"In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects." pg 66
i was flipping thru' the flair application on facebook today and found a quote from one of my favorite movies, the princess bride: the Sicilian is being pursued by the dread pirate roberts and the pirate is gaining on him, and as the pirate conquers one challenge after the other, he keeps saying one word, "inconceivable!" until finally his partner says "you keep saying that word. i do not think it means what you think it means." it struck me that maybe we keep saying a lot of "spiritual" theological words, and they do not mean what we think they mean - words like inspiration, infallibility, predestination, among others - what if in scripture god was trying to express from an infinite mind to a finite one what true relationship was meant to be, and we keep trying to boil that expression down into systems so that we can understand it instead of simply trusting what we do not completely grasp and living in it? we seem to give lip service to "lean not on your own understanding" and then spend a great deal of time & energy judging "spirituality" & relationship according to our own understanding.
anyway, i haven't reached any conclusions about the above words one way or the other, except that my own understanding, & others', must always be suspect - we see thru' a glass darkly, and if i know for certain what has been a source of mystery for biblical scholars thru' the ages, what need is there to go back to the source to find the answer? our systems of understanding god and scripture seem to have pushed us further into religion and further from relationship and dependence, which seem to be the point of scripture in the first place?