Reply #23: Christianity, at least, does. And all that stuff matters

[Inland]

In Christianity, the value, meaning and significance of Jesus is, in fact, that his existence, life and death have some transcendent meaning and effect. It is true that the value, meaning and significance of the life of Jesus is suddenly negated if in fact he is not "God's son". The reason why the value of Jesus to you is not negated if he is in fact entirely human is because you never put any other value on him at all; the reason why you don't find the nature of Jesus relevant to your spiritual faith is, simply, because you don't believe in any transcendent meaning in his life. That's fine. But it isn't Christianity.

Nor do I have to make a case for Jesus being divine. That was never my interest. My case is that a belief system isn't Christianity without attaching a transcendent, transformative value to his life and death. It is the difference between, "Jesus died for your sins" and "Jesus died", between a savior and a victim, between a guy who died and a guy who conquered death, between a guy who is still here and a guy who isn't. One's christianity, the other isn't.

I don't find the assertion that an only human nature of Jesus is somehow less dogmatic or irrelevant to be convincing. To say that the existence of divinity is not relevant to anything that matters in spiritual faith is a little disingenuous: it matters as much to one who wrongly believes as it does to one who wrongly does not, and one can be as dogmatic about the lack of divinity as one is about divinity. If the existence and identity of divinity aren't important, then the word of an omniscient, ominpotent God is worth no more than the word of Dear Amy. By defintion, that can't be.

A Christian would say that you are missing an awful lot by skipping all the part where Jesus redeems mankind with his death, and conquers death for all mankind in his resurrection, because to them, it isn't a metaphor, but a real, actual, this is the prerequisite to see an actual entity of God and never die sense. You can write that off as something that doesn't matter, but I can see a lot of difference between that and your position, in an objective sense.