antlers, it's funny. My idea of what a church should be drives you away.... and your idea of what a church should be drives me away.
Yep. We see things differently regarding this matter. That’s OK with me. People see things differently regarding politics, the economy, certainly religion, and pretty much anything else. To me, the church is most appealing...and ‘Christians’ are most appealing...when grace is most apparent. And Jesus extends grace to all...not just to “the saints”...but also to “the lost.”
Problem is that I’ve never found the latitude given in scripture for the Christian to view God as he pleases or chooses.
It’s telling (and sad) that someone/anyone who professes to be a Christian is completely dependent upon “scripture” to tell them what their own “view” of God is. There were tens of thousands of Christians who knew the God of the New Testament before there ever was a New Testament. They knew that God loved them, and what God had done for them, before a New Testament ever told them so. Some people choose to have a living vibrant relationship with a living resurrected Savior. Others prefer to choose a ‘relationship’ that is dictated to them by what’s between the covers of a book that didn’t even exist when Christianity began. Nor did it exist for the first 300 years of Christianity. Then in the 4th century when the Christian scriptures were bound together with the Hebrew scriptures to become ‘the Bible’...it was kept out of the hands of the people by the Church for another 1200 years. Christians have been without ‘the Bible’ for a whole lot longer than they’ve had it.
