In the beginning, God created skies and earth.
I hope my post today finds you well. Welcome back.
In 1517 Martin Luther wrote his 95 Thesis against abuses he saw in the Roman Catholic Church. He nailed them onto the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
It was a Protestant Declaration of Independence. Since we Baptists love our independence from the rest of y'all brothers and sisters, and from each other, I thought, just for fun, that I would write my own 95 Thesis. Below is the first twenty-six.
In 1517 Martin Luther wrote his 95 Thesis against abuses he saw in the Roman Catholic Church. He nailed them onto the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
It was a Protestant Declaration of Independence. Since we Baptists love our independence from the rest of y'all brothers and sisters, and from each other, I thought, just for fun, that I would write my own 95 Thesis. Below is the first twenty-six.
1. All Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ. They should love each other as family members.
2. The majority of Christians from loners to every imaginable denomination or cult are good, decent people. The ones who are not, who are mean and violent, are no different than the worst people in the world.
3. Mean and violent Christians are woefully misguided, yet God loves them.
4. Christians are commanded to love the worst people in the world.
5. Like a family all Christians argue among themselves.
6. To grow as a Christian is the responsibility of every individual.
7. To grow as a Christian means to grow perfect in love.
8. To grow as a Christian means to take the responsibility of one’s edification upon one self.
9. Modern Biblical scholarship is more honest and ongoing than dogmatic Biblical scholasticism. The latter perpetuates conclusions reached by less well equipped minds from the past.
10. It is useful for Christians to learn how the Bible was put together. It is crucial that Christians who are immersed in dogmatic Biblical scholasticism compare it to what modern Biblical scholarship has discovered.
11. All Christians should learn church history, the history of theology, and what other faiths believe in order to see how diverse and rich is the massive vault of Christian media and thought.
12. Christians who ignore Church History are doomed to repeat it. They will never enjoy the liberty of making up their own minds about the nature of God.
13. Just as no child’s relationship with a parent is exactly the same, no Christian’s relationship to God is the same. That includes perception as well.
14. Doctrine should be personal and celebrated among like minded Christians.
15. Arguments over doctrine are futile like arguments over astrology or poetry.
16. The study of doctrine is fascinating. Doctrine is Christian thought. Not all doctrines are created equal or sensible and some truly are more equal than others without being very sensible at all.
17. It is more important to love than to have so-called right doctrine.
18. The trinitarian doctrine is a wonderful symbol for relating God to the soul. It is not God’s physiological structure.
19. God is the ground of Being-itself, the power of being, the answer to the question of why there is something and not nothing.
20. Squeezing God into a trinity is like squeezing all the wool in the world into three thimbles.
21. Many Christians relate to God as a parent who is the underlying being of God, a son who is the logic of God, and a spirit who is the presence of God in our lives.
22. Orthodoxy is someone’s doctrinal presuppositions and statements that have been accepted by enough people willing to use power to enforce it.
23. When a doctrine has to be coerced, it is an idol and should be recognized as such.
24. Orthodoxy relies on literacy to survive. The fixedness of text makes orthodoxy possible for it creates the illusion of authority. Having an army to enforce it also helps.
25. Once orthodox concepts are written down, they can be questioned and eventually discarded. A text can be a two edged sword that turns upon itself when it is compared with other texts by new generations of scholars.
26. Often orthodoxy is based on absurd reasoning. For example, the father of distinguishing between heresy and orthodoxy, Irenaeus, claimed there should be four gospels because there are four winds. Apparently, Irenaeus did not know about pressure gradient force.
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