In Reply to: Re: Let the dead bury the dead & Berg's forsake all doctrine posted by Miguel on October 23, 2003 at 20:05:07:
"One of the most perverse items in Berg's conception was his ability to generalize for others what he would not apply for himself."
I've been wanting to say something like this for a long time. I've never been convinced that Berg somehow strayed from a correct understanding of scriptural truths, but that his approach to understanding scripture and teaching it was corrupt and dead wrong from the very beginning.
One of the first things I did after leaving TF was take some courses in the Bible studies department at a Catholic college. I learned two basic things. As you noted, remarks to specific people and situations cannot be generalized, but must be first understood in terms of their cultural and historic context. Once the context of the statement is understood, you can translate the meaning into a modern equivalent through a process called hermaneutics.
The other thing I learned is to understand the conventions of the literary form in which a text is situated and analyze who was in the original audience when a teaching was given. Even generalizing the lesson of a parable can be problematic if you don't understand how a parable works as a literary form. Parables are different than fables. Parables always have a barb, an ironic twist, or criticism intended for some member of the original audience (usually the pharisees, sometimes the disciples).