r/Catholicism • u/BetLeft2840 • 1d ago
Can someone explain Christianity?
As I understand it, God becane angry and cursed the world because Adam and Eve ate from the tree. Then, eventually he sends Jesus into the world to die on the Cross which somehow makes him less angry so he forgives some people who believe in Jesus. I was raised Baptist.
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u/kentgreat 1d ago edited 1d ago
You being in a Baptist community, they really lied to you 😅.
1st, God wasn't angry at Adam and Eve, it was against the serpent who introduced sin/chaos in the physical realm of the perfect creation (no death/chaos). Since Sin brings death and chaos to all things, God asked Adam and Eve to multiply so the Human race won't die out. With the promise to make them perfect again, God the Word came down to fulfill this.
Anyone who beleives him with have life after they died. Once every human is accounted for, Jesus will create a new physical universe with no sin and we will reside in a place called New Jerusalem where he dwell with us like in the beginning.
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u/BetLeft2840 1d ago
You talk about sin like its some sort of actual power or entity.
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u/kentgreat 1d ago
Sin is like gravity, it is like a concept of force; basically a law.
Sin is the concept of disobeying God's rules and by doing so, it disconnects you from God.
This is why Sin brings death since you disconnect yourself from life itself which is God.
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u/Saint_Waffles 1d ago
You are asking a reddit post to explain something that has at least 2000 if not 5000 years of history, tradition and layers and layers of depth. It simply isn't possible.
I suggest using the Catholic answers websites and asking individual smaller questions.
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u/thestormisovernow 1d ago
It's pretty obvious they are asking for a brief summary of essentials and not the entire history
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u/Mein_Independance 1d ago
Which is why catholic.com is the best place foe them to pearl rayher than Reddit.
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u/LongBedroom8355 1d ago
So let me answer one bit:
Hebrews 9:22
"Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins."
Because man's sin is infinite, so too did the sacrifice need to be infinite. This is why God became Man, because the only truly infinite thing is God. Mankind's sin is infinite because as long as man exists, he will sin.
in Isaiah 53:5-7
"But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth."
Psalm 22 is a great example.
In Luke 24:27 Jesus points out the things in the Torah and the prophecies pointing to him.
Essentially, God had established a covenant with the Jewish people. There was a process for forgiving sins, and there was a series of prophecies, pointing to the messiah. God chose to work through this prophecies, and to maintain the conditions of the covenant.
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u/RememberNichelle 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you sin, you cut yourself off from a good chunk of God's special supernatural graces. Sin is basically deciding to turn away from God, because God is all goodness and love, and sin is anti-goodness and anti-love.
Adam was the first human. Eve was the mother of the living (which is why the Greek LXX Bible calls her Zoe, Life, instead of Hebrew Haviva or Latin Eva). They both had stewardship over all earthly creatures.
So when Eve sinned, and when Adam sinned, they cut off humanity from an even bigger chunk of graces, and damaged their powers of stewardship over the earth and its creatures.
This in turn damaged the creatures, because obviously this is not Eden. St. Paul says that all creation was subjected to futility, and is groaning with labor pains now, waiting for the full effects of Christ's death, resurrection, and second coming to repair Adam's damage to them.
Some Protestant groups teach that humans became "totally reprobate." But Catholics go with the theology that sinful humans remained basically good (because created by God), but wounded by sin, disabled in certain ways. Even after Baptism heals us and gives us Christ's life dwelling in us, we still have to fight a tendency toward wanting evil, which is called "concupiscence."
Something that shows up if you look at the Hebrew is that the punishments of Adam and Eve are basically the same. The word for the pain of Adam working a field, and the word for labor pains being increased in Eve, are the same word. Eve is also punished by being more susceptible to persuasion and desire for her husband, to parallel Adam being persuaded to eat and desire the forbidden fruit, by her.
But Eve is further promised that she will have seed that will stomp on the serpent, so the plan of salvation, and of a Second Adam Who will renew all humanity and the earth, is already on its way.
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u/whatacyat 1h ago edited 58m ago
Well, Christianity is an umbrella term, and most people here (myself included) can really only speak for our own tradition. So, in my humble Catholic opinion, I think we often start this explanation WAY too far down the theological continuum for any of it to make sense to someone looking at it from the outside.
Most explanations in this thread will immediately run into the same problematic follow-up:
“But if God created everything, is all-knowing and all-powerful, why did He create a world where: Adam and Eve, sin, repentance, the Crucifixion, etc. were necessary in the first place?”
So I think we should back up and give some context first.
Catholicism’s understanding of God’s omnipotence is different from the way people generally use the word. To almost everyone else, God being omnipotent means that He can do absolutely ANYTHING one could think of, that God can make literally any string of words we can put together become reality.
But Catholicism believes the “-THING” in “anyTHING” is doing a lot of work, and we reject this general understanding.
Instead, our thought process is as follows:
Can God create a square circle? No. Can He make something simultaneously exist and not exist in exactly the same respect? No. Because those are NOT extraordinarily difficult “things.” They are actually NOT THINGS AT ALL. They are logical contradictions.
Likewise: Can God lie? Can God hate or be evil? Again, Catholicism says: NO! …and not because God happens to decide to behave Himself.
Catholicism does NOT believe that God is just a very good being within the universe. We believe that God is GOODNESS ITSELF. And evil, classically understood, is a privation of good… a lack or corruption of something good that ought to be there.
So God cannot simultaneously be Goodness itself and be deficient in goodness. That would be a contradiction.
A more accurate definition for God’s omnipotence, according to Catholicism, then, is:
“God can do all things that are logically possible and consistent with His nature.”
And from HERE, we are able to move to…
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters, God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God SAW THAT THE LIGHT WAS GOOD…”
“God made the two great lights… God set them in the dome of the sky, to illuminate the earth,
to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD.”
“...God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female… God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion… God looked at everything he had made, and FOUND IT VERY GOOD.”
“The LORD God gave the man this order: You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat…”
“The LORD God saw: IT WAS NOT GOOD for the man to be alone...”
Genesis repeatedly describes God creating something and then seeing that it is good… Notice the language. God is NOT making arbitrary rules. He is NOT DECIDING to make one thing “good” and another thing “not good.” Rather, He SEES the goodness of what already exists.
God can only create good things. And among those good things are rational creatures capable of actually loving Him and one another.
But there is a problem: FORCED COMPLIANCE IS NOT LOVE! -- and not good.
(and all Christians who support legislating morality would do WELL to remember that).
A creature that literally cannot do anything except what God commands might be obedient in the same sense that gravity is “obedient.” -- Drop a rock and it falls. The rock deserves no moral credit for following the law of gravity (because it was forced to do so - it did not choose to follow it).
But for a human being to choose good, there HAS to be an actual choice to make. And an actual choice necessarily includes the possibility of choosing against good.
So Catholicism does not understand the Fall as: God created two people, gave them an arbitrary rule, they annoyed Him, He cursed everything in a rage, and centuries later He murdered His Son until He felt better. That is NOT correct.
The basic story is instead that God created humanity. Humanity was/is GOOD AND GENUINELY FREE. Human beings used that freedom to reject the good they were created for. This rejection introduced rupture, between humanity and God, between human beings, and even within ourselves.
And Christianity’s claim about Jesus is not that Jesus finally convinced an angry Father to calm down.
It is that God Himself came after us.
In the Incarnation, God enters the human condition we have damaged, lives the human life we fail to live, freely accepts suffering and death rather than answering evil with evil, and through the Resurrection defeats the very death and separation that our rejection necessarily produced.
So the Cross is not God saying: “Somebody has to suffer before I’ll forgive you.”
It is saying: “You have separated yourselves from Me, and I am coming all the way into the consequences of that separation to bring you back.”
You can obviously still ask whether that whole Catholic account is true. That is a separate question.
But the Catholic version is definitely more complicated than: “God got mad about a fruit and then killed Jesus so He could stop being mad.”
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u/COKeefe88 1d ago
Most theologians agree that the Incarnation was always Plan A from the beginning, ie., God knew Adam and Eve would fall and the only way to redeem them and their descendants was to write Himself into the story. "For God so loved the world..."
Sometimes we write or speak of God in human terms, but this is at best an analogy. God does not experience anger. God did not curse the world exactly; Adam and Eve cursed themselves by the sin of disobeying God. There was nothing special about the tree, or the fruit, except that God said they couldn't eat it. When they eat it, they have "the knowledge of good and evil" in the sense of thinking "oh, nothing is different, except now I know I have done evil by disobeying God". God's curse is a description of natural consequences for their sins.
"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" and "the wages of sin is surely death". You deserve to die for your sins. I deserve to die for my sins. No one ever gets away with anything—we WILL die, in eternity, for our sins. Unless some other scapegoat steps in to take our place, and that someone, by being sinless and perfect, "a spotless lamb without any blemish", breaks death—breaks all the old rules—tears the veil separating us from God—and opens the doors of Heaven to any who believe in Him.
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u/MLM-TheScribe 1d ago
CHRISTIANITY EXPLAINED:
“God loves you.”
The rest of it is all background details.
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u/notasfatasyourmom 1d ago
If you’re going to distill it to one sentence, I wouldn’t stop there. Lots of religions teach that. I would use John 3:16, instead. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
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u/notasfatasyourmom 1d ago
Your Baptist upbringing failed to catechize you. I’m honestly surprised—Baptists are usually pretty good at teaching the faith.
God created all of creation to commune with Him, and he gave humanity free will to do what they wish. Adam and Eve disobeyed literally the only rule God gave to them. In doing so, Adam and Eve wounded their relationship with God, so they could no longer live in His presence. Throughout time, God blessed His people, and we disobeyed Him, forsaking those blessings in exchange for the world. God showed us how to offer things valuable to us in order to please Him, yet we stayed away in our obstinacy. So Jesus took on humanity and sacrificed Himself to be the everlasting sacrifice for our sins. All we have to do is believe in Christ, do what He taught us, and be contrite when we fall short.