Hello Greg and others, Darren has suggested we stop the debate on sexuality. My point is about the use of the bible (and Lindsay has raised another good point about how we regard the church). If we are to continue, I'd like to divorce the topics of the bible and the church from the issue of sexuality. As I have said many times already, I think we need to address these issues first and then come back to the sexuality issue.
So, with a change of subject line, onto Greg's query addressing the issue generally... "Greg Crawford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >If you could give an example of how you use the Bible to arrive at your views it >might help to advance the discussion. Then it might be possible to compare >approaches to see if the approaches are indeed different. At the moment I >suspect that subjectivity plays a big role; a bigger role than the actual >approach to the Bible. First, I think the bible is a tool for use in gaining understanding about how to live in response to God, not an end in itself. The value the bible is that it gives us insight into how Christian and Jewish people before us understood God. Like any other statement concerning the nature of God it is at best limited, sometimes faulty, and occasionally completely wrong. So I use the bible alongside many other tools for understanding God: my own experience, the experiences of others, prayer, meditation, worship, caring for people, etc. Second, leading on from the first, while I think we have come to understand that some specific teachings of the bible represent an understanding of God we have now developed and moved on from, I find the broad themes about the nature of God in the bible tend to be constant throughout the bible, the history of the church, and the current experiences of myself and other Christians. Things like love, justice, tolerance, compassion, grace are all constant. So in using the bible to understand a particular issue, I am primarily concerned to see which point of view fits best with these broad themes. Hope that helps. Jonathan __________________________________________________________________ Switch to Netscape Internet Service. As low as $9.95 a month -- Sign up today at http://isp.netscape.com/register Netscape. Just the Net You Need. New! Netscape Toolbar for Internet Explorer Search from anywhere on the Web and block those annoying pop-ups. Download now at http://channels.netscape.com/ns/search/install.jsp ------------------------------------------------------ - 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 ------------------------------------------------------
