Thelonious Cornpepper
2 min readMar 11, 2022

--

Christians call your analysis deconstruction of the Christian faith. The term deconstruction implies that Christianity was constructed. Therefore, the question is who did the constructing. If I am reading your comments correctly, I believe you would say that would be Paul, and Christian scholars would agree with you. The difference is that you believe that Paul was acting on his own, whereas Christians believe that he was acting under the inspiration of God, which means that God did the constructing through human beings, primarily through Paul.

All of which means that in the final analysis these matters are matters of faith, which is to say they are matters of conscience. It is very easy to poke holes in the edifice of Christianity. As you point out, Jews contend for the faith once delivered --- although that is not a term they would not use --- by identifying passages they believe have been taken out of context and twisted in order to be applied to Jesus. Christians will argue just as fervently that the ministry of Jesus was prophesied in what they call the Old Testament. Which side one comes down on is a matter of faith and a matter of conscience. It is easy to argue that one's conscience should be informed by factual analysis, but that's not really the way it works. If one has to violate one's conscience in order to accept deconstruction of one's faith, then what has been accomplished?

I have no answer to all this except for the one principle that is taught in all religions: treat others as you would want to be treated. Without that, all the other details in Christianity or Judaism or any other religion really don't matter anyway. If the world passed through fairy dust tonight and every human being truly started loving every other human being, the world would be transformed into a place we can scarcely imagine.

--

--

Thelonious Cornpepper
Thelonious Cornpepper

Responses (2)