Thanks for your thoughtful comments. You touch on several themes in your comment here that are essential to what I am attempting to accomplish with this blog. I’ll mention just one theme here.

The entire history of the Christian church can be seen in its relationship to the dominant political power.

Christianity started as a splinter sect of Judaism, which was protected by Rome, then became a persecuted, unauthorized religious group when it was clear that the early church has broken away from Judaism, and then became the official religion of the Roman empire under Constantine, after 312 CE.

That was a dramatic change in the relationship of the church to the political power of the Roman Empire in less than three hundred years.

The relationship of the church to political power has only grown more complicated in the last 1700 years.

Kalinda Rose Stevenson

I’m amazed by how many people who profess to be Christians and “follow Jesus” and His teachings attend and obey institutional structures called churches that have no basis in New Testament teaching, and these people obey the commands from on high as if their lives depend on it. As I’m sure you know, the organized institutional church structure didn’t hit Christianity until Constantine politicized Christianity by making it the official state religion in his empire in the 4th Century A.D. Jesus didn’t teach a politicized structure; He (and the apostles after Him) taught close personal relationships along the line of a close extended family unit. So, I find claims of authority by what we in America commonly call “church” dubious, at best, and downright dangerous, at worst.

And, often, these people say they obey the authority of God or the authority of His Word as their highest authority.

My other comment has to do with those who say they place the ultimate authority in the Bible. Aside from issues about which translation or mis-translation they are reading (I’ve found people rarely go back to the Greek or Hebrew and dissect passages to word meanings and verb tenses, etc. to get a clearer understanding of what the passages simply says in the original manuscripts) and whether they have an accurate understanding of what the text says, I find very few people think about how they are to interpret this text. If the Bible is the Word (I assume they mean logos, as in John, chapter 1) of God, then they haven’t thought about the implications of this. Logos, as I’m sure you know, is intelligent thought as formed into words. But that doesn’t address the issue of context. If the Bible is the logos of God, a “lecture” by God or a conversation with us, we don’t have a face on which to see facial expressions or an auditory voice by which to hear vocal intonations that we can use to give context to what is written.

So, the question arises, how do we get that context so we understand what is written? “Word People” often can’t tell you.

I can tell you my belief, as a Christian, on how to get this interpretation (but I’ve written enough in this blog post, so I’ll save that for when and if I’m asked). I do think this interpreting is key to understanding what God is trying to communicate.

However, I am simply amazed (and, frankly, distraught) by how much “teaching” and “preaching” out there is simply based on a cursory reading of a text in English and, apparently, no attempt to get an understanding of what is being communicated except what they read into it from their worldview.

Which means, frankly, that they could read either a book by Karl Marx or by Ludwig von Mises (on opposite end of the spectrum on economic theory) and end up with the same conclusions and “teaching” based upon what they want to see.

And we wonder why there is no unity of belief on much of anything among those who profess Christ.

- John