That is not the New Testament message. It never was

There is nothing in scripture that remotely reflects your belief that Jesus came into the world to suggest that, "I am God....and so are you."

Doesn't have to be. I treasure the Bible because it introduced and still sustains my spiritual practice. But the Bible does not have to authorize my understanding of Jesus. Nor do I have any desire to cite the Bible as the basis for what I've come to understand about Jesus.

In fact this is the starting point of all heresy as revealed in the opening chapters of Genesis in the story of Adam and Eve.

Heresy only exists when divergency from orthodoxy is considered a crime. The Genesis story is not a recording of a literal event. It is a beautiful Hebrew hymn and the more important knowledge from Genesis is why did the writers express Genesis in that manner?

Equating yourself with Jesus and God is the ultimate end of your kind of folly.

Equating your own interpretation of the Bible as truth and mine as myth is an even more precarious kind of folly. Most myth is in reality another way of expressing truth.

You would place your ideas, beliefs, and teachings on the same level of importance as those of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Thomas Jefferson declared that he himself was Christian in the only way he believed Jesus wanted believers to be Christian. I personally believe that the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God and that humans also have the same status is an incredibly powerful and empowering message.

Restricting Jesus' divinity to a heavenly attribute truly diminishes and reduces spiritual power in being mortal. Extending Jesus' divinity into his actual mortal life extends the resurrection and all implied in a wonderful manner. You can phrase the belief in whatever educated format that suites you, but your teachings do not reflect the New Testament message that Jesus came into the world to save us from our true inner nature of rebellion.

That is not the New Testament message. It never was. That is why the issue of historical redaction of the scriptures to support a politically religious or religously political position is important. So long as we believe that your declaration is THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE message from the New Testament, we remain in spiritual bondage to orthodoxy at the cost of sustained spiritual ignorance.

"Teachings" are nothing more than expressed opinions that others must validate for themselves. You youself have applied this process to my writings and have differed with my opinions. If I were you I would not then label my opinions "teachings." You imply a kind of validation in doing so. Stick to words like heresy. That will get the knee-jerk reaction you want from spiritual innocents who might encounter these writings.

I disagree that our true inner nature is rebellion. Once again, in my opinion, the construct of a Judgmental God requiring obedience and commanding an army of humans against a supernatural evil is a false one. My experience of God is best described by the image of the Father of the Prodigal Son.

Your message is perhaps the most extreme form of heresy available today because it is given apparently within a 'Christian' context. It belongs within the Unitarian religious construct, imo. At least in those churches, there is not the pretence of a conflicting belief in the truthfulness of the story of Jesus.

I confess that what I believe about Jesus the Man who became Jesus the Christ conflicts with that story of Jesus constructed and supported by Biblical literalists - the same literalists who behave in a manner that suggests that if their interpretation is wrong, all is lost.

The Episcopal Liturgy includes the Nicene Creed with which I strongly disagree. I propose the Nicene Creed as the traditional Jesus story in synopsis form as interpreted by biblical literalists. And yet, based on my own personal experience with God and Jesus, I can easily relate the essentials of the Nicene Creed to Jesus' compassionate mortal message.

The thrust seems to be that if my views do not reflect the "approved" interpretation of the New Testament, I should perhaps cease publishing my opinions rather than run around saying what I think as an intellectual and spiritual danger to minds too young to have yet completed their Christian literalist programming?

I must be a literalist myself ... I assume that fathers all ought to act like the Father of the Prodigal Son

Arthur, are you talking about "fundamentalists" or "literalists"? Isn't it literally impossible to be a true literalist?

Oh man ..... I've always had an aversion to labels and the on-going plague on me was the original reference to fundamentalists and literalists I made in my earliest posts.

Most of what get's my dander up is the use of Biblical verses in a literalistic "one true and absolutely restricted meaning" upon which the only agreement is found within a particular group.

But you know ... I must be a literalist myself since my disagreement with others is founded in the same thing. For example, I assume that fathers all ought to act like the Father of the Prodigal Son.

I guess the bottom line has to do with additional assumptions, such as the one I infer which is that God agrees with my assessment of the Prodigal's father.

So, I don't know ... maybe I speak of "rigid, inflexible, literal fundamental Biblical evangelical theological absolutists." (Now I need to go wash my mouth out with soap.)

Don't answer that! God doesn't make phone calls to individuals

Love is the reason for communion between God and humanity. The love is limitless, boundless, freely expressed and available for us to perceive as we endeavor.

If I get a daily phone call from God and a biblicist is sitting at my table drinking coffee with me when the phone rings, what can he say?

"Don't answer that. God doesn't make phone calls to individuals. Trust me!!"

??

By the way, what is your opinion on God demanding that Hosea break the Mosaic law, and marry a woman who was a harlot? What are your thoughts on that?

My opinion?

Well, I suppose it's an eye-brow raiser in a debate between two literalists trying to reconcile its meaning with a God who cannot tolerate sin with any degree of allowance.

Why I believe the bible is not the inerrant and absolute word of God written by men through his inspiration

(1) My study of how the books of the Bible were written, the process of inclusion and exclusion of specific books in both the Old and Testaments reflect the actions of mere mortals endeavoring to express their understanding and perception of God.

For example, a short bit of research will lead to experts on Hebrew writing forms that will illustrate that Genesis in its phrased and structural form is in fact a hymn to God and not a literal recitation of the specific acts of God.

Prophetic books written by "prophets" were not issued compiled singly or as a collection with a forward by God declaring the innerant definition of what was written. Were that true, those writings would not contain warnings and statement replete with explanations of choices to be made with proposals of alternative outcomes at the hands of God.

That's why, for example, Abraham could talk God into backing down on destruction of a city by continually lowering the number of righteous men to be found there.

Books left out of both the O.T. and N.T. reflect a rejection of writings not in harmony with specific partisan theological priorities.

The quality of some of those rejected writings is tremendous and nowhere will you find any writing by any of the early fathers that defends what was included and what was excluded without a justification of the growing Catholic orthodoxy.

(2) After having come to love scripture under the controlling tutelage and programming of one specific church, it was my on-going bible study which began to illuminate conflicts in doctrines and other absolutes adamantly proclaimed by that specific church as innerant and divine. Followed by encountering the same transparent inconsistencies in all Christian churches.

(3) The inclusion of historical knowledge as to the politics, economy and social evolution surrounding the rise of the Catholic Christianity which survived Roman persecution, endured Roman domination and ultimately outlive the Roman Empire itself - only to fall into the same power traps that empires fall into.

Subsequently the vicars of Christ tacitly endorsed, encouraged and ordered persecutions of Christian heretics in exactly the same arbitrary manner as their earlier Roman Persecutors who had influenced not only what N.T. books were included and why, but who got labeled heretics and who did not. All this long after the time of the historical Hebrews.

And as I have written elsewhere, the Protestant Reformation - in which protestors literally yanked the bible from out of Cathlicisms controlling hands and read it for themselves - formed alternatives to Catholicism founded mostly on the same evolved doctrines that came into being under Catholicism. They reformed but insisted on retaining an acceptance of what the Catholics had told them the bible was - in effect accepting the lie that a polluted and redacted scripture was in fact the inerrant WORD of God not to be interpreted in any other "private" way.

These are spiritual, intellectual and academic reasons for my not accepting the bible as an inerrant word of God that somehow survived all the tampering, manipulation and redaction of scripture and somehow came through millenia unscathed.

That the bible contains the mind of God as conveyed spiritually through a reading of scripture with a sincere heart and real intent is what matters to me.

That the bible contains the not-to-be-tampered-with and traditional commonly and privately accepted interpretations that brook no deviance is not something I believe.

Nor do I believe God expects me to use the bible in such a limited fashion.

a religious addict with an addiction to the book

I said it started out with God speaking to the Patriarchs, but as things went on, the written word was replacing that system - Yoday we have the written word, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

I would also say that all who have that view obviously ignore, refuse to admit or are ignorant that such a view is based on a monstrous assumption. And it is only assumption ... an assumption I refuse to make because in my meager life efforts, I have encountered no proof that the assumption is valid.

I have encountered proof that valuable spiritual content in all scriptures of all spiritual paths are confirmable with the guidance of a holy spirit - but not in any formulaic or dogmatic way.

A willful refusal to step outside the single book is, as I have stated many times before, an example of lazy literalist thinking.

It comes down to being a religious addict with an addiction to the book.

As a professional social worker, I cannot avoid constant interaction with addicts of all kinds. Conversations with drug and alcohol addicts about their addictive behavior is exactly the same as conversations with bible addicts.

Biblical idolatry today is the same as the scriptural idolatry state-of-affairs with which Jesus had to deal.

I Do take that passage literal

But, posing the question in a way that makes one's beliefs about the Bible a matter of truth creates a narrow version of the Bible and its value.

Portraying disagreement that the bible is inerrant as a desire to reject and declare the bible void is a debating tactic designed to "win" the argument.

What of deductive reasoning, deep thought and being lead by the Spirit?

These are the starting points and with a sincere desire for understanding, one can exercise Paul's gifts - given by the spirit- of the word of wisdom and the word of knowledge.

I view the bible as an opportunity for a conversation with God. If I lack a willingness or am afraid to use deductive reasoning, deep thought and to ask the spirit to lead me; if I'm looking merely for absolute commandments with no desire other than a formula, I'm interrupting God's conversation with me and limiting Him to the literality of a verse.

It has been said by some that God needs no defenders and that the idea that God does not have to justify Himself is unreasonable ... that it is rude, faithless and blashpemy to ask God to justify or clarify something in the bible or something someone has said that God has commanded.

But I say that this whole notion is only a notion, that God is approachable - willing, in fact - to give more to all who will ask, seek and knock.

I Do take that passage literal.

"Ask and it shall be given Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you."

By taking that passage literal, I discover that it's okay with God if I approach scripture with deductive reasoning, deep thought and the knowledge that I'm being led by the spirit.