Pick and Choose
So what do we do with the tough issues of Christianity? The issues of Women Pastors, Homosexuality, avoiding a brother who is in continual sin? Chuck said it well on the Eriv message boads "If it can be clearly shown that the Bible takes a particular stand on an issue, am I willing to yield to its authority on the matter?"
Are we willing to obey God, even if we come to a conclusion that we disagree with? Do we justify and interpret Biblical passages to mean things that they don't mean? It seems like an easy thing to do.
posted by Dan Price @ 10:18 PM
11 Comments:
The question about rather or not we are willing to obey God even if the conclusion is one that we will disagree points at what I am thinking is the heart of the problem with Christianity. It seems that to many times we base our understanding of Christianity from Language and that Language is negitive. Guess where I am goin is to many times as Christians we use war like pharses and what not so that we begin to think that way. That we are marching on and going to overtake all that is bad. It brings me back to the verse "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." The church todays seems to have either one truth with no grace or grace with no truth. Guess the answer I am putting out there for the question is that maybe we should be striving as Christians to living out both grace and truth and what we do with the tough issues will work themseleves out. Of course I am setting my self up for attack but then being a Christian I am use to being attacked, at least I learn about it when I go to Chruch.
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Right, I agree with the heart of your post. Finding the balence of grace and truth and not just being one without the other. But I still think it is easy for us to interpret particular passages of scripture one way or another according to what we want it to say. For instance I have a friend who tries to balence his life with grace and truth, but he goes to the extreme of saying that homosexuality isn't wrong (so maybe he isn't finding the balence?) And it comes down to the fact that I don't feel comfortable with the idea of women not being elders. But scripturally I see that as the best intrepretation of that scripture. I guess in this post I'm not talking about the Grace issue as much as the Truth issue (because I probably talk about grace more often).
yeah, and on another one of your points, our "battle" is NOT with flesh and blood, but in the spiritual world alone.
“If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God's, then indeed He will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices."
John Stott
You are right that our "battle" is not flesh and blood but the terms of lang. are. Guess what I mean that we should save the use of battle lang. for talking about the real battle going on rather than descirbing what I belive about God or how to worship him. This sounds like a tanget but i think what happens is that we take the battle to grace adn the meaning of grace. I know what you mean about the tough issues. In someways I just ignore the ones I don't like. Guess we have to sin somehow. I am not serious suggesting these but I have found this my defalt. I guess my two sense is that there are so many issues out there as Christians that we should be focused on then women elders. I mean the point of the Gospel was not to tell us how to run a church but rather to save the lost and aid those who need it. The church is a long way from both so I guess I suggest to the church that focus on those issues unitll they are done. Now you may say to me that the women in church are there so we have to deal with it. Ture. I say leave the church. Again I am kidding but maybe there is some truth to that in my life. I found the church world much more focsued on stuiped stuff then the point of the gospel. But Dan you know that we were in a special case so I know not every church is like that.
If reading the Bible a certain way I agree. We come to the Bible to prove that in which we already hold. To many times do we have a belife and then we go to the Bible to support it. So we pull verses from all over and say look the Bible says it is right. I think of the moive PIE. Where the old guy says that if we think there is number that is important then we start to see it every where. If 7 is the great number then all sudden we find that there is 7 steps to our house, 7 people in line, 7 dollors in my pocket and we think God is giving me a sign.
I my best antwort is let us try to be objective.
that last post was awesome. I need to watch Pi again.
And I agree also that determining Women's leadership roles isn't the most important action that the church can be doing. but for me it would be a cop out to just give up on struggling with the issue.
As far as leaving church, you could do that. Paul had fights with his brothers in acts and they went their seperate ways. But I think that part of the essence of church is all the shit that comes along with it. Because in that weakness God uses us. Now of course we should try and rid ourselves of anything that hinders us/God, but I still think it's worth the struggle. Everyone says "I want a New Testament church" and they are usually referring to Acts 2 where there were 120 people and they shared everything etc... But thats where the shit hit the fan. All throughout Acts there were struggles, people getting mad at each other over whether or not Gentiles should be circumsised and so on. In the Pauline Epsistles most of what Paul was writing about were problems in the NT church! Some of them seemed a lot more jacked up than any church I've been in. So I guess I'm saying there is a time for everything. There's a time to part ways and a time to stick together no matter what. Just my humble opinion though.
dan, i think the question you pose is a serious problem. a lot of people that won't see the truth in Christianity, or in Jesus for that matter, use the Bible as an excuse. they see it as inconsistent and wrong. much of this can be attributed to the fact that we as Christians interpret it very differently. noel is exactly right, we use it to echo what we already think is the truth. but isn't the Bible reflecting God in this way? doesn't God speak differently to each of us? perhaps that this is part of the beauty of the Bible, that it means different things to different people. But does God want us to spend our lives trying to figure out what is the "truth" in the Bible, or to worship and serve him? the Bible is our guide but so is our faith. clearly there are things in the Bible that we must yield to, the ten commandments and the golden rule, but as for other topics, maybe we just need to open our minds and trust that God will guide is in the right direction.
anonymous... AKA: Nate Klan
I have Pi if you'd like to borrow it or watch it sometime.
Nate again...
As a forethought, let me say that I fail at this more often than I ought to and hopefully will be held accountable by the friends I have to dig into the scriptures more.
In response to the anonymous post:
I'm not sure that 'opening our minds' is going to be the best way to determine God's will.
On the contrary, it seems that the best way to determine God's will would be to look to his word. Being a christ follower begs a desire and ability to seperate right from wrong and accept the right as truth. We sometimes derive different meanings from areas of the word, but we are in a community of believers so that we can talk about these differences and make sure that what we have interpreted is correct, not just the way we want it to be. The bible is not a fun moral guidebook, it is directions on how to have a more deeply connecting relationship with Christ. You are right that we need to trust God to lead us in the right direction. We need to get that guidance from God through the word.
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