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Posted on 04/06/2004 8:41:35 PM PDT by churchillbuff
Yale Ph.D. Dubs 'Passion of the Christ' 'Pagan'
ANN ARBOR, Mich.-- No, he's not talking about the hefty box-office receipts, pewter nails, or excessive gore, though these are all symptoms. He's talking about the idea, blazoned on www.ThePassionoftheChrist.com, that "dying was Jesus' reason for living."
"The God of Gibson's film is a bloodthirsty God," says Dr. James Cook, 15-year religion professor at Oakland Community College in Farmington Hills, Michigan. "This supposedly loving heavenly father wants a human sacrifice to appease his wrath. That's not ethical monotheism. That's not the Jewish idea of sacrifice as token of repentance for sin. That's paganism."
When asked if Jesus being a blood sacrifice for sin wasn't what most Christians believe, Cook replied that that's exactly his point. "Gibson isn't making theology. He's reducing to absurdity a life-denying theology that stifled Jesus' real message almost immediately after he died."
And what was Jesus' real message?
"Love," answers Cook. "Not 'God loved us so much that he accepted his own son as a blood sacrifice in our place.' What kind of love is that?" Cook believes Jesus taught that we must love one another the way God loves us.
According to Cook, Jesus' followers corrupted his message. "You see it right there in the New Testament," he charges. "It goes from 'He who would be my disciple must take up his own cross and follow me' to 'Christ paid the penalty for sin' so we can go to heaven." The result, he avers, is an "anti- Christ Christianity obsessed with escaping this world instead of transforming it through love."
Like many Jewish leaders, Cook, who calls himself a Christian existentialist, sees Gibson's film as anti-Semitic and says its anti-Semitism is part and parcel of its paganism. "Paganism is about power and security. Ethical monotheism is about serving God in spirit and in truth. Judaism is the original ethical monotheism. It witnesses against the preoccupation with a never-never land in the sky. It's about God's kingdom coming to earth. Jesus didn't run away from life. He embraced it. He didn't live to die. He died to live. God didn't plan his death. We continue to crucify him as long as we don't live in love."
Cook expresses his views dramatically in his new novel, "The Judgment of Christ" (Publish America, Feb. 2004).
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What's the name of that again? 12 Mile High?
Your call.
So is this guy suggesting that instead of the once-for-all bloody sacrifice, we should all make bloody sacrifices of ourselves? That doesn't seem too ethical to me.
That's at the top of my reading list. [/sarcasm]
What a shock. The PhD has a novel to flog. No wonder he's making waves, stirring up controversy.
If this is what passes for the fruits of "higher education" in academe, count me out. This chump doesn't understand the first thing about Christianity.
And here too:
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation;
and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.
...how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
Hebrews 9:11-12, 14
Um, YES He did.
The perfect sacrifice and the incomprehensible cost to God Himself is the embodiment of love and the entire gospel message. This "Christian existentialist" is simply parroting a very old lie and dressing it up as new "truth."
700 years before the birth of Jesus the prophet Isaiah wrote:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
This destroys the lie that " Doctor" Cook is spewing that the message Jesus preached was somehow corrupted by the early believers, or that God had not planned for Jesus to make this sacrifice for us. This prophecy was penned 7 centuries before the fulfillment.
That Mr. Cook is supposedly a "Christian" religion professor is suspect indeed if he misses such a foundational principle! This demonstrates a PLAN not an after-thought.
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