Okay, I think I understand where you’re coming from.

Nonetheless,I do maintain that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” refuses the arbitrary insistence that this be understood as 2 parties i.e. a Loving God walloping a Devoted son. Apparently, this is a mystery but heck! why start at Golgotha? I’d always stumbled over Abraham’s extraordinary obedience in trussing up Isaac! But there is a point made elsewhere on this site about Jonah’s revolting at the prospect of Obeying God without hindsight. The book of Hebrews (I think: I’m not sure all of a sudden!) teaches that Abraham reckoned God could bring Isaac back because of a Prior Promise banking on Abraham’s Offspring etc. I think what’s crucial here is trusting God with our lives, even to the point of death and not flinching (and, OF COURSE, how easy is that to say..!).

P’raps that’s the ONLY way to trust and experience this God ‘who raises the dead’? Maybe that’s the crisis! At one time, Cephas/Peter was full of beans about following Christ even unto death (presumably because he was fired up with the vision of a revolutionary leader): fails miserably, only for the resurrected Jesus to tell him ‘Oh by the way, you WILL die for me…only this time you WON’T want to…)

Anyway, I’m all for people exploring the ethnic and cultural distinctiveness with which these things were realised and come down to us…but i must confess i didn’t realised that might constitute a whole new manifest movement!

I’m certainly not well-versed in post-modernisms and hermaneutic-ing this or that so i doubt i’m speaking the same language as the contributions you may be after.

But if this Baudrillard chappy is right in his insistence that our realities are ‘constructs’ divorced from the Object of our passion (dunno if i’ve got that right) then I think we’d be no further on or any better off than a perplexed Pilate standing before Incomprehensibility Incarnate and saying, “You what??”

Anyroads…that’ll be all for’time.

ga_ge