Essential Righteousness - Part VII (Conclusion)

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI

IV. Christ-the Essential Description of Righteousness

So we are faced with the fact that God has spoken definitively in His Law, in His word. We are ourselves subject to the same self-deception and self-righteousness of the Pharisees. And here is God’s Incarnate Son explaining to his hearers that they do not rightly understand the Law. If we care about discipleship, this should be alarming. If those most zealous for keeping the LAW OF GOD can not only go so far off course but also lead countless numbers of people with them, how do we reckon that we will not find the same in our own lives?

“Our Lord has not come to make it easier for us or to make it in any way less stringent in keeping [the Law’s] demands upon us. His purpose in coming was to enable us to keep the Law not to abrogate it.” ~ D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, p. 174-75.

To ask what the role of righteousness is in the believer should be to ask what the role of Christ is in the life of the believer.

If you are one who struggles with self-righteousness (and we all do), the answer is not for me to preach to you that you must stop being self-righteous. No, that is only preaching a different flavor of the same prescriptive parsimony – a variation on the same wretched theme. What Christ is offering is far more abundant! It is a liberal outpouring of nothing less than the totality of God Himself. What the self-righteous need is the gospel in which the impoverished are made rich in Christ. Our appetite for cheap imitation is then swallowed up by a hunger and thirst for the Righteous One. As we abide in Christ we bear the fruits of Christ, which is nothing short of an ongoing miraculous work of God in our lives. We are called to greater things than spiritual forms of Russian roulette.

Suffering and Sanctification

One of the dangers in trying to blog about things like suffering or sanctification (i.e., the process of a Christian becoming more and more like Christ) is that given the very limited space there is a temptation either on my part to give a pithy post or for you, the reader, to think you will find a simple answer about things that do not by their nature lend themselves to simple or pithy approaches.

My pastor used the following illustration last week in our order of worship, which I found very helpful in grasping some of the pathos and psychology involved in growing up in Christ.



As we grow in Christ, we become aware of two things with respect to our discussion here. First, we grow in our awareness of the holiness of our Triune God, it is a holiness that is full of awe for us. At the same time, we become increasingly aware that we are distinctly not like God in this respect. In fact, some of the most mature Christians are those who are painfully aware of the great incongruity that exists between God and us.

The thing that often happens is that as we grow in our awareness of God’s holiness and our sinfulness, our knowledge of Christ and the salvation that he brings us in Himself somehow stays stagnant, a stale proposition caught between the cogs of rationality and logic. While rationality and logic and propositions are absolutely essential to Christianity, they are easily exhausted and surpassed when the subject matter is the Triune God and His saving works on behalf of His people. To put it another way, our apprehension of Christ does not grow proportionately with the awareness of God’s holiness and our sinfulness.

So why does the Cross remain locked away, increasingly just a proposition of the mind? Part of the answer to this question would seem to lie in the fact that Christ beacons us to come and die with Him and we avoid suffering with all that we are. In other words, Christ will have himself found in suffering. When we avoid it, we should not be surprised that we do not find Christ, and that the Cross – the pinnacle of suffering and glory – is reduced and diminished into the void of propositions.

“Christ died for the sins of the world”. That is not only a proposition, but a redemptive historical matter of fact. He who bled the ground red at Gethsemane anticipating the blood he would finally shed upon the Cross outside Jerusalem is redeeming and has redeemed even suffering. That does not mean that you should just quote a Bible verse when all Hell breaks loose in your life. It does mean that the God who created and is recreating the world is in the midst of that chaos. The God whose Spirit hovered over this world when it lie formless and void in chaos, that One spoke and life and order emerged.

That God, our Lord Jesus, speaks now into the formlessness and voids of our own lives with the full undeniable purpose of transforming and renewing us into the unblemished likeness of our Maker. He is able, even to give us hope in hopelessness, light when our eyes would seem as though they were gouged from our heads. He loves this world that much. May we move towards Him as His people in the chaos to find that He wields not a battle-axe but a scalpel towards us.

God's excellences and perfections are full of life and action

All things are of God, through Him, and unto Him.  Hence our soul can rest in it with unperturbed certainty.  It is God’s will, his eternal, independent, and immutable will, that in the church [humanity] be restored and saved.  We are convinced of this comfort of election even more when we remember that the counsel of God is a work of His mind not merely, but also of His will, is not a thought merely which belongs to the realm of eternity but also an almighty power which realizes itself in time.  So it is with all God’s excellences and perfections: they are not passive, silent attributes, but are almighty powers, full of life and action.

Herman Bavinck
Our Reasonable Faith
Page 270

Essential Righteousness - Part VI

View Previous Posts in this Series:
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V

C. Christ Our Righteousness (Mt 5:17-19)

So far we have said that one must have righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. We have also found that the nature of this righteousness is essential, relating to the core of our beings. Further, we considered that the Law of God has always been a description of righteousness to which humanity as God’s image is to emulate as salt is salty and light is lumi-nous. Finally, we have said that while the Law of God has always been concerned with the heart, it lacks the power (as the Apostle Paul teaches us) to circumcise our corrupted hearts.

Matthew 5:17-19 (ESV) 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is ac-complished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus as the Fulfillment and Goal of God’s Law

Jesus begins this section following his description of Kingdom citizens with an imperative that his hearers not think that he had come to destroy the Law. This presents us with a distinct challenge. Apparently, Jesus anticipated that his teaching on His Father’s Law would sound to his hearers as if he was going against everything that they knew to be true about the Law. This is often the case when Jesus invades our lives is it not. We find that he challenges all that we know to be true about re-ligion and all of life.

A Misunderstanding the Purpose of the Law

By saying that he did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfill it, Jesus is cluing us in that perhaps his hearers did not understand the Law as they thought they did. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law. Paul tells us that the Law was given as a tutor to point us to God. The Law reveals to us the righteousness of God that is alien to us. Jesus comes and ful-fills this Law from the heart perfectly.

The Law Exposes Us as Idolaters

Second-rate obedience will never save us. That is what the Ser-mon on the Mount is all about. Israel had settled for second-rate. They had redefined the Law so that it might be fulfilled in terms of outward appearance. God’s interest in their hearts, in the core and totality of who they were, had been swept away as prescriptive parsimony.

Blogger for MS Word

I thought I would let those of you who read and post on this blog or others in Google’s blogsphere that Google has a nice new toolbar for Microsoft Word for Windows (2000 or later).  You can compose in Word and publish from Word without even opening your browser.  Imagine all the publishing benefits you get that way (e.g., auto-spell-check, macros)!  Anyway you can download it for yourself.

Essential Righteousness - Part V

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

B. Essential Righteousness (Mt 5:13-16)

The connecting thoughts between the Beatitudes and Jesus’ staggering statement about righteousness in Matt. 5:20 are the rest of the passage we are considering together. He begins by using two metaphors to explain the nature of true righteousness – righteousness that actually corresponds to the righteous standard of his Father – the righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the Scribes and Pharisees.

1. Statements of Essence Mt. 5:13-16

Matt. 5:13-16 (ESV) 13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. 14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Jesus is making a descriptive statement about citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Just as salt in and of itself is salty, so Kingdom citizens have certain innate properties as Kingdom citizens, matters of fact, for those who are His subjects.

In other words, if you saw a white grainy substance on a table and when you tasted it you found that it was sweet, you would not conclude that the substance on the table was salt – even if it was in a saltshaker! You would make these conclusions because there are certain properties that salt has simply because it is salt. The same is true for light. Jesus is making statements of essence, describing a Kingdom citizen at their most basic level.

2. Two Approaches to Righteousness

There is a continuum of responses we can give to Jesus’ teaching on righteousness at this point. On the one hand, we can either cry out to God because we see that we are immeasurably poor in spirit, unable to bring about the essential heart change that the Law required. Or on the other hand, we can work to redefine the LAW OF GOD, to say in effect, “Define Righteousness” as if it were somehow ambiguous or vague.

The former is a description of one who has been converted by the gracious and saving power of God’s transforming Spirit. The latter is a Pharisee, who would reduce righteousness to their own subjective rules of preference; thereby contorting God’s uncreated righteous standard to the perverted standards of their own created imaginations.

On Tradition

Google's homepage had this quote of the day today, which of course got under my skin a little - but in a good way. That is, in disagreeing fundamentally with it, the quote caused me to think more precisely about what I do think about tradition. Okay, so here's the quote:

"Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening."

- Barbara Tober

Many in my circles think of tradition as something to which we should always be striving to return to more fully. I think that is problematic for eschatological reasons. Christ's Kingdom has come and is coming (already/not-yet). All of time and creation is interpreted through the two episodes of Christ's advent (1st coming and 2nd coming). The first episode has already occurred and out of that has spawned the tradition of His church marching forward towards the second episode, when Christ returns. Faithful tradition always marches in subordination to Scripture, the Word of God, the Word of Christ. Nevertheless, tradition is always moving forward, carrying the Church of Christ through the different and manifold challenges that face it in any generation or location. We look back as it were to gain perspective about the destination to which we are going. We must never confuse that with swimming back upstream, to return to an era of the Church that has served its purpose according to the divine plan. And so we march expectantly on, being encouraged in tradition that we do not march alone. In other words, tradition is one of the manifold means by which God brings the "unexpected" into reality.

Bavinck on Providence

I am continually amazed at the Dutch Reformed theologians, or at least the Bavincks and Ridderboses of the world. They seem to have not swallowed the jagged pill of rationalism that the Enlightenment was handing out like a cosmic drug-pusher. Bavinck begins his volume on the Doctrine of God, "Mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics." He writes about a God who is really God! who is really and infinitely more than just a projection of himself. To write about such a God entails mystery. With that introduction, let me share with you a few lines on the Providence of God that I found worth pondering:

If God and his human creatures can only be conceived as competitors, and if the one can only retain his freedom and independence at the expense of the other, then God has to be increasingly restricted both in knowledge and in will. Pelagianism, accordingly, banishes God from his world. It leads both to Deism and atheism and enthrones human arbitrariness and folly. Therefore, the solution of the problem must be sought in another direction. It must be sought in the fact that God-- because he is God and the universe is his creation-- by the infinitely majestic activity of his knowing and willing, does not destroy but instead creates and maintains the freedom and independence of his creatures. (pp 376-77)

I would love your thoughtful reflections on this quote.

Essential Righteousness - Part IV

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Part I | Part II | Part III

III. The Teaching of Christ

A. Righteousness that Abundantly Surpasses … (Mt 5:20)

We have reviewed the LAW OF GOD and saw that the Old Testament presents it as a description of the Righteousness of God. We then turned our attention briefly to the LAW OF PHARISEE, which we have said was a perversion of the LAW OF GOD, having twisted it into a prescription for attaining righteousness. So now we come to contemplate together the meaning of Jesus’ teaching in our passage.

Matt. 5:20 is the exclamation point, the conclusion to which the rest of our passage is flowing (Mt. 5:13-20). It will serve us well to begin there and then consider the preceding verses. In this way, we will better appreciate what Christ is teaching us along the way if we have His destination in mind.

Matt. 5:20 (ESV) 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds [abundantly surpasses] that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never [in any way ever] enter the kingdom of heaven.

Three Implications For Righteousness In Matt. 5:20

When Jesus says that a person’s righteousness must abundantly surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees he is making subtle and powerful implications.

Insufficient Righteousness

First he is saying that the righteousness of the Pharisees is insufficient. They write checks and have nothing in the bank to show for it. Imagine how this would have shocked not only the Pharisees, but also the masses that thought of them as being icons of righteousness in the community.

Non-Existent Righteousness

Second, the Gentiles, who were there from the surrounding territories, were of course aware that in the economy of Jewish religion the Pharisees were considered wealthy in currency of righteousness. Therefore, it is safe to say that Jesus is also implying that none of his hearers – Jew or Gentile– had any righteousness whatsoever of which to speak – their righteousness was non-existent. Paul in great unity with the thought of our Lord tells us in Romans 3:9-20 that there is none who are righteous – and he had previously been a Pharisee of Pharisees (Phil 3:1-11).

Remember how Jesus began his sermon:

Matt. 5:3-6 (ESV) 3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

The Beatitudes give us the paradigm for understanding the entirety Sermon on the Mount. Therefore, they speak to our passage (Mt. 5:13-20). We find here that it is precisely those – and only those – who are poor in spirit and hunger and thirst after righteousness who are heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven and who will be satisfied in their appetite for righteousness.

What is profound about Jesus’ statement is that he describes those who hunger and thirst after the righteousness that they do not themselves have! It is these, who know their own righteousness is insufficient and non-existent, who are the ones who are blessed; it is these – and these only – who will be the sons and daughters of God! The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those – and those only – who are poor in spirit.

Pharisaic Self-Deception

Jesus exposed the righteousness of His hearers as insufficient and non-existent. The problem is that many of His hearers were convinced otherwise. And so we come to the third powerful implication that Jesus teaches us in Matt. 5:20 – that of self-deception.

Jesus is exposing the self-deception of the Pharisees. They are deceived in themselves about what righteousness is on an essential or most basic level. Consequently, the Pharisees are deceived in their understanding of what the LAW OF GOD actually taught. They believed that they were rich in spirit because of the cacophony of their ‘righteous acts’. They had printed off Monopoly money by the ream and then declared themselves rich!

Jesus explains that they hunger and thirst after something other than righteousness. In fact, they are only playing religious games. They play a kind of Religious Russian Roulette with a fully loaded revolver.

Unless your righteousness abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never in any way enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Essential Righteousness - Part III

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Part I | Part II

II. The Law of Pharisee

If the LAW OF GOD was the description of True Righteousness but lacked the power to transform the deadness at our very core, the LAW OF PHARISEES was something subtly other than that.

The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day who had won the esteem and the fear of the masses by vigorously establishing the Jewish culture over against the pagan cultures that were impinging upon it. They saw the LAW OF GOD as a prescription of what one was to do in order to be righteous (i.e., a list of things to do and not do). For example, the Law required that a person fast once a year. The Pharisees would fast twice a week and make sure that everyone understood that they were the religious over-achievers.

They did not understand that since the creation of the world, God has always been primarily concerned with our hearts, with the inner disposition that His creatures have with Him as their Creator. In Matthew 23 Jesus will call the Pharisees hypocrites, play-actors and whitewashed tombs, being polished shinny on the outside and full of the rancor and stench of death on the inside.

Essential Righteousness - Part II

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Part I

I. The LAW OF GOD

First and in a very cursory way, let us consider the LAW OF GOD. The LAW OF GOD is the verbal revelation written down for us as a lasting description of who God is essentially, at the core of His being. The Ten Commandments are not a prescription by which God must abide in order that He might be righteous. He is himself righteousness and the Ten Commandments describe this to us.

Second, the LAW OF GOD has always been concerned with the renewing of the heart. In Deuteronomy 10:16, God tells the Israelites that they must circumcise their hearts. In Joel 2 we find that God wishes that the people would ‘rend their hearts and not their garments’. At least these Israelites had reduced religion down to outward appearance and had thereby redefined it. Yet again, Deuteronomy makes plain that it would ultimately be God who would circumcise the hearts of His people and their offspring with the purpose that they would love the Lord their God (Dt. 30:6). Such language as ‘circumcision of the heart’ should sound familiar to us. It echoes the language that Jesus used with Nicodemus, telling him that he “must be born again” (Jn 3).

Further, while the LAW OF GOD has always described righteousness as something that God desires to find in us on a heart-level, it lacked the power – as a description – to renew the core or ‘heart’ of a person. Indeed, “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Ro 8:3-4). So we see that the LAW OF GOD was always a description of True Righteousness, while at the same time, as a description, it was powerless to transform us, to circumcise our hearts.

For now, let us keep this paradigm or framework of the LAW OF GOD in our minds. In this way, I believe we will begin to see the great incompatibility that the LAW OF GOD has with the LAW OF PHARISEE.

Reflections on the Eucharist

The confession of my own ecclesiastical tradition asks this question in its shorter catechism:

Question 85: What does God require of us, that we may escape his wrath and curse due to us for sin?

Answer: To escape the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin, God requires of us faith in Jesus Christ, repentance unto life, with the diligent use of all the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption.

First off, for brevity's sake, those outward means stated above are identified clearly as the Word, sacraments and prayer in this confession of faith.¹ Most people would pitch a fit if the word of God was not preached in their church on Sunday morning - or at least I hope most people would. I think people would at least notice if there was no prayer at all in a Lord's Day worship service - or again so I would hope. So why are the Sacraments, given to us by Christ himself, treated as second-rate? They are the place in which we say we find explicit blessing from Christ and the working of His Spirit as an effectual means of salvation,² in which Christ and the benefits of the New Covenant are represented, sealed and applied to believers.³ Specifically, regarding the Lord's Supper, through which we are, by faith, made partakers of Christ's body and blood - with all his benefits - to our spiritual nourishment and growth in grace.⁴

So why is it that most - at least in my tradition in the United States - are content to administer or receive the Sacraments only as often as is minimally possible to say that we engage in them regularly? In other words, if someone sought to eat as little as possible, consuming only enough to say that they were not - not eating, we would be deeply concerned for them. We have called that behavior anorexia in some cases. I believe that the American church has filled their heads with the Word and sought to starve their souls by not receiving the Sacraments as much as possible.

At the end of the day, we keep these old rusty signs of the New Covenant hidden, pulling them out once a month, once a quarter, as if we do it because we have to. Receiving the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper should rather be our Eucharist, our thanksgiving, that we cannot help but receive, believing that He will communicate to us all that we need and all that he said he would through it. May we not be as children who always want to eat meat and never vegetables. The Church of Christ needs the balanced diet of all the outward means by which our Lord communicates to us the benefits of redemption.

__________
¹ Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 88.
² WSC, Q 91.
³ WSC, Q 92.
⁴WSC, Q. 96.

For those of you who would like to get a copy of the Westminster Confession, you might find this modern version edifying. You will need to block off a day to search through all the scripture references that can be given to support the positions advocated here.

Essential Righteousness - Part I

This begins a serial posting in which we will reflect and contemplate Matthew 5:13-20.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Mt 5:13-20 ESV)

Introduction: Russian Roulette

There are some things in this world that are as foolish as they are deadly. Russian Roulette is a brutal and devilish game that is played by taking a revolver which holds six bullets and placing a single bullet in one of the cylinders, spinning the cylinder with the bullet inside, placing the gun to one’s head and then pulling the trigger. The participant has a 1 in 6 chance of killing himself or herself.

Now imagine that someone put one bullet in each of the six chambers in the cylinder of that revolver so that it was fully loaded. The odds would be impossible. The participant would have a one hundred percent chance of ending his or her life.

I do not know why anyone in his or her right mind would engage in this activity or even think of it in terms of a game. I suggest to you that this is precisely the parallel to the inevitable outcome of playing the “Self-Righteousness Game” – a spiritual version of Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver – to which Jesus has directed his attention in the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus has given us a paradigm here in our text for understanding what righteousness truly is. He gives us a description of those who in fact hunger and thirst for righteousness. He further exposes the destructive consequences of following our own self-made prescriptions for righteousness (i.e., for playing spiritual Russian roulette).

In verse 20, Matthew makes clear for us that Jesus is emphatic that there is no way ever that anyone who does not have righteousness that abundantly exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Apparently Jesus’ understanding of righteousness was fundamentally different than that of the Pharisees who were the Bible Teachers and Preachers of the day.

In order for us to understand the meaning of Jesus’ words in context, we must consider three things by way of introduction:

1. We need to understand what the LAW OF GOD taught.
2. Next, we will consider what the LAW OF PHARISEES is and how it essentially differed from the LAW OF GOD.
3. Then, we will consider what bearing Jesus’ words here – in the Sermon on the Mount – have on the LAW OF GOD and the LAW OF PHARISEES.

Reflections of a Now-Millennialist

I continue to prepare for my licensure exam on Saturday morning, February 4. I have found a very helpful site, which is generally irenic referencing primary sources (a big plus in my book), and I believe is founded by Darrell Bock of Dallas Seminary. Dr. Bock is of a more Progressive Dispensational flavor. I found the article outlining the Four Major Millennial Views to be very helpful but I thought it was interesting how our biases all come out in whatever we do, regardless of how we come down on any given issue.

Regarding amillennialism, the article reads:

The amillennialist believes that the Kingdom of God was inaugurated at Christ's resurrection (hence the term "inaugurated millennialism") at which point he gained victory over both Satan and the Curse. Christ is even now reigning (hence the term "nunc-millennialism" — nunc means "now") at the right hand of the Father over His church. After this present age has ended, Christ will return and immediately usher the church into their eternal state after judging the wicked. The term "amillennialism" is actually a misnomer for it implies that Revelation 20:1-6 is ignored; in fact, the amillennialist's hermeneutic interprets it (and in fact, much of apocalyptic literature) non-literally. [see the quote on their site]

I appreciate the fact that the article recognizes the misnomer that the term "amillennialism" is. It is a view that is best characterized as a Now-Millennial view, that Christ's reign and kingdom is now upon this earth in an already-not-yet fashion. While some may see that kingdom as being inaugurated at the resurrection, that is not the only teaching on inauguration from amillennialists - or at least people I perceive to be such. I believe that I recall Ridderbos teaching that the Kingdom of God was inaugurated at the Baptism of Jesus in which the Father initiatess Christ's place as King by anointing Him with the Holy Spirit - an explicitly Triune affair.

I believe the statement made above that amillennialism implies that "Revleation 20:1-6" is ignored" is a most unfortunate caricature. What amillennialist would think she had the right to ignore any part of scripture? Who has the right as a creature to determine to which parts of scripture one will submit and to which parts one will ignore?

The point is that amillennialists have taken the view that they have taken because they believe scripture to be the infallible and inerrant teaching of God, precisely because they have not ignored scripture. To be fair, the Blue Letter Bible site does acknowledge that the real issue between the views is founded upon the hermeneutic that one brings to the texts of scripture. However, that is a far cry from ignoring pericopes.

It is a little more involved than simply ignoring a pericope don't you think? Surely if we are going to have decent and edifying conversations between Christians, conversations that don't ignore entire chapters like John 17 and Ephesians 4 and books like 1 Corinthians that underscore the imperative of unity in Christ's Church, we must do a little better than dismiss others views as "ignoring" parts of scripture when their views do not quite agree with our own.