"All wood burns. Therefore, all that burns is wood."

In logic, a syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.

Here is an example of a valid syllogism:

Major premise: All mammals are warm-blooded.
Minor premise: All black dogs are mammals.
Conclusion: Therefore, all black dogs are warm-blooded.

This kind of logic seems self-evident.

However, some things can be stated in a logical manner which, when looked at more closely, prove not to have any logical link.

To quote Sir Bedevere from Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail - "All wood burns. Therefore, all that burns is wood."

This uses a form of logical statement (a universal affirmative) and then converts it completely, and falsely, into another.

It seems to me as if many people, over many years have tried to use a similar kind of logic with respect to the Bible:

Premise: All the books of the Bible reveal truth about God.
Conclusion: Therefore, all truth about God is revealed in the books of the Bible.

I feel that this way of thinking about the Bible has lead the church, and us as individuals, further away from God rather than closer to God. Instead of allowing ourselves to be lead by the Holy Spirit towards truth we are often told to “immerse ourselves in the Word” to discover God’s truth.

No doubt the Word contains truth about God but that does not necessarily mean that all God’s truth is contained in the Word.

I believe that the meaning behind John 16:13 is that the Spirit will come and continue to guide or lead us towards truth – that God’s truth will continue to be revealed to us through the Spirit and through inspired people whom the Spirit touches. I believe that the age of inspiration and revelation have never left us; that divinely inspired writers, poets, prophets and singers of psalms walk among us to this day.

Look at the evidence. Paul seemed to feel that slavery was OK as long as owner and slave were good to each other. The Spirit has lead us (albeit slowly) towards God’s truth that slavery is an abomination in God’s eyes. How about apartheid? Try women’s rights. Paul would have pretty uncomfortable with women in church without headscarves – and women preaching to the men would have sent him spinning in circles. If Joyce Meyer behaved as Paul would have had her behave, I believe the Kingdom of God would be poorer for it.

To be true children of God I feel that we need to learn to detach ourselves from the “security blanket” of the Bible and learn to walk in relationship with God.

Take the example of a marriage. I can read all the books in the world on how to have a successful marriage. I can gain and gather all of that knowledge (and that may be a very good thing). But unless I actually put the theory into practise in a real relationship I will never learn that a marriage is so very much more than the knowledge from the book. The reality of my relationship with my wife is not through a book; it is not in a book; it is in learning to walk with her, hand in hand, chat by chat, day by day. Imagine my wife’s response if she said to me one evening “Let’s go to bed” and I said to her “Hold on a moment, I’ll just go and read a couple of chapters of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to see if that’s a good thing for us to do.”

God reduced and limited to the covers of a book is sad thing. I believe that when Jesus spoke of life abundantly lived he did not intend a return to the Pharisaic rules with their “Cans” and “Can’ts”.

He came to bring us into relationship with God, not into relationship with a book.

Which of you fathers, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?

I have a worry about theology. Most of my Christian mates believe that it doesn't really exist - theology that is, not God. Theology is the discussion of God or the nature of God and they would say that because, if God is essentially unknowable, then how can we discuss the nature of God.

I think differently. I think that we can deduce quite a lot about God from personal experience, from the cumulative experiences of those who wrote about God through the scriptures and from the consistent and persistent revelation and inspiration we have received and continue to receive.

Let's start at the beginning - Genesis 1:27 - we were made in God's own image. That is a good place to start. I know all the stuff that follows about "fall" and "sin" etc but, at the very start we were made in God's image. The question we need to ask is "Can we reverse engineer this - Are we able to find about anything about the true nature of God by looking into ourselves?"

It seems to me that Jesus said that we were able to do this. In Luke 11 (Lord's Prayer, Ask, Seek , Knock etc) Jesus goes on to speak about our own (a parent's) normal love and respect for a child.

He asks the question of whether we would trick our children by trying to feed them a rock if they asked for food. The obvious answer being that no normal parent would do this.

We need to stretch this a bit further. As parents can we imagine what a child of ours would have to do for us to give up on them, to throw them out and have nothing more to do with them; to punish them for the rest of their lives with isolation from us? I don't know what our kids would have to do to warrant that, but it would have to be pretty bad. Most parents seem to find it very easy to forgive their own children, to give second chances and to welcome reconciliation. I know this is not universal - there will always be those weird exceptions which make the news and make the rest of us wonder exactly what is wrong in the world. But, the norm seems to be that a parent would walk over nails, broken glass and fire to save their child; that forgiveness and love is something which is born in us to give to our children.

I believe it is that way because we are made in God's image. We are like that because God is like that. God finds it easy to love and forgive us, not hard. However loving and forgiving we are towards our children, God is much more so towards us.

I don't know if you can accept this as a given, but stick with it. It has some interesting follow through ramifications when we get to sacrifice, blood, forgiveness, revelation etc