The need for teachers arises from pits, abysses, and gulfs in our ability to understand now even those things that were clear and simple then.
� We don't know the concepts that were every-day, down-home, red-neck, "country" clear when Jesus spoke them and the others wrote them to His followers.
� We don't know the significance of those concepts in the cultures that all those folks came from.
� We don't even know the meanings of some of the English words used in the early translations, which often continue to be used without explication in the later translations.
In those days, for example, let meant "hinder," among other meanings that were opposite our general meaning of let today (" ... To omit or forbear to do something. ... To desist, forbear" � Oxford English Dictionary).
How many of us can define, say, faith, without (a) parroting some hazy Bible verse or (b) funbling with a hazy personal guess? The little boy who "defined" faith as "believing what you know ain't so" nailed it in terms of the concept that's so often imparted by most doctrine, which is far from what the original word pistis meant in Jesus's time.
� We don't all understand the words that aren't there, of course � the words that "translators" have substituted for literal translations for some unscriptural reasons. The English versions of the New Testament in particular are pock-marked with these usurpative insertions.
� Many among us don't understand even modern English as well as we all should. Much that is difficult to understand from unguided private reading (especially fragmentary reading that ignores context) becomes crystal-clear when someone who knows points it out.
� We don't know the things of the spirit and the Holy Spirit well enough to cleave to them whenever things of the soul and body pull at our thoughts, motives, desires, tastes, opinions, and loyalties, in opposing directions.
Have Christian leaders been letting the rest of us down for centuries? Yes � by both (a) feeding us false or weak dilutions of the Bible's meanings and (b) failing to make its concepts as clear to us as they could have and should have been doing. But then, concentrating on what an evangelist friend of mine (former Baptist pastor) identified as the primary Three Bs of their concern ("buildings, budgets, and bodies"), they've long had other fish to fry.
Many of us teach � some things right, some things wrong. Few among us are teachers whom the Holy Spirit has assigned the role.
The teacher's role is in large part just sweeping the d�br�s out of our understanding.
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