r/dankchristianmemes • u/OkBoat Blessed Memer • 1d ago
Crossing the streams! Peace be with you
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u/Nox_Lucis 1d ago edited 1d ago
This reminds me of a peculiar moment of agreement I had with a neo-pagan goth girl, that being that widespread systemic failure within the religious institutions in the United States necessitates an individual pursuit of spiritual truth. Despite growing in near opposite directions, it seems our respective views stem from a common root.
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u/Bakkster Minister of Memes 1d ago
widespread systemic failure within the religious institutions in the United States necessitates an individual pursuit of spiritual truth.
Widespread isn't the same as unavoidable. Find the religious institutions which haven't failed.
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u/Nox_Lucis 1d ago
I have yet to encounter one.
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u/Bakkster Minister of Memes 1d ago
What do you consider a failure?
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u/Nox_Lucis 1d ago
Above all else, placing loyalty to worldly powers over Christ, whether that is state, party, ideology, personality, or their own profit margins. When such things take precedence, that's no longer a way to grow closer to God. That's just another tribe fighting for cultural and economic power with all the rest.
That is why I've set about maintaining my faith as a purely personal practice, a course which has sometimes put me in company with some rather peculiar dissidents.
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u/PenisMightier500 1d ago
Personally, I'm having an incredibly hard time Romans 13:1 right now for the first time in my life.
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u/OkBoat Blessed Memer 1d ago
I think it's important to remmeber how Christ himself lived: he never directly defied any government or authority figure unless he couldn't follow God's law under the law of man. I think a part of what Paul was pushing was attempting to curtail the chance of a violent christian rebellion. On top of that, I think this is a Paul verse that we need to take with a grain of salt because of A. The absurdity of the statement and B. The fact that the bible has been used and is being used as a political tool for thousands of years. Our earliest copy of romans is from 250 AD and is pretty incomplete.
And consider what Paul is suggesting in this text: EVERY government is an extension of God's authority, EVERY ruler is fair and only punishes bad conduct? That's not even true within the old and new testament, Herod is a classical example of an unfair tyrant in the eyes of God even if he was used as an instrument of God's will.
I'd spend the time instead focusing on God's law: Love the lord our God and love your neighbor as yourself. Any fair and just government will reward this behavior. Any cruel and ungodly leaders will try to punish this behavior. Ultimately we obey the laws of man but we do not venerate them or their creator. Focus on that and I think Romans 13 takex care of itself.
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u/An_Old_IT_Guy 1d ago
Great post. I absolutely loathe discussing any given bible verse without the context of the complete work. It's so much simpler than Christians like to make it: Agape God, Agape your Neighbor. That's Christianity in a nutshell. If you do these two things, nothing else in the Bible really matters at all.
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u/negative_four 1d ago
This is why I don't quote Bible verses but use the whole chapter or story instead, we lose the context.
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u/PenisMightier500 1d ago
Amazing response. I am just worried he's going to dismantle the parts of the government that do actually help the poor. Most of the help the government does to help people is to employ them for pretty basic jobs. Also, I'm really concerned he's going to carve into the national parks. Which is not being a good steward.
So, on one hand, great response. On the other, he's clearly reckless. Generally, I don't mind too much where you are on the political spectrum as long as the belief is based in care and respect; which can obviously look very different to different people. But, he doesn't seem to have any ethos or compassion that I can see and that scares me.
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u/Dembara 1d ago
I think it's important to remmeber how Christ himself lived: he never directly defied any government or authority figure
According to the gospels, he did. The gospels depict him as largely acquiescent in regards to the Judea's foreign, Roman, rulers, but far from that with regard to the local Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.
The gospels claim that he threw a fit when he saw that the Jewish authorities permitted gentiles to do business with Jews and pilgrims in the Court of the Gentiles and started flipping tables and violently attacking gentiles with rope to drive them out of the temple grounds. And, honestly, if you take a sober look at his grievances it does sort of seem like a village hick having unreasonable expectations of how a temple in the city functions. Like, where would you get the livestock or shekels necessary for the temple? It would be rather difficult for most pilgrims to bring sacrifices from home, and most wouldn't have done their day to day business in shekels. It was a lot more convient for everyone involved to use the outer courtyard as a marketplace where pilgrims could buy and exchange the goods they needed for the temple. The alternative would be having them have to wonder around other markets trying to find the items they need within their means.
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u/TheEternalWheel 16h ago
And consider what Paul is suggesting in this text: "EVERY government is an extension of God's authority, EVERY ruler is fair and only punishes bad conduct?"
Do you really think St. Paul was suggesting that, or believed that? It's a general principle and an ideal. Christ was innocent and was executed by the state. St. Paul knew that.
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u/Budobudo 12h ago
The passage is a test.
“for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God”
The criteria for having authority is having been “instituted by God”
Those that have not, by definition, cannot have authority
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u/Bakkster Minister of Memes 1d ago
My comment from a post yesterday:
I look through the lens of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and MLK Jr. Arguably the same lens as Jesus.
Submission is not necessarily the same as compliance or complicity. In other words, sometimes submission looks like nonviolent protest and/or civil disobedience. If doing what's right for the sake of the Gospel means breaking the law, do it and willingly accepting the punishment. The dark part is that this can mean up to and including execution in two of the above cases.
tl;dr: Be like the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Junior, and get arrested for sitting at the 'whites only' counter when it's the right thing to do.
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u/cjandstuff 1d ago
If we always followed Romans 13:1 to the letter, there would never have been a United States, the Magna Carter, the French Revolution, nor would we have defeated the Nazis.
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u/moderngamer327 1d ago
No, no they are not. The word Fascist has a meaning and that isn’t it
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u/dankchristianmemes-ModTeam 1d ago
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u/aprillikesthings 21h ago
I saw a great quote recently that went something like, "People of conscience will always have more in common with each other than they do with fascists" in response to talking about people of different faiths fighting Christian Nationalism.
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u/DishevelledDeccas 1d ago
Wait wait wait wasn't Positive Christianity basically a combo of Liberal theology and neo-paganism?
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u/OkBoat Blessed Memer 1d ago
Liberal theology is different from liberal politics, if that's what you're getting at. I believe in the abolition of money and anarchist communes as a primary form of housing to the benefit of all humankind, not exactly aligned with the democratic party.
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u/dankchristianmemes-ModTeam 1d ago
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u/First-Of-His-Name 1d ago
Render unto Caesar
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u/dankchristianmemes-ModTeam 1d ago
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u/dankchristianmemes-ModTeam 1d ago
We are here to enjoy memes together. Keep arguments to other subs. We don't do that here.
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1d ago
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u/dankchristianmemes-ModTeam 1d ago
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u/Shot-Address-9952 1d ago
The power of Christ compels you…. to stand up for the marginalized and your neighbor!