Unexpectedly busy today, no time to give detailed responses...

(snip)

> Up until the last paragraph is all fine; the last paragraph starts speculating. There are many, many different interpretations; I would guess that there are almost as many interpretations as scholars. The reason being, of course, that the Bible doesn't give any interpretation, just what happened.
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> My own interpretation is simply that Jesus forgave her. That's what he does. I think that using this to support or refute political positions misses the point. It's not that only God can judge right or wrong, it's that only God can forgive all sins.
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> Jesus can and does forgive people who have committed heinous crimes. But one cannot stretch this instance of his forgiving nature to mean we ought to try to forgive similarly wicked crimes that weren't committed against us. Mercy is, essentially, withholding justice from the guilty.
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So you're saying that there exist people whom Jesus has chosen not to forgive? That his infinite love includes blowing off some people and letting them go to Hell?

This is a possible POV, but not one that I hold or that I think the Bible supports. Or that makes sense if your definition of "loving" has anything at all in common with mine.

Mercy is *not* withholding justice from the guilty, in the long run. The justice has been given out already; it was poured on Jesus' head. In that sense justice has been withheld from all of us. The only decent thing to do in light of how Jesus has forgiven us is to, both as individuals and as a society, forgive those who sin against us and against our laws.

See the Parable of the Debtors. Or the Lord's Prayer. We *are* to emulate Jesus, as his disciples (that's what "Christian" means, follower of Christ), and he specifically told us to forgive sinners. As God, he already forgave their eternal sins against God's Law; as a civil government, we have the burden laid on us to forgive his trespass of the written Law and use our power to protect him from himself and help him change; as an individual, if it were I victimized by a murder it would be my burden and my duty to forgive him for his specific crime against me. (I already said I personally don't have any right to determine what happens to a murderer since I'm not an aggrieved party, but as a member of a democratic society I am part of the civil government and have the right to affect its decisions.)

> > Love is the Law. But the Law is not love.
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> What?
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Love encompasses and contains the written Law. The written Law on its own does not encompass love. (Set theory: the Law is a subset of love, or the Law of Love.) Hence Jesus "expanding" the Law in his explication of love.

> > "Fulfill" has a pretty strong connotation of "end", at least to me. Maybe the original Greek has some nuance the translators missed?
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> I read Nyperold's response to this, but I can't help thinking it might not be a bad translation at all. Look at Romans 10:4 "Christ is the end of the law... ."
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> > BTW, *nothing* in the Law says anything about the soul or the afterlife (correct me if I'm wrong). The written Law's punishments are temporal; that's why the Hebrews had no concept of an afterlife beyond a hazy idea of Sheol, with some exceptions in visions from the prophets;
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> Well, it does mention them. See Dt. 6:5 and Dt. 10:12. But really, the law is law. One can't commit crimes against or consciously do much of anything with souls except *be,* so there's no imperative for the law to mention it a bunch of times.
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I mean the Law doesn't specify eternal consequences for the soul. It does mention the soul, but just as something you have right now; many people of that time just assumed the soul would be annihilated at death. (See parts of Ecclesiastes.)

One very well *can* commit crimes against the soul; James told us to commit crimes against the body was basically committing crimes against the soul. (How can you bless someone's soul while starving her body to death?) And things can likewise be done to the soul; being condemned to Hell, for one thing.

Jesus with his teachings on Gehenna made it kind of clear that the *full* Law very much applies to souls, and it is, in fact, the soul and its welfare that are the central emphasis of the full Law; sins against the body are a side issue. (Matthew 10:28.)

> > To argue otherwise and say that the mercy was just mercy with no eternal significance is to have a capricious, inscrutable, and ultimately unjust God. "Oh, I feel like forgiving Cain, but all other murderers get zapped. David's after my own heart; he still gets saved, but someone else with the same crime? Hell-fodder." More like the Greeks' Zeus than the lawful, just God the Jews loved and worshiped, than any God I would care to worship. (That's less of an arrogant, self-serving statement than it sounds; it has to do with how I define God.
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> This reminds me of a section from _The Best Things In Life_ where the character is asked, "If there were two Gods, one perfect in power but imperfect in goodness and the other perfect in goodness but imperfet in power, which would you choose to serve?"
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> I think the whole debate about whether God exists is too ironic. No quantity or quality of discussion or logical arguments makes any impact on the Truth of the matter. And the same goes for any sentence including "I believe God is/isn't/does/doesn't ..."--God Will Be What He Will Be, and our belief in his nature affects only ourselves.
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Yes, I phrased that wrong. I didn't mean to sound like I started out defining my favorite God and then looked for an interpretation that would allow him to exist.

But, to quote Oolon Colluphid: "Who is this God person anyway?" What would it take for an entity to be called "God"? Just to be all-powerful, or appear so to human beings? To create the Universe? To give a set of rules and regulations? To show some miracles to some prophets?

I don't mean to be disrespectful or blasphemous by these questions, but what I'm trying to say is that, as C.S. Lewis pointed out in _Mere Christianity_ and elsewhere, the reason I am driven to believe in any sort of God in the first place is because of my need for an overriding purpose to existence of the world and my need for a real basis for my conscience and morality.

In other words, the only meaning of "God" that I think makes sense is "the reason for everything, both the 'are's and the 'ought's."

It is this that should be our standard for judging; remember Paul telling us to test the spirits. As weak mortals we're awfully easy to fool when it comes to omnipotence; our basis for judging spirits, angels, or gods should be whether they are good. Whether they can give an answer to the question of life ("How, then, can these foolish children be saved?") and whether that answer stands the test of truth.

If there were two entities like you describe, the only way one of them could be defined as "good" would be if there were some sort of higher entity that determined "good" and "evil"; in order to determine such a thing, he/she/it would have to supsersede the powerful entity in power (at least in order to be in a position to judge), even if he/she/it for some reason by nature could not exercise power in any human sense over the powerful entity. *That* entity would be God, and I would serve that entity *through* the good, weak entity.

Interestingly, the situation does parallel something we see in real life. Look at the temptations of Jesus in the desert, the choice before him: Satan, undeniably evil but seemingly powerful and active; God, undeniably good but seemingly silent and passive. Jesus had enough faith in the power of right over wrong, by the very definitions of right and wrong, to follow God; I hope I also would. I think a faith in God based solely on an experience of his power is a dangerous thing; it's a shallow one and easy to shake. "A wicked and perverse generation asks for a sign." "Do not put your God to the test."

> > > > I believe God is a rational God and that he loves us enough to make his Word comprehensible to us to the extent necessary for us to live godly lives, and so I refused to give up trying to reconcile "turn the other cheek" with "eye for an eye".
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> Mercy and Justice, in their proper balance, is a big topic.
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They're the two major, paradoxical elements of the same God.

I still hold that they're both facets of the higher truth known as Love, and that it's our limited POVs that make them seem to be in opposition to each other. (A loving God could not abandon the innocents to the criminals's predation; nor could he abandon the criminals to the innocents' vengeance. Especially when the criminals and innocents happen to be the same group.)

> gab"butting in as usual"by

Ar"makes a career of butting in"thur