Sorry for taking so long to reply... life suddenly got VERY busy... I just want to address a couple basic assumptions that I think we're diverging on.
One is in how “flesh” is defined. I don’t think its talking about your body, or about the natural world. Other translations say “sinful nature”, by which they mean the natural human tendency to not live well, which means various things.... not minding living enriching ourselves regardless of the effect on other people, enjoying things which are destructive, lust for power and control, etc etc... I think what most Christians believe is caused by arrogating to ourselves the place of God. It’s our nature, it isn’t God’s. I think that that’s what it’s talking about as “the flesh” vs “the Spirit”... two different ways of being, our natural one and God’s, that God’s mercy is letting us participate in and grow into. If you read the first couple posts, they’re all about that.
The second place we diverge is that rather than “having a direct line to the Spirit” Christians know about Him through reading about Him and through accepted church doctrine. Christianity actually teaches, so far as I know at least, that it’s horribly dangerous to not have a personal relationship with God, and just learn through doctrine, for exactly the reasons you talk about... people are fallible, power corrupts, etc. On the other hand, doctrine is necessary too. I came up with a metaphor, which probably breaks down quickly but I like it. Say you move to a completely foreign country...let’s say Azerbaijan. How do you learn about it? Do you stay in your hotel room and read all the books you can by very educated people? Do you go out into the market and respectfully and open-mindedly talk to people, who might not have any education but who do live there? Do you just wander around the countryside, observing and taking notes, then making judgments based on your personal experience? I think you do a balance of all three. The scholars aren’t enough... they are probably all biased in different ways, they are fallible, and they probably disagree with each other anyhow. But they have spent a long time studying the place, and they know things that you don’t. Your interpretation of your experience of the country will be much, much poorer if you decide in your arrogance you don’t want to use anyone’s ideas or conclusions but your own. So you read what you can, you find out about the people that are writing, and you see what resonates most with your own experience and what you hear from other people. Same with talking to the market people... their ideas of history and science might be laughable to you, and their views seem narrow and ignorant, but there are things that one can only know by living in and experiencing a place rather than looking at it from above. Whatever you do, you have to use your own mind and heart to make your decisions and figure out how to live and think about things, but all the while be aware that the way your mind and heart interpret things is not pure, unclouded and just, but influenced by many other things, from your past or personality or what have you. The longer you live there, the more trustworthy your own impressions probably are going to be. So for me, to know about the things of God has been like that a bit. It’s a place, it’s an economy, it’s an order of things, in all of which are expressed the personality and intent of God. You don’t actually need theology, or to talk to (and listen to!) other Christians, to live there, but it’s really helpful if you want to live well, participate, understand what is going on and have your experience make sense. But nothing can substitute for living there and interacting with the place yourself.
There’s a lot more that could be said, because my metaphor really doesn’t do justice at all to the fact that “living according to the Spirit” is actually a relationship with a PERSON (which is the whole point of everything, happiness is all good but it’s just a byproduct) but I just wanted to talk about how reason can’t be pure and needs to interact with other people, in understanding God just like in understanding anything else.
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