>People have spoken about the issue as being fundamentally about how we regard >the bible and there is a lot in that.
>But I wonder if it is also about how we regard the church. I agree with this. I believe that most fundamentalists have a self-deceiving theology of the church. It emerges temporarily to endorse scriptures at a particular time some hundreds of years after the foundational event, and then disappears into irrelevance. However, I think that the fundamentalist approach to the Scriptures is also extremely limiting. Most fundamentalists go to the Scriptures looking for laws - an odd thing in view of the Pauline analysis of the Christian Faith as a life freed from law. However, there is much more in the Biblical Faith than laws. There is the record of a God who deals with human beings in ways that defy their limited grasp. By way of example, groups within our congregation have recently been viewing movies of the Bible in private homes. The movies are fairly accurate to the Biblical text. Recently I prepared some study questions on the Judge, Samson, and also asked group members to respond to his "Application for a leadership position within the people of God". Well, he passed the superannuation medical, but after that it was all down hill. His theology was naively charismatic. But the big black mark against him was his morality. After marrying a non-believer, he is widowed. He then uses the services of a prostitute and engages in an affair with Delilah. At least one group wanted to reject his application and endorse it with "don't call us!" The point of course is that God did call Samson and from the womb. So it will not do just to quote moral standards. There must be a Biblical understanding of the way God calls and elects people. Mind you, that is probably too Calvinistic for some of the ex-Methodists in the Uniting Church. - Greg ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
