Summations Only

Yes, in a pretty similar fashion as what happened in Africa. Was is Desmond Tutu who said abou the missionaries that "When they came, we had the land and they had the Bibles. Next thing we noticed was that we had the Bibles and they the land"?In most cases the Religion of Love(tm) has been spread with either a sword or a rifle.

Sorry, I guess I have to literally spell everything out. We are saved from death by RESURRECTION, DA, not from actually having to die. We don't stay dead, we don't even stay in spirit form, we are resurrected with our BODIES, that's a PHYSICAL resurrection, which was impossible before Jesus died and rose again. When you say that "even" Jesus died you seem not to grasp that because Jesus was sinless He didn't have to die at all, because death is the result of sin. (But of course someone who believes in evolution wouldn't grasp this since death is just a part of life for you) But Jesus died FOR us, in our place, so that HIS resurrection could be OUR resurrection. BODILY resurrection.This IS based on the Bible but like a good liberal revisionist you change the meaning of the words that have been understood by orthodox theologians down the centuries in the sense I am using them. You really should read Machen who focuses on this liberal corruption of the Bible. Liberals don't seem to know how to read in context. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

A good follower of revisionist history. No, there were genuine Christian converts among the Indians, converted by love and persuasion and not by sword.

Yes, you are right. Of course there were also those who converted voluntarily. Does it vindicate xianity in a similar fashion as it would atheism since peeps turn from xianity to unbelief without coersion?

Good god! I don't want to be resurrected into this old, achy, arthritic body! Can't I have a better, younger one? I would like fresh eyes that are not fuzzy everywhere, a better digestive system that won't clog up, a bladder that actually stays empty for more than two hours ... and a bigger dick would be nice.

I was merely trying to correct a typical revisionist history, not to "vindicate Christianity."

If you aren't saved I'm not sure what sort of body you might expect, but those who are saved get glorified perfected bodies.

I grasp that. You are throwing around baseless accusations and assumptions of what I do or do not grasp. Death is part of life. For everyone. Those in Christ will be raised with a spiritual body which are conversions of our physical bodies to a perfected spiritual body. And I could say your intrepretation is liberal. You have not shown where my interpretation of the Bible differs from Machen. Not that it matters to me what Machen does or does not believe. And I could say the same for you. Your accusations against me are baseless and void of evidence.Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

Where in my, fast becoming, inerrant bible does it assure this perfection in my AL (after life) body? Is there a list of what attributes this AL body has, what is meant by "perfect"? I certainly don't want to leave those kinds of decisions to a tribe of 3000 year old desert nomads.If I'm given a new perfect body, "perfect" would have to do something about my face. I might feel like me inside but it wouldn't really be me, would it? I mean, it would really not do for me to look into my perfect mirror in my perfect man-cave and have to ask, "Who the hell are you?!"

Again, I'm taking it from what you've written, but if I'm wrong I'm happy to be wrong. But since you believe in evolution it seems you must deny what the Bible says about how death entered with sin -- ABE meaning not only spiritual but physical death /ABE --, and if you deny that, instead thinking that death is just a part of life and not something that entered that corrupted the life God gave, I'd think it would make Jesus' death for us hard to explain. But the question is whether death was ALWAYS a "part of life" according to your theology or a corruption of life that entered because of sin, as my theology says. You appear to think that Adam would have died anyway and not on account of sin, the Fall, so that the only death he died was a "spiritual" death. Do I have that wrong? So that although you can go on to describe our resurrected bodies I have to wonder where that fits into your theology since it seems to be all about spiritual life and death and not bodily life and death to you. As long as "spiritual" doesn't mean something ethereal to you, something that can't eat fish for instance, as Jesus demonstrated He could in His glorified body, but really IS a body, though changed and glorified, we are in agreement on this point.But again, your language in general about spiritual death as opposed to bodily death suggests you don't believe Jesus died for our bodies and that "spiritual body" suggests something nonphysical.We are even said in scripture to be WAITING FOR the redemption of our BODY, not just our spirit. [abe: which confirms the interpretation that the body died at the Fall, or why would it need to be redeemed? /abe] In fact according to my theology our spirits are already regenerated through being born again in Christ. Our body is vile now because corrupted by the sin nature, so it needs to be raised an uncorrupted body.The reason to read Machen is that he demonstrates how liberals change the meaning of the Biblical text. You can quote the part about the spiritual body correctly for instance, but in the context of other things you've said about how it's all about spiritual death rather than bodily death, it seems likely you mean something different by all these things than traditional theology taught for all the centuries up to the development of modernism or liberalism. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

"BiBlical prophecy" .. also known as 'Ink Blot Test for the gullible'. That is no basis for waving the bible and being a bigot, and treating your fellow human beings as pieces of dirt.You should be ashamed of yourself, but you will take this and proclaim that 'See, it was right in the bible they would persecute us'.

Funny, I've treated no one as a "piece of dirt" but you have. What's your excuse?

Well, why did God say to Adam regarding the tree of knowledge of good and evil "for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." I have looked up the Hebrew word used for die in that verse in my concordance and no where else is it used in the context of spiritual death. There is no indication that die means to start the process of dying. It means exactly what it says - Adam would physically die. And yet Adam and Eve ate of it and they did not die, not for hundreds of years later.In fact, when God finds out what happened he says "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." He even had to assign cherubim with a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life to keep man from it. Why was he worried that man might live forever when he had sworn that eating the fruit would result in death.Also, why did God make all the plants for food? Why would an eternal being that could not die need to eat? You do realize why we eat right? We need to take in energy from the environment to maintain our body systems. Without that intake of energy, we would die. And yet if before the fall there was no death, why would Adam need to eat? Did Adam need to eat or did God make food available just for fun?Oh, and you do realize that plants die when you eat them, right? So there WAS death. But you probably want to restrict the meaning of death to only things that breath air; oh wait ... plants breath air too. So was there ANY organisms that died before the fall? How about bacteria? Nematodes? I don't see that. Why does it make Jesus' death hard to explain? His death would still pay the price that could reconcile us to God. Why does death being a part of the physical world change that?The whole "no death before the fall" bit just doesn't make sense and it doesn't even fit with the Biblical evidence.HBD

No Yes of humans. The passages in Romans that Paul writes is talking about spiritual death of humans as a result of Adam's sin. If it is also talking about physical death as you say, and I do not deny, than it is only talking about human physical death. Why? Jesus' death and resurrection enables us as Christians to avoid spiritual death (separation from God) not physical death.

The words in Greek for death 'thanatos', 'necros', 'apothnēskō' used in Romans 6 and other locations in Scripture have a meaning which are interchangeable for physical and/or spiritual death. There is no distinction using these words alone. The meaning must be derived from the context in which it is written. Sometimes it means one or the other, sometimes it means both.