I do appreciate your reply. I can understand your reasoning for starting with Revelation, yet it would not be my preference. I believe If you start at the front of the book you will have a solid foundation in understanding the rest of the book. The word is spiritual, all of it, and it is so amazing how one letter in the Hebrew alphabet can represent so many things, the stories and how many different spiritual mysteries they hold for us to uncover. It is still so VERY relevant today. The writers of the New Testament knew this and wrote about it, in there day it was only the OT. So many mysteries were uncovered after the death of Christ. Paul was one of the best at uncovering these revelations, I do agree his writings, however at times it trips me up a bit too, but Peter told us Paul was difficult to understand. 2 Peter 3:16. I am curious why you reject so much of the Word? "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness," 2 Timothy 3:16 Can we not learn from Israel, they were saved out of bondage, given instruction, walked through the valley(or wilderness), and were lead into the promised land. "Those who cannot
remember the
past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana
I don't reject any of Scripture. I put it in its proper hierarchy of authority. Men are fallible. Paul, whose writings fill half of the New Testament, was a
particularly fallible man. He was a hard-core fanatic, a murderer of Christians. He never listened to anybody's arguments. It took Jesus himself to knock him from his horse and blind him to get him to see the truth about who Jesus was. After that, Paul was a Christian, but he was a fanatic Christian, prone to the same sort of rhetorical excesses in his Christian faith that he exhibited in his Jewish faith. The problem with Paul is that he says both yes and no. He is on both sides of many things. One must do backflips of logic to try to make Paul hang together. And it's obvious enough that the other Apostles were not entirely impressed. James' terse "faith without works is dead" is obviously a very direct refutation of one of the most misunderstood passages of Paul. Paul SEEMS TO SAY that what a man
does in his life is not relevant to whether or not he passes final judgment. And that is flat out false. Jesus makes that clear in Revelation: men - CHRISTIAN men and women - will be judged by their deeds, not by what they thought, but by what they did. (Of course, things like loving and forgiving and believing are also deeds. When Paul, the Jewish lawyer trained by Hillel, the Pharisee and scholar of laws, speaks of "works", he (probably) isn't speaking of deeds. He (probably) is speaking of
mitzvot - specific "works" under the Torah. So, deeds very much DO matter, but going through the specific ritual acts of the Law of Torah don't. Paul doesn't actually
say that. He writes in a style that allows people to assert that what you do, your sins, don't matter, you've just gotta believe. Paul can be naturally read to have said just precisely THAT, in some places, and this site is full of Christians who believe that. And maybe Paul believed that, at some point. He didn't believe it at other points. He's all over the place. And regardless what he wrote and what he believed, the right answer comes straight from the mouth of Jesus in Revelation: deeds matter. If Paul appears to say otherwise, then he must be interpreted differently. If Paul really DOES say otherwise, and meant it, then Paul was in error and this part of Scripture must be disregarded in favor of the more authoritative Scripture, which is Jesus himself, giving DICTATION from the Throne Room of Heaven, in the last book of the Bible.
I read Paul and know what he says, but precisely because of Paul's poor judgment and fanaticism, and his excessive statements on many things, I find Paul in conflict with Jesus and the other apostles a lot. In all such cases, the answer is obvious: Jesus is God. Paul was not. Jesus trumps. Always.
Of course, this means that parts of Scripture are more authoritative than other parts of Scripture. That should be obvious. Parts of Scripture recount flat history - who, what, where, when. Parts of Scripture are poems and songs about God written by men. Parts of Scripture are personal mail - Paul's letter to Timothy wasn't written to be "scripture", it was a letter to a young man he knew, giving advice. Parts of Scripture record the words and arguments of the Devil himself. Shall we assert that
those words are authoritative, as read? Of course not! And parts of Scripture were inspired by God to record God saying "I, God, am saying thus and so". All of the LAW in Scripture comes directly from God. Revelation goes a step further. John is not the author, he is a scribe. Jesus tells him to take dictation time and again. And at the end the warnings of a curse are put on the scroll: change a word of it, and the various damnations contained herein will be visited on you.
So, it is not that I discount Scripture. What I discount, and discard, are the hermeneutics that other Christians use regarding Scripture.
I agree with you, for example, that the Hebrew pictographs underlying Genesis 1, in particular, are inspiring for what they reveal. But those same pictographs don't really reveal anything dramatic once we're into 2 Chronicles. The subject matter of Genesis, and the fact that God had to give the information for no man was there to see it, lends itself to the utility and power of high symbology. Flat history, such as the Chronicles, don't. Men cannot intentionally write letters with that degree of intricacy in conveying message, and they don't. The particularly deep pictographic revelations are found really in early Genesis, when natural history is being told. But God back then did not reveal life after death, judgment, and the City of God. He didn't reveal that in any usable detail until Jesus. So, it isn't that I discard the Old Testament. It is that the Old Testament is not central to what Christ taught and revealed. It is an example book and a moral lesson book, but it is not "The Law" for me, and never was. That's clear enough because the CONTENT of the law of Jesus is different from the content of the Law of Moses.
Now, I hear and see lots of Christians asserting otherwise, with strong words, but their words are not quoted from Jesus. It's always some confection of Paul. And Paul is not God. Paul writes about long hair, as though it were a sin. Jesus had long hair. We know this from the Shroud of Turin image.
The reason I read things the way I do is because I think it's the right way to read it. If I start with Genesis and come forward, there are clear lines of authority, and the way that different parts relate to the other text is clear. When I look at it using the hermeneutics of other Christians, I end up with a confusing mess that doesn't work, and that ignores some facet of the real world.
