Response to Judy Hansen
At the beginning of your essay, you state a simple truth, but I'm not sure of your source. I do agree with the precept which is "For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard." from the New Living Translation which I often quote. A Jewish Believer once pointed out that this has an allegorical basis of someone shooting an arrow at the target. In practice our arrows don't even reach the target.
1054 AD, the Great Schism, happened almost a thousand years after Pentecost, and by then, an awful lot of misconceptions had entered "orthodox" denominational Christian Religion. That is to say, there had already been many schisms. Even the letters of Paul and Peter saw schisms creeping into the understandings of Believers.
The Book of Acts shows the original Gospel:
The Holy Spirit Comes - Verses 1-13.
Peter Preaches to the Crowd - verses 14-41 (the Gospel in a rather large nutshell).
The Believers Form a Community - verses 42-47
The easiest way for me to express my point comes from my Union Contract Negotiator days. Those churches that formed afterward were like an Employer violating all the terms and conditions and even the pay scale agreed to in the original contract... Unfortunately, there was no Grievance Arbitration Board to settle disputes. So, the disputes and schisms remained and still continue to muddy the waters today.
Without a personal relationship with God and Jesus, how can our meager minds truly understand what the Bible says?
And I believe neither of the churches you mentioned had that relationship. They had become like the Jewish Religious Hierarchy who actually were barriers for the new Jesus Sect.
I highlighted "The discussion becomes about shared ideas of our humanity. It is less about who gets into heaven or who goes to hell and more about how we live our lives to serve and honor others." I highlighted it because "how we live our lives to serve and honor others" is how God will Judge us all, Believers as well as unbelievers - what people often miss, but is in the New Testament verses.
Yet, many facts have been lost over time and ignorant proclamations. For example,
faith somehow became a noun instead of a verb.
sin evolved from doing hurt and harm into being bad
belief became something we do rather than we are shown.
sheol became Hell, a nightmare, a place of eternal torture instead of eternal separation from God, Jesus, and the Bible.
I have discovered and tried to share on Medium other precepts misconstrued over time and misconceptions spread like mold over the unleavened bread of theGospel. Notwithstanding i did very much like that highlight
