[quote]Headhunter wrote:
[quote]KingKai25 wrote:
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
How about this…repent and believe.
I want you all to do three things from this day forward:
- Go to your local parish and talk to the priest about frequenting the sacraments.
- Pray for just 15 minutes a day, same time, same thing. And, keep it simple stupid.
- Study the faith everyday for just 15 minutes a day, same time, every day.
Follow this until you’re at 100% for an entire month, then give me a call. [/quote]
Watching SpongeBob would be better.
[/quote]
I’m sure it is easier on the intellect that actually studying something you don’t understand.[/quote]
Well, it was designed so that no one would understand. That’s why you and KK and JP have walls of text trying to figure it out.
You won’t.
It was designed so that everyone would think: “Wow, this is really awesome! I don’t understand it so it MUST be great! I guess I better just trust the ones who DO understand it and take orders from them!!”
They don’t understand it either but they know how to rule gullible people.[/quote]
“Design” implies intention. Prove your case - where is the historical evidence proving that each and every author of the various documents of the OT and NT, writing over hundreds of years, intended that NO ONE understand them? It’s a cute theory, HH, but like all of your theories, no solid historical evidence underlies it. How sad it is to see someone at your age having already given up the search for truth; now, you bask in your ethnocentric bigotry and prattle on about issues you know nothing about, writing witless posts in the hope of shaking the faith of others, or at least annoying them a little. How pathetic.
We will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. [/quote]
Let’s use an analogy: you are teaching kindergarden. Would you make your teachings understandable to the kids? Certainly. It makes no sense to do otherwise.
What would be the incentive to make your teachings full of cryptic messages? To encourage people to accept things like dead people getting up and walking away, something that they’ve never seen before or can’t be repeated as an experiment?
Why all the mystery? During Mass, the priest chants about ‘accepting the mystery of faith’. Why is it a mystery? Why not have it all there, plain and simple?
Why is your doctrine as complicated as the IRS codes? What’s the goal of that?
[/quote]
In other words, you don’t HAVE any historical evidence to support your point, so you rely on conjecture, i.e., “this is what I would do if my goal was X.” The problem is that you are working thoughtlessly under several incorrect assumptions, the same thing I have called JP on several times. You are misunderstanding the nature of the Bible and its purpose.
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“The Bible” is not a single work, but a contingent collection of Scriptural texts. It is not a unitary work; it is NOT a text with a single message. The church delineated the contours of the canon, albeit (as I have argued before) for justifiable and legitimate reasons. But Individual texts exercised revelatory functions independent of one another for centuries before canonization; they did not fall down together from above.
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These texts were written over hundred of years by different authors in a variety of cultural milieus and situations with very specific audiences in mind. Most of the things YOU consider cryptic are only so in your mind, because you know nothing of the historical and cultural conditions in which these texts were composed. In other words, none of these texts were written with YOUR understanding in mind. Rather, they were written to be read and understand by people living in each author’s own time. This is why I have advocated again and again examining the cultural milieus in which these texts were written as the primary key to their understanding.
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Finally, contrary to the ridiculous claim of some Protestant pastors that Paul’s Letter to the Romans was intended as a systematic explication of the doctrine of Justification by faith, not a single one of the Scriptural texts were ever intended as an instruction manual. Every single text was written to those who shared the author’s framework. The texts presuppose that the author and his readers shared many assumptions and much information in common. In other words, these texts were not meant to communicate doctrine systematically; rather, they were intended to communicate particular truths to those who already shared many doctrines with their authors.
The reality is that, as literary theorist Jonathan Culler notes, “a language is a theory of the world.” Communication through language requires shared conceptual frameworks, i.e., ways of looking at and organizing the world. Because God chose to inspire particular individuals to write at particular times in particular languages, the understanding of those texts necessitates knowledge of the various cultural situations in which those texts were composed. This is an inescapable corollary of God’s decision to reveal his truths through particular individuals at particular times in history - by using a particular human language, the content was ultimately communicated through and bound to particular cultural codes. You cannot access the content without understanding the cultural codes that are an inherent and inescapable aspect of every language.
In summation, your kindergarden analogy doesn’t apply at all, because it fundamentally misunderstands what “the Bible” is. “The Bible” is not a unitary text with a single message; it is a compendium of texts written over long periods of time for specific, historically situated audiences who shared knowledge of particular cultural codes and theology with the authors. The Scriptures aren’t instruction manuals; they are more like letters between close friends. They remain relevant for us because of the unchanging nature of our God; what he communicates to people at one time has ramifications for us today, because we too are God’s people. But the original revelation was given to particular communities to communicate information to THEM in languages and codes THEY would have understood; to understand them, we must try to understand the cultural codes shared by the original readers and authors. And when you do this, the texts are far less “cryptic” and “mysterious.”
