God has feelings too.
There are 2 types of people in this world. The ones that divide people into 2 groups and those that don’t. Everyone is an individual whether they like it or not.
For the last few centuries, Christian leaders had to defend against critics denying the divinity of Christ. Now the Church seems to be hurting because there is no real understanding of Christ being fully human. We say it in our doctrine, but we do not feel it in our hearts.
We are all sinners and God died on the cross for our sins. This is true. But God did not hate us before that. God hates sin because it hurts us.
God does not just love us in an abstract or general sense. God doesn’t see us as the same in terms of our personalities. God has an emotional life too. He has called us to have different roles as there are many different spiritual gifts.
Christ had all the human limitations of having a body and still had emotions and a unique personality and interests. He had friends and He grew up not unlike the other siblings in His family. Christ was tempted by the devil in ways that show He was frustrated by His human limitations as well.
Christianity was and still is revolutionary. We are not meant to understand the entire Bible but to follow it. Christ made things simpler and more direct like in the golden rule and that we are to love God and our enemies as ourselves. God was so concerned about our attitudes that He preferred true repentance over sacrifices that He ordered. The law became synonymous with our conscience.
Christ was not talking in riddles or mysterious codes like koans in Buddhism. The reason why we need faith is that is the only way we an understand and relate with God. We cannot get meaningful answers solely by analyzing Scripture.
The Bible opens a huge can of worms. This is deliberate as this forces a spiritual crisis for us that builds our faith. We are to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul.
This goes beyond intellectual understanding and into physical application. If the body and feelings didn’t matter anymore what was the point of the festivals of the Old Testament or the rituals of the New Testament like communion and baptism? Why would a God that wasn’t artistic have such elaborate instructions for the temple? Would an uncreative God have chosen the sacrificial system of the Old Testament with all the blood and gore?
This is the fallacy in saying that spiritual things are good and material things are bad. The theological implications of this deny the basic identity of God taught in the Bible. You cannot have a second Adam and have a sufficient sacrifice if you Jesus was not fully God and Man at the same time.
God the Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit all have the same personality. Christ is as concerned about evil as is His Father. The Father is as compassionate and forgiving as His Son.
If the human body is inherently evil, why does the Holy Spirit choose to dwell within us. If Jesus was not the same as us physically and emotionally, then how would He know about all our temptations?
The Bible and the God we serve go beyond our ability to fully grasp them. We cannot always understand Scripture. Even the angels couldn’t figure out about Christ before His birth. The only reason why any of us can truly understand Christ and overcome our pride is by a miracle from God.
Modern psychology comes from the Bible. Christian mystics and other great Christian writers talked about this for centuries. We had the evidence right in front of us, but we missed it hiding in plain sight.
The modern Church has gotten so good at abstract theology that it forgot the emotional aspect of people. We now often confuse sin, which is still very real, with limitations of being physical beings. We are so driven to spread the Gospel and convert as many people as possible that we make it hard for people who are quiet or shy from expressing their faith in different ways.
We are so concerned with people doing everything correctly that we do not give people enough freedom to find new ways to spread the Gospel. We get nervous about any innovation in our understanding of the Bible. Imagine if Christ came today. We might totally mistake Him for a cult leader or a counter culture outcast.
There is amongst many Christians a stereotype that our society is obsessed with being unique. But this is untrue to a large extent. People today more than any other time before want to belong and experience intense pressure to fit in with others. We all are being pushed to be experts or leaders in some respected academic field today.
Many of these ideas that I am criticizing are elitist and similar to an early heresy of the Church called Gnosticism. Gnostics believed that the god of the Old Testament was the devil, Jesus was God but not man, and we were saved by secret knowledge. This was an early attempt to make Christianity into a form of Paganism. Today we might call this New Age.
This is likely why there are so many teen suicides today. We are innovating our society into a broken one where there is no continuity or culture left. The Church is guilty of this too. Where has the American Church engaged academia recently? Pointing fingers at the same things their Church members are also guilty of does not count.