I disagree, truth is not subjective, it exists in reality apart from it being accepted by anyone.
I don't disagree with you on this regard, but face it,
you and
you alone have chosen to believe that Scripture is what you believe it to be, and have decided to subject yourself to what you believe to be its infallible authority.
You decided that --
you. So how can you claim that you have not made Scripture authoritative over yourself by your own authority? We all have a mental map of reality contained within our minds. Mine is different from yours on account of my life experience and education/training. I don't make scripture the only source of knowledge, by my choice, because I understand that it can easily be misinterpreted, especially by those lacking in emotional intelligence and psychological (spiritual) maturity.
God forbid this thought! All Scripture is God breathed and useful for instruction.
Breathed, really? Would that include the New world translation "breathed" by the Jehovah's self-appointed Witnesses? Or maybe the Book of Mormon? And which canon of Scripture is the real McCoy? The one used by the Orthodox Christians, or the Roman Catholics, or that used by the Protestant reformers, whose Bibles contain fewer books than the other two Churches. And besides that, how do we really know that the Bible is the Bible unless we trust the men who decided which of the early Christian writings belonged and which didn't? Yes, men decided which writings belonged. By what authority did they do this, seeing how they didn't have scriptural instruction telling them which books were okay? Clearly, they made their decisions about these books based on some other kind of authority.
This is a dangerous way to search for truth. it is the way of the Muslim mystic, the Buddhist monk, the neoplatonist philosopher, who in their heart of hearts wants to taste the divine. But, how do you know then you are not being demonically deceived?
It is also the way of a Christian ascetic, and yes, it is dangerous, but irreplaceable as a source of truth. Suffering and deprivation are the only paths to a level of knowledge and understanding not attained by any other means, and temptation and deception is encountered and must be overcome with the help of God.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for that we do not see. I place my faith in God and His only recorded source of revealed truth. Truth revealed by God is of a higher source than that our minds can comprehend on our own.
I agree that God's truth is greater than our minds can comprehend. What you and many others do not realize however, is that those Muslim mystics and Buddhist monks that you have so handily invalidated above have also experienced that same revealed truth, which is why they too insist that theirs is the true faith. Subjectively their religious experience is identical to that of our Christian saints, the differences are in the objective beliefs. But our Bible would have many of us believe that those standing outside of Christianity are totally godless. And you know those other semitic peoples who lived in the land of Canaan, the ones that Yahweh allegedly commanded the Israelites to entirely wipe out, showing no mercy to even the women and children as a condition of their inheriting the promised land? Well, they were just people. They were no more evil or less deserving of living in peace than the Israelis who so ruthlessly killed them in order to gain possession of the promised land. What really happened is that the Hebrews murdered and slaughtered those people because they wanted to steel what they had, then they justified it by believing that they were God's favored people and therefore had the right to kill those godless outsiders. And today we condemn Muslims as backward terrorists for having a similar mentality to those ancient Jews. If they are backward, and I agree that they are, then so is our Bible, and we must recognize it as such to a degree, or else remain every bit as backward as the Islamic extremists.
Another thing to consider, just as one of many examples, is that neither their faith in God nor their search for answers in the Bible could save the millions of victims of the bubonic plague, who turned to both in order to spare their loved ones this horrid death. They suffered and died anyhow, without anyone to comfort them. But it was ultimately the discovery that the disease was spread by rats infested with the disease carrying lice that finally enabled us to stop this disease, and God-given scientific curiosity that later led to the synthesis of medicines by which we could defeat it. Where in the Bible did it teach us about the rat lice? Just saying, ya know?
If you seek truth from anything other than His revelation, then you seek it from yourself. That is a lower authority than God.
Nah, we should seek truth wherever it is and by any means possible: through various branches of science, the arts, poetry, literature, philosophy, Religious tradition, mythology, etc.
Truth is truth, wherever it is revealed.
1. If the writer's of Scripture are deficient in the ways you stated, then why even care what is the proper interpretation of Paul's thought?
Because people are always misunderstanding Paul's thought, which leads to many divisions and denominations. That stinks.
2. What is mistaken here? I don't necessarily disagree that we like with a paradoxical truth: man implicitly has a measure of free will, yet God is sovereign over even the mind of man: "The mind of man plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps." (Prov 16:19)
I already told you before: we get it,
we really do. Man does not choose what happens to him. I did not choose to be born, nor do I wish to die, and I control very little of what happens in between. most things I have no say in. It goes without saying. But given your logic, then "Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?" means that none of us have anything to worry about regardless of our wickedness, because God wills us to turn from our wicked ways and live, and what God wills God makes happen, and we have absolutely no choice in the matter -- we're all saved in the end and that's that! Awsome! I can go and covet my neighbor's wife now.
For this reason we much approach God with humility. I know that I have free will, but I also know that I never willed anything faithful until God changed my heart, which is my very will. So, that is our measure of free will, for God has the veto power. The Scripture says distinctly:
I think that those of us who belong to our Church understand this quite well. The Church and the Bible teach us that God desires all to turn to Him and receive the kind of Life that only He can give, and stands at the door of our hearts knocking, and it is left up to us whether to let Him in and how long to let Him remain there. Besides, the Orthodox are the ones who repeatedly implore the Lord for His mercy. Ever been to an Orthodox prayer service?
Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking [a]by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus is accursed”; and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 12:3)
I cannot even confess in my mouth that Christ is Lord or believe in my heart that He rose from the dead apart from the Holy Spirit. In that sense, in every faithful Christian is a supernatural miracle playing itself out in real time.
Yes, we know this too. It is from our subjective experience within the Church. We've been living this way since Pentecost and will continue to do so until the return of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.