LOL. Show me all the people on this forum whom YOU managed to convince on a major doctrine.
Convinced of what exactly? That the bible is prolific with material dynamics? Believe me, lots of theologians are ALREADY convinced. How about we start with Augustine? He wrote:
"“Whoever saw that dove [descend upon Christ] and that fire [at Pentecost],” he wrote, “saw them with their eyes….in corporeal forms”. Augustine’s additional examples of “corporeal forms [were] the fire of the bush, and the pillar of cloud or of fire, and the lightnings in the mount” (Augustine, NPNF Part 1 Vol 3 Book 2 chap 6).
How about the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia? Composed by 200 evangelical scholars? It states:
"The glory of Yahweh is clearly a physical manifestation, a form with hands and rear parts, of which Moses is permitted to catch only a passing glimpse, but the implication is clear that he actually does see Yahweh with his physical eyes"(The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia on “glory”).
My main thesis is already established in the minds of scholars - that the Bible has plenty of hard evidence for material dynamics. Such scholars haven't provided any hard evidence for immaterialism.
"
1. The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with
faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse
love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural
human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Others, again, frame whatever sentiments they may have concerning God according to the nature or affections of the
human mind; and through this
error they govern their discourse, in disputing concerning
God, by distorted and fallacious rules. While yet a third class strive indeed to transcend the whole creation, which doubtless is changeable, in order to raise their thought to the unchangeable substance, which is
God; but being weighed down by the burden of mortality, while they both would seem to
know what they do not, and cannot
know what they would, preclude themselves from entering the very path of understanding, by an over-bold affirmation of their own presumptuous judgments; choosing rather not to correct their own opinion when it is perverse, than to change that which they have once defended. And, indeed, this is the common disease of all the three classes which I have mentioned —
viz., both of those who frame their thoughts of God according to things corporeal, and of those who do so according to the spiritual creature, such as is the
soul; and of those who neither regard the body nor the spiritual creature, and yet think
falsely about
God; and are indeed so much the further from the
truth, that nothing can be found answering to their conceptions, either in the body, or in the made or created spirit, or in the Creator Himself. For he who thinks, for instance, that God is white or red, is in
error; and yet these things are found in the body. Again, he who thinks of God as now forgetting and now remembering, or anything of the same kind, is none the less in
error; and yet these things are found in the
mind. But he who thinks that God is of such power as to have generated Himself, is so much the more in
error, because not only does God not so exist, but neither does the spiritual nor the bodily creature; for there is nothing whatever that generates its own
existence.
2. In order, therefore, that the
human mind might be purged from falsities of this kind,
Holy Scripture, which suits itself to babes has not avoided words drawn from any class of things really existing, through which, as by nourishment, our understanding might rise gradually to things divine and transcendent. For, in speaking of
God, it has both used words taken from things corporeal, as when it says, Hide me under the shadow of Your wings; and it has borrowed many things from the spiritual creature, whereby to signify that which indeed is not so, but must needs so be said: as, for instance, I the Lord your God am a jealous
God; and, It
repents me that I have made man. But it has drawn no words whatever, whereby to frame either figures of speech or enigmatic sayings, from things which do not exist at all. And hence it is that they who are shut out from the
truth by that third kind of
error are more mischievously and emptily vain than their fellows; in that they surmise respecting
God, what can neither be found in Himself nor in any creature. For
divine Scripture is wont to frame, as it were, allurements for children from the things which are found in the creature; whereby, according to their measure, and as it were by steps, the affections of the weak may be moved to seek those things that are above, and to leave those things that are below. But the same Scripture rarely employs those things which are spoken properly of
God, and are not found in any creature; as, for instance, that which was said to
Moses, I am that I am; and, I Am has sent me to you. For since both body and
soul also are said in some sense to
be,
Holy Scripture certainly would not so express itself unless it meant to be understood in some special sense of the term. So, too, that which the Apostle says, Who only has
immortality. Since the
soul also both is said to be, and is, in a certain manner
immortal, Scripture would not say only has, unless because
true immortality is unchangeableness; which no creature can possess, since it belongs to the creator alone. So also James says, Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. So also David, You shall change them, and they shall be changed; but You are the same."
"15. As for that which the apostle says, And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him: either the text has been so turned, lest any one should think that the fashion of
Christ, which He took according to the
human creature, was to be transformed hereafter into the Divinity, or (to express it more precisely) the Godhead itself, who is not a creature, but is the unity of the Trinity, — a nature incorporeal, and unchangeable, and consubstantial, and co-eternal with itself; or if any one contends, as some have thought, that the text, Then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, is so turned in order that one may
believe that very subjection to be a change and conversion hereafter of the creature into the substance or
essence itself of the Creator, that is, that that which had been the substance of a creature shall become the substance of the Creator;— such an one at any rate admits this, of which in
truth there is no possible
doubt, that this had not yet taken place, when the Lord said, My Father is greater than I."
CHURCH FATHERS: On the Trinity, Book I (St. Augustine)
