I apologize, I probably didn’t elaborate enough, but to put it simply, I don’t expect new scripture. Returning to my previous analogy, I see the purpose of scripture as more or less exposition of establishing order in a manner that we were able to understand. For instance, a 2 year-old who is told not to take toys from other kids or that he can’t have a cookie any time he pleases probably doesn’t understand the reason behind why those rules are given, and it’s pretty difficult to explain to him in a way that he can understand. I see a lot of the early part of the Bible, particular the books of law, as being not terribly dissimilar where God is mostly establishing his relationship to us and telling us how to behave.
As we go farther, we’ve grown up more, and we can see through an example like the sermon on the mount that Jesus goes through a bit more to try to explain some of the rules and why they make sense.
But I think we’re past a point where revelations such God or from prophets or from Jesus are the sort of thing that will have that sort of impact. At some point, you stop just accepting rules, and you wonder if they make sense, and you question the authority that is giving them. Where in times past, God could simply exert his authority, in the way that a parent can over a young child, short of God circumventing our freewill, sending a prophet down probably isn’t terribly convincing except to those who already strongly believe.
And so, I think to expect God to reveal himself to us in the same way that he has in the past is to overlook that, along with growing up and being able to understand more, we also have to learn things differently. In many ways, I liken the state of humanity in being at the point probably most like a teenager, in which we’re in many ways both outright rejecting that level of authority, but also learning through our own experimentation and mistakes.
As such, the way I think that God continues to reveal himself to us is through us relating to the lesson that he taught us when we were younger and expounding upon them to relate to our current situation. Learning not to take other kids toys when we’re younger relates to a larger lesson of respecting the property and feeligns of others. Moreso, parents don’t just disappear when a kid becomes a teenager, they’re still there to ask questions and sometimes help us out when we REALLY screw up, and many of us do the same thing when we study, pray, and meditate.
The greater mistake, as I try to point out, is in failing to expound those lessons. When we fail to see the they were explicitly put in place to protect us, or that we fail to connect the smaller lessons together to learn the larger lesson. That, I think, is where many modern Christians lose perspective on the message.
Again, I disagree, and I think I covered most of the reasons why. Our understanding of God isn’t just from the lessons he’s taught us, but is a summation of all of the lessons we’ve learned from those lessons since then. I think Jesus set a precedent for this when he summarized the law of the prophets. I saw that as an example that, when we were young, we needed a lot of specific things spelled out for us because we really didn’t understand the motivation behind doing or not doing certain things. As we got older and wiser, we are able to understand the reasoning and get a more general rule and learn how to apply it to other situations that may or may not have been explicitly outlined earlier.
I also see our relationship with God being much the same way. And, truth be told, it’s something that I’ve struggled with immensely over the years because I had a hard time shedding the perspective of God that was put on me when I was younger. It raised a lot of seeming contradictions, because I was viewing this other understanding of God’s laws but as coming from the same child’s eye view of an authoritative parent view. Now that I view my relationship with him differently, those apparent contradictions have mostly evaporated.