Sola Scriptura Doesn't Make Sense

[JAL]

And what was that nonsense about "esoteric revelation" ? I'm not privy to any special revelations (I'm no prophet as yet). As I result, I'm just an ordinary believer practicing exegesis and human reasoning, like pretty much everyone else on this forum.

 

[Der Alte]

Um...I think you're barking up the wrong tree. I have always assumed the singular. I was objecting to another poster who proposed the plural.

Mea culpa. Maybe the right person will see my post.

 

[JAL]

I don't think Sola Scriptura is against praying to God for the understanding on His Word. Many times, other Christians who are Sola Scriptura have told me to pray over the meaning of His Word. I see no evidence in the official teaching from a reputable source that says that Sola Scriptura is against praying to God for understanding Scripture or to know that it is true by God's Spirit. You keep making this false assertion that it is the official teaching of Sola Scriptura. Sure, I imagine some out there have come to rely more on the scholars, etc. I have seen that on the forums. They think that is the way to understand God's Word when it is not the way. But this is not mentioned in Sola Scriptura.

I didn't say that Sola Scriptura is against praying to God for understanding (although it does lead to a logical contradiction per point# 4 in my Summary of Objections). What I implied, rather, is that SS is a movement infertile to Direct Revelation, for reasons such as:
(1)It holds that exegesis is supposed to be the primary dictator of all personal and church affairs. For example liturgies are destined to forever consist of man-made traditions because there is no determined pursuit of a revival where Direct Revelation spontaneously and unpredictably dictates every moment of the service.
(2) When SS proponents pray for understanding, it is generally not like this, "Lord, give me self-authenticating Direct Revelation" but rather like this, "Lord, make my mind a better comprehender of your Word" - in others words, "Make me a better Bible scholar."
(3) Problem #2 is continually reinforced by the following mentality, "God speaks to us primarily through His written Word" and thus reading the Bible (scholarship!) is advanced as the primary means of hearing God more. The truth is that prayer, praise, and worship are the primary means of hearing God more.
(4) On the assumption of SS, why seek Direct Revelation at all? If SS is true, Direct Revelation isn't of much use to me since I have to "check it out with Scripture" regardless. So I might as well skip that pursuit and go straight to exegesis.

Thus, instead of fostering Direct Revelation - and making it our chief goal - SS tends to suppress that pursuit. By way of contrast, Paul puts it on top of the list of priorities alongside love, "Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual things, especially the gift of prophecy" (1Cor 14:1).

 

[1213]

...via "the hearing of faith" (which is the literal rendering of the Greek). ....

And by that we know that the message in Bible is correct and we should remain in the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus therefore said to those Jews who had believed him, "If you remain in my word, then you are truly my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."
John 8:31-32

Unless obviously, if you don’t want to be a disciple of Jesus, but rather follow someone else.

 

[JAL]

Post 393 has a summary of objections to Sola Scriptura - about 16 of them. Therefore I trust you're not expecting to dismiss my whole critique with an empty wave of the hand.

And by that we know that the message in Bible is correct and we should remain in the teachings of Jesus.

You're responding to my reference to the "hearing of faith" in Galatians. You should rather begin with my initial exegesis of the passage at post 15 where I point out, for example, that at Gal 3:6, Paul turns us back to Gen 15 as the paradigmatic example of what it means to "receive the Spirit via the hearing of faith" (Gal 3:2, 5). It's a Direct Revelation - a revelatory vision.

"The Word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision [speaking promises]..Abram believed [the spoken promises]".

This "Word" was not the written Word - it was not a Bible dropped on Abram's head. It was the divine Word - an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise this anecdote would have failed to demonstrate "receiving the Spirit through the hearing of faith" (Gal 3:2, 5). Isaiah 55:11 shows that God outpours the Word/Spirit from His mouth when He speaks (similar to how you exhale breath when you speak). Thus hearing God speak - Direct Revelation - is the key to receiving sanctifying/reviving outpourings. And please pay close attention to the dynamics of faith here. The promises spoken to Abram spawned and/or raised his faith - they helped him to feel certain of divine providence. Thus faith cometh by hearing the divine Word (Rom 10:17).

And since you brought up this passage, let's talk about sanctification. A perennial contradiction in traditional thinking on the new birth is the inability to account for the sinful nature. Given that the new birth is an impartation of holiness, how does it retain a sinful nature? The two cannot coincide. For example when we say that God is holy, we do not find it necessary to add, "And, in addition, He has no sinful nature alongside his holiness" - that would be redundant for where there is holiness, it logically excludes sinfulness. How then do we retain a sinful nature? The only solution is to recognize the mind as divisible into parts (although I don't want to get into a full defense here of the concept of a tangible soul). Thus the new birth was a sprinkling of the Word/Spirit upon ONE part of the heart, and sanctification consists of additional sprinklings upon the rest of the heart (the sinful nature) until the heart is filled full with the Holy Spirit.

What does that mean? Sanctification can be defined as a series of Direct Revelations (hearings) because we receive these outpourings via the hearing of faith.

"Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? 3Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made mature by the flesh? (Gal 3).

Paul's argument is obvious.
(1) They had begun by receiving the Spirit via the hearing of faith.
(2) How then were they to mature? The same way they had begun!

Recall that Abraham already had saving faith prior to Gen 15. That passage exemplifies sanctification, therefore, not so much the new birth. Anyway the upshot of the passage is that Paul is defining sanctification as receiving the Spirit again and again and again, as Gordon Fee himself concluded, "The clear implication is that even though [the Galatians] have already received the Spirit, there is another sense in which God supplies‘ the Spirit again and again" (Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), p. 388).

Jesus therefore said to those Jews who had believed him, "If you remain in my word, then you are truly my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."
John 8:31-32

Unless obviously, if you don’t want to be a disciple of Jesus, but rather follow someone else.

And you assume that the Word here is the written Word? Why can't it be the same divine Word who came to Abraham?

 

[JAL]

Regarding sanctification, Paul's point is this. The new birth isn't by good works of the law. You don't sustain the new birth by working hard for God. Rather it's somewhat monergistic (please do not read Calvinism here) - regeneration is a work of God. How then are you sanctified? By good works of the flesh? No - rather by receiving more outpourings (you can think of it, loosely speaking, as more new births).

Revival and sanctification are the same thing. Frankly this is a historical fact. If you read up on the history of revival, you'll see that entire villages and communities often became holy overnight, when a reviving outpouring fell in their locale. They didn't become holy by human effort. It was a work of God. That's why we need to pray for revival.

 

[JAL]

Bible Highlighter,

Here's an example of what I'm saying. Logos Bible Software has a web page for their NICNT (New International Commentary on the New Testament). Here's what it says:

"Each volume in the NICNT aims to help us hear God’s word as clearly as possible."

I'm not opposed to reading commentaries - but really? Examining works of biblical scholarship are touted as the key to hearing God? That's precisely the mentality that the Sola Scriptura movement tends to foster.

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

If it wasn't for scripture you wouldn't have a gospel. And believing the gospel is not a matter of opinion, it is simply believing the facts presented in scripture.

I agree. The problem with sola scriptura being discredited by Protestants (we know and accept that Catholics include tradition along with Scripture and this is not really relevant to the OP, so our Catholic brethren can make a sigh of relief! ), is that people read into the text that isn't there, and they tend to ignore parts of the text that are there and does not suit their pet theology. But in the 66 books of the Bible, every issue that we are likely to encounter is already dealt with somewhere among those books.

Before the printing press, the scriptures were copied by hand. Every church would have had access to a copy and/or had a teacher who could relay the content. In the very early church, before the canon was fully distributed, they relied on prophecy (which was still active at the time) to guide them in the faith .

Agreed. Because handwritten copies were relatively rare and expensive, normal people often didn't have a copy and had to depend on their ministers to make them aware of what the Scriptures taught. This is why the Reformers and Puritans in the 17th Century did mainly expository preaching, to make their people as fully trained in the Scriptures as possible. Some preached for hours at a time, and sometimes several times in one day.

"hearing with faith" simply means believing what you heard. Nothing to do with direct revelation. The word "hearing", akoēs, is the normal word for physical hearing with your ears, as any lexicon will tell you. The Galatians received the Spirit because they believed what they heard, the gospel. It is nothing to do with extra sensory perception or any such like.

Members of churches, listening to their pastor or minister preaching the sermon, has to exercise a lot of trust in the preacher to preach sound doctrine. This puts the pastor or minister in a very serious position of trust, and this is why the Scripture says not to become many teachers, because teachers of the Scripture will be judged more strictly than ordinary congregation members.

I know, as a Pentecostal, I have heard preaching consisting of "new" revelation that the preacher has "heard" from the voice of the Holy Spirit. After 48 years in the faith, I tested many things I was taught as a Pentecostal and found that they were missing from the New Testament! That sort of turned my theology on its head, and I learned that if it ain't in the NT then it ain't true.

(Hey buddy! "Yield not to temptation!" You know what I mean, both of us having very many debates on Pentecostal issues. We don't want to hijack the thread! ).

 

[JAL]

I know, as a Pentecostal, I have heard preaching consisting of "new" revelation that the preacher has "heard" from the voice of the Holy Spirit. After 48 years in the faith, I tested many things I was taught as a Pentecostal and found that they were missing from the New Testament! That sort of turned my theology on its head, and I learned that if it ain't in the NT then it ain't true.

Any unregulated religious quest tends to be chaotic and thus disastrous. It happens with exegesis, for example on this forum - even on the current thread - I've seen examples of "exegesis" unregulated by cogent hermeneutical rules, resulting in seemingly bizarre conclusions. At least the seminaries have insisted on some kind of standards here - therefore don't expect to get published in their journals if you are a chaotic writer.

Fine. But when we turn to the arena of Direct Revelation, the church has ignored the one regulation that is both critical and common-sense based. And the inevitable result is the sort of chaos that you apparently witnessed for 48 years as a Pentecostal.

If you've been following this thread, you already know what regulation I have in mind - 100% certainty.
(1)A leader should prescreen any messages. He shouldn't allow someone to tout a message as prophetic unless it was first delivered to himself the leader at 100% certainty.
(2) The congregation shouldn't accept a message as prophetic until it is delivered to them at 100% certainty.

Exceptions can be made in the following sense. Suppose a leader is prescreening a message and feels something VERY CLOSE to 100% certainty. In this case he should see to it that the message is at least prefaced with a disclaimer to the effect that "we are not sure this is a Word from God."

To summarize. Please don't base your theology on unregulated chaos. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let me ask you this: The last time you felt the love, peace, and joy of God wash over you distinctly ("loudly and clearly") during the praise-and-worship part of a church service, did you seriously question it? Did you feel an urgent need to "check it out with Scripture" because it might be a counterfeit of the devil? No, because it elevated your level of certainty too high for that. You immediately felt something close to 100% certainty that it was a true work of God. That's Direct Revelation at work.

Treat every "revelation" with the highest skepticism until it becomes incontrovertible - until it raises your level of certainty so high that you find it IMPOSSIBLE to question in good conscience.

Again, it's not complicated.

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

Any unregulated religious quest tends to be chaotic and thus disastrous. It happens with exegesis, for example on this forum - even on the current thread - I've seen examples of "exegesis" unregulated by cogent hermeneutical rules, resulting in seemingly bizarre conclusions. At least the seminaries have insisted on some kind of standards here - therefore don't expect to get published in their journals if you are a chaotic writer.

Fine. But when we turn to the arena of Direct Revelation, the church has ignored the one regulation that is both critical and common-sense based. And the inevitable result is the sort of chaos that you apparently witnessed for 48 years as a Pentecostal.

If you've been following this thread, you already know what regulation I have in mind - 100% certainty.
(1)A leader should prescreen any messages. He shouldn't allow someone to tout a message as prophetic unless it was first delivered to himself the leader at 100% certainty.
(2) The congregation shouldn't accept a message as prophetic until it is delivered to them at 100% certainty.

Exceptions can be made in the following sense. Suppose a leader is prescreening a message and feels something VERY CLOSE to 100% certainty. In this case he should see to it that the message is at least prefaced with a disclaimer to the effect that "we are not sure this is a Word from God."

To summarize. Please don't base your theology on unregulated chaos. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let me ask you this: The last time you felt the love, peace, and joy of God wash over you distinctly ("loudly and clearly") during the praise-and-worship part of a church service, did you seriously question it? Did you feel an urgent need to "check it out with Scripture" because it might be a counterfeit of the devil? No, because it elevated your level of certainty too high for that. You immediately felt something close to 100% certainty that it was a true work of God. That's Direct Revelation at work.

Treat every "revelation" with the highest skepticism until it becomes incontrovertible - until it raises your level of certainty so high that you find it IMPOSSIBLE to question in good conscience.

Again, it's not complicated.

I researched the prophetic by reading nearly every book written about it - or else the ones I could purchase from my favourite Christian second hand bookshop over a year. I actually filled up most of a bookcase with them by the time I had finished buying and reading them all. Through that I got a very good picture of the range of belief and opinion concerning the prophetic, the voice of God, the difference between the voice of the Holy Spirit and that of the world, flesh and the devil. It didn't make me an expert in the practice of the prophetic, and probably gave me more head knowledge than actual practical skills. But it showed me the possible minefields in it, and believe me, there are plenty of them, and if one is not careful, one can step on a mine and have things blow up in one's face! Consequently, I don't go rushing into giving prophecies these days, because often I don't know when it is the Holy Spirit or just me wanting to give a helpful word to someone. I learned very early on not to give prophetic words on demand, because that is not how it works.

My view is that most prophecies given are from the flesh - through a natural desire to help someone at best, or at worst, wanting to be seen and heard for the praise of men for one's "wonderful gift of prophecy". I have learned that if anyone starts a prophecy by saying, "This is what the Lord is saying" it is more likely to be of the flesh than of the Spirit. If the Lord is really saying it, then that will be obvious to the listener and so the "prophet" doesn't have to take the Lord's name in vain by adding an authority on to it he doesn't have.

I know that many won't agree with me, but I have read it all, and seen it all over my years associated with the Pentecostal movement, and my view comes from that experience of the good, bad, and ugly that I have observed over the years.

 

[JAL]

I researched the prophetic by reading nearly every book written about it - or else the ones I could purchase from my favourite Christian second hand bookshop over a year. I actually filled up most of a bookcase with them by the time I had finished buying and reading them all. Through that I got a very good picture of the range of belief and opinion concerning the prophetic, the voice of God, the difference between the voice of the Holy Spirit and that of the world, flesh and the devil. It didn't make me an expert in the practice of the prophetic, and probably gave me more head knowledge than actual practical skills. But it showed me the possible minefields in it, and believe me, there are plenty of them, and if one is not careful, one can step on a mine and have things blow up in one's face! Consequently, I don't go rushing into giving prophecies these days, because often I don't know when it is the Holy Spirit or just me wanting to give a helpful word to someone. I learned very early on not to give prophetic words on demand, because that is not how it works.

My view is that most prophecies given are from the flesh - through a natural desire to help someone at best, or at worst, wanting to be seen and heard for the praise of men for one's "wonderful gift of prophecy". I have learned that if anyone starts a prophecy by saying, "This is what the Lord is saying" it is more likely to be of the flesh than of the Spirit. If the Lord is really saying it, then that will be obvious to the listener and so the "prophet" doesn't have to take the Lord's name in vain by adding an authority on to it he doesn't have.

I know that many won't agree with me, but I have read it all, and seen it all over my years associated with the Pentecostal movement, and my view comes from that experience of the good, bad, and ugly that I have observed over the years.

You're just confirming everything I wrote in my previous response to you. You are referring to controvertible experiences. The real mark of an authentic revelation is incontrovertibility. You said it yourself:

"If the Lord is really saying it, then that will be obvious to the listener."

In your research you apparently read hundreds of articles on the prophetic, but I am confident that most of them did not stress incontrovertibility defined, for example, as follows:

"You should accept a revelation without question when in fact you are UNABLE to question it."

That's a tautology - therefore I don't need to study 48 years worth of books and articles on the prophetic, as you did, to evaluate its veracity. And it holds true both for the speaker and for the audience.

 

[1213]

…
This "Word" was not the written Word - it was not a Bible dropped on Abram's head. It was the divine Word - an outpouring of the Holy Spirit…. …Thus faith cometh by hearing the divine Word (Rom 10:17)….
…And you assume that the Word here is the written Word? Why can't it be the same divine Word who came to Abraham?

Firstly, I want to say, I don’t really understand why make a problem of this Sola Scriptura matter. I understand that God has spoken in many ways to people and people have not had the Bible always. Bible also speaks about Holy Spirit that can teach people. So, Bible is not the only way.

But, I think it is disturbing, if disciples of Jesus belittle or revokes what is said in the Bible. I for example believe that Bible has the words Jesus declared as God had commanded him to speak. And now, if someone claims to be a Christian (disciple of Jesus) and tells that things are not really as Jesus said, I think that is wrong and not something Christian should say. So, what do you say, is Bible wrong? If you don’t think Bible is wrong, then I think we don’t have really any problem.

And my answer to the question, why it is the written word (in that case), I think it is the written word, because there is no reason to think it is something else.

I agree with the idea that faith comes by hearing God’s words. I think God’s words are in the Bible, and if person receives them, he can become faithful/loyal to God. Before hearing or reading, it would be difficult to be loyal to something, because one doesn’t know for what to be loyal.

 

[JAL]

But, I think it is disturbing, if disciples of Jesus belittle or revokes what is said in the Bible. I for example believe that Bible has the words Jesus declared as God had commanded him to speak. And now, if someone claims to be a Christian (disciple of Jesus) and tells that things are not really as Jesus said, I think that is wrong and not something Christian should say. So, what do you say, is Bible wrong? If you don’t think Bible is wrong, then I think we don’t have really any problem.

I believe that Scripture is inspired and true. I personally don't know any Christians who would disagree.

Firstly, I want to say, I don’t really understand why make a problem of this Sola Scriptura matter.

Paul was furious with the Galatians - he called them fools because he perceived their error as catastrophic to the maturation of believers. In my understanding, the error of the Galatians was to fall into the practice of Sola Scriptura!

I agree with the idea that faith comes by hearing God’s words. I think God’s words are in the Bible, and if person receives them, he can become faithful/loyal to God. Before hearing or reading, it would be difficult to be loyal to something, because one doesn’t know for what to be loyal.

That's the Sola Scriptura position! It advises us, "Want to hear God? Look to the Bible!"

Like you said, "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing from the Word of God" (Rom 10:17). The whole Christian life hinges on faith - so where do we get faith? From the words of the Bible? That's what the Sola Scriptura movement claims. Are they correct?

Again, Paul gave us an EXAMPLE - and the example he gave was the experience of a PROPHET (not a Bible scholar, in fact there was no Bible back then). It was thus a DIRECT REVELATION.

"The Word of the Lord came to [the prophet] Abram in a vision [speaking promises]."

In this scenario, Abraham's faith elevated because he heard God speak.

You cannot just ASSUME that faith comes from reading the bible, or ASSUME that such distinctions don't matter. 100 billion souls have lived and died since the world began, and so we need to mature in a way that most effectively reaches them. How we walk DOES MATTER. Paul believed it matters - it mattered enough that he called the Galatians "fools" for straying off the beaten path.

You'll probably reply, "I know that faith comes from reading the Bible because it has bolstered my faith in the past." There are two problems with this assumption:
(1) How can you be sure THAT type of faith is identical to the kind thematized in Scripture?
(2) How can you be sure that Direct Revelation wasn't also a factor here?

Please don't presume to dismiss these issues as relatively unimportant.

 

[JAL]

Maybe this will help. Where did Paul's faith come from? He was already a Bible scholar before conversion, right? He had already read the Bible - but had no faith! (He may have had some Bible-based faith, but it wasn't the kind of faith that God was looking for). Then he had a Direct Revelation on the Road to DAmascus. He heard God speak - and now suddenly he had real faith!

 

[Michael Garrett Andrews]

Jal, allow me to play devil's advocate if you will, in order to clear up some things for me and help solidify your doctrine.
I think we may have overlooked something concerning direct revelation. At the end of the day, we are using our interpretation of the bible to confirm this doctrine. When in fact if this doctrine is true we would not need the bible at all. We would need nothing to confirm it! i believe it is highly possible we may have anthropomorphised God in our interpretations of how he communicated with prophets such as Abram, Moses. We are going by the bible, because nobody alive today has a clue how God communicated to Abraham, we can say we know it was an audible voice or vision ( like the bible says!) but We can't prove this. And if i hold firm to direct revelation , and don't have direct revelation myself, then God is not in my experience, only words in the bible. I agree, direct revelation trumps sola scriptura, but i'm still right where i started if God doesn't speak to me directly/Vision/ Audibly. What if i ask him to speak this morning, and i die tonight not having recieved a reply? The Only solution i can think of in this case is to revert back to faith, " the righteous will live by faith" By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, “In Isaac your seed shall be called,” concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense." - hebrews 11 . So he at least had to have faith he would raise him from the dead. I wonder if in reality, we have the same information about God that Abraham did?

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

You're just confirming everything I wrote in my previous response to you. You are referring to controvertible experiences. The real mark of an authentic revelation is incontrovertibility. You said it yourself:

"If the Lord is really saying it, then that will be obvious to the listener."

In your research you apparently read hundreds of articles on the prophetic, but I am confident that most of them did not stress incontrovertibility defined, for example, as follows:

"You should accept a revelation without question when in fact you are UNABLE to question it."

That's a tautology - therefore I don't need to study 48 years worth of books and articles on the prophetic, as you did, to evaluate its veracity. And it holds true both for the speaker and for the audience.

I call reading up all I can about a topic to check whether my thoughts about it are sound or not and according to Scripture, being teachable. I have found that in the main, those who purport to receive "special revelation" from God tend to be unteachable, because "I got this from God and not from man". Therefore they don't listen to correction when they need it. All you have to do is watch Kenneth Copeland get very aggressive when someone tries to advise him about some of the wacky "revelations" he gets. And Benny Hin saying that he is "God's anointed" and anyone who criticises him, God will destroy.

 

[JAL]

Mike, don't worry about offending me. As long as you have sincere, reasonable objections, I'm happy to address them.

Jal, allow me to play devil's advocate if you will, in order to clear up some things for me and help solidify your doctrine.
I think we may have overlooked something concerning direct revelation. At the end of the day, we are using our interpretation of the bible to confirm this doctrine. When in fact if this doctrine is true we would not need the bible at all. We would need nothing to confirm it!

And we don't need anything to confirm it - the evidence from the Bible is icing on the cake. Let's pretend we're having a conversation before the Bible was written. Topics include:

(1) Does God exist?
(2) Which religious document did He sponsor, if any?
(3) How do I know, even if I read the right document, whether I'm picturing the correct God? Maybe I'm praying to a conceptual idol, not to the real God (viz. today this brings to mind Mormons, JW's, unsaved Jews, etc).
(4) How do I know my faith is of the right kind and strong enough to have eternal life?
(5) How is my fallibility to be overcome, for example when reading God's book? Or when making moral decisions that could harm the world in ways that my feeble mind could not possibly have anticipated? (For example going on vacation to another country without realizing I'm spreading Covid-19 to that nation).

Direct Revelation solves these problems - notice at this point I've drawn this conclusion without the Bible. I don't need the Bible to confirm. I don't even need to know which religion is the correct one, to reach the conclusion that God, if He exists, would need to leverage Direct Revelation. (But it's nice that the Bible seems to confirm that hypothesis over and over and over again).

I used simple reasoning to reach that conclusion. It's not infallible, but we're all agree on that point, right? Currently none of us participating in this discussion are infallible, for example no one on this thread has claimed to be a prophet.

Those who dissent with this conclusion are free to provide a more well-reasoned theory. Certainly the Sola Scriptura theory isn't an improvement.

I think you're pointing out that I can't PROVE my theory 100%. True. I can't even prove that you exist. Neither can the Sola Scriptura party. All we can do, in our current state of fallibility, is pick the most reasonable theory presented to date.

Nobody alive today has a clue how God communicated to Abraham, we can say we know it was an audible voice or vision ( like the bible says!) but We can't prove this.

Right. I can't prove it 100%. Would you say the same about all communication? Would you say:

"Nobody has a clue how men speak to men."

I don't think you'd be that skeptical. And if you understand my metaphysics, I'm saying, based on Isaiah 55:11 for example, that God speaks to men the same way that men speak to men. Sound waves (Energy/Matter). Of course, shortly before impact, He can reshape the divine Energy/Matter into Light Waves, or Water Droplets (see John 3:5), or whatever He likes. But that's not really anything new because Cable TV can send a fiber optic wave, for example, that eventually gets converted into sound waves.

"Fiber optic cables carry communication signals using pulses of light generated by small lasers or light-emitting diodes."
Is Fiber Faster Than Traditional Cables? Learn All About Fiber Optics

If even human beings can convert light waves to sound waves, can't God convert His Sound Waves to any kind of material impact? But I've digressed into metaphysics. Sorry!

I agree, direct revelation trumps sola scriptura, but i'm still right where i started if God doesn't speak to me directly/Vision/ Audibly.

Don't be short-sighted. In the IMMEDIATE SHORT TERM the doctrine of Direct Revelation doesn't gain you much. But things would likely be different if the church had been cultivating prophets for the past 2,000 years. It's much easier to become a Joshua if you've got Moses as your mentor. The point is to begin moving in the right direction.

And not just because "infallible doctrine" is important. For example, I tried to demonstrate, a few posts back, that Paul, in Galatians, defined sanctification as an ongoing sequence of Direct Revelation.

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, “In Isaac your seed shall be called,” concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense." - hebrews 11 . So he at least had to have faith he would raise him from the dead. I wonder if in reality, we have the same information about God that Abraham did?

I disagree. Abraham did not need to have that faith in resurrection. Nice that he had it, but what he really needed, from the Voice, was 100% certainty that killing his son was the morally right thing to attempt.

I'll now prove this point. Suppose Abraham attempted to kill his son simply because he reasoned that God could raise him from the dead. In other words, suppose the Voice wasn't the decisive influence. This creates 2 problems.
(1) If he lacked 100% certainty that the slaughter was the morally right thing to do, we cannot celebrate him. Anyone who tries to kill his son on less than 100% certainty has opted for evil and merits contempt and imprisonment (unless you really want to maintain that Abraham was a man with a warped conscience, that is, a psychopath).
(2) If Abraham was driven by reasoning he should have completed the slaughter! What stopped him? The Voice! Thus we see a parallel:
(A) The Voice is what started him along that path.
(B) The Voice is what ended his trek along that path.

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

Mike, don't worry about offending me. As long as you have sincere, reasonable objections, I'm happy to address them.

And we don't need anything to confirm it - the evidence from the Bible is icing on the cake. Let's pretend we're having a conversation before the Bible was written. Topics include:

(1) Does God exist?
(2) Which religious document did He sponsor, if any?
(3) How do I know, even if I read the right document, whether I'm picturing the correct God? Maybe I'm praying to a conceptual idol, not to the real God (viz. today this brings to mind Mormons, JW's, unsaved Jews, etc).
(4) How do I know my faith is of the right kind and strong enough to have eternal life?
(5) How is my fallibility to be overcome, for example when reading God's book? Or when making moral decisions that could harm the world in ways that my feeble mind could not possibly have anticipated? (For example going on vacation to another country without realizing I'm spreading Covid-19 to that nation).

Direct Revelation solves these problems - notice at this point I've drawn this conclusion without the Bible. I don't need the Bible to confirm. I don't even need to know which religion is the correct one, to reach the conclusion that God, if He exists, would need to leverage Direct Revelation. (But it's nice that the Bible seems to confirm that hypothesis over and over and over again).

I used simple reasoning to reach that conclusion. It's not infallible, but we're all agree on that point, right? Currently none of us participating in this discussion are infallible, for example no one on this thread has claimed to be a prophet.

Those who dissent with this conclusion are free to provide a more well-reasoned theory. Certainly the Sola Scriptura theory isn't an improvement.

I think you're pointing out that I can't PROVE my theory 100%. True. I can't even prove that you exist. Neither can the Sola Scriptura party. All we can do, in our current state of fallibility, is pick the most reasonable theory presented to date.

Right. I can't prove it 100%. Would you say the same about all communication? Would you say:

"Nobody has a clue how men speak to men."

I don't think you'd be that skeptical. And if you understand my metaphysics, I'm saying, based on Isaiah 55:11 for example, that God speaks to men the same way that men speak to men. Sound waves (Energy/Matter). Of course, shortly before impact, He can reshape the divine Energy/Matter into Light Waves, or Water Droplets (see John 3:5), or whatever He likes. But that's not really anything new because Cable TV can send a fiber optic wave, for example, that eventually gets converted into sound waves.

"Fiber optic cables carry communication signals using pulses of light generated by small lasers or light-emitting diodes."
Is Fiber Faster Than Traditional Cables? Learn All About Fiber Optics

If even human beings can convert light waves to sound waves, can't God convert His Sound Waves to any kind of material impact? But I've digressed into metaphysics. Sorry!


Don't be short-sighted. In the IMMEDIATE SHORT TERM the doctrine of Direct Revelation doesn't gain you much. But things would likely be different if the church had been cultivating prophets for the past 2,000 years. It's much easier to become a Joshua if you've got Moses as your mentor. The point is to begin moving in the right direction.

And not just because "infallible doctrine" is important. For example, I tried to demonstrate, a few posts back, that Paul, in Galatians, defined sanctification as an ongoing sequence of Direct Revelation.


I disagree. Abraham did not need to have that faith in resurrection. Nice that he had it, but what he really needed, from the Voice, was 100% certainty that killing his son was the morally right thing to attempt.

I'll now prove this point. Suppose Abraham attempted to kill his son simply because he reasoned that God could raise him from the dead. In other words, suppose the Voice wasn't the decisive influence. This creates 2 problems.
(1) If he lacked 100% certainty that the slaughter was the morally right thing to do, we cannot celebrate him. Anyone who tries to kill his son on less than 100% certainty has opted for evil and merits contempt and imprisonment (unless you really want to maintain that Abraham was a man with a warped conscience, that is, a psychopath).
(2) If Abraham was driven by reasoning he should have completed the slaughter! What stopped him? The Voice! Thus we see a parallel:
(A) The Voice is what started him along that path.
(B) The Voice is what ended his trek along that path.

Okay. Let's say I get a revelation that I say comes from the Holy Spirit that says Christians should be always prosperous and that healing is guaranteed, and if a person is in poverty and doesn't get healed, he must have sinned in some way and displeased God. How are you going to test whether I am right on wrong, and what would be the basis of your test?

 

[JAL]

Okay. Let's say I get a revelation that I say comes from the Holy Spirit that says Christians should be always prosperous and that healing is guaranteed, and if a person is in poverty and doesn't get healed, he must have sinned in some way and displeased God. How are you going to test whether I am right on wrong, and what would be the basis of your test?

You're asking a question that I've answered several times already. I'm still at work - if I can't find you a good link right now, I'll have to do it later.

 

[JAL]

Are you aware of my main maxim known as the rule of conscience? My entire theology of Direct Revelation is predicated upon the maxim (I like to call it the rule of conscience):

"If feel certain that action-A is evil, and B is good, I should opt for B".

I've challenged people over the years to postulate a scenario that clearly calls for departure from that maxim. No one has succeeded to date.