[OBW]

Ohio,

I fully understand your position, and predicament. You know that there are problems, but they do not automatically jump out because we intend to take a different viewpoint.

And Nigel's articles are generally excellent. My comments to him at the others are not to stifle them, but to spur them on.

I can’t find the reference at the moment (maybe in one of the forums or in some book I’ve recently read) but it essentially suggested that we are, to some degree, trapped in our historical prejudices and biases. In other words, the colored glasses that we wear cannot just be taken off in an instant to allow for a pure, unfiltered look at objective facts. This source was effectively suggesting that the colored glasses were at least partly stuck to our heads via some sort of glue that is not easily removed.

Now I am not fatalistic enough to buy that notion in total. But there surely is some truth there. Yet at the same time, we do have ways to overcome these biases; tools that can help eliminate the tendency toward predisposed error.

As you know from my previous posts, I left the LC in August of 87. Yet I have testified here of several things concerning which I have only recently had my eyes opened. You may recall in approximately Aug or Sep of 2007 I raised a question concerning what Paul was talking about in 1 Cor. 3, especially the middle part concerning the wood, hay, stubble, gold, silver and precious stones. I had come across this while reading through 1 Cor. for reasons having nothing to do with any of the LC discussions. As I read, I realized that the portions about following the various teachers was a long section that started in 1:10 (or so) and continued through part of chapter 4. As I was reading chapter 3, I was not thinking in terms of Lee’s teaching, but was simply seeing the full context of the chapter. Suddenly the words of 3:9 jumped out at me. Paul said “we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building.” So I decided to find out who was “we” and who was “you.” It became clear that “we” was Paul, Apollos, Cephas, etc. ─ the men that the Corinthians had been arguing about. And “you” was the Corinthians. So when you move to the next verses which talk about building, there is a continuity between “we” who was the workers, and “you” who was the building.

Now I acknowledge that we are unable to fully extricate ourselves from the truth of verses 10 through 15. But Paul was talking about the builders ─ the workers ─ not about the Corinthians who were what was being built.

The point is that I came to the words as presented in the scripture. I came seeing words with their own meaning, connected by grammar that, while not totally unambiguous, takes the meaning of separate words and turns it into more complex meaning. But if I had come while allowing tapes of those convoluted, high-sounding things that we so often repeated when pray-reading, like “thank you Lord that your are the processed Triune God that we can build with to make our works approved,” or something like that, it would have caused my thinking about who these verses we're talking about to be converted from the workers ─the teachers ─ and into me. By allowing Lee’s teachings to too often be where we start (and I was still doing it regularly for almost a year after my first visit to the Bereans forum) we ignore the actual words on the page and the actual grammar and the actual context, substituting whatever it was that Lee said.

It is for this reason that I feel compelled to vocally challenge the Concerned Brothers. While I do have confidence that they are headed in the right direction (and may even be further down that road than I am giving them credit), as long as the “writings” that we are concerned about going beyond continue to be Lee’s, we are misaiming.

While I do attribute some of my alleged “wisdom” to age and experience, which I will note that others, including you and Nigel and many others also may have, I realize that with age can also come a tendency to close one’s mind to change. I do not pretend that at my best I could ever come up with as clear and sound a theological position as someone like Nigel can. But unless he and the other stalwarts keep the focus on the source rather than some intermediary, it may end up to only be a shift within an existing dogma rather than a truly liberating experience into the fullness of the gospel of Christ.

It was in one of the Star Trek movies, The Wrath of Khan I believe, in which Lt. Saavik was chastised for quoting Starfleet regulations to Kirk. Later, after Kirk nearly got his head handed to him due to his ignoring those regulations, he said to Saavik something like “You keep right on quoting Starfleet regulations.” I probably have an even lesser position in these discussions, especially relative to the likes of Nigel and even some of the BBs and their technical resource people, but I am convinced from where the LC has gone that the quoting of Starfleet regulations (i.e., scripture and sound principles of using scripture) is too often necessary. When I do it and it is unnecessary, I can be ignored.

And you do the same. When you see me wandering in a field mooing like a cow, following some rustlers in a pickup truck with hay in the back, slap me in the face.