(Note: This post is an edited version of one of my responses in an ongoing conversation with a reader. Click here to see the original version within its thread.)
Hi Ben,
Thanks for sticking with the conversation.
I wish I could run a cable from my brain to yours and upload not just the answers to your specific questions, but the grand picture in which those answers become clear. Without that big picture, the details make no sense. It’s like examining a newspaper photo with a magnifying glass. All you see are isolated blotches of light and dark. But when you pull back, a coherent picture emerges. All those little dots suddenly make sense, even while receding from specific notice.
Alas, technology has not yet achieved brain dump functionality, and I lack Spock’s mind melding capabilities. I therefore must stick with these awkward and time-consuming words in communicating these things to you.
In this conversation you have presented many grainy details of specific verses where Paul says this and that. And while not avoiding the graininess of particularity (hence the wordiness of my previous replies), I have also attempted to pull back and show you the picture as a whole, so that those dots of Scripture resolve into a coherent picture. That picture is not the one contemporary Christianity sees, because contemporary Christianity is still using a magnifying glass and missing the big picture.
In this reply I’ll pan out from the graininess to look at the big picture, without which the details of what I have said to you about particular Bible verses will make no sense.
For more on Jesus, Paul, and the changed world, please click here to read on.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 