And again out of curiosity, what was the pastor's point in all this?
Well, that was the second and perhaps more important reason why I wanted to talk to him.
The point that he made was that the example of the Sadducees shows us "how dangerous is to use Scripture selectively". Why I wanted to talk to him about this is because, in my opinion, the church council is guilty of using Scripture selectively to justify their position in favour of the ordination of women as elders and pastors! And I said this to him. I also told him that I have on more than one occasion written extensive replies to the commission chairs and other "important" individuals in the congregation (Pilgrim you know about this) but never got a decent reply.
It was (again) a rather disappointing discussion because at first he said that he is not really interested in what I wrote and the other documents that I refer to in my letters. I was silently shocked at this because he is supposed to be a shepherd for the members of the congregation etc etc. He later turned around and admitted that it was wrong that I got no replies to my letters and said that he would read the stuff that I brought with me. But he will only have a look at it in January when synod meets and some of these issues are on the agenda. I really don't expect a lot to come out of this.
About the sermon, I really don't think the theme "In the name of Jesus" was really addressed.
That's my version.....
Perhaps an illustration of the sort of dualism in using Scripture. A couple of weeks ago one of the professors at our seminary gave a sermon from Phillipians 2:19-30. Almost right at the beginning of the sermons he said that one might wonder why God had passages like this included in Scripture. He then was very explicit about the specific reason why God had it included - I can't remember his exact words, but he was very confident that the reason he gave was exactly that why God had it included. But I know that this professor also supports the views of the Biblical/Evangelical feminists in many aspects. Why can't he then not also explicitly state the reason why God intended to have certain other passages like in 1 Tim 2 and 3 etc also included in Scripture? When it comes to these passages then we are completely clueless about why God intended to have it included in Scripture and tries our level best with all sorts of schemes to avoid the direct and natural reading of these passages - well that's their position.
One regularly finds these kind of inconsistencies in sermons.
