payattention said:
You complicate matters by claiming that I said Paul cannot be listened to on any particular point. Maybe you can provide a screen shot where I said that. One does not exist. My point has always been that what we have in the Bible are human reflections on the interaction between God and his creation. As with anything man does we are sometimes correct and sometimees incorrect. Paul was not alway correct. Sometimes he was even aware of it. Other times he admitted that he was just giving his opinion. The only wise approach is to read him the way the Bereans did. I'll give you one example where he was wrong or used the wrong word, leading to a false teaching. It is clear both from John 3:16 and any summary review of nature that salvation is an act of love. Everyone who is lost deserves to be saved. Yet Paul says that we are saved by grace. We are not saved by grace. We deserved to be saved because we belonged to God and were taken away under false representations; deceived. Our opportunity to serve as ambassadors of the kingdom is an act of grace, not our salvation. Paul may have meant to refer to our service as ambassadors of Christ but he used the word saved. As a result Christians routinely present a contradictory view of salvation, declaring it to be both deserved and undeserved. But this error, or whatever you may call it, does not disqualify Paul anymore than an error in my textbook disqualfies the author as an authority in the field.
This comment I did not reply to earlier, because I wanted to calm down first, so I will reply now
What I am referring to is the conversation where I posted one of Paul's comments and you said "Paul saw through a glass dimly" ie...skipping over Pauls statement as though it had no value. If you really want me to find it I will, but I am sure you can recall the conversation.
Moreover, we have agreed that at times there might be human elements. And now you have agreed that it doesn't disqualify Paul as an authority. So why did you dismiss my point merely on the fact that Paul, in another chapter, said he sees dimly. The point is, that you only accept Paul when you like what Paul says. That is why I said you reject anything Paul says AT FACE VALUE, because you do.
And as to him saying he gave his opinion, I assume you are referring to I Corintians 7, (there may also be a mention in the discussion of weaker brothers, etc. I would have to check) I think you missed Paul's point there.
Finally, as I mentioned to you in pm earlier, I think woobadooba is right. I think you continually assert that you are superior to others in your method. But now when pressed, you say it is not even properly a method. What are we to make of this? You mean all this talk about your method and it doesn't even do anything? It is not a method? All it does is say that we can't know anything? If all your method says is that you can know nothing for sure, then I think I like my method better.
