Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Two things:

Intellectual, theological:
I was walking through B&N today, and, while browsing the religion section, I came across a copy of "Good As New," a modern paraphrase of the New Testament. Of course, it has all those problems that evangelicals will jump all over, like not being a direct translation, etc. However, what really jumped out at me was the fact that they excluded some books, such as Revelation, 2 Peter, and Titus, and included the gospel of Thomas. Now, upon realizing this, I first became angry. I mean, how can you exclude the book of Revelation from the NT? But, as I thought about it, I realized that this was, sort of, a result of the idea of Sola Scriptura. I mean, if you deny that Christians of the Early Church have any authority, or if you deny the authority of the Councils, then you have no basis to say "This book should be in the Bible, and this one shouldn't." I mean, what most evangelicals would say is that the early church all agreed that these books were written by the apostles and thus we can trust that they are reliable. Well, this is WRONG. There were a number of books that we now have included in our NT whose authenticity were highly debated, such as Revelation and James and 2Peter. On the other hand, if we are to use the argument given above, the available data seems to indicate that all the early Christians believed that worship should be done liturgically, so a lot of christians today are doing worship wrong...

I dunno, just some things to think about...

Emotional, spiritual:
(After writing all that I just wrote in the above one, I am tired and want to go to sleep, so this one won't be so long...)
Can one have assurance of salvation? My faith is weak, my doubts are many; my mind is weak, my questions are many; and God is Holy, and I am evil. I have a hard time believing that God loves me. I mean, I know that the Bible says God is love, but the question I have is what that "love" means. Is it at all like how I understand love?
I suppose that if one has the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, one can know that one is Christian. however, how does one know that one has the Spirit? B/c, if I look at the fruits of the Spirit, I don't know if I have love, I don't know what joy is, I don't know what peace is, I am not very patient, I am a mean jerk, I am evil, and I am selfish. Also, if one has the Spirit, one knows that the spirit guides him to understand the tings of God, but how can one know that he has the Spirit?
I fall in and out of love with God, in my struggles with sin. When I sin, I want to repentand be forgiven, but I don't know if I can honestly say I really want to turn from my sin.
To be honest, I need grace. But, God gives grace to the humble and opposes the proud, and I am full of pride. Will God have grace on me to help me through these things? I don't know.

I know there isn't much structure to what I just said, and I don't know how coherent I am. But, as for now, I am going to sleep. Good night, and may God be gracious and merciful to us all...

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Regarding the Bible you saw:

Academically, the Gospel of Thomas shouldn't be in there. See NT Wright's work on Gospel of Thomas. Very sound research. Academically, Revelation and others fit in frame, style, etc. Way better than Tommy boy.

11/30/2005 4:13 AM  

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