Coming prepared for class

In Paul’s epistles, he sets up the model for what the true church is to be about; a classroom for the authoritative communication of sound doctrine.

With the completion of the Bible, there was no longer need for just one or two people in an assembly to do all the communicating because every Believer suddenly had the enablement on his/her own through their own personal copy of the written Word of God.

“It’s not the preaching skills; it’s the doctrine done God’s way—Paul’s way,” says Jordan.  “There’s a great word you ought to learn. It’s the Latin word habitus. It means ‘the orientation of the soul for the purpose of acquiring wisdom.’ You see the word habit in there? There are things that you learn and there are ways to learn wisdom; the Pauline edification.

“Habitus is to provide a structure for people to acquire to orient their soul so they have wisdom that they can go out and walk when the rule book runs out.

 

"That’s what the local church was; it was a classroom. Not just didactically, but in the life—trying to produce the habits of godliness in life. And that’s what Paul established and that’s what was there when Paul set up his model.

*****

"When Paul informs in his last written epistle (II Timothy) that 'all they which are in Asia be turned away from me,' he’s saying, 'They’ve turned away from me; they’re not following what I taught.'

“Before the Apostle Paul is even off the scene, what happens to his model? Well, it gets corrupted. It doesn’t cease to exist because there are people who still follow it. But it gets to be corrupted.

*****

“It was during the Enlightenment period that the model became: ‘We’re going to find the truth and it’s going to be one unit. We’re going to develop one perfect body of knowledge that everybody can agree to and science is what’s going to help us do that because we believe all knowledge is a unit.’

“That’s why theology was the queen of the sciences in the Enlightenment. They believed science would allow them to produce this general encyclopedia with all this knowledge united together, which would then allow them to produce a perfect man, a perfect society, and this is where the universities began.

“A university is a collection of colleges. Now when you got that idea, what’s going to happen? It’s gonna fail. Can you come to one perfect man, one perfect knowledge? No. The only place you can find that is where?

“This fails, so what follows is Post-Modernism, which says there is no perfect knowledge. It says, ‘We tried to find it and couldn’t, and the failure to obtain to a unity of knowledge means there isn’t any perfect knowledge. There can’t be one perfect knowledge. There can’t be what’s called one meta-narrative. There can’t be one narrative that explains everything.’

“Now, doesn’t Genesis 3 explain things? ‘Well, it can’t be that simple . . .’ So you have what’s called multi-culturalism, which is what naturally comes out of all that. It says, ‘Everybody’s story is as equally good as the other guy’s story because there is not one true over-arching truth.’

“Everything is fragmented so you have this endless array of micro-theologies and micro-truth and everything is just total division and there is no truth.”

(new article tomorrow)