Mark

Hi all

As you are all aware i have been slow in response and the comments here seem to reflect that i am avoiding answering questions, thus my view is terrible, i treat women unfairly.

Due to this what i would like to do is slowly go back over the 10 questions and post the original questions and all the responses thus far. I will do 1 question at a time and answer as succinctly and accurately as possible. If others dont want me to do this let me know, otherwise i will concentrate on those questions. Please be aware that i have always tried to be concise and answer to the best of my abiblity without simply cutting and pasting every question ever asked- i simply don’t have the time to do such things. If this has appeared as evasive i apologise, but please don’t read into my responses or opinions from what is not said. I aprecaite gengwell’s understanding on this issue.

Quickly i just wanna answer Kay’s last comments regarding church fathers. INdeed they are fallible and got many things wrongs, as we all do now aswell. However they are the closest people we have to the NT times who would best understand language, culture, exegesis than we can ever do this far from Christ- that is why there imput is invaluable. To be accurate historically we need a good understanding of history. They give us insight into early theological crisis, early ministry formation, interpretation of scripture, language difficulties and ultimately how the church began and grew through the early centuries of persecution. And not only that they show us what was ‘orthodox’ christianity in those years.

The further we are from the culture of the NT and indeed the OT the harder it is to understand the culture. The only downfall in my opinion about their writings, is often we don’t have the writings of those who were not ‘orthodox’ e.g Arius because often their works were burnt or lost once condemned, so we have to reconstruct the early ‘heresies’ from what is written within the orthodox… the old ‘history is always written by the winners’ debarkle.

I will be back over the next few days with my re-posting of question 1