By Anon ..
Jesus brought ‘salvation’.
According to this view, Jesus teaches people how best to think and behave, if they want to achieve bliss.
Thus salvation is achieved by being merciful, meek, pure in heart, feeding the hungry…
Some evangelical Christians, such as the crypto-Jew John Calvin, disagree with this view, claiming that God demanded a human sacrifice before anyone could be saved.
This ties in with the ancient religions of Iraq and Iran whose priests enjoyed human sacrifice.
And if nobody could be saved prior to Jesus’s death, then Abraham was not saved.
According to this view, Jesus brought salvation by defeating
Satan.
The problem with this view is that wars, famine and evil continue to exist.
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Jesus brings salvation by appeasing the feudal lord.
In the 16th century, the Calvinist
Protestant Reformers declared that God was full of anger and demanded a sacrifice.
So Jesus was sacrificed to appease God.
This Calvinist theory conflicts with the idea that God is a loving and merciful God.
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Advocates of the
New Perspective on Paul argue that many New Testament books by
Paul the Apostle used to support the theory of penal substitution should be interpreted differently.
When Paul said you could not be saved by ‘works’, Paul meant ‘works’ such as having your penis circumcised, not eating pork, and not working on the Sabbath.
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Jesus taught people to be merciful, meek and pure in heart.
In 11th Century Christian Europe, “an entire class of warriors … had little to do but fight among themselves.[9]”
In 1095 Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade as a way of getting rid of these Christian thugs.
In the Holy Land, at that time, Christians and Moslems ‘lived in peace’.
The Crusades changed all that.
Radulph of Caen wrote that the Christian Crusaders “impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.”
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Can homophobes be saved?
Everyone can be saved if they ‘tune in’ to the ‘Holy Spirit’.
When you are tuned in to compassion and not forcing your own selfish agenda you will find that life goes better.