Quote:
Originally Posted by Trapped
The events you list out did not have a direct effect on me, but I think honestly a part of the "why" is simply that most Christians are not trained or equipped to do so (oh no, now I sound like WL....."most Christians.....")
What I mean is, Christians generally AREN'T standing there actively aware they should have the whole armor of God on. . . .
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Let me respond (or add onto) this one thought.
We may not have had the necessary equipping. And yet the people within the LC are constantly inundated with scripture. I have to say that there is no way to deny that it is often considered the one thing they really did kind of well. They taught us to really get into scripture.
Or did they?
I ask, somewhat skeptically, because I am not sure that constantly reading a lot of scripture is as beneficial as we sometimes think. (I can hear it now; "OBW is saying that we don't need to read the scripture." But that is not what I said. Let me continue before you respond.)
What I am saying is that the way we read scripture and the goals of our reading can make it into something that might lead to a "Ye search the scriptures that points to me but you do not come to me" kind of reading.
And so when faced with a whole bunch of scripture, it is almost natural to rely on someone else to provide at least part of your understanding of it beyond the very cursory understanding. But when you have been doing that for long enough, you would think that a person would begin to have some ingrained knowledge. They might even remember enough other scripture (at least in paraphrase and possibly without chapter/verse sites) that they begin to have a basis to think a little on their own. Unless they have truly left their brain at the door and never think beyond what is fed to them, they should eventually start to sense something not quite right.
Yes, too many of us were not equipped to understand scripture.
Yet in some ways that is not really true. Too much of the nonsense we were fed happened through the forcing of "unnatural" understanding onto otherwise very understandable words. When you read "A = B" but are then told that it is really talking about "F = Q," you have a decision to make. Are you going to 1) stand up and say "how did you get that," 2) go home and look into it, or 3) just accept that you don't know anything and therefore this guy who says he knows a lot must be right?
I know that there are alternative options. But this is a generalization of how we got where we did. I know that some part of it was yet another option in which the alternative understanding was phrased so that we benefitted in personal esteem to know it (we have a higher understanding and vocabulary). And other similar things.
But are we really so "poor in mind" that we abdicate everything to someone else and are therefore prone to being led that far astray? If that is the case, then it is simply the providence of God that so many managed to avoid the LC or see through it up front.
In short (too late!) while I somewhat agree with your idea that many of us were not equipped to deal with what we were hit with, at some level, many of us should have had something nagging us to at least be troubled during our stay. For me, it was (unfortunately) mostly outward issues with certain elders as well as the nearly aloof and missing leadership in Irving in its early years that led to my leaving. It took years to awaken to the doctrinal/scriptural issues. I know I had some hints of it along the way, and even afterward. But as I said, it too 18 years after leaving to really look at it from a scriptural basis.