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To: kosta50
You don't make disciples of nations. You make disciples of the individuals in the nations. That's what a nation is, a large group of individuals who form a corporation that occupies a lot of land, which without them no nation is formed.

I think you've come down with an acute figure of speech.

You might note that few of the great masses of people could read. How many of the 5000 that heard Jesus in the wilderness, which he fed with the bread (not counting the women and children), do you figure could read.

Nowadays it's quite different. The words of Jesus Himself are available to the people, and they read about His promises and teachings, which are for them, who have souls and who can be filled with the Spirit.

141 posted on 11/15/2006 10:07:37 PM PST by William Terrell (Individuals can exist without government but government can't exist without individuals.)
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To: William Terrell; annalex
You don't make disciples of nations

Why don't you take that up with the translators of the New Testament. The word used "ethnos" (eqnoV) means a large gathering of individuals, a tribe, or a nation (just as American native tribes are considered nations).

The NT says "make disciples of all the nations." I take it that you are correcting the Lord. Good luck!

You might note that few of the great masses of people could read

I have news for you: we still have large numbers of functionally illiterate people with poor reading comprehension skills. The illiteracy in the world is not negligible. Likewise, outside of the prosperous dozen or so developed countries, bibles are not as readily available and affordable to vast multitudes of people 2,000 years after our Lord instructed his newly appointed Church elders to teach the masses what he had taught the Apostles.

So, if the Bible was not written for the masses, obviously it wasn't intended for the masses to interpret it either. Those who subscribe to "each man his own pope" Protestant motto attest to the fragility of such endeavors by the fact that new "denominations" are being formed as "true" churches of Christ ever day, now numbering in tens of thousands and continually atomizing.

Why? Because there are as many opinions as there are individuals. The Faith once delivered by the Lord is not a matter of one's personal opinion or, God forbid, subject to logic or rationalizations.

Clearly, the Lord never intended the nations of believers to read the Bible and teach themselves. There is no biblical reference to "sola scriptura" heresy. It's a man-made tradition of Luther.

146 posted on 11/16/2006 5:56:40 AM PST by kosta50 (Orthodoxy is pure Christianity)
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