Thoughtful Christians must reject teachings by some in the church that exalt Scripture to the point of making an idol of its various writings. That goes, for example, for the scriptural writings about sexuality, which are in the limelight again with the opening of the Lambeth Conference.
The various scriptural writings might indeed have been God-inspired.* They can indeed be useful for teaching, correction, etc. (see 1 Tim. 3.16). And for the sake of argument, let's assume that those writings were a complete and totally-undistorted presentation of what God had to say to us at the time.
We can't rule out that God might have something different to say to us now, at a later stage in our development as a species. When my son was younger, he would sometimes ask if he could have a glass of wine with dinner. My response was no. Now that he’s an adult, when he's home from college I’m the one who offers him a glass.
For all we know, God might well be doing something similar. Anyone who presumes to claim otherwise with (false) certainty would seem to be setting himself above God.
Time and change were created by God as much as anything else. Given the dramatic changes of the past 2,000 years, it's certainly conceivable that God might have different instructions for us now than he did back then.
It's breathtaking that some traditionalists seem to think otherwise — that God had exactly one chance to say everything he was ever going to have to say to us, and therefore what he caused to be said in Scripture was “it,” once and for all.
They blaspheme against the Holy Spirit who deny even the possibility that God might say something different to us now. It might happen to be true that God would never change what he putatively said before. But categorically declaring that to be the case is way, WAY above our pay grade.
Paul had the right advice in 1 Thess. 5.20-21: Don’t despise those who claim to be inspired by the Spirit — test everything, and keep that which proves to be good.
* There's no reason reason to assume Scripture was any more God-inspired than, say, Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s special- and general-relativity papers. If anything, Newton's and Einstein's writings arguably had an additional divine credential: they weren't merely creatures of their authors' creativity, they were testable against the actual reality that God wrought (cf. Deut. 18.20-22).
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whell i was wondering if cursing the holyspirit is the same thing as blasphemy of the holyspirit a sin that God wont ever forgive?
Posted by: lincoln | November 11, 2008 at 10:26 AM