Re: wots uh the deal with these errors.
Submitted by F.O.D. on June 30 1999 at 14:43:33
In reply to wots uh the deal with these errors. Submitted by The Dream Dragon on June 29 1999 at 03:58:57
|
Hello Dream Dragon, glad you dropped by. That's a pretty intense question about the infallibility of the scriptures. I wish I could add something more constructive to what the others already said, but I think their comments are much more helpful than anything I could say. I've thought about similar questions, about why we have the particular collection of writings that we have, and call it God's Word. Like why do we have 1 and 2 Corinthians, but not 3 Corinthians, as Rex mentioned, or why do we have Paul's epistle to the Colossians but not his epistle to the Laodiceans? (see Col 4:16) I once put the question to my brother, who has some theological training, and he couldn't say any more than that a couple of centuries after Christ the churches met together and put together the various documents which they had all come to accept as carrying doctrine and the teaching of the apostles, and excluded all those manuscripts over which there was some degree of dispute. It seems all a bit too arbitrary for my liking. If the letter to the Laodiceans were ever to be dug up somewhere, would we then include it to our list of holy scripture? Interestingly, Martin Luther himself rejected the epistle of James from the Holy Writ, calling it an "epistle of straw". The attitude of the Quakers that Heather mentioned seems quite reasonable, to see the written documents that we have as records, "witnesses" to God's will and word, while not being his Word as such. But I fear that wasn't exactly the sort of comment you were hoping to hear. Perhaps it might be helpful to keep in mind that the revelation God has given us, which we read in the Bible, is not a static thing in the sense that he binds us to follow blindly something which he had said at an earlier point. The example I have in mind is the Lord's Sabbath, the Day of Rest. In the Old Testament it's difficult to find something that God takes more seriously. It even gets mentioned in the Ten Commandments. In Jer 17:27 God says he will bring fire on Jerusalem if they will not keep the Sabbath day holy, even if they just carry any load. But when Jesus came he put the Sabbath in perspective, pointing out that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And Paul writes "Do not let anyone judge you with regard to a Sabbath day", Col 2:16. So if you take the OT verses on their own, you'd have to say that Paul or Jesus himself was introducing a contradiction into God's revealed will. And in a sense that is true, in that whole thing that Jesus has achieved for us is to win us life by God's Spirit, so we are no longer ruled by Law. We now have the freedom to know the Spirit that stands behind what is written, and to live according to that Spirit. I think the lesson that Jesus was trying to get across is that God doesn't want us to be mindlessly following the instructions for life he has given us, but rather he wants us to be searching for the meaning behind them, to be searching for God's heart itself, which is deeper than the written record. I think this can be scary, because it can take away the walls that we once hid by, but I think it is the difference between being a child of God and a slave of God. Feel free to talk and bring up more questions. We're here to walk the long road together. God isn't upset if we don't understand or get everything right all at once. Peace and love, Fod |