The very first difficulty anyone in the present ought to encounter on considering the character of Jesus is his view of human nature. Everything that follows Jesus' teaching is based on his assertion that thinking is as bad as doing. Fantasizing about sleeping with someone, even looking lustfully at someone, is just as sinful as the act. Wishing that someone might come to harm is the equivalent, for him, as murder.
At the least, this is magical thinking -- the belief that our thoughts about reality are indistinguishable from the reality. People have thoughts all the time, though, without ever thinking about carrying them out. There can never be any moral equivalence between an imagined act, even one intensely imagined, a fantasy which we take satisfaction in indulging, knowing it to be a fantasy, and deciding to take real steps to making it come true.
The same failure of boundries characterizes the entirety of Jesus' teaching. A large segment of protestant Christians holds that Jesus' moral teachings were only meant to show the impossibility of living by them, which is especially convenient when one wants to do all the forbidden things and then say "I'm not perfect -- just forgiven!" Ironically, one of those who took Jesus at his word, Origen, is considered a dreadful extremist who mistook Jesus' meaning in cutting off the member of his body that made him stumble. Catholic theology even considers such an act, making oneself a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven in that fashion, to be a sin.
Jesus castigated the teachers of his time for finding all sorts of convenient shortcuts or loopholes for themselves, while at the same time making things impossible for others. Then he raised a standard even more impossible to maintain -- or, as one would say as a Catholic, possible only with grace -- because his view of what human beings should be is not based on wide observation or on deep thought.
No one claiming omnipotence could possibly hold this view of human motivation, human dreams, human failings, or human achievements.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
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