Re: Krishna and Prophets
From the Bhakti List Archives
• February 28, 1995
Re: Jesus being God Well, in the end, a quotation here and there from the Bible do not really matter in this discussion, since Christianity has as its *fundamental* tenet that Jesus was "fully God" as well as "fully human". Sound contradictory? It may on the face of it, but much theological discussion on this topic has occurred over the past two millenia, so what may seem contradictory to outsiders seems as clear as day to orthodox Christians. Nevertheless, here are some quotations. The most obvious examples of Jesus's divinity occur in the Gospel according to John, found in the New Testament. Here, Jesus as the Son is represented in Greek as the Logos, which translates to "Word". But the Word is the same as God. John 1:1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 1:3: All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. Furthermore, in the Jewish tradition, the only person who can absolve humans of sins is God himself. Jesus very clearly takes on this role, and declares himself as the redeemer. The Jewish people of his time react to this as an implicit claim that he is equal to God. We have to view the Bible and the story of Jesus from the cultural perspective of the Jews of that time. I would ask you look at passages such as Mark 2:7, "And who can forgive sins but God only?" There is a file on the network for about this question, directed mainly at people who are not familiar with the Bible. The difficult thing for non-Christians to understand is the Trinity concept of Christianity, where there are three persons in God, but they are of one essence. Therefore, Jesus is not simply God; he is more properly the *incarnation* of God, since, unlike in our religion, the Incarnation is a unique, one-time special occurrence. It is very hard to properly convey Christian ideas about the nature of God in so short a manner, but trust me on this one: their entire religion is based upon Christ being the redeemer, Christ being God, and Christ having died to absolve us of our sins. Re: The Painful death of Christ -- why? This is another difficult question for non-Christians to understand, but let us go back to the time of the early Jews, where it was thought that any digression from "the Law" of God (equivalent to Dharma-Sastras) was considered a great offense. The Law included minute details (equivalent to "aachaaram") of observance, and they believed that God was appeased through regular sacrifices, etc. This was the so-called "Old Covenant", a contract of sorts between the Jews and God. So, all the while they are waiting for the Savior, who will restore them to righteousness, lead the out of slavery, etc. The exact nature of what constituted the Savior was in great debate at that time. Anyway, according to Christian belief, Jesus came as the Incarnation of God to show people the "new way", the New Covenant that God wanted to strike between people and the Lord. But, again according to Christian belief, the wonderful paradox which shows the great condescension of the Lord is that he incarnated in a way that made him "fully human" -- he was perfect, no doubt, and "fully divine", but fully human in that he was flesh and blood. (This is a very deep theological issue which I do not properly understand). To perform the last sacrifice necessary to redeem all people, Jesus underwent great suffering in the name of the Lord. This is a sign of his great mercy. Jesus is therefore seen as the "Lamb of God", sacrificed to absolve all sins of the people if they simply put their faith and surrender to him. The mystery of Christ is that three days after his crucifixion, he was resurrected -- this is the heart of Christian belief, that if we believe in Christ, we are granted everlasting life in heaven and we shall not die in an inert way or go to hell, or any such thing. Salvation is attained. Just as westerners find it hard to understand our belief system since they do not come from our cultural perspective, we will find it hard to accept all these beliefs since we do not understand the basis of Christianity. This is in fact why Indian Christianity is in many ways more like a bhakti movement than like Western Christianity. Mani
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