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Not sure what you mean by "accepted practice", but its common, its simply human nature to prefer what confirms our ideas.
I'm scared to bring this up because I don't want a bunch of bible bashing. So, what is your interpretation of elohim's?
Consider that those over us might be seen as gods, but also that those that became the fallen elohim became our lesser gods. God's battle with those not of His will happened long before us and continues against them including their nations which fill our world today. A world focused on the adversarial ways of both fallen elohim and of man to this day.
By accepted practice, I mean Christians do it without fear of eternal damnation
Christians do not live in a constant anxiety of losing salvation. Thankfully, God is merciful and forgiving and being saved is by faith in Christ, not by our own perfection.
Yes that happens in certain cases.
Rom 11 is the place to get the answer - (since are trying to avoid the traditions and sayings of men - for the answer)
You're right and my definition of accepted practice was rather sloppy. I meant not seeing it as a sin
Why would the Bible be unsystematic, chaotic or open to interpretation if it's the word of God?
When we say its the word of God, we do not mean it was dictated, composed, translated, printed and commented by God. God inspired ancient authors about various thoughts regarding salvation and monotheism, namely in prophecies, but other than that, they were quite free to use whatever words or genres or style they wanted.
I have the same impression of the Bible as you described but I thought that might be due my lack of experience. When you encounter a contradictory or cryptic verse, do you simply choose your own interpretation ?
Sometimes, we need to simply accept that there are some contradictory details in the Bible. Contradiction is a formal logic thing and our formal logic was not as used in the ancient Mesopotamia as is in our industrial/scientific era. For example, there are whole chapters about the same event with different details about the event, sometimes contradictory (like the story about the death of Saul). Because contradiction was not a problem for them, they rather wanted to preserve both variants than to have just one. Or some text was composed from different authors so its sometimes incoherent (like Gen 1 and Gen 2).
One of the challenges I see here is that, while humanity more broadly can reflect on physical observations of reality to ground their understanding of reality, the church doesn't have that ability when it comes to the Bible.
I have only just come across this thread, because somebody added a new reply today. What you suggest does happen, and that is why, in my view, it is important, both in preaching and in our private bible reading, to cover the whole bible, even when some passages might seem difficult. Otherwise, we can spend our Christian lives repeatedly reading the same favourite bible passages, and preaching/listening to preaching on a restricted number of passages of Scripture.
