(August 3, 2023 at 2:06 pm)Bucky Ball Wrote:(August 2, 2023 at 8:00 pm)Belacqua Wrote: I take seriously Blake's view, when he says that while the Bible is a founding document for our culture, any great book is an expression of God's word and deserves respect. His idea is that God is and acts through people (an old minority tradition in mystical Christianity) and that the sum of human knowledge (including math and science, as well as Homer and Shakespeare and Proust) is all the word of God. But you're right that it takes time for people to work things out, so there are bound to be sentences in the Bible which we shouldn't take as true, just as there are scientific theories which used to be popular but aren't any more.
The action of the Holy Spirit may be ancient, but it's actually mainline, and was never a minority view and is current dogma in mainline Christian communities.
There are differences between Blake's view and that of the mainline Christian communities which I find significant and fascinating.
