Hi (to a netfriend):

My point about many hermeneutical approaches has to do with our limitations in seeing the whole beyond the parts (the wood and the trees etc.). Inevitable, I would have thought, when humans with their limitations try to understand/explain the ways of God.

Take Luke/Acts’ and the Johannine documents’ varying treatment of the significance of prophets, for example.

You cited Satan’s wiles. There are many demonic strategies (a la C. S., Lewis’ Screwtape Letters). One of them is to separate what God has joined together.

More examples: in the apostolic churches the question ‘Who, under God, governs the church?’ was answered several ways. There were apostles, prophets, teachers, bishops, elders. If you put the NT documents in chronological order, there was a developing ecclesiology. Today we might add another (unknown back then): grass-roots democratic ‘ownership’ of decision-making.

Another: how do people come to know God? In his magnum opus, Streams of Living Water, Richard Foster suggests there are six broad Hebrew-Christian answers: from the contemplative, holiness, charismatic, social justice, evangelical, and incarnational traditions. The devil’s job is make these ‘either-or!’

And have you noticed charismatic-flavored Generation X’ers tend to write Christian music that is predominantly ‘I-me-my-ish’? Half (or more) of the contents of the biblical Psalms and Prophets, which express negative emotions or a passion for social justice, don’t often find their way into modern Christian songs.

Why don’t we model our churches on ‘The Early Church’? Well, which one? Paul Minear offers 96 images for the church in the New Testament.[1] Raymond Brown distinguishes at least nine major ecclesiologies in Christianity’s first century of existence.[2]

[I read this today somewhere on the Web: “Well, spank my bottom! How absurdly simple!” I cried. “Quite so!” said Holmes, not a little nettled. “Every problem becomes very simple when it is explained to you.]

If only everything were simple!

P.S. An ABC-TV team interviewed me last week for a future Compass program on homosexuality and the Australian churches. ‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘Well, we can’t find anyone else on this topic who’s neither totally conservative nor totally liberal.’ Interesting…

1. Paul Minear, Images of the Church in the New Testament, Westminster, 1960

2. Raymond Edward Brown, John P. Meier, Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity, Paulist Press, January 1983. Raymond Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind, Paulist, 1984.

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher