jim stone wrote:Right. It's very hard to stop on a dime with 'Christ came,
died on the Cross, and rose again.' One needs to know
how to live as a Christian in this world, it would be a poor
religion that didn't equip you to deal with major
moral problems in a way that is
informed by the central vision, even though the 'essential
doctrine' doesn't immediately speak to them.
Not ALL of the debates are mere mental exercises,
quite a number of them arose because they
had to (can Christians fight in war, kill in self-defense?), and I don't see dismissing them in advance. When you do engage them
quite a few are pretty plainly not mere mental exercises, but
the religion made practical.
I see the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as essential, but, likewise, the social message is also essential. Too many wish to subject the one to the other. They will minister to the poor and needy
if they can also try and convert people. It becomes almost pharisaical, in the sense that Christ spoke of so many among the Pharisees of His day. In the parable of the Samaritan, we see that the priest, who had what is to be understood as the right
form of religion, neglected the beaten-up man, while the Samaritan, what would have been considered a heretic, behaved in the much more Christlike manner, in tending to the man's wounds and renting him a room.