(By John Stonestreet & G. Shane Morris, Breakpoint). Who is Jesus? It’s a foundational question, and one many Christians struggle to answer.
In Matthew 16, Jesus asks His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
“Some say John the Baptist,” they replied, “others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But who do you say that I am?”
These days, increasingly odd and just plain wrong answers to Jesus’ question seem to be floating around everywhere, and churches are one of the easiest places to find them. This shouldn’t surprise us, however. As we’ve said before on BreakPoint, beliefs come in bunches. So when you see increasingly unorthodox and innovative ideas about sex, marriage, and the human person coming from religious leaders, you can bet they’re also entertaining increasingly unorthodox and innovative ideas about truth, the Bible, and even God Himself.
For example, Dr. Karen Oliveto, the first openly lesbian bishop in the United Methodist Church, recently offered this message to her flock:
“Too many folks want to box Jesus in,” she wrote, “carve him in stone, create an idol out of him. [But] the wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting one, prince of peace, was as human as you and me. Like you and me, he didn’t have his life figured out.” Jesus had “bigotries and prejudices,” she added, even sins which He had to learn to overcome.
Wait, Jesus can be an “idol”?
Related article: Prominent Presbyterian pastor’s answer to the question “Is Christianity the only way to heaven?”
“No God’s not a Christian. I mean, we are . . . For me, the Christian tradition is the way to understand God and my relationship with the world and other humans . . . But I’m not about to say what God can and cannot do in other ways and with other spiritual experiences.”
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“The real Jesus” … um… you do realize that most of the NT is fictitious don’t you, and that “Jesus Christ” is a theological construct that bears little resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish apocalyptic prophet?
I “realize” no such thing, and frankly, sir, neither do you. The notion that “the NT is fictitious” and that the Lord Jesus, as he is represented in the Scriptures “is a theological construct that bears little resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish apocalyptic prophet” is itself a presuppositional construct that lacks evidential support, and which cannot explain the phenomenal impact that this one Man has had on billions of lives over the past two thousand years.