![\"\"](\"https:\/\/orderofcenturions.org\/documents\/sermon_images\/peter_cornelius_trevisani.jpg\")
<\/a>The sermon at my church this Sunday was about Cornelius in Acts 10<\/a>. In the story, Peter sees a vision in which he is told to kill and eat all sorts of things that were prohibited by the Jewish Law. Peter understandably refuses to eat such unclean things, only to be told by the heavenly voice that he should not call unclean what God has cleansed. Eventually he comes to understand this as a point about God cleansing not only prohibited foods but even excluded people.<\/p>\nNot long ago I posted about Scripture\u2019s testimony regarding its own insufficiency<\/a>. In Acts 10 we seem to have the Bible telling its readers to be prepared to set the Scripture\u2019s own teachings aside in response to new revelation. That is, ultimately, what we find in early Christianity: a movement whose spiritual experiences were so powerful, and so clearly had spread even to Gentiles, that some (but not all) of its members were willing to set aside stipulations of Scripture about circumcision, food and Gentiles, so as to incorporate the Gentiles into the people of God.<\/p>\n This aspect of the New Testament and early Christianity simply cannot be fit within the framework of a supposedly inerrant Bible with an allegedly uniform, monolithic teaching. It can<\/em> fit within a view of Scripture as witness to God\u2019s progressive revelation<\/em>.<\/p>\n Conservative<\/a> Christians often claim to be the most faithful interpreters of Scripture. But it seems to me that if we have ears to hear what the Spirit was saying to the churches down the ages, it will become clear that focusing on written words and using them to argue against what the Spirit is doing often led people to be on the \u201cwrong side\u201d as far as the Bible\u2019s own perspective is concerned. And part of the message of many parts of the Bible is a warning to learn from such mistakes of the past.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/15\/69795042_471709bc6f.jpg\")
<\/a>And here we reach the crux of the matter. Unless one artificially insists that God has ceased from revelation (why on earth or in heaven would God do that?!), then it is clear that the Bible should lead us to expect to have to set even more of it aside, precisely as we learn more about God. As God continues to pour out his Spirit on people previously excluded, we are called as Christians to continue the process of rethinking and setting aside. As we continue to study the Oldest Testament, what God \u201cwrote\u201d long before even the earliest source of the earliest writing in the Jewish Scriptures (I\u2019m referring here to the \u201cbook of nature<\/a>\u201c), we find that some things were revealed long before but, because we had yet to understand them, were not reflected in the Biblical writings. But just as Paul argued that the Law of Moses could not set aside the covenant with Abraham which pre-dated it<\/a>, so the Biblical texts cannot invalidate the \u201cScripture\u201d God \u201cwrote in stone\u201d much earlier than the tablets Moses supposedly brought down Mt. Sinai. If Moses, from a Christian perspective, could not trump Abraham, then why do some who supposedly accept Paul\u2019s point in Galatians 3 nonetheless allow Genesis 1 to trump what God wrote in the earth and the universe itself?<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.churchofreality.org\/images\/stupid.gif\")
<\/a>Nevertheless, I understand why it is attractive to be a religion of the book. Religion that is focused on spiritual experiences and prophetic figures is a very messy business, and we don\u2019t seem to ever know for sure which of the supposed divine spokespeople has really heard from God \u2013 if indeed any of them have heard more than anyone else. But the Bible does not offer itself as an antidote to such messiness. And at times, it points beyond itself and even undermines itself, so as to ensure that we are open to the messiness that is the way of living faith moving from the past through the present into the future.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7622297540113836091-5949770531990132078?l=exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com\")
<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"