Not sure which way to jump on this one:
Every Christian should be a pessimist because the most effective government the world had seen up to that point, and the best religion on the planet, conspired between them to kill the best man who ever walked the face of the earth.
Every Christian should be an optimist because of what happened 2 days later.
Or to put it another way, it's Friday, but Sundays coming.
I don't really get your first points. "The most effective government the world had seen up to that point" just means that they were effective at controlling and organising people - not that they were morally good. And why do you think that Judaism was the best religion on the planet? Yes it was an effectively moral framework, but surely the revelation of the truth in Jesus showed that Judaism was just as wrong a way of life as most other religions? (Which leads to the wider question of why God bothered with Judaism in the first place.)
ReplyDeleteBut I think the bottom line is that the Christian worldview is a fundamentally optimistic one, because it believes that we're all created with a purpose and loved by the Creator.