scottisimo said:
This is what you wrote earlier: "Each of us individually are taught to receive personal revelation and guidance from the Holy Ghost without the aid of man made commentaries trying to guide us in what to believe."
I don't take that as praise for manmade commentaries. But let me restate my point further down.
Okay, I take your point. Commentaries are fine, but as a basis for understanding and not as a basis for belief. It seems to me that many people I come across seem to elevate the writings of others about scripture almost to the level of scripture itself. I'll ask them about a scripture and the first thing they do is look for someone elses commentary on that scripture to understand it's meaning.
scottisimo said:
You also wrote: "If Orthodox Christianity were truly interested in a unity of faith, all the different denominations would instruct their adherents to discard all the commentaries of men such as Calvin, Luther, Wesley etc and to trust in the HG to guide them into all truth independently without having other people tell them what to believe or what the scriptures mean. This would lead to an eventually abandonment of man-made creeds and lead all Christians to trust and seek for personal revelation from God."
These manmade creeds and commentaries are simply statements of what the fellowship of Christians believes. They are not calling believers to stray from the Bible. That's not their purpose. They are explaining the personal revelation of men who truly sought to know God.
These commentaries go much further than that. They are used as articles of definitive belief within those circles and are elevated often almost to the status of scripture.
scottisimo said:
I think you know what I mean. JS published lots of literature. Why doesn't the LDS encourage its members to discard his writings? (Remember that your solution for the non-LDS church is for us to discard writings by Luther, Calvin, Wesley, etc.)
Actually, JS didn't publish a lot of material. We have the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price. But very little from JS directly. There is a book called
Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith but it is not widely circulated. We are encouraged to read the scriptures directly and limit our reading of other materials. There are only five books expounding our doctrines that are published by the church and one of them is a history book.
Compare this (for example) with the SDA church which publishes an enourmous number of books written by Ellen G. White.
scottisimo said:
I've read writings by theologians who show a very sincere desire to receive divine revelation in their investigations and to share what they've learned with a larger audience. Gregory Boyd, CS Lewis and Darrow Miller come to mind. Also, a theologian must work on the basis of their intelligence. God gave us intelligence, not that we would be foolish, but that we would use our intelligence to investigave the manifestations of God. Of course we depend on God for confirmation and correction.
Fundamentally I agree. However, these people can really only receive revelation for themselves. No one can set themselves up as a prophet.
[BIBLE]Hebrews 5:4[/BIBLE]
scottisimo said:
You also wrote: "One can learn more in five minutes this way than in years of intellectual study of Calvinistic interpretation (for example)."
This would work if we were all perfect receptors of personal revelation. Yet you are very good at pointing out that Calvin's personal revelation is not correct. (I'm not Calvinist.) We can think we've learned a lot in private meditation. However, because our beliefs shape the way we behave and interact with others, we always end up sharing our personal revelation with others, whether verbally or non-verbally. We learn from others that we are right, and sometimes we learn that we are wrong. Or in other words, we learn when we have truly received divine revelation or when we've just been thinking what sounds good to us. We must share our personal revelations to learn from others. And that's the point I said I'd make earlier.
Again, some excellent points here. This is one of the reasons our church is structured the way it is - to give the maximum opportunities for us to edify each other. We shouldn't require people accept what we say just because we say it. We should gain independent confirmation ourselves.
As you say, we are not perfect receptors of the HG. That is an important point. Sometimes it may take years for us to accept a particular doctrine or teaching, or worse, to unlearn an incorrect one. I have been taught false doctrine by well meaning people in our church. For many years these were a stumbling blockj for me. Fortunately, because I read the scriptures independently, my HF was able to point out these errors in doctrine through the HG. I was able to cast them aside and progress from there. For each false belief I cast away, the HG worked more fully with me. This also enables me to listen to others no matter what the source, and independently study and ask God to guide me into truth.
scottisimo said:
In the course of one of these meetings, have you ever come to the conclusion that what you received in a personal revelation was actually wrong?
Never. Not once I received a witness of those things.
Over the course of time I have had to fine tune my testimony as I have studied and learnt more. Sometimes that means going back to basics. That's something I've had to do on four occasions.
