Let me respond to a cluster of comments saying "MAGA can't be Christian because XX Bible verse says YY" OK, sure, but to quote Reverend Lovejoy, "The Bible says a lot of things" - ThreadSky

polphilpod.bsky.social • 8 hours ago

Let me respond to a cluster of comments saying "MAGA can't be Christian because XX Bible verse says YY"

OK, sure, but to quote Reverend Lovejoy, "The Bible says a lot of things"

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chaoscontrolchaos.bsky.social•8 hours ago

In the New Testament, conservative evangelicals seems to love the fire-and-brimstone of the Book of Revelation - which (I think) many scholars believe is of dubious merit for inclusion. Outside of this, it's unclear to me they like much of anything more directly related to Jesus.

polphilpod.bsky.social•6 hours ago

I'd push back on this a bit - Revelation's imagery is not unique to that book: All the NT authors are apocalypticists in some form or another - Paul certainly is. The gospel's differ in how much they emphasise that, but Mark definitely does (See Mark 13 for instance, that's quite 'revalation-ish')

chaoscontrolchaos.bsky.social•6 hours ago

Very fair...all excellent points. I stand corrected.

chaoscontrolchaos.bsky.social•5 hours ago

Though I do prefer to be patted on the head and have my priors confirmed. 😜

somuchderp.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Even if you find a verse in Timothy or whatever that says "Jesus Christ himself said 'verily, verily sex between men is great, I like it, and all the gays get to go to heaven'", and you surprise your Evangelical friends with it, it's not going to change they're feelings about homosexuality.

polphilpod.bsky.social•6 hours ago

The Jonathan & David story is honestly not a million miles from this,

somuchderp.bsky.social•6 hours ago

Mark 14:51-52 "A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind."

polphilpod.bsky.social•6 hours ago

I think the only verse of Mark that doesn't have a parallel in Luke or Matthew - they were just like 'yeah, leaving that one on the cutting room floor

polphilpod.bsky.social•6 hours ago

But then they counter with the Levitical prohibitions, or the Matthean definition of marriage and . . . then what? Then you have to decide which verses count, what is interpreted in light of what.

somuchderp.bsky.social•6 hours ago

Yup. And let's not forget they just out the blue decided that 14 books of the King James Bibke were just... not the Bible anymore and so they could just ignore them.

somuchderp.bsky.social•8 hours ago

The Bible can be used to justify literally anything.

realityred.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Interpreting the Bible = SCOTUS interpreting legal precedent.

polphilpod.bsky.social•8 hours ago

To be less flippant, the protestant Bible* is a collection of writings from hundreds of authors, editors, and compliers working between 800 BS and 200 AD (with earlier antecedents & later additions), in different areas of the world, in different languages, often in mutual ignorance of each other

polphilpod.bsky.social•8 hours ago

They wrote in different genres, for different audiences, and had radically different moral and theological frameworks and imaginings.

The transactional theology of Deuteronomy is aggressively rejected in Job, Paul insists a resurrected body is made of Pneuma, Luke insists its not, & so on

polphilpod.bsky.social•8 hours ago

By analogy, if I complied the most important liberal writings of the last thousand years, that collection would contain texts arguing for and against slavery (& empire, & patriarchy)

A random line from Locke would not be sufficient to exclude a group of people from liberalism

polphilpod.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Especially if that group constituted the *numerical majority* of self-identified liberals.

So it is with Christianity, there's a lot of frameworks you can draw from the bible (& the biblical authors have very different ideas about how we should read them or scripture)

polphilpod.bsky.social•8 hours ago

At a first pass, & attempting to read the texts on their own terms, I'd say the bible doesn't neatly validate either modern conservatism OR modern Liberalism.

And how could it? It pre-dates even the antecedents of those ideologies by a thousand years.

polphilpod.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Does that mean Christianity can be anything?

Not exactly, in the same way as not everything is liberal. But both clearly have very wide range historically and defy a quick 'in or out' binary test, unilaterally imposed.

finagle-a-hegel.bsky.social•7 hours ago

Good point that they even disagree on the meta-issue of how best to read and interpret the text itself. Level of possible versions is positively fractal at that point

sanfele.bsky.social•7 hours ago

As a Christian (RC), I feel free to say that that Christian movement has always been fraudulent. The bible may say a lot of things but the words of Jesus are very consistent. They are using His name for their own evil purposes.

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