Driving the money changers out of the temple may have been a symbolic act but it was nevertheless an act of violence. It was a’ parable’ involving people getting hurt, contrary to Jesus’ teachings. Would you like someone beating you up just to make apoint?
Or do you mean to say that it did not really happen and was just included in the godspels as a kind of parable?
This is not a question of reading Scripture piecemeal, it’s a question of the gospel not being internally consistent, and no amount of apologetics can change that simple fact. Using your ‘wholistic’ approach I could show you how Hitler was in fact morally perfect. I can prove anything. But I prefer to stay with the facts. And the facts are: Jesus did not love his enemies [My emphasis added]
You read a newspaper story of a man who attacked another with a knife and made a huge gash in his chest. Using the swift but critical judgement you have shown above, you jump to the easy (for you) conclusion that the act was unloving, violent and evil.
However, as you read further, the story reveals that the armed man was a surgeon cutting into a patient’s chest to repair a defective valve, it soon becomes clear that your rash judgement has erred again. You remind yourself with a palm shot to the forehead that apparent acts of violence can end up achieving good ends and therefore be loving acts.
A surgeon cutting into a patient or a dentist extracting a tooth are “hurting” people as well, but doing so for their own good.
Hurt does not equal harm. Sometimes hurting someone is intended to lead to ultimate good for them and therefore can be an act of love because it is corrective of a defect. It is, therefore, possible to love someone, even our enemies, and still hurt them intentionally.
Jesus’ act of violence does not ipso facto make it an unloving act. He offered an ultimate good, their salvation, to his hearers. Sometimes tough love is necessary to make a point to someone who refuses to listen.
In your argument, you are confusing kindness with love. It is possible to show kindness to someone about to murder another by picking up and handing them the gun they carelessly dropped, thus committing the ultimate unloving act of being an accomplice in the death of the victim. Love, in this situation, could very well call you to be violent and undertake a swift kick to the abdomen of the would-be perpetrator. Love will resort to violence when that option leads to the best, i.e., loving, outcome. When faced with the evil choices of others, sometimes violence is the loving thing to do to protect those involved or bring about the optimal good possible given the circumstances.
Your argument is that Jesus could not have been good and therefore not God merely because he was violent towards others. Like a surgeon who shows masterful expertise by using controlled “violence” to cut open a chest and repair injured tissue, Jesus as the loving and good God, made a moral choice to use controlled violence in a specific situation. God, as all-knowing and omnibenevolent has the moral purview that you lack, thus rendering your argument a rash judgement of the actions of a much more capable individual who was in a much better position than you (two thousand years removed) to know what the loving option would be. Since you have such limited access to the relevant ethical considerations of the case, I find it astounding that you can even venture an opinion. Your judgement that his behaviour was not loving is as unconvincing as you claiming a surgeon is being unloving merely because he wields a knife to cut into another person.
Your underwhelming claim is fundamentally flawed. :crutches:
