Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
This little parable was cute. The whole of it created the impression that the Word of God was not to be considered, pondered, reasoned with, or learned, but just absorbed by eating. And eating was declared not to be learning about it, or studying it, but simply chewing on it.
I do not know when that was first published in The Stream, but if the time I saw it was the original, it was no earlier than late 72 if not early 73. And the mode of "eating" was never more obvious than the times of morning watch when verses were seldom read more than once, then chopped into one to three word fragments and "eaten" by repeating those little bits, punctuated with "Oh Lord," "amen," "hallelujah," or other similarly short phrase that is not part of the verse until you have spent sufficient time turning a meaningful sentence into a few paragraphs of unintelligible pureed soup.
You can say that the ingredients and nutrients are there and that it therefore represents "eating" the Word of God. But that is true only if the metaphor of eating the Word is meant to be milked for every possible similarity to eating that you can find. If it meant that the collection of words into sentences and paragraphs and whole discourses of thought are of no real consequence and the random slicing and dicing and rearranging and repeating of them with other words interspersed is of benefit to us, then what was actually written was really not important.
And using any collection of random words should be able to achieve the same result.
Unfortunately, that is sometimes what Lee thought. Maybe not because he didn't like what it actually said, but because he was blinded by what he wanted it to say, and therefore did not take due care for what it actually said.
And when your only solid base of truth — the Word — has been obliterated into puree, how do we ever really understand what it is that the Word is speaking to us? Or it is accepted as really meaning whatever Lee said? We were convinced that considering the words as words in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs was anathema to the correct understanding of it all, so we did not challenge anyone's rendition of anything. Or rather we only challenged everyone except Lee. For Lee, it was time to shout "hallelujah" rather than actually read it and ask "where did you get that?"
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Just for the sake of argument, suppose that the minister of God's word told the flock to "meditate on the word day and night" via any means they wanted. They could pray, declare, give speeches, sing songs, shout, speak it to one another, make outlines and bullet points. They could murmur, yell, read silently, whatever. Methodology was flexible. Okay, fine- at some point, hopefully, the written word might be accompanied by the Holy Spirit of God who inspired those very words. And then Christ will thereby make His home in your hearts (I am assuming behaviors which at least attempt to line up with said words).
But now my argument is this. Suppose the flock leader then said, "But only do this to odd-numbered verses... ignore the even-numbered verses because they are irrelevant". Or, "Only do this with books of the Bible beginning with the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, and M, P, and T. All other books ignore."
You'd be like, "Huh?" That's nonsensical. Yet look at WL going through the Bible with his "God's economy" template and effectively that is what he did. He arbitrarily gave us some texts which were "profitable" and others that were "unprofitable." To me, it's a bizarre interpretive scheme nowhere indicated by the numerous citations in the NT.
And yet because the LC culture dictated that we be "one" with "God's present oracle" we essentially did just that: paying attention to what we were told to look at, and ignoring the rest. In the case of the Psalms it was a lot: according to WL only 3 of the first 21 were "profitable", and this ratio pretty much continued throughout the book.
That's why I noted the Hunky Dory parable. We were told to "be filled with the Triune God", and then told, essentially arbitrarily, what was God's word to fill us, and what was to be ignored. And what was to be ignored was not just a few disputed verses somewhere. It was vast sections of text. Completely contrary to the reception of said text in the NT itself. And yet we were reminded, "Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God." Every word? Or just some of them?