[aron]

Originally Posted by OBW

It is not just a Lee problem. It is heavily an evangelical and fundamental problem. Most of our core teaching starts with Paul rather than with Jesus in the gospels. That would be OK if we truly understood Paul. But when we declare that our new life in Christ is by grace and not works, we prove our misunderstanding of that passage. It did not dismiss works other than with respect to what it is that provides salvation.

And when we read that I am free from the law of sin and death and declare that the law is abolished, we clearly have not read Christ. He said it remained. He said it was harder than we originally thought. (Funny, we think the Jewish leaders were simply stupid adding on so many more nuances to the actual laws. But Jesus took it even further!) If we started with Jesus — with the gospels — and allowed the following material to provide further understanding, we would never use the words of Paul to dismiss the words of Christ.

I grew up in fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, and in retrospect it seems as though we instinctively transposed "grace" or "Christ", upon encountering "law", without having considered what it had possibly meant to the epistolatory writers, and their readers. It was as if some "recovered" insight into Paul's teaching had now simply rendered any consideration of law or obedience as superfluous. This was indeed convenient, but unfortunately too convenient: since we had our meaning, and had convinced ourselves of its solidity, we'd simply ignored the possiblility of any other meaning.

Only years later did I begin to appreciate the obedience of the Son. Yes, the poet's declarations of allegiance and fealty, and God's subsequent approval were arguably vain, but deeper still lay the Son. And we dismissed this because we thought we already had laid hold of "grace". We missed a lot, I believe.

Originally Posted by OBW

And sometimes we do it too. We allow the epistles (ignoring James for some) to not only “denude the surrounding text of Christ,” but to denude Christ’s text. To refuse his own words.

What helped me immensely was the stunning realization that at the time of the writing of the New Testament, they didn't have the New Testament! The scriptures were what we now call the Old Testament. So the shared meaning of the NT was a deep, deep appreciation of the OT. It was the scripture, God's speaking, in both its promises and its perils. This shared understanding formed the conceptual basis of the narrative of Jesus presented in the gospels, and the letters that followed.

Millenia later, we who treasured the NT often weren't too interested in the OT's content because it was, well, old. But in our willful ignorance of what was old and fading away, we failed to truly understand what was new (of course I am painting with a very broad brush here, but I speak as one who sat in meeting after meeting of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, and heard the conversations after the meetings, and saw the living).

Originally Posted by OBW

The second thing that is bothering me was: Simply as words, this is as real as it gets. The Word of God is God. But John more specifically put it as “the word became flesh.”

So the first response should be “what could be wrong with that?”

On the surface, I agree. But what do we mean when we say that? What did John mean when he wrote that? (Or more correctly, what did God mean when he inspired John to write.) I don’t think I know for sure. But we have been operating on the premise that it is one particular thing to the exclusion of other possibilities. And we probably have never considered that there is even one other possibility.

The Word is the spoken/written expression of who God is. Since he does not lie, it is an accurate description. But as written, every word is not necessarily descriptive of God in itself. “In the beginning, the earth was waste and void” (or whatever translation you want to use) does not describe God. But the narrative in Genesis 1 tells us a lot about God. But when I juxtapose a statement like “the pure Word of the Bible which is Christ himself” up against Genesis 1:1, I am left with a resounding “Huh?”

There is something about this statement (and there are similar statements outside of the LRC, so this is not personal to us) that seems to be making more out of words than what they are. The description of the death of Judas is not Christ. But in the context of the story of his life on earth, his betrayal, death and resurrection, we learn something about mankind in the description of the destruction of someone who rejected Christ. So, as a whole, we learn much about Christ. But in isolation, it is not “simply Christ”.

...I’m coming to the thought that the words are, in themselves, nothing special. But when we see how God is revealed in its narratives, descriptions, and in the very words that he spoke on various occasions, nothing is meaningless. Nothing is “natural concept of man.” Nothing is worthy of derision.

... making bald declarations like “the pure Word of the Bible is just Christ himself” doesn’t solve anything or do anything. It even could be argued to suggest something that I don’t think we mean. But finding God, Christ, the Spirit revealed in so many ways and aspects throughout its collection of words does a lot. The catchphrase too often distracts from the revelation that is really there.

Almost like ignoring grace because Christ is grace. If Christ is grace, then what is grace? If I do not need grace, but only Christ, then why mention it?

If the Pure Word is just Christ, then I don’t need the word. I just need Christ and it all comes to me. If so, then why the word? If so then why do we stray so far when we think we are so spiritual and only caring for Christ? [We may] replace the truth found in the Word with a catchphrase that allows us to do without it.

In seeing the penitent psalmist's acknowledgment of failure and God's mercy, we may say to ourselves, "This isn't Christ. Jesus never sinned". But in the psalms of penitence I could still feel the words of Christ. Why? Because I am a sinner, and Christ bore my sins on the cross, and because of His gracious substitution the psalmist's repentance wasn't vain, nor is my echo of the psalmist's words. Because Christ is standing by the Father, pleading my case, and the Father listens because of the righteous One standing before Him. Suddenly, I sense these words of penitence received by the Holy One of God, the great High Priest, and laid before the Father's throne, having been borne aloft by His sent Paraclete.

If it were not for my faith, I would be lost. I am sure of it. By my faith I see the righteous One, and even in the failures of David, Peter, and so many others I now can see God's mercy in Christ Jesus. Through Christ it was available for them, and even for me. For some funny reason it wasn't until I read Psalm 51, for example, that I really could feel the resonance of Jesus saying, "Peter, you will fail. You will deny Me tonight. But I have prayed for you and My prayers will not fail. You will be saved". I was like, wow. Somehow the misery of Psalm 51 allowed me to appreciate Peter's loss, and Christ's hand of mercy reaching out.

And on and on. You get my point. Therefore, when Paul wrote "let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly" I think there is a lot of latitude for our own interpretation, application, and experience. Back when I was effectively ignoring the text which formed the shared basis for understanding this kind of encouragement, I was missing some of its latent power. And this misaiming, I later came to feel, Lee had also done. He'd ended up with a teaching but lost the power.