dseusy wrote:Any suggestions?
Thank you for asking. I have several.
First, I appreciate your humility. One who is humble is both a better student, and a better teacher.
I want to (in the most loving way possible) cause a deep inquiry of why we do what we do which I hope ends in people being spurred to draw nearer to God with confidence in His Son, instead of the confidence which comes from ourselves.
(1) I don't know most here outside of the forum, but my impression is that most of the active participants have been on the road of deep inquiry for some time. There are many other Christian forums where there's not the spiritual maturity and openness to God that's here. While we all need encouragement and challenge from time to time, your efforts toward this particular kind of encouragement and challenge might be more profitable where spiritual maturity is more lacking. Maybe you'd find it helpful to think of this forum as a place to be encouraged and challenged yourself through fellowship with equals, rather than as a mission field of sorts.
Jesus asked questions and elicited responses to trigger truth in love... {chomp} I was referring to the tactic, not the content.
(2) It's not possible to separate the tactic from the content. Jesus used different approaches with different people; one approach might be appropriate and profitable for one target audience, and inappropriate and counterproductive for another.
(3) When you talk about grammar and the meanings of words, while discounting the well-established knowledge of those things as unspiritual and worthless and substituting your own meanings, you're not going to score a lot of points with those who are more knowledgeable, or in the habit of using reference materials. This is what Michelle meant by anti-intellectualism; it's counterproductive at best, and likely to be dangerous -- it's difficult or impossible to avoid being misled when you reject the objective standard. A lot of good people have fallen for a lot of really wild ideas that they think are straight from the Bible, simply because they failed to pay attention to readily available knowledge, when they should've known better.
