“Racial identity is incompatible w/ the Christian Gospel. The Gospel was created partly to overcome racial identity. The Gospel was created to forge religious identity.”
Andy Sandlin
1.) Sentence #1 explains thus why Jesus had to be descended from David.
2.) Is Jesus, who is now at the Right hand of the Father, no longer to be referred to as “The Lion of the Tribe of JUDAH?”
3.) The Gospel was created in order so that the Ethiopian could no longer be used hypothetically as one who could not change his skin?
4.) How can it possibly be the case that given this view that Christianity is not pure on Gnosticism? Seems the Manicheans were correct after all.
5.) More of the modern Gospel that teaches that grace destroys nature. Once you love yourself some Jeebus you no longer are “Red or Yellow, Black or White, because after all you’re all the same in God’s sight.”
6.) Since the Gospel was forged to create religious identity clearly we can also do away with biological gender identity since it must be the case that if the Gospel was created to overcome racial identity it must also be the case whereupon the Gospel was created to over come gender identity.
And he, as well as those who share this opinion, are not that uncommon among those reputed to be pillars in the Church.
“5.) More of the modern Gospel that teaches that grace destroys nature. One you love yourself some Jeebus you no longer are “Red or Yellow, Black or White, because after all you’re all the same in God’s sight.””
Moreover, this notion is not even necessarily Christian, in the sense that Christians would have a monopoly on such ideas. Buddhism, for example, which like Gnosticism teaches the ultimate meaninglessness of material world, has had a similar concept of “spirit”, or whatever they call it, overruling material identities.
(Buddhism also was the first big “missionary religion” in the world, spreading from India to East Asia, so those liberals who praise Christianity for being the first “international” religion find themselves outbid in that area as well.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huineng#Meeting_the_Fifth_Patriarch_of_Chan_Buddhism
“”So you’re from Ling-nan, and a barbarian! How can you expect to become a Buddha?” asked the Patriarch.
I replied, “Although people exist as northerners and southerners, in the Buddha-nature there is neither north nor south. A barbarian differs from Your Holiness physically, but what difference is there in our Buddha-nature?[12]”
And thanks to the doctrine of reincarnation, these Eastern religions can accept trannyism also without too much fuss – in the previous life, you might have been member of the opposite sex!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimalakirti_Sutra#Synopsis
“Śāriputra asks the goddess, perhaps somewhat peevishly, why she still has the (inferior) body of a woman, if she has attained to such high levels of insight. In response, she uses her own supernatural powers to switch bodies with Śāriputra, who is even more perturbed to find himself in the guise of a woman, but finds that nothing he does allows him to return to his own “true” form. Eventually, the goddess takes mercy and releases her hold, but the overall effect of the exchange is to show the vast superiority of Mahāyāna doctrine and practice over the other, more traditional forms of Buddhism of which Śāriputra is a paragon. The drama presented in this chapter has been an important reference point for traditional and especially modern attempts to find Mahāyāna perspectives on the nature of gender, and Buddhist feminist attempts to find canonical sources for a stance that ascribes equal spiritual status or potential to women.”
Manichaeism, too, got started as a self-consciously cosmopolitan religion. It literally began in Babel, and “ecumenically” combined the ideas of different religions, mixing Christian and Buddhist phraseology:
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09591a.htm
“Babylon was still a center of the pagan priesthood; here Mani became thoroughly imbued with their ancient speculations. On Sunday, 20 March, A.D. 242, Mani first proclaimed his gospel in the royal residence, Gundesapor, on the coronation day of Sapor I, when vast crowds from all parts were gathered together. “As once Buddha came to India, Zoroaster to Persia, and Jesus to the lands of the West, so came in the present time, this prophecy through me, the Mani, to the land of Babylonia”, sounded the proclamation of this “Apostle of the true God”. “
“Progressive” theologians always imply, and often state out loud, that what makes Christianity true or positive religion is precisely its egalitarianism – that Christ brought new enlightened, universalist ideas in the place of narrow-minded, tribalistic and discriminating notions that both pagans and Jews had entertained. This was the standard Unitarian song-and-dance that Thomas Jefferson believed in, for example:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-40-02-0178-0002
But when you think about it, you will see that at least THEORETICALLY, Eastern pantheistic religions offer a better doctrinal basis for ultra-egalitarianism than Christianity does. For reincarnation doctrine implies that each of us would have been lowliest outcasts (and even animals) in our previous lives, and they actually had devotional practices that underlined this message:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhicitta#Tibetan_Methods
“B. So as to aspire Bodhicitta:
The Lojong (mind training) practices:
Others as equal to self: Exchanging self and others: (Tonglen) the Sending and Receiving while breathing practice,
Others as more important: Viewing all other sentient beings as having been our mothers in infinite past lives, and feeling gratitude for the many occasions on which they have taken care of us.”
This was like Christian Southern slaveowners would have had pious meditations about how each one of them had once been Negro slaves in their previous lives. This kind of worldview implies total evaporation of Western Christian notion of stable selfhood or permanent identity (that sick modern ideologies like trannyism are also promoting). Buddhism indeed preaches that “self” is non-existent.
So in Buddhism, “grace” most certainly does destroy nature. For once the being has been “enlightened” by the spirit of Buddha, he/she/it will realize that the material world is an illusion, and his/her/its own self is an illusion as well. Talk about “deconstruction” – like Cultural Marxist academicians talking about this or that traditional cultural system being a mere “social construct” – pious Buddhists seek to deconstruct literally everything that exists!
https://archive.org/details/edgarquinethisea00heatuoft/page/302/mode/2up?view=theater
“Never did Christianity, even in the heart of the Middle Age, so absolutely anathematise Matter. To the Oriental the visible world was an imposture; he wished to tear off the mask that covered the universe.
…
Since the dogma exacts the abolition of all private or collective personality, Buddhism left to itself tends to a rejection of such ideas as the Nation, the State, the Government, the only true society being the Monastery. The true believer has no country but the convent; and as all that recalls individual right is contrary to the spirit of his religion, it follows that he can possess nothing of his own. The Buddhist, from his very nature, belongs to the mendicant orders. All alliance, except with the invisible, being wrong, marriage is condemned; but since in this exaggerated idealism each reform goes so far as to become impossible, polygamy is simply corrected by celibacy, property by almsgiving. The rigorous consequence of Buddhist dogma would result in the absolute extinction of humanity.”
Racial identity is incompatible w/ the Christian Gospel–Sandlin. So, are we to conclude that the Apostle Paul was opposing the Gospel when he expressed passionate concern for his “kinsmen according to the flesh?”