Mainly interesting to my Oxford crowd

[liv]

Poking around some of my old bookmarks (yes, I'm displacing), I discovered that Gerv has finally succumbed, despite all his former protests, and is now keeping a blog.

It's called Hacking for Christ and the title pretty much sums up the content, as far as I've read: mostly highly technical discussion about Mozilla and other computery things that I don't even know how to classify, and quite a lot of that deeply offensive right-wing Christianity that Gerv does, but we still love him anyway cos he's Gerv and he's so very sincere and well-meaning. I'd syndicate it here but the feed is in a format that is too cool for LJ.

Edited 6.9.04: Now public, with permission from Gerv.

Comments

[liv]

Cornelius is a God-fearer, that is, sympathetic to monotheism but not a convert to Judaism, and God hears him, after all.
That's a very interesting story, thanks for pointing to it! I think that the concept of a God-fearing gentile (in more modern language, an ethical monotheist) works a lot better in Judaism than it does in Christianity. Because we explicitly don't have the Unique Salvation issue.

It seems like part of what that story is doing is making a point to those Jews who think that gentiles may be righteous and holy and acceptable to God, but they're kind of smelly all the same, and we'd rather not associate with them. Which unfortunately is not an attitude that died out in the first century.

There's also the whole issue of defining Christianity as something separate from Judaism, something that is open to non-Jews as long as they accept Jesus. That's pretty much a non-issue nowadays, since it is fairly generally agreed by now that Christianity is not a branch of Judaism.

So I'm not sure how your Cornelius example can be applied in a contemporary context.

[nameandnature]

The position of Gentile Christians was a really contentious issue for the early church. Peter seems happy with the idea in that passage in Acts, but later Paul records a stand up row with Peter, who had come under the influence of the Jerusalem church run by James (whose own Epistle in the NT famously says people are saved by deeds and not by faith alone). The whole of Galatians is a fuming flame from Paul against the idea that Gentile converts to Christianity should be circumcised, and against the Jewish Christians who'd told the Galatians this (who, Paul says, should just go the whole way and emasculate themselves). Paul is something of an enigma to me: scholarship seems divided between those who think Greek influences had caused him to abandon his Jewishness, and those (like Tom Wright) who think that he was engaged in a "critique from within", a radical re-interpretation of what God's plan for Israel was. I wonder what would have become of Christianity without Paul.

Anyway. I suppose my application was that Cornelius was neither a Jew nor a Christian but was asking God for something as best he knew how. I suppose that it's harder to apply that to moderns who probably have heard about Christianity than to people at that time who hadn't, since it's pretty clear that such people are supposed to recognise Christianity and convert when given the opportunity. Still, by "the spirit" of the story, I mean the idea that it is risky to limit your ideas of who is and is not acceptable, since you may be in for a surprise.