The contention is that the letters to the churches in the Revelation of Jesus Christ should be read in only one way with one intended purpose. If read in that way, the contender states, then the rest of the book should be read that way.
I will deal with the first charge by examining if the letters in Revelation 2-3 have only one purpose for one audience.
Tags: letters, revelation
Posted in eschatology, scripture, study | Comments (0)
On the third post on Doctrine for Everybody, we noted that the revelation of God operates in certain spheres and modes within those spheres. We saw that God has spoken explicitly is in the Person of His Son, the Prophets, the Apostles, and finally recorded in Scripture.
But what Scripture? There are plenty of holy books: the Qu’Ran, the Book of Mormon, The Vedas, the writings of Guru Granth Sahib, the extra books dubbed canonical by The Roman Catholic Church and the general consensus of the Eastern Orthodox Church. After all—say some as if proving a point—it’s not like God ever said that these books are not Scripture!
Tags: Canon, doctrine for everybody, old testament, revelation
Posted in scripture | Comments (1)
On the second post on Doctrine for Everybody, we noted that the Church is to believe and teach what someone with Authority tells them to believe and teach—and that someone wasn’t a board of directors! Authority wasn’t derived from within the Church or from the collective body of the Church, but directly from God. Only God is the one who reveals to the Church what she is to believe and teach. In this post I want to discuss how God’s revelation operates.
Tags: broad revelation, doctrine, doctrine for everybody, general, narrow revelation, revelation, special
Posted in study | Comments (1)
On the first post of Doctrine for Everybody, I gave a definition of Doctrine—(1) What the church believes and (2) what the Church teaches. But it generates a real question about how the Church even gets to that point. I mean, does the Church believe and teach such and such because the Church made it up? Or maybe the Church believes this-or-that because of some random accident? Even better, the Church teaches this bric-a-brac because they voted (and the majority won by a slim margin!)?
These are all false; they don’t even work in the real world.
Tags: doctrine, revelation
Posted in apologetics, history | Comments (1)
