Actually, I think I just deleted it Kolo. I had a ping list buried in my freep mail to get to and I've received so much mail in regards to this thread that I deleted what I thought was a closed topic.
I believe that your main objection was that God can not be a part of something that He is. Since Christ is the way the truth and the life, your argument was that he couldn't be both the Truth and the Pillar of the truth. He couldn't be part of something he was in full. I argued that he could be because we see him both as The Life and the Lord of Life.
In the end, you indicated that stylistically it would be more natural to see it as the church being the pillar and ground of truth, but that the Greek didn't forbid the other interpretation. Actually, I found my original email to you concerning this issue and this was my question - kinda on the same track as Annalex. "I was wondering if the sentence structure here allows God to be the pillar and ground of the truth or is it the church. My Greek, being rusty, says no since if it were attached to Theos the ending would be masculine like alletheon. Am I correct here or could it be taken either way?" You surprised me by saying stylistically it was smoother to say it was the church, but that the Greek wouldnt' forbid it.
Here's what I said to you:
"I think one could interpret the passage in exactly the way you suggest. In many ways, it is the punctuation we see in English which leads us to interpret it in the way we do. That Greek of the NT, of course, wasn't punctuated so even the printed structure of what we read in the NT in English is necessarily someone's interpretation. I don't know why even we Greeks interpret it as meaning that The Church is the pillar and foundation of The Truth. I suspect it may go back to the idea that God is "O OWN" (can't use the Greek fonts here unfortunately)which is to say that God is the creator of everything, even the Truth, and thus as Creator wouldn't be part of The Truth. There is also the notion in Orthodoxy that The Church is only interested in bringing The Truth to mankind and thus would be its pillar and foundation. But that aside, I think you are correct to say that from a pure read of the sentence, one might well conclude that it is God rather than The Church which is the foundation and pillar. My earlier mention of the word "tou", for "Who" is just a stylistic observation based on other passages."