background churches that he set up that are fighting about circumcision and kosher diets. Paul and the author of James are explicitly at odds, the author of 2 Peter says Paul is hard to understand and people read him in dangerous ways, and yet they were all revered enough by enough people the early church was trying to unify that they all end up together. (We have much of the stuff that didn’t quite make it, a lot of Zoroastrian inspired apocalypticism from the Old Testament, wild fan fiction from the New Testament, with Jesus zapping people to death and pulling pranks on birds).

The Holy Spirit as theological doctrine is vague because the early church leaders have all these references to it they have to synthesize, but not much to go on. The Ruah Elohim in Genesis, so old that it is referencing gods plural, needs to mesh with the Pneumati Theou that appears to Jesus at his baptism and is being used by Gnostic sects to imply the primacy of the soul over the body. The resulting Trinitarianism is more the early church’s best attempt to not piss off potential members than a whole cloth theological creation. They had something that was clearly separate from God and worshiped as God in their canonical texts and had to decide how to reconcile that. There’s a rough division of labor, with the Father creating, the Son saving, and the Spirit empowering believers, but any question that gets too close to the differences between the persons usually gets answered by reference to the mystery of the Trinity, which is best not to put in non Church approved terms. The schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches was largely caused by a disagreement over whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, or from the Father alone to give an example about how careful one had to be about talking about the Spirit. A minute disagreement about it led directly to the fall of the Byzantine Empire.

rejj

Moon “God” is a triune being composed of the father, son, and holy spirit.

Please, please forgive me – but seeing this immediately reminded me of Gene Ray’s TimeCube.

@exodus I suspect this is a case of the sender of the message (copywriter of the billboard) is so thoroughly engrossed in their belief that they do not even consider the case where a reader would not understand it. Perhaps a sloppy analogy would be a lazy tourist thinking that if they just speak english slower, the locals will finally understand them. The thought “maybe these people cannot understand english at all” never crosses their mind.

This billboard is speaking god at you, slowly.

bankbank

this is why Islam seems superior, when speaking of the Abrahamic religions. there’s just the one diety, that’s it. التوحيد!

although I do believe there are some Christian denominations that practice ‘Nontrinitarianism’?

@exodus yeah in Islam they revere Jesus (PBUH) as one of the prophets, they call him by the name ‘Isa’.

yeso

TracyDMcGrath yes well said. Christian metaphysics were pretty wild and wooly for a few centuries before constantine’s conversion and the religion broadly considered “hit the big time” and went legit.

Part of the emphasis on Jesus being both God and His son simultaneously, has to do with the prophet-based Jewish-messianic arms race happening in the holy land during those centuries. Rather than receiving ecstatic visions or hearing the word of god in his or her brain, Jesus was God’s Actual Kid, and a manifestation of God itself. So the trinity is kind of a weird idea, but it makes sense to look at from that prophetic tradition - if God wanted to further clarify or enhance the religious practices of his worshippers who were Jews living in Levant, he’d send a prophet to do prophet stuff, but with miracles+resurrection to seal the deal.

I’m sure the billboard is just rehashing boilerplate christian outreach/advertising, but it’s echoing this dynamic, as debased as it appears in the OP example

Then again there’s always the gnostic tradition that believes Christ is the Demiurge, and a deceiver that distracts us from apprehending the True God

exodus

TracyDMcGrath thanks, this is helpful! I get the holy ghost thing a lot better now, as I wrote a game (indivisible) that had about 10 different people’s ideas in them, sometimes contradictory, and I had to put them all into one work that made sense, so sometimes a character had to be a lot of things at once and just kinda… let that happen.

@treefroggy I don’t think that’s all the billboard means, because if it did it’d just be like “accept jesus into your heart” as other billboards say. this has implications I might be trying to get to god in some way other than jesus, or… something else. unless they did an even worse job than I already thought at conveying their message.

But I think I mostly get it now!

I saw a mostly-destroyed (and partially refurbished) zoroastrian temple from a bus in esfahan - it was far away but cool to see! the fire temple, I guess it was.

This is closer to what I actually saw, minus the water of course because they were in a 12 year drought. probably a 14 year drought by now.

Moon

… but what if you could get to heaven on roller skates?

The implications…

treefroggy

I don’t think anyone adequately answered the question yet.
A common Christian belief is that you have to admit your guilt of sin and invite Jesus into your heart in order to be saved.
That is what the billboard is referring to.

Unrelated:
The atonement doctrine was mainly the apostle Paul’s thing. Paul was Zoroastrian. Everyone knows Christianity was built upon Judaism but it’s just as many parts Zoroastrianism, something most people don’t know.

TracyDMcGrath

treefroggy Paul was Zoroastrian.

Do you have a source for this? This is the first I’m hearing of it

yeso

treefroggy are you thinking of augustine and manicheasim?

treefroggy

exodus
Dude, I grew up going to church with them constantly saying stuff like “Jesus is the way”. It doesn’t make sense literally, but setting aside all pedantry a billboard that says “JESUS the ONLY way to god” is pretty clear to me where they’re coming from. Drive through texas or the bible belt and you’ll see tons of crazier christian stuff on billboards…. Just slap some vaguely “team jesus” words on a billboard and call it a day.

But you know what…. I see what you mean, you see some islamophobic/ anti-any other religion implications to it….. and you’d be right! It’s very sad, that’s all there is to it!
I may even recall being somewhat surprised seeing a billboard like that driving through the SF bay, because it seems like something you’d see in texas or the bible belt.
That’s a dope temple. Zoroastians believe that when there is fire, God is present. Not that God = Fire, but that God is there when something is ablaze. Also their religious burial practice was to put the bodies on top of temples to be taken away by birds, nowadays I think that has been mostly restricted and now cremation is the main method.

Also! Still @ sheffield, that’s cool you had parents that let you make your own choices, my biological father took me to many churches and stuff, showed me to “judge a tree by the fruit it bares” and basically take the good stuff from any religion. On the west coast there are some pretty progressive and epic churches, but just as many if not more conservative ones that wanna rope you into the cult.

yeso nope!
TracyDMcGrath with all due respect, I come here to discuss video games not spirituality or religion. I put myself in this position though oops. I’m cutting it off here!

My spirituality is very personal and private thing and I’m gonna be the last one to share any of the specifics/sources of it here and I’m gonna dip out of the convo now. Just know I have a deep love and sympathy for everyone! :p unless you like different video games than me then you can go to hell! >:3

milo

As a non religious person, I do appreciate theology and all this religious discussion is very fascinating.

I think @treefroggy has it right, here, about the billboard in particular.

While I’m not reglious these days, I did grow up going to christian church. I stopped going shortly after I graduated high school, started wondering about agnosticism before adopting atheism and now I worship random chaos energy and sonic the hedgehog (with a little bit of mindfulness buddhism mixed in).

Anyway one of the main reasons I stopped going to church was because of the way the church really hammered the point home that we are all horrible sinners who deserve hellfire unless we accept jesus into our hearts. I guess it’s because I grew up in a sort of abusive household, but I just got over people telling me I’m worthless, religious or otherwise. And it went a bit further than that…

For instance… The very first band I played guitar in was the church youth band. We were a christian rock outfit and we had a blast together. I wanted to give us a name (nothing crazy, maybe something biblical) but the youth pastor wouldn’t let us because giving us a name was a form of idolatry and took away from the message of jesus. Okay, fair enough. Whenever I would get a little crazy on the guitar the youth pastor would tell me to tone it down a bit. He felt I was showing off and taking the message away from jesus. Okaaaay, fine.

It got to the point where my close friends and girlfriend at the time (who were also very religious) were telling me I had to rethink or dump certain aspects of my life because those things weren’t “for jesus”. I got fed up. After my girlfriend broke up with me I had a serious rethink about religion and decided it wasn’t for me.

My point here being that, according to the billboard, jesus really is the ONLY way to God. Not playing guitar in a youth band, not holding hands with your girlfriend, not buying transformer toys with the last of your paycheck… Jesus is the only way, so forget all that other stuff and read your darn bible… According to these guys.

TracyDMcGrath

milo Well that sounds real rough. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but glad you were able to get out of that situation.

milo

TracyDMcGrath

Haha thanks! While I did grow disillusioned of the whole thing, during my time in th church there was a lot of love and I spent time around some wonderful people.

It did really change the way I view church altogether, and religion vs. spirituality. I believe the most important part of a connection with your deity is the personal connection. That’s “spirituality” while congregation and youth groups and stuff like that is “religion”, at least to me. And I believe the spirituality part trumps all aspects of the religion part. There’s a Bible verse where jesus talks about the hypocrites who pray on the street corner for all to see “for they know what they are doing and have received their reward in full”. He says to go into your closet and pray to God in secret and “He will reward you in full”.

So, back to the billboard… The person that paid to put that up, in my opinion, is going against one of jesus’ main tenets, which is to keep your spirituality between you and God.

TracyDMcGrath

milo I think of that verse every time I see a street preacher haha.