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.
If all die in Adam, which was a consequence of sin, then being made alive through Christ is the consequence of his work. Notice the consistency in my reading. You want to say all die because of the consequence of sin, but only some reap the consequence of Christ's work. Again, all means all in both cases. You are projecting your doctrine on the text instead of taking it for what it says.
It actually should be.
I'm not concerned with whether your or any seminarian thinks it is profitable. What is important is that it is realistic, accurate, honest, and truthful. Thus far, all that typically happens in so many evangelical churches is for Christians to stick their head in the sand and pretend major problems with the Bible (and its misuse) all in the name of so-called "inerrancy" and their favored definition of "inspiration."
No, the Church derives its authority from Christ, and it has been mediated through His Apostles and earliest disciple. But to put the New Testament on some kind of conceptual pedestal apart from the significant it has an an expression through the Church is a kind of historical oxymoron and one that I can never unsee and one that I'll never abide by.
I'm not so sure it needs to be, or rather that it is truly proper. Much of that involves distrusting God in the process and instead relying on secular epistemological foundations. If someone doesn't believe God's word is God's word, scholarship isn't going to convince them.
Are you advocating being skeptical about inspiration?
Personally, I'll take God's word over lying historians.
Fair enough, but the authority of the apostles is vested in their written documents and has been historically attested to as such. Ultimately it seems to me you're questioning the reality of the existence of God's word, which to me appears to lead to an inescapable skepticism.
Are you denying the Bible is God's word?
You protest God is a hidden God, but it seems to me God is a God of revelation. The question is, are we going to trust that revelation or are we going to believe the serpent when he says "Surely you will not die"?
Feelings and moral values have a place, certainly, but that place is not one of evaluation. Our feelings and moral values are supposed to be brought into check through Scripture, not rule over it.
You asked a question about interpreting the text, so I responded about interpreting the text. If your point is we should allow our feelings and moral values to determine our interpretations, you are by necessity introducing a foreign element and have abandoned interpretation.
This seems like an entirely different question to me, but ultimately I would say no our feelings and moral values do not play a part in how we apprehend God. God's trancendence makes it so that nothing can be known beyond His existence through natural senses/moral values and the like. Our image of God must match up to His self-revelation, which is through Scripture. There is somewhat of an interpretive spiral in which our larger view of God will influence how we view narrow texts and vice versa, but to allow our image of God to be based on anything but His own self-revelation is more building a god in our own image(our feelings and moral values) rather than responding to the God that is revealed in the pages of Scripture.
I'm not a proponet for either UR or ECT but I do believe Christ did teach to those on one side of the gulf. It just tells me that ultimately our Father is fair where Christ is concerned.
Here's a few to consider.
Are you fit to judge God? Is it not inspired text? We must take it seriously, though where we find that phrase it would be a mistake to take it literally.
Where emotion is a part f the text, it is appropriate to incorporate but must be drawn from the text not our emotions overlayed over the text.
It is God's self-revelation, every bit of it shows how God wants us to think of Him. Including the bits about smashing babies on rocks.
Sure, but our sense of goodness and morality is corrupt beyond measure and requires God's correction. If we base our image of God on our personal sense we are not apprehending God but creating a god after our own image.
Proper or not, it's what I have been doing for decades and if people, or fellow Christians don't like it, they can get out of the way. It's time to live in reality as it is rather than creating fanciful theologies that only serve as conceptual bubbles by which to artificially provide an enclosure for that theology. We can't be "Christian" AND stick our heads in the sand at the same time. To think we can and should do so is delusive and cultic, and I for one absolutely refuse to do live, breath and approach Jesus in that way. I don't have to in order to "be saved," and I'm not going to.
I'm not advocating or prescribing any particular 'brand' or path in understanding inspiration, whatever that is. What I am doing is descriptively descerning my view from that which other Christian hold, and I won't be badgered by anyone into a particular pigeonhole of dogma about the supposed nature of the New Testament (or the Old Testament for that matter) that doesn't really explain much of anything fully or coherently.
And I suppose you think you have the exclusive insider track on exactly 'who' everyone has to not only listen to but adhere to? I think a mere statement such as this one says little to nothing about the actual mental acts of any one historian who engages elements of Christianity. So, don't rely on playing that card too fervently. It's very weak. Very weak!
That's assuming a whole lot about the nature of each individual piece of literature that is, and has been, artificially collated into the 27 works we know today as the "New Testament." Don't overplay it. If you do, you'll just find folks walking away from your church as soon as they find out any bit of reality that you've failed to address or account for.
No. But at the same time, I'm not affirming the overly determined definitions that any one single Christian denomination pushes as "THE TRUTH," especially not against and in contradistinction from all others.
When you speak of "reality" it appears to me you're making a number of preliminary assumptions that don't wash with an interventionist God, assumptions that are certainly common in our day but it ain't necessarily so. But then again "reality" is beyond my ken.
Prior to a view of inspiration it seems there's an important assumption about historical uniformity that is in play. Ultimately, the question is do we believe the Bible is God's word or not because if we do then we have to allow for a certain immunity from criticism.
No one historian, no, but the accumulation of historical opinion. I certainly don't think I have an insider's track, but either the Bible is God's word or it isn't. And if it is God's word it has to take precedence over whatver critical method is being applied to try to undermine it's authority.
Folks will walk away for all sorts of reasons, that's God's business. But again, is it God's word or isn't it? Are we going to believe fallible human methods of inquiry and speculative reasoning or are we going to act in faith? God be true, and every man a liar.
I'm not either, what I am insisting on is that we treat God's word as God's word. If Scripture is God's word, we must abide by it.
Like a jeweler regarding fake gems, my preference is to get to know the genuine in God's word, rather than engaging with philosophical approaches.
It's not a matter of "failing to address," but a matter of whether or not faith is taken seriously. As I repeatedly ask(and I don't think you've given a straight answer) is Scripture God's word or is it just another type of literature like all else?
When I speak of "Reality," I'm fairly certain that you have little idea about what I have in my mind, so please save me the usual sort of pedestrian level rhetoric that gets passed off as an educated statement. Moreover, you don't get to take with your left hand what you've given with your right, so make up your mind about what it is you think you're saying and stop playing both sides of the conceptual court. It's ill suited for someone such as you to do so.
Again, you're plying double-talk and saying essentially nothing by speaking out of both sides of your mouth. Again. My advice. Just stop. You'll lose before you begin, especially since Philosophy of History and Historiography is one of my stepping stones.
Not so. For me, my existence preceeds my encounter and engagement with what is, at the point, a mere collection of pages lying upon a shelf or table. The Bible, such as it is, is never excused from critical method; in fact, it invites critical method to be applied to it. And as far as I'm concerned, if it really is divine in nature, then it should be able to sustain some assaults of our human intellects as it is more than merely pressed under the superficial weight of today's so-called "Generation Z Deconstructionists" (which on the whole is a parody of a more Derridian deconstruction, as little as that itself is worth on the whole.)
Well, then, don't be liar when you respond to by saying that your question isn't appropriate when it's applied to me. The real question is, "Who do we say Jesus of Nazareth was (and IS)?" The rest is window dressing for our respective perspectives on some thing called "faith in God."
And I'm insisting that we treat human conception about God as human perceptions of what it is we "think" God has revealed to the World through His early Church (and derivately, through the age worn pages of both Testaments).
News flash: You're not a jeweler and none of us has been placed in a perfect vantage point by which to evaluate the essence of the Bible. Philosophy, whether we like it or not, and even if it is trussed up and dressed up as "systematic theology" doesn't fully offer comprehensive discernment in the ongoing evaluation we all have to make with our engagement with the Holy Spirit and the Bible.
I'm not playing both sides, I am skeptical about any claim to "reality," and I only have as much idea as you have thus far conveyed. You seemed to parade "reality" out as if I would understand what you meant, so I don't get why you now object to me working with what you've given me.
There's no playing obtusely, outside of revelation I am an epistemic nihilist/hard skeptic.
It's not simply that no human knows everything, but every human begins with a faulty epistemic foundation and essentially never escapes it. We know nothing, apart from God. I assume you're familiar with Munchaussen's Trilemma.
Again there is no double talk, human inquiry is worthless. Vanity of vanities.
I didn't summarily dismiss them, I pointed out that even before we begin to assess our view of inspiration we have to establish a theory of history. And its a feedback loop, since our view of inspiration will also have a major impact on our theory of history
Whose existence? For me, even more fundamental then my own existence is God's existence. Beginning with nothing will lead you no where, into solipsism. At some point something is taken for granted that dictates the whole rest of the house of cards we build. To me, that brute fact is God and so the most sure basis for systemic truth is His revelation not what can be ascertained through phenomena and noumena.
I don't care to tread where you tread, because any ground but God's word is sinking sand.
That question has consequences and antecedents. Because how do we learn of Jesus of Nazareth, except through revelation? If Scripture is not God's word, what trustworthy source do we have for learning who Jesus of Nazareth is? And if it is God's word, how can we make ourselves masters over it through speculative and critical methods?
It's not the conceptions I'm concerned with, but the persistence and preservation of God's word as God's word and its exclusivity for deriving our conceptions about God.
I have my issues with systematic theology, and my dismissal of philosophy is not in its usefulness as a tool for examining Scripture. But in my eyes the only appropriate theology is a theolgy that seeks to qualify God as He reveals Himself in Scripture.
Either it's God's word or it isn't. If it's not God's word, I don't see how it is worth reading. I understand coming to Christ through alternate means, but once you recognize the reality of a God that enters history and is Lord over it I'm not sure how post-Enlightenment philosophical ideas persist.
Thanks for reading through those verses.
