If the experience dictates the Scriptures, that would lead to imbalance because you give priority to experience before the Scripture.
Holy Bananas!
This is seriously amusing to me. You absolutely do not understand what balance means. You seriously can only see things as one end or the other. There is no "both" in your vocabulary. There is no mutual information exchange between your extremes, and you cannot fathom what that means when I suggest that, as your response above clearly shows. Where have I ever said experience alone in anything I've said? I haven't, yet that's all you can imagine when I take the Bible off it's worship pedestal you have it on. To you, if I don't give it permanent authority over all experiences, then I placing experience over it! Your mind cannot fathom balance.
Here's what you said that I originally responded to. Let's observe the train of thought on your end:
I believed it should be balanced. We believed in the Scriptures and experienced it in our lives. It can’t be the experience dictates the Scripture but the Scripture dictates the experience.
This is a flat out self-contradiction. It is not balanced at all if "scripture dictates experience". It's totally one-sided. I reject your idea as unbalanced, unrealistic, and unhealthy. It's so unhealthy you can't even see the contradiction in these sentences you are preaching. There is no balance at all here.
You say Scripture dictates experience. That is not balance. Experiences impart information to us that our mere reading about things cannot. Think of it like reading about the ocean. You've never been to the ocean, and so you read about the description of it from others who have been to the ocean. What you cannot relate to through direct experience yourself, you fill in the gaps with your imagination, with things you can relate to that "sound like" what that person is describing. It gives you a certain "understanding" of the ocean, even though you've never been there.
But then one summer you finally fly out to the ocean and are there in person. You take of your shoes and walk into it, you fall into it, you swim in it, you spend many days in its presence. Now, everything that you read about it, its composition, its life, its origins, the smells associated with it and the descriptions of the those who live there of it, and so forth, suddenly make a great deal more sense! But you don't throw out the books you've read about the ocean just because you've now been there yourself. They still have value to you. They still inform you, and inspire you, and give you a vocabulary to speak of your own knowledge and experience with. What you are doing now is
balancing experience with head knowledge.
Here's what you do instead. You read about the ocean in your ocean book and form opinions based upon your ideas of what you read, lacking any experience with the ocean yourself. And then when you hear in person of those who have been to the ocean speak of their experiences, you weigh them against what your opinions are which you came to through reading your book about the ocean, and when they don't agree with your ideas about the ocean, you deny their reports, imagine they are emissaries from the devil, believe they are not describing the ocean at all but a chemical factory instead. The only valid experience of the ocean to you is what agrees with your beliefs about the ocean. This is not balance at all, but a domination of beliefs over experiences. You do not
allow experience to inform your beliefs. You reject experience that does not conform to your beliefs.
Here's imbalance on the other extreme. Someone who lives at the ocean and swims in it every day has come up all on his own some funny ideas about what the ocean is. He imagines it's made of chicken stock and houses hidden people with rubber feet in it. He thinks because he has experiences, that any of his ideas about those experiences must also be true! He rejects fact-finding from others with not only experience, but head knowledge. He rejects evidence to the contrary of his beliefs, living in "woo-woo land" of his own imagination. He is as one-sided as the other with only head-knowledge who falls victim to the worship of his own beliefs over experience. Each person is equally imbalanced.
When I say balance, I mean balance. Head knowledge and experience together. Each informs each other. Head knowledge helps form and shape an understanding of experience, giving it contexts, giving it meaning and understanding. And experience illuminates head knowledge, giving it actual substance, a reality of experience that is not just thoughts "about" something, but the actual taste of that something. Balance. Both. Not one over the other. That's balance.
Contemplative Christianity :
Experience : 1st priority
Scripture : 2nd priority (due to non-authority)
Experience does not necessarily need a Scripture for reference, guide and examination.
Basis or point of reference : none (based on one’s experience and desire of man’s heart)
False. This is your imagination at work projecting the opposite extreme of the imbalance you live under on to others, without actually understanding them.
Reality: Knowledge and experience work together. To have one without the other leads to imbalance.
Is scripture irrelevant because it's not Absolute? No. Even without experience, even if it's all head-knowledge about the divine rather than experience with the divine, it can be understood and approached rationally, non-absolutistically. It's not experience that make me believe the Bible is not absolutist. It's my rational mind that tells me that!
Evangelical Christianity :
Experience : 2nd priority
Scripture : 1st priority (due to authority )
Experience need a Scripture for reference, guide and examination.
Basis or point of reference : Bible as the Word of God; dependency with the Scriptures.
And this is why its presentation of God is a caricature of themselves. You have no experience to balance anything out. You experience is dictated by your ideas. They are experiences of your ideas. And what experiences you may actually have, if they don't agree with your prior understanding you reject, suppress, or deny them. Thus guaranteeing God remains a reflection of your own ideas, your own biases. This is extremely imbalanced and unhealthy.
Oh! If that will the case, there is no way to say that I’m injecting.
There is no way for you to see it yourself. That is clearly evident. I can however see you doing it quite easily.
Then why Jesus need to come here and die on the cross if the Christian beliefs is exclusive.
Jesus did not say
“I am the truth and so others are also truth.” He did not say aside from
Following Me, you may choose to follow other belief that you like.
Yes he did. He said of those who followed him that they are the light of the world. The Light of the word is "The Truth". If that Light shines within us, we are the Light of the world too, we are "The Truth".
When Jesus said, "I am the Truth", he was speaking of the recognition of the Truth in himself. But again, back to your extreme binary, black and white thinking, to you if Jesus said he is Truth, that mean no one else can say that because there can be only one manifestation of that. If he is the truth, others are not, is how your mind hears this. I don't hear it this way.
Jesus is not a belief system you follow.
Of course, my ideas came from what I think is the Word of God.
To be precise, your ideas came from what you inserted into what you read. You read some words, you tried to relate it to your understanding and made it fit as best you could into what you are able to comprehend, rejecting what didn't fit into that framework. This is why you cannot comprehend what I write either.
Oh! I thought we’r finish with the cult discussion. Again, I’m not in the cult. You're mistaken. You need to dig more about the cult practices.
I've done plenty of digging into cults. I am not mistaken.
