Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts !…

Isn’t it great that HE made us neither male nor female, bond or free, Jew or Greek, & we are FREE in HIM!

And, those men AND women who seek God all of their earthly lives will be first, & those men AND women who live for themselves all of this earthly life, will be last. That’s what I mean.

My tradition leaves me in no way prepared to accept that the Spirit speaks to the “authority” of the church in any way beyond the way the Spirit might speak to anyone in the church. That may be a weakness of my paradigm… but I also see Christ’s promises made to believers concerning the Spirit to be to all believers (John 14 and thereabout).

I think our problem is that we think we are seeking “infalibility” at all. God calls us to be righteous more so than he calls us to be right. I will never be fully right about everything… and I will never be righteous of my own accord. God desires seekers– and worshippers who worship in Spirit and truth. It’s a journey. As some have alluded… we’ll never work some of these things out– they may not even be things we need to work out. We do, however, need to continue seeking, speaking and patiently relying on God.

If we don’t rely on the Spirit, we’re in trouble from the start imho.

These doctrines were crystallised by the disputes among early Gentile church fathers who looked into the Pool of Narcissus (the scriptures),
saw themselves imaged there, and then projected this, their own image, upon the world through the medium of ecclesiastical councils called by Roman Emperors from 325AD onwards.

Christendom bears the image, not of the mind of Jesus and the character of the Supreme Being, but of early Gentile theology.

Of Jesus the apostles taught:

That he was God’s ‘anointed’ who would one day sit on the throne of David and rule over the Kingdom of God on earth.

That he was ‘anointed’ with full power and authority to speak and act in the name of the YHVH and to perform the specific tasks spoken of by Isaiah the prophet (Is.61).

That he was the ’son’ of God by human parentage (John 1:34, 45, 49) though not the son of Joseph as commonly supposed at the time (Matt. 1:25).

That he was a ‘god’ in the sense in which he used it himself, that is, a man “unto whom the word of God came.” (John 10:34) On his reasoning, Moses and the prophets were also ‘gods’.

That he was the ‘only-begotten’ of God because he was the only-resurrected, not because he was born to a virgin.

That his ’sonship’ of God refers to a purely ‘ethical’ relationship.

Eternal life is to be found in spirit, not doctrines. Jesus’ true message, unfettered by doctrines, brings hope and a sense of human dignity to the despised and rejected of the Earth.

The New Testament writers enumerate principles to follow in order that Christians living many centuries later may become one with Jesus. Where John preached the gospel of love, Paul announced redemption by a inner and spiritual identification with Jesus, with a self-imposed crucifixion and resurrection.

Church doctrines can deliver no such message. If Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth today, he would be unidentifiable in terms of doctrines and would most likely be subjected to the same treatment he received the first time.

Hmmm. I have some trouble accepting this Spirit business. Sounds good, but not sure I see it working in practice. I’ve seen plenty of “spirit-led” people or groups of people come to different conclusions on interpretation of Scripture or any number of issues. I think if you make the Spirit your primary access to truth, you’ll get just as many variations of that “truth” as “Spirit-filled” people you consult.

I would have an easier time accepting the Catholic position, where when decisions are being made that are binding on church, the Spirit is speaking to the authority of the church, and they are in effect carrying out God’s will.

I have a harder time believing that we all have access to this kind of authority. Christianity, in its present state, certainly doesn’t appear as if God works that way.

Is it also possible that the lack of God’s Spirit is also what enables us to miss the point of the scripture we have?

It seems to me that the work of the Spirit is the central defining factor that makes or breaks scripture, tradition, interpretation, and everything else we try to put ahead of God. Could it be that, as Paul points out, with the Spirit’s guidance I can even grasp large chunks of God’s “invisible nature” in the creation around me? We can bicker about hermanuetics and canonization all we want, but if we aren’t being “in-Spired” today in our approach then scripture is just as succeptable to the human slight of hand as any other bit of literature is.

Let’s pray for humility and guidance from God at every point along the way– no matter what we are reading. The spirit helps us to discern truth–in the Bible, in Sports Illustrated, on Cope’s blog, in the works of Chaucer, in the pulpit, in the Firm Foundation, in New Wineskins, in the Koran, the works of Budda, Donald Miller or Brian McLaren.

Oops… I may have said too much…

How does the fact that cannonization was a process, rather than a decisive moment, make it any less a tradition? It certainly isn’t scriptural, i.e. the Bible is not self validating in what books should be in it and what books should not. What are you left with? Tradition. Why don’t most Protestant Bibles have the Apocryapha? If the canon “selected itself” then why is there such a difference in Bibles between Catholic, Protestant, EO, Syriac, Ethiopian Christian groups? Denying the role of history (i.e. tradition) is like looking at the Bible with rose-colored glasses. Not as it is.