That limits Scripture and makes the understanding dogmatic. The beauty of Scripture is its timelessness which you seem to want to quash.
Scripture is not literature in that sense. The authors are not trained or follw specific rules of writing. This is where study and learning can be detremental. You can dig too deep and miss the trees for the wood.
i am sorry, but that just doesn’t apply. Most Christians are not as learned as you appear to be. Scripture is for the masses not the elite. Meaning must be avaialble to all. A person reading Scrioture fr the fist time will not have the sort of learning you seem to demand.
You can get the gist without delving into linguistics or culture.
I have often wondered if Paul’s letters would have been written differently if he knew how they would be looked at by later congregations. I’m sure a lot of us would write our emails a bit differently if we knew they would be read daily by hundreds of millions of people 2,000 years from now.
At the same time, I think we all agree that scripture can’t say whatever we want it to say. It seems prudent to at least start with what Paul intended to say, and how it was understood by the people whom the letters were addressed to.
Obviously we can’t, so the next best thing is to analyze the text with historical context in mind.
How would you determine if his words are being abused?
We get some of the issues. For example, in I Corinthians Paul writes about the issue of buying meat that was used in sacrifices. Some of the Christians in Corinth thought it was sinful, but Paul didn’t really agree with them. The middle road was:
I Corinthians 10:23-24: Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.
IOW, if it’s a point of contention in the church then don’t buy meat from sacrifices. Statement of the issue followed by an answer.
Well, we still get some of the issues contrary to your claim that we get none of the issues. I understand you were probably being hyperbolic, but it’s still an important point.
What would have been fascinating is if the letter from the Church of Corinth to Paul had survived to this day. That’s the context we are missing. The Church of Corinth would have already known many of the issues Paul was addressing in his response, but we are missing that context. In many cases we do have to read between the lines.
I was thinking more of the dreaded 2 Tim 3 where, despite the claimed meaning of “breathed,” the sentance in context is clearly not a claim over the nature of Scripture only the use of it.
It is a case of reading too much into the words. I doubt whether Greek was Paul’s frst language and so his choice of word may not be as precise as people are claiming.
I think we agree on this point. As I said in other posts, I really don’t think Paul expected his letters to be regarded as they are today, or even a few centuries after he wrote them. I could be wrong on this point though since church history isn’t my expertise.
This discussion does make me flash back to my Sunday School days where we learned the different types of love described in the New Testament: phileo, agape, and eros. While we may use “love” to describe all of them, there was a nuance in the Greek (according to what I can remember of my lessons).
I’ll chime in with agreement here too. Paul even corrects himself when he realizes he made a mistake about who or how many he baptized in a certain community. Not how one would casually talk in letters if they thought their words were going to be enshrined as inerrant communication, direct from on-high! So while I as a believer have no trouble respecting how God used Paul and all his written words for our instruction, it nonetheless boggles my mind that people could imagine that Paul thought his letters would be enshrined and combed over for every detail to build yet newer ever more furnished doctrinal edifices with new layers of law added on top of all the old layers! I mean - yeah - he obviously thought his letters important enough to be read and even spread around; nobody will accuse Paul of humility in that regard I don’t suppose. But that he wrote at all was itself a concession in lieu of the best thing he really wanted: to be there in person and in spirit. And most important of all - that Christ would be in their midst. I think Paul would have thought of the law and the prophets in his day as vehicles to move people on to the real goal: Christ. Not as an end in and of themselves. So he would probably be horrified to think his own writings might one day also serve as a kind of “law 2.0” turned into yet another stumbling block for those who otherwise might come to Christ. And yet the irony is … it’s because we have been intimately familiar with Paul’s own writings that we can come to that conclusion!
That’s not how literature works – you can’t “quash” it by understanding the meaning.
Humans wrote it, therefore it is literature.
They use vocabulary, grammar, and intent – that’s what makes literature.
It is available to all in the same way it was when Paul wrote: people who know how to understand it explain it.
“Meaning available to all” that does not rest on the writer’s intent and the understanding of the original audience is nonsense: it does away with meaning altogether by letting everyone decide what it means.
Politicians love the approach you advocate for because it allows them to spin everything so they’re always right.
In specific places such as the example I used he would have been more careful to show that some statement was a quote he was addressing/refuting, but he would be up against the same problem we all are: we have no way of knowing how future people with a worldview that doesn’t exist yet will see or fail to see things that are obvious to us, and thus there will always be blind spots.
Thinking of blind spots, I presume that biologists would recognize that “T aquaticus” is likely a species name, whereas someone familiar with Latin but not biology might think it stands for “totus aquaticus” and means you love all things having to do with water.
Do you think, therefore, that Scripture has a defined and specific meaning? How do you account for writers reinterpretting “Old Testament” writing?
Take the Suffering Servant chapters of Issaiah. Are they about Israel or Christ? What was the original intent? If that prevails what happens to the reinterpretation?
Are you dismissing the notion of a personal faith?
Are you claiming that all must agree?
Are you even daring to claim that you have the definitve understanding and all must agree with you?
Is God inflexible? Or does He meet people where they are!
You appear to have put constraints onto Scripture and how it can be understood. Is that Scritpural also?
It’s good to hear that my thoughts weren’t coming out of left field and comport with the beliefs of Christians.
Being the friendly neighborhood atheist, I also want to emphasize that I am not trying to diminish the importance of Paul’s letters. Paul was in conversation with the Disciples, so his writings offer a direct link to the foundation of Christianity. Also, Paul’s letters are judged to be worthy of cannon based just on the writing itself. Yes, I am aware of the “controversy” surrounding the authorship of some of the traditionally Pauline letters, but in the end it is both their content and time of authorship that matters here.
Biologists, and especially molecular biologists (which I consider myself), will recognize it to be a reference to Thermus aquaticus which translates to “hot water” in the Greek and Latin respectively. These are the thermophilic bacteria, first found in Yellowstone, that supplied us the thermostable DNA polymerase that we use in so many of our PCR reactions in the lab. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without Taq polymerase.
On a lighter note, if you want to make a room of molecular biolgists laugh out loud, dress as a Roman legionnaire and proudly pronounce, with hands on hips, “I AM THERMUS AQUATICUS!”.
And have as a partner a swimmer in just a speedo adding, “And I am Totus Aquaticus!”
(find another version that t aquaticus can stand for [tertius aquaticus, perhaps], who each announces himself as “T Aquaticus”, and you can play “Will the real T Aquaticus please stand up”)
I think it more likely that the understanding of the people at the time it was written took precedence, and for those of us coming later, God (doubt Paul could think about this) had to trust we would use our intelligence to adapt it to a more meaningful understanding for our own situation. And it is not that I think the future is already written (I don’t), but most things are pretty predictable all the same.
Take the destruction of the temple for example. I think that was highly predictable given the character of Rome and Israel, but especially when they didn’t listen all that well to Jesus – just too hard-headed to avoid that outcome.