I agree that you can't find one without the others, so you lose Christ when you dismiss the Father (and Christ) of the OT and the rest of the NT. The OT was mostly written by witnesses to the events too.
FK: That's because you see Christ's singular mission on earth to be the sum of His being. I don't know why you believe that, but to believe it WOULD require throwing out the vast majority of scriptures.
The alternative is to make Christ something other than God, something lesser, which seems to be the underlying current in many so-called Christian groups outside the Apostolic Church.
But the Apostolic Church condemns your personal view of the scriptures. The Apostolic Church holds that the scriptures are Holy, and you do not. Your true Bible is only a few pages long.
This is a great statement that ought to be paid attention to. I believe that if God had not given us the Epistles, we would really not know how to apply the Gospels (Matthew through John) correctly in this age.
Revelation was progressive from Adam to Christ, and from Christ through to the Church Epistles. The mission of Israel's Messiah and King while on earth was obviously the pinnacle of revelation at that time.
But with the rejection by Israel of their King (and the consequent rejection of the Davidic Kingdom), and having murdered Him, the Resurrected Son of God, from the Right Hand of His Father, continued to give new revelation to take us through a previously unrevealed age of the Body of Christ.
This revelation is in the Epistles, and is the Holy Spirit's guidance into all truth, promised by our Lord in John chapter 16.
ALL of the Gospel records (Matthew through John)are true, but they are not ALL the truth. There is subsequent revelation -— the pinnacle got even higher.
The Epistles are just as much the Words of God as are the Gospels. The Words in Romans through Philemon (where Paul is the human writer) are no less the words of the Lord Jesus Christ than are the words printed in red (in your Red Letter Edition) in Matthew through John. The Gospel records are the Son of God speaking from Earth. The Epistles are the Son of God speaking from the Glory, by the Holy Spirit, through Paul, Peter, James, John and Jude.
Through the Gospels, we lose some of the Hebrew OT misinterpretation of God, FK, i.e. reject "eye for an eye" (proportional justice) and do not return evil for evil, or "love your enemy" and do not hate him (as the OT says), and be merciful so that you too can ask for mercy, etc.
Sure there is Christ-like God all over the OT, but He is hidden and can be found only through the prism of God witnessed in the Gospels.
Which is precisely the reason Christ instituted His Church, lest we fall into misinterpretation and stray from Christian teachings.
Those sects that try to stuff Christ into the mold of the OT God are diminishing Christ's full divine revelation and are making Christ conform to that which He redefined and reinterpreted correctly.
The purpose of the Church is to guard against such misinterpretations by holding on to the tradition passed on by the Apostles, which has been safeguarded for 2,000years by One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
But the Apostolic Church condemns your personal view of the scriptures. The Apostolic Church holds that the scriptures are Holy, and you do not. Your true Bible is only a few pages long
You have a remarkably short memory, FK. Not so long ago I posted the official position of the Orthodox Church on the Scriptures, and this was actually my third such post.