[Peter Debelak]

aron:

I appreciate your thoughts here. I often think that we bracket Christ's words in the gospels to issues related to the "individual Christian life; while the epistles are about the "body" - and, in the way we treat them, never the twain shall meet. That is, we perceive (explicitly or not) the Epistles as going further that Christ's ministry...

Recently I've been wondering if we look to Christ's words enough in determining what our "corporate life" should be and how "practical" we should approach its implementation.

In fact, I've had a liberal little thought: what if we consider the Epistles to be circumscribed by Christ's words in the Gospels. As a hermaneutic to interpret the Epistles?

Does that change our understanding of a lot of the seeming prescriptions in the letters?

Peter