Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
So if right and wrong concerning a shrimp boil, er food sacrificed to idols, boils down to one's own conscience, it is certainly nice that the law allows us to depend on conscience in that regard. Do you then extrapolate it to say there is no objective rule for right and wrong, and that conscience alone must rule?
Hm...so there are no exceptions to it - we must live by the rule of conscience as our guiding principle - but God will judge us based on something else? You're not making any sense here.
Is he talking about everything, or is this in regard to a specific subject? Even you said the two references play nicely together.
God does not engage in the self-contradictory.
This too is a bit of a loaded question, so I will need to clarify. I can't conceive of "evil" existing in a vacuum. The terms good and evil wouldn't really have a great deal of meaning if I were the only person existing. Evil, then, seems to be by definition a decision to treat people with a sub-par degree of kindness. (And kindness can be understood as an effort to reduce or minimize suffering).
You are not the arbiter of good sense. Let me try again. Add just two little words. Repeat after me: "It doesn't make sense TO ME." There, that wasn't so bad, was it?
I suspect you don't understand how powerfully Direct Revelation functions in a church era ruled by Moses-magnitude prophets like Paul.
(Sigh) Word games, as repeatedly mentioned.
I think there are degrees of evil. Perhaps it is true that the unregenerated cannot do anything in complete purity. Even so, the fact remains that he is obligated to heed his conscience - he should strive to do what is right to the best of his knowledge and ability.
Are you moving the goalposts, or is this the way you really think? Is right and wrong only about kindness vs subpar kindness, or is it about obedience to God?
Where is your Biblical authority that "Paul was simply extending the principle of conscience to all remaining issues" here? I see Paul talking about how even if your conscience says something is ok, that one should refrain from what may damage a brother.
So, supposing you are right that even the unregenerated is obligated to heed his conscience, where does that give supreme authority to the rule of conscience? Where does that make conscience the final arbiter of right and wrong?
Read between the lines. Paul merely makes accommodation for the weak conscience of the weak brother. He never says that eating such food is wrong in itself.
When is it NOT the arbiter of my decisions? 2300 posts deep - care to provide an example?
If that's all you get out of 1 Corinthians 8, it strikes me as a pretty shallow exegesis. But Romans 14 too? Surely "damage to a brother" isn't the full scope of that chapter. Yes it is mentioned, because it places a limit in our freedom, but a larger point made in the chapter is that righteousness cannot be defined in terms of laws. What is righteous for one person is unrighteous for another, depending on conscience.
Well, no. That is your strawman, your caricature.
God doesn't change the nature of some so that they are regenerated. God regenerates them which means they are reborn, and no long slaves to sin. He doesn't force the change of nature, as though having consulted a person he goes ahead and changes them anyhow, against their will. It is very simply what happens when the Spirit of God takes up permanent residence in a person, changing them from death to life.
This is rather amazing to me, how God's gracious mercy is considered by the self-determinist to be forced puppetry.
I think I might have told you once, I don't get this from Calvinism, nor from Reformed Theology, but from experience and scripture and agonized prayer. But I have no view of God as puppet-master, regardless of how YOU see it. Your narrative being drawn from a necessarily self-determining point of view, I can see how you might think it is puppetry, since it doesn't allow for self-determination to rule toward Godliness.
Calvinism, or Reformed Theology, as I understand it, fully allows that people make real choices, with real, even eternal, consequences. People choose for themselves wrong from right, and right from wrong, PRECISELY AS GOD HAS DECREED. But you need to skip a few steps and invoke puppetry. You would describe God acting on our level of existence, like JAL, as thought he is not omnipotent creator. Not so.
Polemically you continue to use loaded questions and statements to supposedly impugn my position. Strawmen. What precisely do YOU mean when you say that God does not "allow conscience to define right and wrong for us in all things" ? Because if we fully unpack your highly loaded words, I would fully agree with you at least in one sense, which fact doesn't establish any exceptions to the rule of conscience.
Is it coherent to depend on self-contradictory constructions, such as "Can God make a rock too big for him to pick up?" to make the point that he is not omnipotent? Because that is what you are doing, in asking, "Can God cease to exist?" No, it's worse than just that it is self-contradictory —it presumes to hold God to human conceptions.
Deflection
Self-contradictory construction. God is subject only to himself, but even that is a poor way of saying that he is eternally and faithfully himself. He never changes. He is the I AM —self-existent. But you want to make a mere creature out of him. He's not subject to your illogical constructions.
Strawman. Misrepresentation. I didn't adduce the paradox, ""Can God make a rock too big for him to pick up?"
Nope.
Ok, Mark, you concoct meaningless terms like "self-existent" and pretend that you're making good sense - superior sense - here. Whatever.
