11 July 2022
We don't need a theory for the inspiration of Scriptures. We need to hold ourselves accountable to the Bible because that's what our convictions will tell us. If you don't get that from your convictions, I don't have to work with you. I don't have to treat you as a fellow Christian. That's my convictions.
The whole collection of scholarship about the inspiration and authority of the Bible is intended to convince the intellect. I does nothing for the heart; it cannot move your faith. You can tell that the voice of God is in those pages in any language, but the key is not the knowledge. The key is your heart. Faith is in the heart, not in the head.
If your heart doesn't witness to what I write here, then walk away. I'm not trying to build a club of like-minded people. We don't need another gang, another organization. I'm trying to build faith in people who feel driven to something that hasn't been offered elsewhere. If you feel the need to join something, try the Radix Fidem community. If not, go off and start your own. The thing I seek from this blog is an awakening of faith and heart-borne walk in convictions.
Yes, I'm actually seeking to destroy western Christian religion, but not by attacking it so much as drawing people out of it. Let the institutions and structures fall on their own. They rest entirely on fleshly reasoning and activity. The Kingdom of Heaven is an empire of hearts, not bodies and human systems.
To fellowship in faith, I'll be looking for certain things. One is that you will respect the Bible and hold yourself accountable to it. It's not a question of style where I expect you to quote it all the time, with chapter and verse. The Hebrew people didn't do that so much. What I expect is to see that you reflect on your actions with a strong sense of humility, a sense of grace and unearned privilege. Two, you are going to love people. That love might be pretty tough at times, but it has to be there. If you can't express compassion over typical human failures, then you aren't walking in the Spirit. Show me those two things and we can at least talk as equals.
We don't need huge bodies of people together in one place at the same time. That's a fallen human urge, not a mark of the Spirit. We need a large number of scattered small households of faith. We need lots of heart-borne leadership because no one of us has the right answers for more than a small clan of people. We don't need grand visions; they are already there in the Word. What we need is the ancient visions brought to life in the ever-changing context in which we live.
The only need for scholarship is the one that bridges the gap between our current culture and that of the Bible. We have a pestilence of people reading their own cultural biases back into the Bible. The vast majority of American churches are the product of the Enlightenment, not the Hebrew gospel of Jesus the Messiah. We need a scholarship of covenant boundaries with a tribal feudalism that God demands in His Word.
Yes, God is moving in our world today. But if you don't know what to look for, you won't see that movement. The place to start is clarifying your own convictions. Don't look for cute and novel ways of interpreting the Scriptures, as if to show off what a clever servant of God you are. At the same time, we certainly don't need more of the Enlightenment crap we've had since the birth of America. America is dead; stop flogging the corpse. It's time to rediscover the Hebrew outlook and make it live in our modern context.
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