Fake News and the Death of Christianity: Western Christianity's demise greatly exaggerated

We still have to ask: a “threskia” of just what? Or rather Whom?

It just happens to be the Holy One in whom we live and move and have our being.

Entertain the opposite thesis for a moment: it ISN’T godliness. It’s different and can include ungodliness. Ok, so why would it appear there? It’s in the sight of our Lord. Would ungodliness even work there? We happen to have a coincidence in referents here. Call it H2O or agua, it’s water.

And thus we get back to the quibble that you began with. That somehow this negates the reality that a worldly concept of religion exists and that we can speak to it.

You are teaching lower criticism.

I am preaching theology and I aver that in this case we have a coincidence in referent. A “threskia” of God is... Guess what. Right! It is godliness.

Sometimes bible teachers can get too abstract for their own good.

Quit while you are not too far behind.

Well rx, your diatribe notwithstanding, the Book of James is written mainly to Jewish believers (”to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad...” v.1:1) about the outward manifestation of faith in Christ. “Religion” here is more like a Christian practicing his faith in some visible way. But the essence of Christianity is not “DO” but “DONE” (John 19:13; Rev 16:17, 21:6). Generally, the use and meaning of the word “religion” has meant man’s attempts to reach God in a myriad of way and rituals down through the centuries.

I’m glad to see that you acknowledge that we are saved by grace through faith and it is also important to remember that, “as you, therefore, have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him” (Col 2:6), knowing that you did not receive the Spirit by the works of the law but by the hearing of faith, so that having begun in the Spirit, you do not now try to be made perfect by the flesh (Gal 3:2-3).

I see no relevance whatsoever between to whom the Book of James was written and what I wrote, except in a positively-correlated way. That is, what I wrote is not in opposition to that at all. That James addresses his writing to the diaspora only reasonably grounds what both he and I said to the pre-Christian era's religion and worship of God, where ritual trappings were far more familiar and prominent than admonitions toward a nebulous concept of "godliness."

With religion (as in 1:26, 27), Jews were familiar with the trappings. In daily-, tabernacle- and temple-related rituals, Jews were not so much attempting to reach out to God as much as obeying what God had prescribed for them to do.

What Jesus (likely the brother of the author, James) was doing was taking the OT context of religion and bringing it into His era, where loving God with all one's heart, mind and strength and loving one's neighbor as oneself were the paramount things God wants for all His children. As Peter came down with just a few essentials as Christianity widened to include Gentiles, loving God and one's fellow man changed to become a reality of worship as opposed to a ritual of worship most often confined to a temple. (Cf. John 4:20-23)

I really don't get your contrast of "DO" or "DONE" as a prescription for us. 2017 Christianity is not amidst the later chapters of Revelation, nor is Christ about to be crucified literally once again.

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