Greetings all. > "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. > Jonathon wrote:
> 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. Allan I have been one that has been lurking in this debate, partly because I think we have done it all before. But I want to suggest that Jonathon is right on the ball in suggesting that it is how we regard the Bible that needs to be addressed. It always seems strange to me that those on the other side of this debate want to treat the Bible as though it was a book that somehow was endorsed by God as a full and complete history of God's interaction with the world. The problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever to support this argument. All sorts of wild ideas have been constructed to justify this claim, such as the divine guidance of the authors by the Holy Spirit, but none of them survive even the simplest test of scholarly research. Ultimately, belief in the Bible as the ultimate revelation of God is simply a faith statement that stands outside of reason, logic and scientific research. I am not suggesting that we can't learn something of the nature and reality of God from reading the Bible, but we are actually reading stories of how a particular group of people over a particular time in the development of human history understood their own relationship with their God Yahweh. The stories also tell of how a group of these people discovered what they believed to be a very different way of seeing this God in the man known as Jesus of Nazerath and the subsequent friction that arose between them. The big dilema we are now facing relates to how much authority we are prepared to give to the accounts of these ancient writers and their perceptions of God. Do we, as some do, want to hold their writings as being the only authentic revelation of God and they are therefore infalible? Or do we, as some of us do, believe that these people have related their stories within the cultural world view of their time? These two opposing views whould lie at either end of a continuum with most peoples beliefs falling somewhere between the two poles. The evangelical side of Christianity, largely through fear and superstition, has done a pretty good job of getting the majority of Christians to lean towards the first option which means that when issues such as sexuality come up the Bible becomes authorative beyond what it can be demonstrated to be. Herein I am suggesting, lies the dilema for the UCA. We probably have a higher percentage of people who gather towards the liberal end of interpretation than any of the mainline churches yet the average pew sitter probably leans towards the conservative end without even thinking about what the consequences of such a belief is. This has allowed the conservative EMU/ Alliance factor to generate a fair ammount of hysteria without any real or interlectual substance to their arguments. How do we solve this problem? I don't know, but I firmly believe that if we go down the path the the EMU/Alliance lot want us to then it will be the beginning of the end of the UCA. If God is going to have meaning in the decades ahead, then our perceptions and understandings of God must relate to the world as we know it today, not the perceptions and understandings that most of the developed world have already rejected as being unsustainable. Just a few more thoughts to chew on. Allan _________________________________________________________________ > 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 > ------------------------------------------------------ > ------------------------------------------------------ - 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 ------------------------------------------------------
