From Pine View Farm

Metamorphosis 0

Beware of those who claim God is on their side.

Too often, they make their own god, as James Carroll points out in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

The other side of this story is the way in which, again from the very start, we humans have used Jesus as a lens through which to project our prejudices and needs onto the screen of history. So when 1st Century Roman military occupation led to civil war among the colonized Jews, Jesus people purged him of Jewishness to imagine a Gentile Jesus (“His own knew him not’’), in radical contradiction to the first fact of his history — that he was a Jew through and through. When Christians found themselves aligned with the Roman empire, Jesus emerged as the embodiment of political power (King of Kings). When, in times of plague, the challenge was to make sense of inescapable misery, an agonized Jesus came to the fore (the bloody crucifix), as if God could will suffering as a mode of redemption. When Christianity remade itself as Christendom, a necessary reaction to material excess elevated a puritan Jesus (the cross without a corpus). Against cold rationalism, there came a warmly pious Jesus (the Sacred Heart). In line with racist eugenics, an Aryan Jesus emerged (blue eyed, light brown flowing hair). When the time came for the overthrow of the corruptions of the old order, why not a revolutionary Jesus (liberation theology)?

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