Rules Defined

I was talking with Esther about this a bit at dinner tonight. She told me I needed to define what I mean by "rules" since that means different things to different people. Some would consider the Ten Commandments the "rules." That's not what I mean. A direct edict from God like the Ten Commandments is pretty hard to miss and pretty hard to argue against unless you want to outright rebel against God. What I'm talking about is to take a concept or principal from scripture and, through a single human interpretation, synthesize a hard and fast rule from it. I believe we are given principals in order to wrestle through the application of them every day we live. The synthesized rule may make sense in a given situation, but it's an application with blinders on - a single simplistic perspective on what may be a complex and multifaceted situation. It may sound like I'm pushing situation ethics here, trying to twist scripture to support whatever I want or want not to do, but I'm not. I'm saying that taking the first interpretation of a scriptural principal that you happen to come across and leaving it at that, never looking or considering or studying any further is lazy at best and possibly very dangerous. I believe we are meant to wrestle our way through the understanding of truth. I don't mean making up our own truth. But I think living by a list of synthesized, one-size-fits-all predetermined rules with a simple black and white flow chart mentality constitutes making up one's own truth.