Our job is to provide a safe environment for people to encounter Christ through the Scriptures , community, service and solidarity and to guard from inaccurate teaching but also the lack of teaching the full message of the Gospel so that people in the Church wouldn’t lead others people to self-destruction and selfishness. That doesn’t mean that we can’t lead people to know themselves, achieve self-realization and to become the themselves more and more – the person God created them to be. Instead our tradition and the presiding paradigm teaches that we are to deny self as both our identity and flesh rather than as the just the flesh - the selfish destructive person inside of us who we really aren’t as the Scripture has shown us in Romans 7.
Learning from others is something our tradition does poorly because we are too triumphalistic and think we don’t need to learn from other faiths or traditions because we’re on the right side of it all to begin with. I think this is one of the most arrogant and detrimental attitudes of our tradition and believe it to be very sinful and destructive, un-Biblical and un-Christ like. There are many reasons for that from my understanding. One is that every great religious idea that we found our tradition on especially and the great doctrines of our faith in Scripture – they’ve all been borrowed from other religions and philosophies and re-calibrated for our own use and understanding. We aren’t as original as we think we are.
How does this effect my view of Scripture? For myself Scripture is not truth – God is, Jesus is. Christ said it Himself - way/truth/life is a person, not a book or propostion and Scripture is an accommodation for us to reveal that truth - it is not in and of itself a crystallized truth - it is a truth giver, communicator and norm for truth, but it is not truth. It isn't a necessity for God to reveal Himself to us, it's his choice and He chooses to do so through different means - Scripture, experience, community, nature, sense and conviction, and these are all accommodations not necessities that God provides for us. God doesn’t have to accommodate anyone but He chooses to most of the time because of his love and as a result of the flip side of this conversation, it is possible that many can encounter Christ without Scripture and still know truth, live truth, preach truth, etc… The Bible doesn't have handcuffs on truth, it is just the best way to encounter it in its fullness and freedom but it doesn't at the same time lock all of humanity out from accessing "truth" if they don't have the Bible or have never read it.
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