Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
Because I don't agree with it.
It may be true for those with a love affair with the Bible ... that their fair flower withers and dies when they lose a root system mingled with fallen men ... where failure can only be expected.
But fair flowers rooted in God don't wither and die ; the God that was clearly before the blessed book ; the book that tells of Abraham, who was rooted to God, and not to any Bible whatsoever. Clearly it's best and wisest for fair flowers to be rooted where fallen men have not been the intermediary.
Ultimately, God is the only real root system for fair flowers.
|
There's no problem with the blessed Book; the problem lies with those who handle it, people like you and I. Jesus handled the blessed Book correctly. He was the very Word incarnate. No problem there. You and I, on the other hand, at best are partial. If we presume, Lee-like, to handle the word impeccably we maul it worst of all. Then we simultaneously claim (as his acolytes do) that every thing is "rooted in the word" while producing all sorts of strange fruits.
I got a call from an LC friend, once. He wanted to see how I was doing, and came by to visit. I liked the guy and received him, and we chatted. He did nothing but spew LC cliches. "We have to build the Body", and "we go on together in the oneness of the Spirit", words which arguably derive from scriptures but in the hands of his LC masters have become twisted caricatures.
WL once captivated us with his ideas: Christ is the Good Land, we can experience Christ, and so forth. It was all so new and fresh. But 40 years later it isn't new and fresh. Anyone with new and fresh ideas got run out of town long ago. So they just repeat the same words over and over again. Yes they're related from or derived from the Bible and to their current experience (which experience is mainly speaking the same words over and over again), but the Spirit of God has long since left the building.
God's word is new and fresh; we've barely begun to touch it. I'm not a scholar by any means, and don't mean to cast undue influence to them versus anyone else. But they're exploring, and discovering. Any of us can explore; anyone can discover. God's house has many rooms, many palaces of ivory. We've barely crossed the threshold. Why restrict ourselves to reciting creeds and formulas from days gone by?
I recently challenged the Nicene Creed here on this forum, not to promote heresy nor to create a new gospel or a new Christ. But I wanted to poke the Creed with the word. I wanted to explore the word, versus the Creed, and see if there was any tension there. What can the tension open up? How can we appreciate the Creed as a historical construct, rooted in time, which then further opens up the word to us, which word is timelessness itself?
Doing this in public naturally caused alarm, and several posters said I was going off the deep end. But you know what? I was having fun. The word was opening up to me. I simply wanted to challenge the nice, neat and tidy "truths" and show that sometimes to keep them nice and tidy, we ignore the words of scripture that don't fit. Or we use interpretive rules in one section of scripture, which rules we abandon elsewhere to maintain the neat doctrine. So what do we really care for, doctrines, or interpretive rules, or the word? Have we advanced so far in the word that we can now safely ignore it and gaze reverently at our thought-constructions?
I myself don't want to lead a new religious movement. Things are bad enough already! But I really enjoyed looking at the word as if it were fresh, and new, and had the power to destroy all my ideas and concepts of how things were and ought to be. And I was glad that people eventually got alarmed, and protested. Those two guys on the road to Emmaus certainly had concepts: "We thought that He was going to be the Savior of Israel. (Luke 24:21)" Certainly they had Bible verses to back up their concepts. But Jesus destroyed their concepts. And in so doing their hearts were open, and burning.