Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
One of the great accusations against the new religion, as the NT was being written, was that they had departed from the "straight and narrow". That it was new ground, not ordained by God. If you look at all the citations of "that the scripture might be fulfilled" or "as the scriptures said" or "as Moses and the prophets taught" you realize the speakers/writers were not so much composing a "new" testament as demonstrating the reality of "the" testament. Jesus was the reality of all the types, forms, figures, shadows of the scripture.
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True.
But it was not a free-for-all creating various types. As so many have indicated, you can devise a lot of stuff from scripture if you don't have any boundaries. The boundaries are what the scripture itself reveals.
I can see over and over the types that are consistent with, and provide more evidence of the types that have already been revealed. Those that reduce the commandments to what flows naturally from "love God and love your fellow man." Those that are about the restoration of man from his fallen state to what was "from the beginning."
And what was from the beginning? Represent God as his image-bearer on the earth.
Somehow being declarative about what is the most perfect "church life" does not appear in that. But there is a pattern of leadership from the very beginning. Lee declared that there was not going to be certain ones as priests until that golden calf thing. But does scripture actually declare that in the manner Lee did?
There was already a leader — or two. Moses and Aaron. And while the bulk of what was going to be the Pentateuch was either written on stone by God, or told by mouth from generation to generation, the people weren't rising up to make private interpretation. Yet we find that by the time of Jesus, the questions of the people were put to the rabbis and to the Sanhedrin who considered together and ruled — sort of. Seems there were at least two major schools of thought on many things. And while Jesus is seen as taking sides on one issue, he never really spoke against the process. Or the idea that there was not unanimity in thought.
I really think that we are so used to Lee's way of finding definitive prescriptions for everything or dismissing it altogether. So he went about patching together disparate ideas, even misapplying some, for the purpose of creating prescriptions that were not really there. Or if he didn't like one that was there, he declared that some overarching prescription trumped the reading and it had to mean something else.
But the pattern for the leadership in the NT was already there. Elders was not a new concept. Having those whose livelihood, or at least a large part of it, was in studying and preaching from scripture was not a new concept. The only thing new was the message.
But we need to see it spelled-out. And if it is not, we seek something else spelled-out.
We all submit to everyone. To each other. Just like the examples given of husbands to wives
and wives to husbands. In this way, there is no clear-cut "I'm over you" like a deputy authority, yet we are quick to defer to those who have knowledge, experience, etc., and not just demand our own thing.
We are many posts into this topic and we are no closer to finding a prescription than was the bare question at the top. We try to dismiss the way it was in the first century by using phrases like "that may have been appropriate for that time." As if we are so much more enlightened.
As I write this, I cannot recall if this is in an earlier post here or in another thread. But there is something that our modern (and even postmodern) thinking has done to the church and scripture. We think that it has been subject to change because our knowledge and enlightenment has changed. It may be true that our understanding has changed. But it should continue to ring true with the very thing written almost 2,000 years ago. Something that was true then and is true now. Something that does not change just because society does. Something that influences our culture (we hope), not something that is shaped by our culture.
And if we are seeking an answer in absolute terms to whether we should obey or submit to church leaders, we should expect disappointment because it is both true and not true. It is true in principle, but not true in absolutes. And our history in the LRC demanded absolutes. We need to get over it.