The Text, the Whole Text, and the Context

[kerravonsen]

I was pondering bible-studies I had participated in, and I realised something. Many Christians just sit around in bible-studies and wait to be told what to think. How totally bizarre! What do they think bible-studies are for? A place where someone in authority (the leader) spoon-feeds them pre-digested doctrine, and then they have a cup of tea and a gossip?

Don't they want to find out for themselves? Do they think themselves incapable of finding out for themselves? Or not qualified? Or not authorised? Or is it just like too much hard work? It's a text. Read it. Think about what it says. Figure out what it means. Like we did in English at school.

What do they teach them at these schools?

Yeah, I know. They teach them to hate learning.

Thank God for fandom, where people analyse texts in minute detail, for fun.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

Not hijacking at all! This is juicy discussion.

God gifted us with a brain and he/she/it expects us to use it.

Exactly.

For me, the more I try to intelligently decipher doctrine, the more I'm able to accept it. I refuse to accept it on someone's word alone.

Yep. (nods) On someone's word alone, no. ESPECIALLY if that someone is telling me I'm not allowed to question it.

But I admit there are some things which I don't understand, which I do "accept on faith" because I do trust the intelligence and understanding of scholars who have gone before me -- such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which I find rather incomprehensible. But I'm not going to assume that because I don't understand X, that X must be incorrect. That's limiting the scope of truth to the scope of my own finite understanding, which is just dumb. For me, the Trinity is a Mystery which I just don't understand... yet.

On the other hand, I do feel quite free to question other points of doctrine when I can grasp the edges of them and say "hey, this bit contradicts this other bit, and that doesn't make sense". For example, I don't accept the doctrine of Predestination (at least, not the hyper-Calvinist version) because it seems to say that God is not capable of changing his mind, which contradicts various places in the Bible which explicitly state that God changed his mind about something. I think those hyper-Calvinists would likely say something like "it only appeared that He changed His mind, but He really didn't." Um, no. If you start reinterpreting the text to make it fit with your doctrine, you have strayed from the path of wisdom.

It amazes me that intelligent people accept what is told them by the doctrine of their church because they feel they have to accept it on 'faith.'

I wonder if it's because they don't have a good grasp of what "faith" actually is. Some people think that "faith" means "accept things which you know aren't true" -- which is bollocks. Though I suppose it is only one step away from what faith really means, which is "accept things which you don't know are true". The incorrect version puts the negation onto the "truth" part, rather than the "knowing" part. Just shuffled a few words around, a subtle but vital difference. Faith is what fills the gap between our ignorance and our knowledge. Where you do know something, you don't need faith, because you already understand and know it. It is where you don't know something, either because it is in the future (trusting that God will do something) or because you don't understand it or have insufficient data, that faith provides the footing to step out on.