Don

I used to think there was ONE RIGHT WAY to interpret each verse in the Bible, but more and more I see there are “clouds” of various ways to understand various verses and a believer is to give grace to another with both are in the cloud but not the same.  The other way to address this would be via a quasi-Magisterium and I do not want to go there, that cure seems worse than the disease.

Everyone SHOULD have a current understanding and should be teachable, but if something does not convince them, then it would be bad faith to pretend it did.  We can try to show the non-egals how to understand the Bible in a egal way, but in the final analysis, it is their choice how they understand the Bible, we cannot FORCE them to see it our way or vice versa.  We are left with trying to convince others and they the same.

I am convinced there are believers that do not believe the same as I do about the milk things of the faith in Hebrews 5; BUT I am still to treat them as believers.  How MUCH MORE for the things that are beyond the milk stage.

One way to see my point is that God COULD have spelled things out step by step.  Instead of ONLY having the woman’s quote God could have written words showing how God DID say what the woman said he did and then have her say them and it all fits together, as we might wish.  But for whatever reason God did not do that.  In my words, there are gaps in the account about things we might wish to know; and how one fills in the gaps tells others about oneself, not necessarily about God or what the Bible says or does not say.

We ARE supposed to use our mind to understand the Bible and make connections and use logic, etc.  And if my words do not convince you, nor your words mine, we each go in peace, I see this as a very small piece of the puzzle, there are much bigger fish to fry.

I remember when a Christian counselor told me that everyone has a right to be wrong.  One of my temptations is to try to get everyone to agree with me-me-me since I am right-right-right and I end up being unloving.  And God rebuked me, informing me that love was more important than being right.  (That is, getting the other to agree with me or at least coming to a common understanding.)

On Jonah, obviously until God acts, such statements as Jonah’s are warnings.  We know this from the nature of God.  Yes, Jonah did not want Ninevah to repent, so he went minimalist with his prophecy.

On Mark, it is important to see truncation as a possibility in Hebrew thinking as Mark and Luke have no exception clause for divorce, while Matthew does; this means some try to suppress the exception clause to reconcile the verses, which is exactly the wrong way to do it, but they are trying to be faithful to the text.  Another way to look at the possibility of truncation is that Hebrews have a worldview that fills in the “gaps” in a teaching based on the Bible.  When a verse might appear to show an unmerciful God, they know they are not to see it that way.  Skeptics have a field day with the gaps, pronouncing it all nonsense and worse.

On the woman, the term “tree in the middle of the garden” is ambiguous, as there were 2 trees there.  So while it is not exactly wrong, it is also unclear.