At the risk of becoming a pariah, I must now take a stand. I am really weary of the theological/doctrine debates that have been raging around me lately. The question I want to pose is why familiarize ourselves with what influential people say and twist Scripture to fit their doctrine?
I Corinthians 1:10-13 "Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it has been declared to me concerning you, my brethren, by those of Chloe’s household, that there are contentions among you. Now I say this, that each of you says, “I am of Paul,” or “I am of Apollos,” or “I am of Cephas,” or “I am of Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?"
I fear and tremble at the thought that I would shun the correction of the Holy Spirit and adopt a feel-good Christianity in which I grow no closer to God and become like the lukewarm church at Laodicea (see Revelation 3:14-22) because I do NOT want my beautiful Lord and Savior to feel about me the way He feels about that church! I would be losing everything to trade His power for my comfort and entertainment. Neither shall I reject Scriptural Truth as I understand it and adopt the World's interpretations merely for the sake of pleasing others. To reject what I know in my spirit to be the true gospel of Christ for the sake of not bruising someone else's ego is the height of blasphemy for me and I can not do it. Indeed, I shall not even apologise.
All this is specifically why I refuse to align myself with popular theological teachings of this day and age. No, I do not know the fullness of what all these doctrines teach, nor do I wish to know. I could devote all my time and energies to learning what people say about the Bible or I could devote all my energies to learning what the Bible says. Those that cannot understand this about me should at least try to realize that the only one qualified to judge another is the same God who knows the minds and hearts of all men.
We should instead be familiarizing ourselves with SCRIPTURE and using it to separate the wheat from the chaff the way God instructed us to. I have been convicted lately to be careful to keep an eye on a certain indicator. How many quotes from people do I use versus how many Bible quotes do I use, for it is said that bank tellers do not learn what is real money by studying the counterfeit. They learn to distinguish real from fake because they handle the real so often that anything else simply will not do. Would that we, since we so heartily claim to love Christ, would constantly handle and thus become so familiar with His Truth that nothing else measures up.
I am truly thankful for learning the inductive Bible study method. It has truly taught me not to err from the path of Biblical Truth. (Kudos to Precept Ministries!) If I am ever in doubt, I have learned to find my answers not in theologians' words, but in God's Word. The thing that we must understand is that though theology is not necessarily an ignoble pursuit, one must be extremely careful to keep the Bible as the plumbline that all else must measure up to rather than using man's teaching to measure everything else by. There comes a time when we must stop being "...children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting..." (Ephesians 4:14) and, Christ being our anchor, and Himself being the Word of God, rely on Scripture alone to tell us Who God is. After all, this is the tried and true method of keeping the Bible in context is by translating and interpreting it by using its own text; Bible interpreted with Bible (Parallelism).
A good example of the process I am talking about can be found at : http://www.bible-truth.org/election.htm
This is an essay entitled A Biblical Explanation of the Doctrine of Election. By Cooper P. Abrams, III.
The author, to me, seems to effectively clear up much of the battle between Calvinism and Armenianism. I may post a further explanation of what I actually believe concerning this whole issue in the near future.
Boundless Love in Christ,
-Patricia (PJ)
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