/lit/ - Literature

>>22729862
The biggest difference is the Person of Jesus and what He has to say.

As Ratzinger repeatedly emphasizes, what distinguishes Christianity from all the religions before it, and all the religions that came after it, is that its central figure is also its God, and also set up a sequence of events as a test case to prove His validity.

Basically, you should take Jesus seriously because of the Resurrection. Jesus' teachings, and everything said about Him, gain authority from the fact that He rose from the dead. All the Gospels build to this truth if you bother to read them.

>>22723992
Anon if you're not going to believe the mystical/miraculous/supernatural stuff in the Bible there's no point in reading it at all.

On that note, I've seen the interpretation that Jesus is essentially cursing some of the crowd with biological immortality, or that there are some immortals among the crowd already. People who really will biologically live for centuries, and live to see the Second Coming.

The idea is that the Old Covenant has been fulfilled in Christ, and we are in the time of the New Covenant. The Old Covenant has been transformed, from a covenant of blood to a covenant of spirit and belief. Therefore, now EVERYONE who believes in Christ and follows after Him can achieve the salvation that was previously only available to the Jews.

Any attempt to avoid this, and say that the Jews are somehow still special and unique, is wrong.

>Romans

Romans does not contradict any of this, rather it reinforces it. The Jews are not banned from salvation, but neither are they any more exclusively saved and preferred. They, like everyone else, have to follow Christ and obey Him. Them especially. He is THEIR Messiah, after all.

>>22644249
Because Christ is Risen.

It's because Nietzsche was a materialist and wasn't able to cure himself of this delusion.

You are not going to get Christianity if you don't believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus. If you believe the Resurrection couldn't have happened you'll NEVER understand Christianity.

You have to believe that a man can rise from the dead.

>>22324164
You'd better hope not. For your sake.

>>22273004
>failed

He did exactly what He prophesied he would do: He rose from the dead on the third day. Can Muhammad beat that?

I'm curious, does Fukuyama spend much time talking about religion in his text?

Because having encountered his thesis without reading the book, it has always struck me as a weakness in the concept. His analysis of liberalism and capitalism, and their triumph over other systems of organization, strikes me as very materialist, which makes sense given that he is the heir to a system of thought that started with Hegel and Marx. But how does such a worldview process people for whom non-material things are of great importance?

I supppose if he addressed Islam after 9/11 he must have written something along those lines.