Indeed and if the canon is sooooooooooo perfectly clear like many love to point out, then well… Gosh, explain all these denominations? Damage Control: “Oh, the stuff they bicker about isn’t major points” or “All the others are wrong, but the one I just happen to be in, is the correct one”
And if it isn’t perfectly clear… Then why must you believe your “Canon” is completely innerant? To what benefit of this if you still can interpret it multiple ways? Has Canon solve the Atonement Theories? Has Canon brought us all together?
If only people believed in the Koran… I might, imagine how unified and better things would be (joking, of course, but ultimately the same line of thinking).
You don’t need a book to tell you what is right. You already have this within you. Personally, I think people are scared to think for themselves, for they feel “safe” believing in canon and something of that like that is complete and without error. I mean, I agree, it is a scary thing to start thinking for yourself and judging on matters with your own mind. It took me a while to become my default mode and religion isn’t the ONLY groups that do this… Social Media, Social Justice Warriors - They don’t think either. They merely repeat what they hear without regard for thought. Only a few people actually break the mold and say “What do I think?” instead of “What do other say?” - Not to be arrogant, we can indeed learn from others and we ought to consider their points. But ultimately, the decision is up to us.
McDonald said it best in his sermon “The Higher Faith”
The aspiring child is often checked by the dull disciple who has learned his lessons so imperfectly that he has never got beyond his school-books. Full of fragmentary rules, he has perceived the principle of none of them. The child draws near to him with some outburst of unusual feeling, some scintillation of a lively hope, some wide-reaching imagination that draws into the circle of religious theory the world of nature, and the yet wider world of humanity, for to the child the doings of the Father fill the spaces; he has not yet learned to divide between God and nature, between Providence and grace, between love and benevolence;–the child comes, I say, with his heart full, and the answer he receives from the dull disciple is–“God has said nothing about that in his word, therefore we have no right to believe anything about it. It is better not to speculate on such matters. However desirable it may seem to us, we have nothing to do with it. It is not revealed.” For such a man is incapable of suspecting, that what has remained hidden from him may have been revealed to the babe. With the authority, therefore, of years and ignorance, he forbids the child, for he believes in no revelation but the Bible, and in the word of that alone. For him all revelation has ceased with and been buried in the Bible, to be with difficulty exhumed, and, with much questioning of the decayed form, re-united into a rigid skeleton of metaphysical and legal contrivance for letting the love of God have its way unchecked by the other perfections of his being.
