Quote:
Originally Posted by Gubei
Igzy,
However, just becase it is not so easy to practice the truth, that does not necessarily follow that we can give up the truth.
My point is that even though one unifying eldership of a local church should be accepted as a valid truth in the Bible, that should not be over-empahsized as to make divisions - as done by "Late Lee."
To me, seeing how difficult it is to practice the truth just leads me more into the deplorable sigh of how human nature is divisive than into the doubt of how this truth is not plausible.
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Hi Gubei,
Here you are basically admitting what I've been saying. There is no practical way to determine which of competing sets of elders are indeed the real set. So your solution is to be nice and kind of hope things work out. That's not very practical when push comes to shove (and there has been a lot of shoving going on lately.)
The problem is not human nature. The problem is you are advocating a practical model for which you cannot provide practical instructions.
I can anticipate some responses. E.g. Everyone has to take the cross and all that. But the fact is the set of elders that "win out" didn't have to take the cross. All they had to do was convince enough people they were bona fide, by any means necessary. This is precisely what we have seen.
This is why I cannot accept the idea of one set of elders over one church in a city as any kind of mandate. Because eventually the ruthless will try to control, and the weak have no place to go. This is also the Roman model.
Advocates of the local church model love to speak of it in all its idealized purity. Unfortunately, a practical local church comes down to following one set of leaders, and those advocates never let the other shoe drop and tell us just how to know who those elders are. They just keep harping on the "truth" of one church per city.
Most of them, like you Gubei, lament "human nature" as the barrier to this ideal. This reminds me of the advocates of Communism in the 20th century. They were always pleading that Communism was a great system, just that it had never been done right. They kept blaming the people. It never occured to them that perhaps their ideal was never intended for this world.