Letters to the editor

Why do people write letters to Witness editor anyway?
I have been interested in many of the letters published in the Witness. I wonder why people write letters to the editor. 
From the content of their letters, it appears that they see a wrong and believe they can correct it. They think that people will be swayed by the logic of their argument or the eloquence of their verbiage. That rarely seems to happen.
Another possible reason is that letters are written “tongue in cheek” to offer a point that may amuse or interest anyone who chances to read it. That seems to happen more often than the writer intends.
It is also possible that some writers know they can incite a response from certain other people by taking a position on a “topic of interest,” so they write a letter designed to fan the flames. That may be why the editor encourages such letters.
A fourth possibility can be found by psychologically analyzing letters. Instead of taking the content at face value, you can ask, “What problem is bothering the writer?”  or “Why does this writer feel it is more important for this subject to be considered by the busy workers in the church than all others?”
Such an approach can lead to endless hours of speculation by those who, like this writer, have nothing better to do.
Bob Ross
Floresville

We can learn from both sides of debate if we truly listen
Thanks to Dan Adams (“We should desacralize, critically consider what Bible says,” Sept. 28), J. David Trawick (“View on desacralized Bible follows flawed reasoning,” Oct. 12) and many others for keeping the dialogue going between the progressive and fundamentalist views in our great body.
Our church can learn from both, so long as we invest time in listening and understanding all sides.
One thing I learned from John Wesley and Albert Outler was that Wesley was a conjunctive theologian, not a disjunctive one. Wesley saw value in all sides of a discussion and tried not to eliminate one at the expense of the other. Oh, he had his polemical causes, but for the most part he was very inclusive.
The risk we all face with our passionate disagreements is that we will cease to love one another. The risk is that our common love might turn into uncommon pride and self-righteousness.
When the focus becomes “my-way-or-the-highway,” we risk finding ourselves categorized as “sounding brass or tinkling cymbals.”
W. Conrad Archer
Boerne

Bible isn’t perfect, but it is essential for knowing God
I have watched with some amusement and somewhat more disdain the latest dust-up between Dan Adams (“We should desacralize, critically consider what Bible says,” Sept. 28) and J. David Trawick (“View on desacralized Bible follows flawed reasoning,” Oct. 12).
I offer two obvious truths about the Bible:
> The Bible is not perfect.
> Without the Bible the God we know would be unknown to us.
To be a literalist in your reception of the Bible, you must ascribe to the Bible a perfection that belongs to God alone. In one sense only is the Bible wholly and without residue trustworthy. The Bible is to be trusted altogether when it unfolds for us the pathway to salvation. In no other region of concern is it without fault.
The Bible is always pointing us away from itself to The One alone who is to be worshiped.
Our knowledge of God as The One who comes to our rescue is derived from that cluster of events that had for its center the man of Nazareth. Apart from those epochal events with Jesus at their center, we wouldn’t know God as we do.
The Bible is the only reliable witness to those events we have. Take away the Bible, and you take away our knowledge of God as savior. Playing this role in our lives, the Bible can never be considered just one book among many good books. It is the essential book.
Dan Adams thinks the Bible has been misused so often and so badly that it should be demoted. Gee whiz, what in human history has not been misused and abused, distorted and damaged by human egoism and self-centeredness?
Lon A. Speer
Missouri City