Climbing Mount BIAS!

Do you see the problem here, Vossler. Once again, you have identified a particular intepretation of scripture as God's word.

So you slide from questioning whether general revelation can amend/correct an interpretation, to denying that God's word needs to be amended/corrected.

But rmwilliamsll did not suggest that God's word might need amending/correcting. Only that our interpretations may need amending/correcting.

It is not a long step to go from this equivocation to implying that rmwilliamsll is opposing God's word rather than questioning an interpretation of scripture. I grant you haven't taken that step. And I commend you for that. But be wary and try not to give occasion to others to step over that line.

Again, you imply someone has said that it supercedes scripture. No one has said this. The understanding of the two revelations is that they are both from God, both equally true, neither taking precedence over or superceding the other.

Do you really think this does not describe what you yourself are doing? You are establishing your beliefs and your lifestyle on what you personally think the bible means. You are judging what scripture means, just as much as those you disagree with. You are deciding what is right and wrong based on your private interpretation of the bible.

If you are not, then on what basis do you claim your interpretation of scripture is not personal and private?

It's true that Trinitarianism can be supported with the Scriptural texts. But so can Arianism. The question is not what you think or were raised to think, but which is sound doctrine? It won't be decided by the Bible because, as the controversy showed (and there was a lot more to it), both sides argued from Scripture.

Faith, I think, is not at all how it is treated in pop Christian culture. It is much more like a trust than an abstract belief. In this sense, we cannot assume that we have understood what is being said. Merely, whatever it is that is meant is true. Thus, we strive to understand what is meant. Growing in faith does not mean resolutely accepting what is understood (or, potentially misunderstood), but working towards better understanding of the One who is heard and the message that has been given.

The realization (in the case of homoousis) was that if the Word is not one being with the Father, then true knowledge of Christ is not equivalent to true knowledge of God. It may be argued that it is possible to know of the Father by a created Word, but we would not know the Father. The Trinitarians argued that this is how we ought to think of John 14:7, for example. But you can see that this is dealing with interpretations. As such, you can see that reason plays an integral role in deciding between sound and unsound doctrine.

I have no idea of what you're talking about. Nowhere did I say science is irrelevant; why do you insist on putting words into my mouth? You seem to make a habit of that.

Good and reliable hermaneutics use the Bible almost exclusively.

David Cooper: "When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense;therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, literal meaning, unless the facts of the context indicate clearly otherwise."

Yes, but whatever that truth may be, it never supercedes the ultimate source of truth, Scripture.

So are you saying that you are one who believes we all can have our own interpretation of the Bible?

Because you apparently see the meaning of the entire Bible as an individual interpretation, then I'm guessing there are no universal truths within it because they're all up to our interpretation. Am I right?

Yes, but if we each have our own interpretation, then we're each playing God and amending/correcting the Bible as we see fit.

there isn't a true interpretation, at least not one we all are aware of, right?

Well if each of us believes that we can all interpret Scripture as we see fit, then Scripture will most certainly be, and has been, superceded.

When did God ever say that there were two revelations and that they were equally true?

By this response, it would appear, you don't believe there is an accurate interpretation of Scripture, yours included, right? The words don't really mean what they say, at least they could mean something to me and something entirely different to you and that's o.k. as long as we're both happy with our interpretations.

But they also use extra biblical rules of hermeneutics, such as

Other extra biblical authorities you seem to use include traditional interpretations, and older sciences such as Copernican heliocentrism which have changed previous traditional interpretations.

I would have thought God was the ultimate source of truth, he created the world and inspired the bible. The scientific study of the reality God created will not contradict what God was actually telling us in scripture, but it has in the past contradicted fallible human interpretations of scripture, as Copernicus demonstrated.

Five major issues in the American Christian church since 1800 have been:
temperance, slavery, social gospel, higher criticism-orthodox/liberal split, ordination of women.

Since 1800 there has been no real or deep change in American Protestantism on the issues you mention as core-the Bible being read individualistically and the lack of political power on the part of the institutional church to enforce doctrinal conformity.

In each of these issues, social pressure has forced an enormous change in not just a few Biblical interpretations but in very large parts of the whole systematic theology. The pressure for change has come almost exclusively from outside of the church and the effect has been drastic in hermeneutics and in Biblical theology.

It is not a question of if general revelation changes biblical interpretation but how it happens.

It is not a question of opposing some monolithic mystical single Biblical theology to forces of change from outside of the church, but how each community within the greater church amends and changes it's interpretation of Scripture as it interacts with the world outside it's community.

Interpretation changes, in response to ideas from general revelation, here are 5 very important issues in very recent history (like yesterday *grin*) where each of us will differ from Christians in our denominations just a generation ago, let alone 200 years in the past.

To assert that biblical theology is hermeneutically sealed from the world is simply to ignore the history of the church.