Saturday 25 February 2012

The Jesus paradox.

One point that Richard Dawkins raises in his book ' The God Delusion' is that if everything needs a Designer, why is God Himself exempt?

It is a valid question , but then he postulates that Natural Selection gives forth everything alive on earth today.
It might seem rational that we find religion of one form or another around the world, and that Pantheism and Animism gradually develop into Monotheism, as it did with the Jews.

Let's be honest, the God of Abraham needed to go send a couple of angels into Sodom to go check it out - this is a far cry from an Omniscient God  who according to Jesus, knows when a sparrow falls.We may say that either God has changed, or is it our awareness that has grown? Hebrew religion shows sign of having developed over time, rather than being handed down, all complete, from the hands of a Divine Revealer.

And yet, there is a paradox about Jesus that I cannot quite fathom.
If Jesus is a legend, as Dawkins insists, then I would expect Jesus to be shaped by the dictates and fancies of his followers. How much easier it would have been for monotheistic Jews to conclude along with the JWs, Arians  and  Moslems  that Jesus was simply a messenger - an angel or Archangel on a mission.

Yet this is not what we see. After meeting Him , not only are they emboldened to declare that He rose from the dead, but they also declared Him to be God incarnate,  and started behaving in line with this. And these were men who were monotheistic Jews who had real problems in letting go of circumcision, don't forget.

Darwin's theory of Evolution was inevitable, it is argued. If Darwin had not found it, Wallace or someone else would. And yet, was Christianity ' inevitable' - something just waiting to happen when the time became right?
I don't get that this was entirely the case. It is as if God, whatever He happens to be, came into our world, and then  went out again , in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Not so much to fulfil Jewish hopes and expectations , but to affirm His love for all humanity. And perhaps, this is what actually did occur.


No comments:

Post a Comment