Metacrock

Meta => I think the Bible was the inspired word of God. I just don't accept the view of verbal plenary inspiriation. I have a different model of inspiration, one that allows for more of a human medium through which the turth of God is disseminated. That human medium allows for human persepectives.

To find out more, if you are interested, read this link:


http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20...Models_rev.htm







Meta => where did I "establish" that God is incapable? That depends upon what one thinks the Biblical texts are for. I dont' think they are a rule book or an insturction manuel. I think they serve diverse purposes but overall they are the record of those who had experineces with the Divine; but they are not necessarily a "Memo form God."

I definatley think Jesus was real. See the threads on historical Jesus.


Meta => All believers accept that humans wrote the texts. The onlky question is in what way God inspired them, and to what purpose. I do not feel that God was writting a rule book. But the experineces of God on the part of the Hebrew people humanized them far more than their sourrounding cultures. Their version of slavery had rule sto protect slaves taken in battle, while other people just raped and killed them. They had ruels by which a salve could obtain freedom, while others just worked them todeath. So yea, it was a step in the right direction. Then in the NT, latter, we find principles of freedom for all people such as Paul's statment "be not a salve to any man."







Meta => You seem to be assuming a verbal plenary model. That is a mistake to think that this is the only notion of inspiration. See the link above.


Meta =>Of course it's still relivant. tha'ts a chrnocentric prejudice. All people a long time ago were just stupid and peole now are smart. That's foolish. People a long time ago had wisdom that is timeless. but it was mixed in with a lot of crap. We have to apply these things to our sitatuion, we have to understand the basic principles and see how they apply to the new context.

Of course, the OT is fulfilled in Christ, so we don't live under the law. Jesus updated it with a more universal message. Bascially I think the OT serves the purpose of creating a context for Messiah, so that Jesus' mission made sense to the Jews. That serves as a segway for his mission to all humanity. But there is timeless wisdom in the OT, you have to look for it, and find it by screening it through the NT.

Meta => Truth is timeless. It's the context that changes, you have to understand how to apply it to the new context.



[colo=blue]Meta ->[/color] It says i'm a liberal christian. perhaps you would enjoy learning something, about theology I mean, then you will understand why that's not a paradox.

malookiemaloo

Sorry only time for a quick reply.

The Bible is patriarchial but that is not necessarily the same as being sexiest.

Against what standard are you judging the Bible? If it is the background of white, middle class 20th c 'liberated' America I can well see how you come to the conclusion you do. But if you were living today in, say, Amman where a man is currently in jail, and a hero, for killing his sister because she had been raped, perhaps you would be taking a different view!

Under the Principle of Accommodation, God speaks to us in a manner and uses symbols thatwe can understand. Slavery, which is as old as the hills, is used as a figure for someone's devotion to God. That is not the same as saying Godd approves slavery. Why does the Bible not then condem slavery? Easy. The Bible id god's word to us for salvation. It is not a manual for social change!!

Take the example of a man who was to marry a woman he raped. This was the ultimate deterrent against rape because women who were raped were considered defiled and no-one would marry such a woman see Absolon's sister, Tamar. And this was not just Israelite society which was actually quite enlightened compared with the nations around.

Finally, Christianitry did more for the liberation of woman than any movement either before or after. No male or female before god-all one in Christ Jesus. Do you realise how revolutionary that was when first proclaimed?

bye for now,


m

Dr Rick

The Bible has explicit commands for humanity that go well beyond "salvation." It has instructions on almost everything from diet (don't eat certain four-footed flying animals!) to circumcision. It tells us that women are are "unclean" when mensturating, that the physically deformed are not worthy to enter a temple, and that it's okay to beat one's slaves.

These issues have nothing to so with salvation; they are just stupid and immoral concepts.

Rick

malookiemaloo

I totally accept the fact that the Bible gives us rules for living. After all it is important that Christians live a life that is pleasing to God.

All I was saying was that the Bible is not a revolutionary manifesto.

I know what you are saying re the levitical rules but I think we have a tendency to judge them by our own stsndards and western culture 2000 years on. If they made sense in the middle east back then, what's the problem?


m

Metacrock

That's becasue the OT is also the cultural literature of a race. If you would read my link on my thoery of inspiration, you would see this. The typical model you are going by is prbabably that of the fundamentalist, right? But tha'ts not an adqequate model. Rather than understand the Bible as a "memo from God," I see it as a collections of writtings by people who had experinced of the divine. Some of those writtings are direct commuication, handed down from on high, some are not. Some are just the cultural literature, the propaganda, the cultural background of this people. But all of it, in one way or another, is produced by people whose lives were transformed by the power of the divine.

I see the OT as setting up a context for Jesus, a context in which the notion Messiah makes sense. Then Jesus comes and gives us the true revelation of God. After all that's what Hebrews tells us happend; "in many and various ways God spoke through the prophets, but in these latter times he has spoken more perfectly through his son."

doc58

Meta,
I have read your posts with interest. This is a bit of a sidenote and I may not be able to express it in such a way that makes sense but your posts are a good illustration of why I am no longer an elder in a Bible Church and have lost belief in inerrancy and many other things invoving Christianity. My Church and I had theology similar to Dallas Theological Seminary.

One component of my change involves the fact that the brightest Christian minds do not agree on the interpretation of so much of the Bible. Your personality, needs, common sense and intellectual prowess lead you to reject verbal plenary interpretation. The same characteristics lead some other PhD in Theology to embrace verbal plenary. John Walvoord at DTS believes in dispensationalism and premillinealism and RC Sproul rejects both.
It goes on and on. And all of these people approach their studies with prayer and submission to God and believe that their views are God given. They can write scholarly papers and have websites explaining their positions convincingly. And yet they are all different. Go down the street and see all the Christian churches you disagree with and yet they all have people who strongly believe in their respective beliefs and are just as smart and prayerfull as I am sure you are.

Could it be that the reason there are so many different interpretations of the Bible and even differing views on how it should be interpeted is that the Bible is a mismash of inconsistency and lack of clarity and not a great work of unity, inspiration and consistency?

The Bible supports:

premillinealism, amillinealism, postmillinealism
Security of the believer and loss of salvation
exaltation of women and enslavement of women
necessity of baptism for salvation and no works salvation
calvinism and arminianism
universal salvation and hell
At every turn, reasonable, godly, prayerful people disagree, all with biblical support.

Why do you think you are right and the fundamentalists are wrong? Are you smarter than all the phD's who you disagree with, more Godly, more prayerful? Has God given you something he won't give them? Do you use your mind more effectively?
What do you have that they don't?

QuietEarthling

Is Bible sexist? Is christianity sexist? Can one be a Christian AND a feminist without suffering from immense cognitive dissonance? These are all good questions.

.Is Bible sexist? Well, which one? There's the NIV, the KJV, the NKJV, NASB, NAB, NIVI, TLB, and so many others, I've lost count! Of course, these are all translations (and interpretations) of the original texts. When you read the Bible in English, you really read the translator's interpretation of it. Is it still a reliable and inspired guide for us? Yes, I think so. Is every word translated absolutely perfectly? Not always. Can we still figure out what the original intent of the Author was? You bet!

.Is Christianity sexist? Once again, depends on how we understand the Christian faith. There are christian groups that are sexist. There are Christian groups who are egalitarian. There are those who struggle to fit somewhere 'in between'. There are tose who misuse the Bible to promote the agenda of male supremacy.

.Christian Feminist - a paradox? In the eyes of many, it is. I spent the first years of my christian walk in a very restrictive church. They believed in the 'literal' interpretation of the Bible - which of course, meant that total denial of historical context, assumptions that the words haven't change meanings in 2000 years, and that a doctrine can be based on 2 or 3 difficult verses.
Then I was exposed to the egalitarian christian thought. Simply said, I was encouraged to look at the scripture in historical context, to interpret Paul in light of what Jesus said, and not the other way around, and to, first and foremost, look at the heart of God. That realization transformed my life.
I am still a Christian, but a different kind of Christian. I am not fixated on the few passages that were mistranslated or misunderstood - but I am able to see the 'big picture' of liberation, freedom, and equality that God wants us to see. I am not sitting there, trying to figure out the ways to 'limit' my involvement in the church, in order to be 'the proper passive woman'. On the contrary, whatever I CAN do, whatever my abilities are, I am able to offer freely to the community, without fears that I am stepping out of line, trying to 'usurp authority', or making the men feel 'dominated' or 'unmotivated'.

QuietEarthling

Doc58 wrote:
The Bible supports:

premillinealism, amillinealism, postmillinealism
Security of the believer and loss of salvation
exaltation of women and enslavement of women
necessity of baptism for salvation and no works salvation
calvinism and arminianism
universal salvation and hell
At every turn, reasonable, godly, prayerful people disagree, all with biblical support.

Me:

to respond to this, I will simply include a page from Philip Yancey's book, Reaching for the Invisible God.

!
As Andrew Greeley said, “If one wishes to eliminate uncertainty, tension, confusion and disorder from one’s life, there is no point in getting mixed up either with Yahweh or with Jesus of Nazareth.” I grew up expecting that a relationship with God would bring order, certainty, and a calm rationality to life. Instead, I have discovered that living in faith involves much dynamic tension.
Throughout church history, Christian leaders have shown an impulse to pin everything down, to reduce behavior and doctrine to absolutes that could be answered on a true-false test. Significantly, I do not find this tendency in the Bible. Far from it, I find instead the mystery and uncertainty that characterize any relationship, especially a relationship between a perfect God and fallible human beings.
In a memorable phrase that became the virtual cornerstone of his theology, G. K. Chesterton said, “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” Most heresies come from espousing one opposite at the expense of the other.
A church uncomfortable with paradox tends to tilt in one direction or the other, usually with disastrous consequences. Read the theologians of the first few centuries as they try to fathom Jesus, the center of our faith, who was fully God, and fully man. Read the theologians of the Reformation as they discover the majestic implications of God’s sovereignty, then strive to keep their followers from settling into a resigned fatalism. Read the theologians of today as they debate the intricacies of written revelation: a Bible that expresses God’s words to us that is nonetheless authored by individuals of widely varying intelligence, personality, and writing style.
The first shall be last; find your life by losing it; no achievement matters apart from love; work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you,; God’s kingdom has come but not fully; enter the kingdom of heaven like a child; he who serves is greatest; measure self-worth not by what others think of you but by what you think of them; he who stoops lowest climbs highest; where sin abounds grace abounds more; we are saved by faith alone but faith without works is dead – all these profound principles of life appear in the New Testament, and none easily reduces to logical consistency. “Truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes,” the British pastor Charles Simeon remarked. With some reluctance I have come to agree.
Consider the basic makeup of human beings. Inside every person on earth, we believe, the image of God can be found. Yet inside, each person there lives also a beast. Any religious or political system that does not account for both extremes – furious opposites, in Chresterton’s phrase – will sorely fail. As a Jewish Rabbi put it, “A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ On the other, ‘For my sake was the world created.’ And he should use each stone as he needs it.”





Doc58 wrote:

Why do you think you are right and the fundamentalists are wrong? Are you smarter than all the phD's who you disagree with, more Godly, more prayerful? Has God given you something he won't give them? Do you use your mind more effectively?
What do you have that they don't?

Me:

Maybe God simply gave us more grace and mercy to capture a portion of His truth that those folks didn't. Maybe they have more grace in other areas, and perhaps they have some truths we do not possess yet.

doc58

Quiet Earthling,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I am familiar with Yancey. Interwoven throughout the quote is his own biases and dogmatism.
For instance, it is dogma to Yancey that Jesus is God and man and that God is absolutely sovereign. However. the Bible has verses on both sides of both issues.
You see, Yancey is comfortable saying the things like "uncertainty, tension, confusion and disorder" in all areas except where he is dogmatic such as trusting Jesus as personal Lord and Savioris the only way to salvation. He sees no uncertainty, tension, confusion and disorder in that.

You said, "Maybe God simply gave us more grace and mercy to capture a portion of His truth that those folks didn't. Maybe they have more grace in other areas, and perhaps they have some truths we do not possess yet."

But then, maybe he didn't. How can you tell? There is no objective way to tell. Everyone thinks they are right! And yet everyone thinks different things. I know a lot of Christians who would be convinced that you are not even a true Christian. They are just as convinced of their truth as you are of yours.
Do you see my point?

Metacrock

Meta =>WEll I went to Perkins, so DTS is our enemy!


Meta => I hope so! I mean being as smart as me is no big trick.

Meta => Have you ever read great literature? I mean like Shakespire, Dante, Plato, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Goethe? All of that is a "mishmash" of differing opinion. Does that mean it isn't great art? Does that mean it's not worth reading? why does the Bible have to be a memo from God? That is only the case if you make the fundie assumptions.


If your faith is improtant to you and you want to discuss it, come to my boards.


http://pub18.ezboard.com/bhavetheologywillargue


Just choose one and lets talk. I've seen happen over and over again. A sizeable percentrage of internet skeptics I know are former fundies, espeicially Calvinists. That's just not necessary. You don't have to lose faith. You just need to boarden your persective of religion and the christian tradition. Think of the possilbity that it's not just this narrow view point of the Bible chruch and DTS.

that's the reason I hate that verbal Plenary stuff. Because they are so rigid about the dogma that it can't have mistakes. .When they find one the whole thing falls apart. And that is so unecessary becasuse it is far more sensible to follow religious beief than to shun it. I was an atheist, and I was an atheist because my fundie up bringing proved to be wrong, and so what the heck. I had been screened off from the real beauty of the christian tradition, I really didn''t know anything about christiantiy, even though I was raised in a very stunch fundie household and knew lots about the Bible. I only knew this one outlook. There's so much there than just the fundies.

I know DTS has smart people, that's not the point. They also have very narrow minded people. It is quite possible to be both. I've know DTS people, they can be smart, they can be very narrow minded.

I we may know some people in common. email me to find out.









Meta => No, God has not given me something he wont give them, rather, something they wont accept; a latteral perspective and an open mind. They are so firmly entrenched in that voice of the elect, that blessed Calvinist "I'm in the chosen" mentality, that they can't understand the beauty of a diverse culture. They can't see that the diversity of the christian tradition is its strength. They have to cause all voices to become uniform and say the same thing, their thing, becasue they can't understand that it's not about being right on every single point.


Have you seen my website?

http://www.geocities.com/Metagetics


come to my boards and read my website.