Showing posts with label Preterism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Preterism. Show all posts

Monday, April 18, 2011

Hell & Manipulation

What if the Pharasees in Jesus' day taught the idea of hell (borrowing it from other religions - Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Zoroastrian and Greek) in order to manipulate people to be good, so that the Messiah could come?  What if Christians started to do the same thing, causing a seperation between people who go to heaven and people who go to hell?  What if Jesus is all about breaking down this seperation, by hanging out with the 'sinful' people and turning the idea of hell onto the religious establishment?  What if Jesus was only ever warning religious people about hell?

Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Great Commission

What if Jesus telling his disciples to "go into all the world" (Mark 16) and to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28) is not the "Great Commission" that we've made it to be?  What if Jesus was really just talking to his disciples back then, about their world back then, which would have been the Roman Empire?  If  Jesus really was talking about gentiles when referring to "all nations", which is better translated as "all tribes", why did it take the disciples quite a few years before they started to warm up to the possibility of sharing the good news with gentiles?  What if Jesus, in these "Great Commission" passages is really 'just' saying to his disciples: "Go and share the good news of the kingdom with our Jewish brothers and sisters before the end of the age is coming (the end of the old covenant, the destruction of the Temple together with the sacrificial system in AD.70)."?
What if the "Great Commission" that even is valid for us today is rather to be found in John 15: 
"My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you."?
What if Christians throughout history, in their effort to "go into all the world", have all too often neglected this most important call to LOVE?

Sunday, February 13, 2011

The last days

What if most of the prophecies in the bible have already been fulfilled?  What if all of them have already been fulfilled?  What if 'the last days' the NT authors wrote about were really as close as they thought them to be?  What if all the things predicted by Jesus in the 'Mount Olivet Discourse' (Mat.24) were really, as he himself said, to be witnessed by the generation of his day?  What if the book of Revelation really contains pictures of things which, back then, were shortly to come to pass (Rev.1)? 
What if 'the last days' (and the end of the world/age) refer to the last days of the old covenant between God and Israel?  What if the king has already delivered up the kingdom to God, and now there is a new covenant: God being father of all, God being all in all? (1Cor.15)