Harold,
There are a lot of posts after the one I am quoting, this is the thing that stands out most to me in all of them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
I agree the problem is not the Bible, but is how it's used. And ya can't get a higher authority then to use the Bible to justify what you want to do (like the formation of the Southern Baptist church, who used the Bible to justify the holding of slaves.)
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This part is very sound, including the parenthetical.
But the parenthetical is also a problem to you.
It is true that many people, back when slavery was an existing institution that was under fire, used the Bible to both justify and deny slavery.
While the Bible briefly describes a peaceful utopia in its first two chapters, the fall into darkness that followed and the slow move of God to give man the opportunity to return to righteousness in obedience to Him began with Abraham.
He made us with free will and continues our free will to this day. So the institutions of man, dark as they may be, were seldom simply edicted away. Instead, a directive of righteousness was placed on us, and sometimes directly upon our institutions.
When we get to the NT, the statements concerning slavery were few, but were (from our present perspective) difficult to maintain while maintaining the institution. Yet God did not insist upon no slavery, but rather upon a level of righteousness that we now consider to be virtually in opposition to it. It took 1600+ years for some of the earliest nationwide stands against it, and still more before it was abolished through war in the US.
If anything, the Bible has provided the direction to move from the worst of that institution to the place where it is now considered abhorrent by most.
Still people will poke and prod at the Bible looking for ways to justify the unjustifiable. Some of it is social evil. Some of it is spiritual snobbery. Some of it is an attempt to personal gain that many would consider the Bible as otherwise denying.
In all this, the Bible makes no error. God stands as righteous in it all and his ways holy.
So I rephrase and repeat something I said way back at the beginning of this discussion: The Bible is inerrant but is read and misread, used and abused by the people who read it. The Bible is righteous but is often chopped-up and made to appear to support the schemes of the unrighteous.
And it is against these kinds of errors that John wrote that we have an anointing and don't need teachers. He wasn't actually saying we don't need teachers at all, but that it should be evident what is outside of acceptable teaching that claims a base in scripture and in God.