Appendix: Reference Notes (5 of 5)

The Living Instance — Sexuality, Ordination, and the Church (Chapter Six)

1. The most honest affirming scholars concede that the biblical texts say what the church has always understood them to say, and locate the authority for the change in contemporary experience instead. If your position requires the Text to be overruled rather than reread, name the authority you have placed above it — and ask whether that authority has the standing to define sin that belongs only to the One who defines it.
2. The redemptive arc you follow beyond the page: by what instrument do you discern where it lands? And if the arc's destination coincides, every time, with where your own culture already stands, are you following a trajectory in Scripture — or looking in a mirror? Jesus, asked about marriage, drew His trajectory backward to the creation ordinance and tightened it. Whose trajectory are you on?
3. Paul's discipline list in 1 Corinthians 5:11 places the greedy, the verbally abusive, and the drunkard in the same sentence as the sexually immoral. When did your church last exercise discipline over greed or verbal abuse? If the answer is never, is your church practicing 1 Corinthians 5 — or practicing a selectivity that Paul's own sentence condemns, and that the watching world reads correctly as politics?
4. 1 Corinthians 5:12–13 explicitly restricts the church's judgment to those inside and leaves those outside to God. What portion of your church's public energy over the past decade was spent prosecuting the sexual ethics of people who never claimed Christ — and what does Paul call that jurisdiction?
5. When did you last hear Romans 1 preached through to Romans 2:1, or 1 Corinthians 5 preached through to its final verses, or 1 Corinthians 6:9 preached together with 6:11? If whole texts have gone unserved in your congregation for a decade — in either direction — who chose your plate for you, and what has the omission formed you to believe?
6. Is there a believer in your congregation carrying this temptation in surrendered silence who has concluded, from what they have heard there, that the church and Christ are equally closed to them? What would it cost your congregation to be a place where the Text is held whole and that person is held too — and which half of that have you been protecting at the expense of the other?
7. The Gospel of John uses the verb believe nearly a hundred times and the noun faith not once — believing, for John, is an ongoing entrusting that produces following, and John 3:36 sets believing and disobeying as opposites in a single verse. If your believing has never once overruled your wanting — on this question or any other — what is it you are actually doing: believing, or agreeing?

Related Corpus Documents The Day You Shall Surely Die (Michlaude Discipleship Project). The theological foundation for the Genesis 2:17 argument made in the YEC section of this document. Establishes from the Hebrew Text, from John 17:3, from Paul's use of death language in Ephesians 2 and Colossians 2, and from Augustine's own distinction between soul death and body death, that the death God warned Adam about was spiritual — severed relational knowing — not biological. When the biological-death assumption is removed, the young earth requirement it generates collapses.

They Were Here Before the Earth (Michlaude Discipleship Project). The field guide to the compound near-truth assembling through the UAP disclosure moment. The pre-terrestrial beings of Job 38, Genesis 6, Daniel 10, and Revelation 12 identified from Scripture, the five-excision architecture of the framework being constructed around them named and answered, and the conversation guide for the moment the question arrives.

When Did You Last Check the Foundation of Your House (Michlaude Discipleship Project). The diagnostic companion. Examines how specific traditions get fused with Scripture in the mind of the believer, with a nine-case Foundation Inspection covering the Sinner's Prayer, the Tithe, the Age of the Earth, the Pre-Tribulation Rapture, and others.

When Salt Loses Its Savor, Volume VI, Battle of Civilizations Series (Michlaude Discipleship Project). The pastoral companion. Addresses these traditions as stumbling blocks that drive sincere seekers away from the Person behind the institution.

Notes on the Page (Michlaude Discipleship Project). The full examination of the Scofield Reference Bible — its historical origins, the mechanism by which the notes corrupted the reader's relationship to the Text, the Dallas Theological Seminary franchise, and the passage-by-passage case against the dispensational grid.

Revelation Walk-Through: Partial Preterism and Dispensationalism in Conversation (Michlaude Discipleship Project). The full parallel examination of both eschatological frameworks through all 22 chapters of Revelation, presented fairly, with both frameworks' strengths and costs named.

The Vine Is the Path (Michlaude Discipleship Project). The direct companion for the reader who has set down a tradition in the reading of this book and does not yet know what to pick up in its place. The abiding of John 15 as a life to be lived, not a concept to be affirmed.

Michlaude Discipleship Project · Coram Deo · Soli Deo Gloria All materials are free.