That is a good intention, Danoh, but it is extremely odd that for 2 years I had no idea from any of your summaries that that was your concern, nor your essential belief as you campaigned for MAD. Not that I'm any more inclined to make use of it. I think you were theologically-legalistic about it, to the point of not even being able to express its benefit.
Consider that that is because you are still reading what you think I am talking about into my words.
Even witin Mid-Acts some have ended up concluding over the years that someone like me is just talking "can't we all just compromise what we hold to just so we can get along..."
People read a thing into it, conclude that was what was meant, and then run with said conclusion as being what was meant.
Take the opposition against Darby's, for example, since the opposition to Mid-Acts is basically the result of the same "one size fits all."
Read, the pdf in my thread about Darby's description in his own words on how he came to understand through Paul's writings who he, Darby was, in Christ.
http://www.theologyonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11628It
It is clear that this distinction then allowed him to see the distinction between Israel and the Body.
It is clear that because he had not known those two as the "one and the same size fits all" that it is taught as, he did not have that clouding his discernment of this issue as has been the case with, say, you.
All this time that I have been ranting on about the need to at the very least explore the Mid-Acts Perspective, my point has been the Grace Life it then allows one to see with greater clarity from said perspective.
The two are that connected to one another.
Seeing who he was in Christ had allowed Darby (only to begin) to see a distinction between that and who Israel is in its relationship with the LORD thru His Son by the Spirit.
This, in turn, allowed other distinctions to become obvious.
Then he died, and those who came after him stopped going further, until men like O'Hair, et al.
But, the one distinction only appears to be an error - to the stubborn outsider - to said individual it appears to be "putting the cart before the horse."
The more astute observer, on the other hand, will relate the observation that what often goes unobserved and is therefore concluded by the less astute as never having been the case when it is brought forth, only went unobserved for so long, not because it was never there all along, but because one or another aspect of its whole was never picked up on.
"I doubt we will ever crack the atom," Einstein once erroneously observed.
Columbus himself remarks in his journals his having observed a distinction between things that (critically) differ, that others had ignored, but that had appeared to indicate to him that the world was not flat, as most then asserted. He then proceeded to explore that.
Such distinctions literally jump out at one; they are so obvious, other than to the OVER "learned."
And here we all are.
Debating a thing is not there because it never was, out of what the less astute, no matter their smarts and or experience, have continually failed to see.
Here we are debating this on what business genius like few, Tom Watson, told a young Steve Jobs, hadn't any possibility of a world market one day - the Desktop Computer.
So blinded from the obvious the great Watson had become; that he had simply been unable to see said obvious in one simple distinction that actually pointed to the sense of the whole that Steve Jobs had been able to see, through said one small distinction.
