I hear a lot of people who just want to get back to the way things were in the early church. EO and RCC argue about who is the original church which to them means most pure? Reformed folks look to the years of Luther/Calvin as the golden era. Agreed, it doesn't exist. We are to look forward to the return of Christ and the New Heavens/New Earth rather than looking back.
Thank you so much for your feedback, Ralph. Very fascinating perspective.
When I speak about the Bible possessing "absolute truth," I am not at all denying the subjective nature of the biblical writers. I don't believe in a dictation theory of inspiration, and believe God worked through their thoughts and not their words. Similarly, the biblical writers were limited by their own experiences and perspectives.
At the same time, I think they did possess some level of inspiration that goes beyond the way you or I are inspired when we sit down to write. I don't fully understand how it worked, yet I take the Bible to be the "Word of God" in some objective sense (even while stopping short of saying that it is all the "words" of God).
What I also mean by this idea is that, even apart from the divine inspiration of Scripture, the biblical writers were actually really trying to communicate something when they wrote the Bible which isn't simply up for grabs and totally subject to whatever interpretation the reader comes up with. While I don't think we can ever fully arrive at understanding *exactly* what any writer means, we should ever seek to come to a better understanding of what they really meant and can arrive at a fairly robust approximation of what they meant.
So, for example, when John wrote that "God is love," he did have a specific meaning in mind when he wrote this, and I'm not sure I can come along and say, "I interpret him to mean that 'God is hate.'" There are, in fact, interpretations that more closely align with what an author meant, and other interpretations that seem to be farther departures from what an author meant (if this wasn't the case, then communication would be a completely futile exercise).
I hear a lot of people who just want to get back to the way things were in the early church. EO and RCC argue about who is the original church which to them means most pure? Reformed folks look to the years of Luther/Calvin as the golden era. Agreed, it doesn't exist. We are to look forward to the return of Christ and the New Heavens/New Earth rather than looking back.
Thank you so much for your feedback, Ralph. Very fascinating perspective.
When I speak about the Bible possessing "absolute truth," I am not at all denying the subjective nature of the biblical writers. I don't believe in a dictation theory of inspiration, and believe God worked through their thoughts and not their words. Similarly, the biblical writers were limited by their own experiences and perspectives.
At the same time, I think they did possess some level of inspiration that goes beyond the way you or I are inspired when we sit down to write. I don't fully understand how it worked, yet I take the Bible to be the "Word of God" in some objective sense (even while stopping short of saying that it is all the "words" of God).
What I also mean by this idea is that, even apart from the divine inspiration of Scripture, the biblical writers were actually really trying to communicate something when they wrote the Bible which isn't simply up for grabs and totally subject to whatever interpretation the reader comes up with. While I don't think we can ever fully arrive at understanding *exactly* what any writer means, we should ever seek to come to a better understanding of what they really meant and can arrive at a fairly robust approximation of what they meant.
So, for example, when John wrote that "God is love," he did have a specific meaning in mind when he wrote this, and I'm not sure I can come along and say, "I interpret him to mean that 'God is hate.'" There are, in fact, interpretations that more closely align with what an author meant, and other interpretations that seem to be farther departures from what an author meant (if this wasn't the case, then communication would be a completely futile exercise).