Russell: Again, I just shake my head for a while. Are you reading what I’m typing? I must not know how to use this thing correctly!

I gave you just a few of the truth claims made by Jesus Himself, you can start with those. A “long list” would take a long time, since they’re on nearly every page, and that’s a lot of pages.

The whole point is a person, and a person isn’t a proposition, neither can he be defined by propositions.

Have I ever said that the point isn’t Jesus Christ? I think I made that point repeatedly in my last post, but perhaps I read too much into what I typed. Yes, the whole point is Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. But as I have also said several times Jesus is not a styrofoam cup, and any philosophy that allows Him to be a styrofoam cup is incompatible with Christianity. Since you have stated that post-modern Christianity doesn’t allow for that, I want to know how. Post-modern philosophy certainly does, and I’ve met people who call themselves post-modern Christians who believe Jesus is something more or less like a styrofoam cup than He is very God of very God.

A person cannot be defined by propositions? Of course not—any person is more than the sum of a set of propositions. But a person can be identified by propositions. How would I know that we’re talking about the same person except that we compare the things we know about him and see if they match up? _David? He’s about medium-height, maybe 5’ 10”, with brown hair. A little heavy, probably a bit over 200 lbs. Good so far? Okay, he’s got blue eyes. What? Oh, the David you know has brown eyes? Not the same guy, then._ In that scenario, am I defining David by propositions? I don’t think so, but I’m using the only tools available to us We don’t have photos of Jesus (not that they would matter in this case), but we have a lot of information written about Him, both before and after His birth and life and death and resurrection. We know something about His character and about how He approached people. If I’m talking to someone who says that Jesus is a source of energy in nature to help us achieve a higher mental state as we meditate, I think that I can safely look at Scripture and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’re talking about the same guy.”

When one is dying bloody on the street, he could care less about the authority of church or scripture, and the gospel describes each of us as dying bloody on the street.

It seems to me that this argument could be used to justify anything, and often forms the basis for Wretched Urgency{tm}, so I’m uncomfortable with it. Part of my discomfort is based on wondering why Paul bothered to write, well, anything, if all that matters is that we’re dying in the street and God has saved us.

Russell, you seem to be treating this as an all-or-nothing deal, which is probably the largest source of our disagreement. I’m mis-stating that, but what I mean is that since you’ve abandoned the idea that you can know all things absolutely, you seem to have bounced to the opposite extreme: that none of us can know anything absolutely. Christianity is either about a person or a set of propositions, but cannot be about both, or a person whom we know at least partially based on His propositional statements about himself. It’s one or the other, never both.

Reject the tyranny of the OR, Russell, and embrace the genius of the AND! {:)}

Tom: That’s a fantastic statement. “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” indeed! Of course, “Christ” ties in roughly a metric ton of propositions in the form of prophecies from the O.T., and “Son” is simple alarming and the definite article “the” is in itself a claim of exclusivity to a certain extent, and “Living God” knocks out a bunch of other theories about things, and the fact that Peter could say that to a man walking on the earth says even more and so on, and already we’ve easily crossed the line at which many post-modern Christians say, “Hey, wait a minute!”

Still, what a fantastic basis for the gospel in just that one sentence. Thanks!