By Herbert Vego
OF the 7.9 billion world population today, 2.3 billion are adherents of Christianity. But the thousands of Christian denominations and organizations disagree on the godhead or divinity of Jesus Christ, the central figure behind Christianity
Various Christian dominations disagree on whether he was a man or God manifested in the flesh. Some of them have strayed away from the traditional dogmatic doctrines in favor of “scientific and verifiable evidence of the faith.” They agree only on one historical nugget: Jesus, a Jew who lived in the 1st century in Palestine, was crucified to death – just like other common criminals in his time. But his resurrection has remained debatable since the first century of the Christian era.
In that century, the Gnostics – members of movements with “secret knowledge about God” – rejected the notion that Jesus had an ordinary impure human body. The priest Arius of Alexandria, however, postulated that Jesus, although the Son of God, was not equal in status or nature with God the Father.
The religious patriarch Nestorius, on the other hand, taught that Jesus had two separate natures – one divine, the other human.
In 451 AD, the debate over Jesus’ nature was largely put to rest when leaders of the Christian church at the Council of Chalcedon – not far from modern Istanbul, Turkey – declared that Jesus possessed both human nature and divine nature. All other notions about Jesus were declared heretic.
During the 16th-century Protestant Reformation in Germany, ex-priest Martin Luther stressed the “Biblical divinity” of Jesus.
It was not until 1778 that another scholar, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, caused a stir by publishing “The Aims of Jesus and his Disciples,” which presented Jesus as entirely human. He branded the authors of the Gospels as “deceivers.”
Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German theologian who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, portrayed Jesus as having been divinely inspired, but not God incarnate.
The famous Albert Schweitzer, a 20th-century medical missionary in Gabon, wrote the book The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906), where he argued that Jesus was an apocalyptic-minded Jew who preached the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom within a wholly Jewish context without intending to launch a new religion. However, he admitted that it was impossible to say with certainty what is and what is not historically accurate about Jesus.
In modern times, news reports allude to a former Roman Catholic American priest, John Dominic Crossan, 87, as having said that Jesus could not have come out of a virgin birth, died and resurrected because “he was just a charismatic shaman or an expert in healing the sick.”
Crossan left the Catholic Church in 1969 to become a follower of the late Robert W. Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, a consortium of Bible scholars who popularized a wave of studies that raised doubts about whether the deeds and sayings attributed to Jesus were historically authentic.
Crossan stressed that what the church teaches as historical facts are acts of faith that are required to keep the Church from becoming completely irrelevant to contemporary Christians.
On the opposite extreme, Filipino televangelist Apollo Quiboloy has “promoted” Jesus as the “present-day Father” and he (Quiboloy himself) as the new “Son of God in the Gentile setting.” He is living proof that it is never too late to start a new Christian flock.
Very ironically, he is a good friend and adviser of President Rodrigo Duterte who, in a televised speech on June 25, 2018, slammed the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and called God “stupid”.
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MORE POWER PILFERERS DIMINISHING
ONE of the reasons why MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power) has reduced its power rates drastically is the drastic reduction of power thieves. The lesser the thieves, the lesser the amount of system’s loss charged to paying customers.
When MORE Power took over from previous Iloilo City power franchisee Panay Electric Co. (PECO) in February 2020, there were 63,000 paying households, prompting the management to inspect the power lines and reaching into the conclusion that more or less 30 thousand other households were stealing electricity with the use of “jumpers”.
Today, the roster of MORE Power’s paying customers number more than 83,000. It means that most of the power pilferers had abandoned their crime and turned legal. Otherwise, they could be caught and face charges in court for violation of Republic Act No. 7832 (Anti-Electricity Pilferage Act of 1994), which carries the penalty of reclusion temporal (12 years and 1 day to 20 years) or a fine ranging from P50,000 to P100,000, or both, at the discretion of the court.
Almost a thousand of the pilferers have already been arrested and charged in court, of whom 703 have opted to settle their cases by paying their arrears and penalties.
It is very risky for power thieves to illegally connect using jumpers because of the round-the-clock operation of unidentifiable security personnel with hidden timestamp cameras. “Timestamp” is a computer operation that automatically inserts current time and address on video of thievery in progress. This is sufficient evidence to nail down pilferage suspects.
