Are we following the wrong guide?

I've been reading and studying lately and doing a lot of cross examination of my own beliefs and spiritual understanding. Without retelling my background and only saying I am now on the back slope of my 63^rd year and would hope that anyone who reads my blogs will not regard my positions of faith haphazardly.

I chafe at Christians who put their spiritual guidance and destiny into an hour or so on Sunday mornings. In fact, I doubt the authenticity of such. It is my firm position that one's spiritual well being cannot be maintained using external stimulus. I am convinced that a person's intimacy with God is fully dependent on their own individual two way communication with God.

That is not to belittle church attendance, I am a strong advocate of faithful and consistent church attendance and involvement. But it alone can not support spirituality.

I was in the 8^th grade when I encountered the first conflicts between what I was being taught in the home and in church and what I could see and hold in the world around me. I readily confess that seeing and holding the world around does require some enlightenment and training. Just as looking at schematic or blueprint requires training to “see” the circuitry or piping the schematic represents or the structure the blueprint describes, so looking at the world around one's self requires some education on what one is really seeing.

The best example of this to me, and one of the most amazing things to observe, is a road cut in a mountain range. I easily and often see in my mind's eye a certain very high, 340 feet high actually, road cut in Maryland in the Allegheny mountains. This road cut is on the north side of Route 40 and is absolutely spectacular. Quoting Wikipedia verbatim:

“Sideling Hill is a syncline mountain, in a region of downward-folded (synclinal) rock strata between two upfolded anticlines. The ridge is capped by an erosion-resistant conglomerate and sandstone of Mississippian (early Carboniferous) geologic age, the Purslane Sandstone of the Pocono Formation. The ridge's slopes are formed of much more easily eroded kinds of rock, including the Devonian-Mississippian Rockwell Formation, with long, narrow valleys paralleling the ridge on either side.”

Now if some of that verbiage gives you pause then for you to understand what you see when you view Sideling Hill you need a little education. I remember specifically the first time I really took notice of Sideling Hill. I was traveling from Maryland to West Virginia and had a few years earlier finished my college days where I had principally studied geology.

I nearly drove off the road looking at this awesome road cut. It was spectacular. And as I stared at it and tried to drive (you approach the road cut for at least ¾ of a mile on either side) I saw many features that I recognized from my studies. I know for sure I passed that road cut a number of times before, but they were all before I had taken a full regimen of geology courses. I was just this time seeing the road cut through educated eyes. What a difference.

And while my geological education came later in life, I was learning things in the 8^th grade that allowed me to see things in plant, animal and soil life cycles that my Christian training was not addressing. Thus began a life long interest and passion in anthropology, geology, cosmology and evolution. And as I began to see more and more evidence of things around me concerning these sciences I began diligently trying to mesh them with theology.

Happily, I have never had a problem reconciling each with the other. Many people have had a problem with me, however. I have been set aside by family and some friends because of my views. Not as many friends as family, I will say. You can pick your friends using some judgment but sometimes don't have that luxury with family.

All of that said, the last several months I have been spending much time, often many hours at night, such as tonight, researching ancient manuscripts by way of books and articles written by very bright textual critics (not critics as in critical of but critics as in critical examiners) who examine older manuscripts for errors resulting from a host of circumstances.

I am not going to go into the multiple reasons the manuscripts were changed, if you don't believe me you will need to educate yourself and that will involve much time on your part. Suffice it to remind the reader that any written document was copied by hand until the invention of movable type. The first known movable type system was developed in China around 1040. Gutenberg introduced his movable type in 1450. So for all of man's history of writing copies before that time were made by hand.

Even the introduction of movable type didn't free the copy process from copy error. The type had to be set by hand. Only with the very lately invented extremely accurate scanning and transmitting of information has copying begun to take on any semblance of presumed accuracy.

Learning to “see” textual errors in manuscripts also takes extraordinary skills developed through education, training and experience. Since I have not gone that route, and certainly don't see myself as having the time, I rely on reputable scholars to find, examine and publish problems in scriptural documentation. Then I can learn from their commitment to the investigation. If you are interested, I can supply you with a number of highly regarded textual critics who have published volumes of works describing the errors and problems contained within every modern translation of the scriptures.

Now for the kicker. Everything I've said to this point is only the prelude to what I really want to address.

What I want to say with certainly for anyone reading this is that I have discovered the real guide to spiritual living. Perhaps I have come upon it much later than you, but from what I observe around me, very few, if any, of the Christian community understand this concept. If they did, there would be no mention of the Bible as inerrant or in the words of most, “God's ordained words.”

Here is what I know now. The Holy Spirit is our guide, not the printed words in the bible. The Bible is used to dictate everything from how people come to God, to how people should dress, to where they should go and the list is endless with fundamentalists and realists. And the scary part is that a lot of people proclaiming what the Bible means in our lives aren't equipped to understand it.

Yes the Bible is a wonderful tool. And yes we can find instruction, comfort and guidance within it's pages. But it is not the final word. The Holy Spirit is the final word. The Holy Spirit is instantly accessible and omnipresent.

The Bible that has been passed down to us was written by people. The Bible that has been passed down to us has been copied thousands of times by people. Many, perhaps most of the copiers of the ancient documents were not literate. They were trained to simply copy an image. You see the letter, and you copy the letter.

Complicating the process is the fact that some of the earlier languages, especially Greek in it's several variants, did not use spaces between words. And much of the Greek was written in all upper case letters. Even if the scribe executing the copy was literate, he would have to be extremely familiar with not only the language but the context and the environment that the image he was copying was written in. If certain concepts and ideas were not familiar to a scribe, he may mistake a word as being incorrect or misspelled and alter it for clarity.

Many places in the four Gospels accounts of events were altered by scribes to “align” them to each other, in spite of the fact that many events remain with discordant descriptions between the gospel authors.

People claim, and the Bible itself claims, that all of the words were inspired by God. I do not contest that at all. I am very suspect of the idea that the very words recorded were God's actual words to the author. I certainly believe God impressed ideas and concepts, laws and guidelines on the author's mind in the region of the brain that facilitates what religion frequently calls the heart. But the fleshing out into structured current language of the day was done by the author within the limitations the author understood at the time.

Every writer that ever lived wrote from the recesses of their mind, their heart if you want to use that simile, but their words were influenced by thousands if not millions of circumstantial and environmental influences they had accumulated their entire lives and were currently experiencing. No one can write what they can not conceptualize.

For those who ascribe to KJV only, get real. You aren't thinking through the process. If God wanted His Words recorded for all time don't you believe He would have made provision for the preservation of them? If that had been done we would not be able to back track through the manuscripts and find so many variations.

I have of late come to the very disconcerting realization that many Christians worship their translation of scripture more than they worship the creator of all things. The Bible, with all it's amazing power and wonder, is still just part of creation. In areas that are problematic and controversial the Holy Spirit takes care them.

Please get over the idea that one Bible is superior to all others. They are all useful and beneficial if treated with due respect and not elevated to unjustifiable esteem. Only the trinity is worthy of highest esteem.