Well, your letter continues in a new vein. Interestingly as an aside, paragraphs are a recent invention. The early Greek and Hebrew texts were written in long flowing streams of letters (some without breaks between words, let alone punctuation). But it's not really that difficult to work out where the breaks belong, if you pay attention.
"Don't shut me off by telling me to go talk to my pastor, he hasn't had an original thought in his life. He seems to have always led a religious untested life, and just doesn't seem to understand what questioning your religion is about."
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I don't know him very well; but I do know that few Christians reach any level of conviction without passing through some doubts to get there. I've heard how Billy Graham was challenged by the question of the authority of scripture, and spent hours in prayer and in questioning pastors and teachers at the seminary. It was shortly after that that he held his first evangelistic meeting, at which he became well known for his expression, "The Bible says...."
I remember several booklets by Jay E. Adams years ago; I think "Competent to Counsel" was one title, but I don't know if that's the one I best remember. Adams observed the verse from Corinthians which reads, "There is no temptation taken you but such as is common to man, but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above what you are able, but will with the temptation provide a way of escape, that you may be able to bear it." From this verse, he pulled many important lessons, of which several have stayed with me for over two decades. One is simply this: we all go through the same kinds of things. They may not be expressed in the same forms, they may not be as severe or extensive, we may have dealt with them in different ways or different contexts, but at a fundamental level, we all know what the rest of us are going through, because we go through it ourselves. Each of us has a habit we couldn't break, a weakness to which we easily succumb, an irritating individual in our lives, a wrong we cannot forgive. When one of us says to another, "I know what you're going through," that's a true statement: we've been through it. Perhaps one person's doubts were never so severe as another's; yet doubt is one of those issues which all of us must face at some point in our lives.
Still, each person's road is unique; each person's pain is individual. It was a difficult moment for me, who for years had waited for God to open the door for an expanded music ministry, to hear how Amy Grant was discovered while she was in high school, because she happened to live in Nashville, and she recorded a couple songs for her mom which were accidentally heard by producers Brown Bannister and Chris Christian. Her road to success was not something she had seriously considered; I, on the other hand, long sought an entrance into professional music ministry, made choices in my life based on that expectation, struggled with years of poverty and dashed hopes, only to reach the point at which failing health combined with personal struggles forced me to give up any serious hope that my music would ever amount to anything. Did God fail me? Did I fail Him? How did I come to believe that I had a future in and a calling to Christian music? Did I mislead myself, or misunderstand Him? I don't have answers to these questions yet; it may be that there is a surprise around the next bend. More significantly, whatever has happened has been to prepare me for what I will have to do in the future, which will be different from that which is ahead for Amy Grant.
Is there a point to this? Well, I'm trying to bring out that each of us has his own tasks to complete, and his own life to live, and yet all of us go through much of the same things--to whatever degree is necessary to bring us to perfection as individuals. There is no point to envying another's lot, or to criticizing it. Each person's life has the amount of trouble necessary to create endurance and character; each path leads through the right training ground to the right tasks, even though we can't always see how that works out. And for each of us, our mission, whatever it is, is assigned from our master--none of us can truly know whether anyone else is doing what he should, because we don't have his assignment.
"Don't tell me that I just have to have faith and believe all of the discrepencies of the bible are mysteries that will be revealed later, they are mistakes that men wrote. Men wrote the texts and men edited. The only thing that you can believe is what's in the red letters. Can you believe them? Men wrote them from their memories many years later. I don't remember what my friends said last week."
Well, I suppose my reaction to this is, "What discrepancies?" O.K., we've had a few uncertainties creep into the text over the millennia--which word was here originally, was this changed to match that, was that changed because of this--but our science of textual criticism has given us a remarkably reliable reconstruction of the original text. I've already addressed the red-letter edition issue, and the concept of inspiration. But this bit about discrepancies is worth consideration.
Nothing real is ever simple; there are complexities to every aspect of the world. Your field is medicine, and you have a position which requires you to answer the medical questions of ordinary people with no medical background--in many cases, not even high school biology. In those situations, you provide answers which are comprehensible and reasonably accurate--and which would have gotten you a failing grade back in school. For example, what does asprin do? You tell your patients that it helps with the pain--but you know that pain is a complex process which includes receptors throughout the body, neural transmission through the nervous system, and interpretation in the brain. Different drugs which "help with the pain" interfere with the pain sensation in different ways--some deaden the nerves at the point of injury, while others shut down our consciousness altogether inducing a pain-free sleep. Asprin does neither of those things; but I would be at a loss to describe its action with any precision--and I'm given to understand that at a deeper level, pharmacologists are not completely agreed as to how or why it works.
Look at physics. We live in a world in which time dilates with velocity, gravity bends space, particles of matter can exist simultaneously in two places (yes, that was a new one on me, too). Yet we still teach the simple and slightly inaccurate laws of motion propounded by Sir Isaac Newton, because they are close enough. I just had to explain to someone writing to my temporal anomalies site that Einstein was neither wrong nor misquoted, that particle accelerators exist in order to take advantage of the time dilation effects of velocity--that is, if we make subatomic particles move at incredible speeds, the tiny fractions of time which comprise the life spans of some of the more elusive are stretched into several seconds, long enough for us to get a brief look at them. The rules which govern the universe are complicated, and it's easy for us to draw incorrect conclusions from them.
It is so in theology. Most heresies historically opposed involved the recognition of one truth elevated to the denial of another. The doctrine of the trinity has been argued to say either that there is only one God, and therefore Jesus cannot be God, or to say that there is only one God, and therefore Jesus is the Father and the Spirit. As to the nature of Christ, whom we understand to be fully God and fully man, there have been those who argued that as God he could not be a man, and therefore only appeared to be a man; those who argued that as man he could not be God, and so was merely a prophet trying to illustrate something; and those who argued that he was only part God and part man, not really entirely either. These are not easy concepts to explain, and the term "paradox" has often been used to describe many of the truths which strike one as contradictory at first apprehension. But most paradoxes can be understood, if one is willing to consider the matter openly and intelligently, although many take a great deal of thought before they are resolved.
More to the point, someone has said, "Men do not reject the Bible because it contradicts itself, but because it contradicts them." I have not found an unresolvable paradox in scripture; but resolving paradoxes is attacking excuses in most cases. People who make these issues reasons to reject the gospel do so primarily because they wanted a reason to reject the gospel, and resolution of the objection rarely results in acceptance of the truth, but a search for a new excuse. I don't mean to imply that this is your case; I just mean that the paradoxes are considerably less serious than most people are led to believe.
Oh--about the disciples remembering the words of Jesus, there's a lot more than just the "divinely assisted memory" theory. Examination of the recorded teachings of Jesus shows that he used many memory tricks to help people learn what he taught. We find such mnemonics as poetry, anagrams, puns (even more pronounced in some passages when translated back to the original Aramaic of the land). It is clear that he repeated identical messages in different places, used many of the same illustrations and phrases for other applications. Additionally, it appears that in the earliest days of the church, many of the stories and much of the monologues were written down in snippets, and that the gospel writers used these snippets as reference materials in reconstructing the life of Christ (John much less so than the others). Much was done to assure the preservation of those words, especially as it became more apparent that the original witnesses might not live to see His return.
I think this a good place to break off again; We'll add more perhaps tomorrow.
--Mark
To Mark J. Young's Bible Study Materials
Read about the Multiverser role playing game--accused by some critics of being "too Christian"
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