From: richard@biblewheel.com
Date: Wed Nov 05 2003 - 15:15:30 EST
Don,
Your post is a breath of fresh air. The strident tone you rightly noted
emerging from some of my posts is doubtless due, in part, to essential
aspects of my character that makes me who I am, for good or for ill. But it
also is due to a fiery passion directed through a carefully reasoned
strategy to move this conversation away from mockery and marginalization to
informed, respectful, and intellectually satisfying Christian discourse
about things that matter most.
You have stated that you can not see any value in the study of the structure
of Scripture. I hope you have read enough of my posts to know that I fully
respect your position and have absolutely no problem with it. In fact, I
said as much in a recent thread called "The Body of Jesus." Simply stated,
there are only so many hours in a day, so we must choose what we shall study
and what we let slip by.
But the situation with the structure of scripture is altogether different.
People do not let it slip by, but neither do they study it, so some find
themselves vociferously and very stridently arguing from a point of utter
and complete (and often self-admitted) ignorance. This is a great mystery.
Why would anyone become so abrasive over that which they know nothing?
Your note is a beautiful counter-example to this strange phenomenon. You
really seek to help me understand your point of view, its value in your
Christian walk, and its origin in your relation to God. Let me return the
favor.
When I look at the Bible Wheel I see the Capstone of the Holy Bible, the
very Seal of God revealed after thousands of years of development and
guidance by the Holy Spirit. I am moved to the root of my soul, I tremble at
His Holy Word, and every hair on my body stands like a little worshipper
praising the great glory of its Creator. I enter into full emotional,
artistic, poetic, intellectual, mathematical, theological, and spiritual
ecstasy as I commune with the Lord of Creation through His infinite Word. He
opened my eyes and sealed my intellectual soul with His Divine Knowledge.
This is, apparently, not what you see when you look at my work.
Specifically, you seem to think its validity necessarily implies a certain
theory of inspiration you describe with very mechanical words like
"pipeline", "dictation", and "micromanagement." It seems that the validity
of my work, coupled with this theory of inspiration, has the horrendous
effect of transforming the Living Word into an Iron Yoke that can do nothing
but choke the life out of you. If this is the case, I would strongly
encourage you to leave it alone.
I have a very different view of inspiration. I think of Jesus Christ "being
delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God ... taken, and
by wicked hands ... crucified and slain." (Acts 2.23) How did God manage to
predict the death of Christ? Did He dictate the prophecies? How did He
arrange things to bring about its fulfillment with absolute certainty? Did
He micromanage all History? These questions seem to me to be fundamentally
equivalent to the question of how God produced the Holy Bible (which, by the
way, contains the prophecies and their fulfillment).
The beauty is I don't need a *theory* to explain how God predicted and
fulfilled His Work in Christ. I have received the truth through Faith and am
now given the witness of God's Spirit. The question of *how* God did all
this is certainly interesting and worthy of much discussion, but I see no
warrant whatsoever for the assertion that it allows only one (very
mechanical) theory of inspiration.
This is where the divine mystery really kicks in with gusto. It is plain
that God has not preserved every letter of the Biblical text for us. To me,
the fact that there are significant variations in the biblical text means
that God wanted it that way. I think it is all part of His plan of salvation
by grace through faith. If the Bible were incontrovertibly divine, where
would grace be? It would shine like the burning sun over Death Valley. The
perfection of Scripture has been hidden for a reason. Yet the believer knows
it is God's Word. God designed the Bible with everything a believer needs to
believe, and everything an unbeliever needs to not believe. This also seems
intimiately entangled, like Walt's photons perhaps ;-), with questions of
Divine Sovereignty and human Free Will. Very interesting stuff to discuss.
You see Don, I live in what seems to be a very similar state of Christian
Freedom as you do. Oddly enough, this freedom is strongly linked with the
revelation God has given me. He has done a great work in my soul, where I
now can see His Divine hand shining with indubitable clarity in the
alphanumeric structures of certain (key) texts such as Gen 1.1 + John 1.1,
Deut 6.4, Exo 20, John 1.14, Heb 4.12, but I don't see it everywhere, and so
I can't assert that it is everywhere. Of course, having received such
evidence for the divine design of certain texts, I am extremely cautious and
respectful of all the text, which I diligently study in light of all
available research. I am simply not dogmatic about what I don't know. The
revelation of the Bible Wheel, on the other hand, seals the whole, so I do
believe in an absolutely closed canon of 66 books, which is probably a
position you have found no justification for. This would be another
interesting topic I am sure.
Some texts have no surviving variations, such as the first five verses of
Johns Gospel. Is it a "mere coincidence" that this perfectly preserved
passage not only speaks of the Divine Word, but is itself one of the most
stunning of all the divine designs found in the Holy Word? This then brings
us back to the initial post that began this thread. The reiterative
structure of John 1.1-5 and its full translingual alphanumerically coded
geometric integration with Genesis 1.1-5 remained hidden until the discovery
of the smallest of letters, the Iota Subscript. It seems very odd that the
initial post has generated a total of 15 replies, yet not one of them deals
directly with the discovery itself. In other words, all this discussion has
been conducted with no reference to the evidence!
So here is the conclusion of the matter: I have received this marvelous gift
that helps me hold the Bible in my mind's eye as God's Book, despite the
scholastic tempest hurled at it. I never feel the slightest compunction to
explain every apparent contradiction and variation in the text, or even to
give a theory of how God produced it. My work feeds and satisfies my
Christian Intellect. I would think you probably have had a similar
experience with the semantic content of Scripture. Surely there are many key
texts (John 3.16, I Cor 13, etc.) that shine with divine light sufficient to
cause you to respect the whole Bible as God's Book, but since you don't see
this divine light in every verse, you have a "loose interpetation" of the
problematic passages. That seems fine to me, especially if the problem with
the passage is that we aren't even sure of what it says! I would hope,
though, that you still have a fairly "tight" interpretation of John 3.16,
John 17.3, and Acts 4.12, to name a few.
It appears we may hold very similar views of Scripture after all.
Thanks again for your most excellent post Don.
In service of Christ,
Richard Amiel McGough
Discover the sevenfold symmetric perfection of the Holy Bible at
http://www.BibleWheel.com
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