"... My question to you is, where is the Holy Spirit in the process? Jesus
told his disciples that when he leaves he would send them the Holy Spirit,
who among other things would teach them the things that he had not had time
to teach them himself....
" Did this work of the Holy Spirit terminate when the New Testament was
complete, or is there an ongoing teaching process that still
occurs?"
HVT: I beleive it continues to occur in essentially the same way now as
then.
RLM: If it is still occuring how do we distinguish between teaching that is
authentic and that which is false? There are many other questions that
follow but I will leave it at that.
HVT: Perhaps that is best done with the aid of communal judgment so that
individual 'noise' is filtered out. Sounds much like the way we operate in
the scientific community, doesn't it?
RLM: It seems to me you have opened a can of worms. ... I appreciate your
courage in voicing these ideas. I agree that we need to wrestle with this
concept but cannot envision a process by which we will come to some
agreement.
HVT: Yes I've opened a "can of worms." But leaving it on the shelf and
pretending that it is a "jar of caviar" does not help either. Will we come
to agreement? I doubt it, but I must nonetheless express what is on my mind
and heart.
Howard Van Till