Fair enough
Submitted by Dirk Gently on October 30 1999 at 14:09:30
In reply to The Question Wasn't Intended As Rhetoric… Submitted by Andy on October 30 1999 at 01:26:22
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Because a group of people got together and agreed on something, doesn't necessarily make it right in God's sight, or true. Well, but look at Acts 15. The situation as I read it was this: there was a major controversy in the Christian community. The party of the Pharisees even had Scripture on their side to insist that all worshippers of the true God ought to be obliged to fulfill the Law. However, this conflicted with the new teachings of the Church. Since there was no way to resolve the disagreement at the local level, the congregation at Antioch sent a delegation to Jerusalem to seek the opinion of the apostles and presbyters. After the discussion was done, James in his role of episkopes of the Jerusalem congregation got up and summarized their conclusions. "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. . ." This consciousness of the role of the Holy Spirit as teacher and guide for the Church may have been self-delusion on their part, but I can't think of any Christian who would want to argue that. :^) Acts 15 has been looked to as a model for the way the Holy Spirit has lead Christ's followers into "all truth" (John 16:13). For the first thousand years of Christianity, all debates about doctrine and practice were resolved in this way. (That doesn't guarantee the process, of course, but Christ seemed quite definite that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church.) Of course, not every council came to the same conclusions. And that's where the priesthood of all believers comes into play. The decisions of the councils are universally valid and binding only so far as the body of Christ (that's you and me) accepts them. It's only been in the past 400 years or so that people identifying themselves as Christians have considered rejecting the consensus of the first 1000 years, but it's only become a common Protestant thing to do in the past 100. In this sense, the old German liberals and the "Bible only" fundamentalists are united. The major difference is that the liberals apply the same logic to the Bible, and reject the New Testament as the creation of "a group of people [who]got together and agreed on something." As far as passages and scriptures being lost or left out of the Bible, I really don't believe that God would have left us with a book that would not guide us to complete salvation. If Paul started writing in the 40's, it took about 50 years for all the books to be written. (That's assuming the conservative scholars are correct.) Even then, some local churches didn't accept the book of Revelation as God-inspired until late 4th, early 5th century. Don't forget, for the first 400 years or so, the "New Testament" hadn't been collected as a single book. Did you know that the first time anyone presented a list of "approved" New Testament books that consisted of only our 27 was in the year 386? And the person who drew up the list was none other than Athanasius of Alexandria, the greatest defender of the doctrine of the Trinity at the first Council of Niceae. In other words, the Trinity was accepted as legitimate and true Christian doctrine before the book of Revelation was. I'm glad to have the opportunity to discuss these things. If we go on, maybe we should move the thread to the top of the list. Dirk |