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Mar. 24th, 2003 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kayreI actually got my Bible study class thinking tonight.... maybe even thinking about more than how to get me to shut up!
First was when we somehow started discussing infant baptism vs. believer’s baptism.... I managed to present a few of the intolerable moral dilemmas that result if you assume one or the other is Right. For example, if all the baptized, but only the baptized, get into heaven... will God accept a hoary old sinner whose parents put him through a socially correct but personally meaningless baptism, but reject a dead Baptist child who hadn’t yet professed faith and subsequently been baptized? Then pointed out a few bits of tricky reasoning that different ministers have used to get around church ‘laws,’ and asked if we really believed God was less willing or able to bend the ‘law’ in order to grant grace-- assuming the laws are valid in the first place.
Later, we were comparing the four gospel versions of the resurrection, and I hammered home every inconsistency-- many are minor, but a few are big enough to be disturbing. (Only Matthew remembered the earthquake??) Folk started into the “four different writers with different viewpoints, different memories, etc.” bit... so I pointed out that they were assuming purely human writing, and asked if they accepted the rest of the Bible on those same terms. There was one startled “Oh!” and a fairly long silence, then we moved on... but I had the sense that a few of them will come back to that question and ponder it.
Poor people, I was much more forceful than usual... pent-up frustrations after a committee meeting during which we spent 40 minutes discussing how to build shelves (sheesh!).
First was when we somehow started discussing infant baptism vs. believer’s baptism.... I managed to present a few of the intolerable moral dilemmas that result if you assume one or the other is Right. For example, if all the baptized, but only the baptized, get into heaven... will God accept a hoary old sinner whose parents put him through a socially correct but personally meaningless baptism, but reject a dead Baptist child who hadn’t yet professed faith and subsequently been baptized? Then pointed out a few bits of tricky reasoning that different ministers have used to get around church ‘laws,’ and asked if we really believed God was less willing or able to bend the ‘law’ in order to grant grace-- assuming the laws are valid in the first place.
Later, we were comparing the four gospel versions of the resurrection, and I hammered home every inconsistency-- many are minor, but a few are big enough to be disturbing. (Only Matthew remembered the earthquake??) Folk started into the “four different writers with different viewpoints, different memories, etc.” bit... so I pointed out that they were assuming purely human writing, and asked if they accepted the rest of the Bible on those same terms. There was one startled “Oh!” and a fairly long silence, then we moved on... but I had the sense that a few of them will come back to that question and ponder it.
Poor people, I was much more forceful than usual... pent-up frustrations after a committee meeting during which we spent 40 minutes discussing how to build shelves (sheesh!).
