Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

Comments on Can We Still Trust God's Word, pt. 5
By Next-Wave Readers

charleswear
(9/30/02 7:05 pm)
[I turn to see a young one, an intense look in the eyes gives away the depth of his searching.]
"A few years ago I pastored a church and had the chance to give messages every week. Mostly these were based on the Bible. I had a couple that attended the church, the young woman was searching. She had an engineering background and was looking for rational evidence of the existence of God. Proof that Jesus was his son. Her boyfriend was a Christian and they often discussed spiritual things. She was straightforward in saying that she did not believe in God, but that she was searching....
"Every week in our little church we would sing songs to God, we called it worship....Circumstances in the young woman's life changed, and one week during the worship she began to cry. After the service finished she came up to tell me that she had experienced God during the worship. She and her boyfriend also wanted me to marry them, that day! So we headed to the wedding chapel. Once I had pronounced them man and wife, she turned to me and said, "Aren't I supposed to be baptized now, isn't that what new Christians do?" So we headed to my house, where we fired up the Jacuzzi and baptized her."
[a smile crosses my face as I remember the day, it was one of the high points of my time pastoring, I take another bite of my hot fudge sundae and turn to K]
"She was searching with her head, but found God with her 'heart'"

gruvEdude
(10/1/02 12:16 am)

As the gruvster continues to watch this discussion he is wondering if anybody realizes that there was more than one article to discuss in September's issue. I keep coming back "tomorrow" for Editor David Hopkins promised September article. Now that it is October it must be one humdinger of an article and will get more response than Ron's article. Whatsomever, good ezine. I look forward to discussion of ways to "explain the kingdom message to the inhabitants of our culture."

From death he did rise and will come again.
Move on with him now to be ready for then.

baruch
(10/2/02 5:08 am)
[Baruch stumbles back in the door]

... sorry guys, I had to pop out and pay my internet service bill. Now where are we...?

Oh -- the Trinity. Actually, I don't mean to question the doctrine itself. It's just that for the first hundred years or so we seemed to be cruising along just fine. We had come to know God as revealed in Jesus and that seemed enough for us. Then, suddenly people started searching with their heads instead of their hearts (As Charlie so aptly said). It's sort of like, we sat down and begin rationalising everything for the sake of stifling a few who would try to steer everything in a totally different direction (ie. Arius of Alexander and others). In doing so, we lost our innocence.

What SHOULD we have done? I don't know. I'm not even sure that had I lived then, I would have done any better. Never the less, we lost our innocence

Once we've lost our innocence, it's hard to gain it back again. That's why it would probably be a mistake, at this point, to try to backtrack and UN-docterinalise the trinity.

To put this disscussion solidly back on to the original subject (as I've been sort of accused of veering it off), isn't that what happened to the authority of scripture as well? Scripture, and revelation from all available sources used to be a living thing, and we've driven the life out of it by our theologising. Again, we have to be careful how we get back on track.

Instead of trying to UN-do 1800 or so years of ecclesiastical evolution, I'd suggest that the challenge for us now, is to try to see where our original innocence (that we lost) would have taken us, and try to steer a course towards that.

[overhears Groovy Dude muttering something about there being other articles in the September issue]

Oh, yeah, and my article too, and not a single comment -- sigh -- But hey! I'm having so much fun here! What the heck!

Edited by: baruch at: 10/2/02 7:13:36 am

hidinchrist25
(11/10/05 11:34 am)

Guys, what a wonderful topic, and I appreciate you discussing this!
It seems to me that we can't agree on everything! First let me ask you, "What is the Bible?" Is it inerrant (without error)? This book that we call the Bible, is it not the inspired Word of God? Sure it is because it is God breathed. What I am saying here is that He spoke to His servants like Moses, David, Joshua, Jonah, John, Paul, Peter, and many other authors in the Bible! Then you may be wondering how did we get the Bible? We got it as love letter "used for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work(2 Timothy3:16-17; 2 Peter 1:20-21). How can we train correct each other if we ourselves are full of sin, and the Bible is full of errors? If this is the case, then we are only getting further away from God, and are falling further into sin because it seems that we are only teaching error and sins. We are also teaching false stories such as Jonah, Noah & the Ark, Jesus dying on the cross, and Jesus rising again from the dead. In other words, if Jesus dying on the cross was just a story and that He even resurrected from the dead, and it did not exist, then how come we are offered salvation by God? Why would Paul say that we are not saved by the law, but by grace?
Jon, I can understand your misbelief in some of these stories, but if the Bible that we have today is whole in itself, and God used His servants to write down what He told them to write, then the whole Bible is God breathed. For example, you don't believe that the "story" of Jonah is accurate because he was swallowed by a whale. Now we must be careful with the words in the Bible, and make sure that we don't twist the words around to make it look better. As I look in the Bible sitting in front of me, I see that it says that he was swallowed by a great fish. It does not say whale, or any other type of fish, it just says a great fish. All we know it could say that the fish could have been a shark, or a big dolphin. We have no idea what kind of fish it tells us. If we want to know what the text says, we must go back to the original text, and see what they had to say. We must also ask ourselves, "What was the original intent of the author?"
The problem is that we as human beings have messed up the translation of the Bible by adding new words, or replacing old words with new words. Remember we are all human beings, and we are all sinners who are the ones who have messed up the original text because we do not go back to the original manuscripts: Hebrew and Greek. For example, the latest TNIV is probably not even translated from the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Instead the work on the NIV translation was completed back in the 1970s. Here is an interesting fact: "In the 17th century, King James's translators worked from the Erasmus Greek text of the New Testament. Erasmus had six Greek manuscripts from which to work. NIV translators work from more than 5,000 complete or partial manuscripts and papyri." If we really want to know what God says, let us all go back to the original manuscripts in Greek and Hebrew, and study God's words for ourselves, or much less let us stick to the original texts that were translated from the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts.
Let me ask you these questions, and maybe you can think on these questions. If we don't take the Word of God as inerrant, and as something that will teach us, what will? Can man take the responsibility of correcting own brother or sister in Christ without the authority of God? My answer is NO! It would be saying that we are higher than God, or that He is on the same level as us. There is no doubt in my mind that God is the Supreme Authority, and He controls everything on earth.
What are your thoughts on the Word of God being inerrant? What are we to do with the Bible now that man seems to be changing the wording around in the Bible? Is there any really right way of treating the Word of God as inerrant?

John R. Cook

If you got this far in this series of comments, I commend you on your curiosity. When I read the posts several weeks ago, I was struck with the relevance of the topic. God bless you as you let the Word of God inspire your life. When you email me to claim your gift for reading all of this discussion please answer the following questions: What is Charlie Wear's beverage of choice and which church father showed up to sit at the bar during the discussion?
---Charlie Wear, May 7, 2006