In what way do I not believe the Bible?elected4ever said:
Over and over again you emphasize the reason of man as a substitute to the truth of God. If something seems unreasonable to you it must not be true. You therefore make God's truth subject to and conditional to the reason of man. You are contentious even to the simplest of truths. Let God be true, but every man a liar.Clete said:
This is true of ANY hermeneutic if it is not used honestly but what I said what not a hermeneutical principle in the first place. It was a conclusion derived from a hermeneutical principle. Do you understand the difference?lee_merrill said:
No Lee, that isn't what is meant by "the plain meaning of the text". What you claim is the woodenly literal meaning of the text, there's a difference. That difference being that one takes the natural sense of what is being said and the other sticks so tightly to the dictionary definitions of each individual word that they can no longer breathe. When I refer to the plain meaning of the text I am talking about taking a passage to mean simply what it seems like the author is saying by a simple reading of the text. In actual fact the specific passage we are talking about is a passage where the plain meaning might be different things to different people depending on which set of theological classes they are wearing and indeed that is what causes you not to be an open theist and me not to be whatever it is you call yourself. The question then becomes who's theological classes are Biblically justified and who's are not.
Saying it doesn't make it so, Lee! And what's more, the Bible directly contradicts you.
It is not a false dichotomy, Lee. The Bible itself makes the same distinction and comes right out and says that God's power is founded upon His righteousness. Did the author of the Psalms miss something or are you simply wrong?
Of course I do! Your theology is not possible if one does not place (whether consciously or otherwise) God's quantitative attributes above His qualitative ones. There is simply no other way to come to the conclusions that you do.
Words have meaning Lee. I know what you've said and I know what you claim to believe and you can pound the pulpit all you like but what I've said remains true. Even your definition of love is made in the context of placing God's power and control over and above His righteous character. In other words, your insistence that God's love is primary is a meaningless argument because it is not love which defines your theology but the other way around; your theology defines love. That's backwards, Lee!
But can't you see that this fits perfectly into how I started this conversation a couple of days ago? Remember when I said that our theology is determined by what we believe about who God is? It's clear to me that you are unaware of what you are doing but as I said in the first post, the debate over open vs. settled theism comes down to whether one places greater emphasis on God's quantities or on His qualities. You deny that there is even any real difference between the two which is proof by itself that you place too high a priority on His quantities because there very definitely is a difference; the Bible comes right out and says so.
If you are in Christ you are already blessed with every spiritual blessing. (Eph. 1:3)
Again, there is not such actual thing as "the reason of man" and if even if there is, it is not the sort of reason of which I speak. I am speaking about OBJECTIVE truth, not mere opinion or conjecture.elected4ever said:
NO NO NO!!!!!!
There is no such thing. Reason is reason. That which is not rational is not true - period.
Like what?
Amen!
I rest my case. You do not know the difference between human logic and the word. There is a difference whether you wont to believe it or not. and you don't.Clete said:
The difference is that one is real logic and the other is not. So called "human logic" is not really logic and all you would have to do to prove me wrong is to present a single Biblical teaching that is demonstrably irrational. But you cannot do it because the whole Christian worldview, as it claims as its object of worship the very personification of logic itself according to John 1, is itself the very foundation of reason.elected4ever said:
The truth is irrational to you. That is why you cling to your false logic. Your opinion on my participation means diddley squat. You are arrogant and self centered even to consider the truth irrational simply because you choose not to believe it. I just choose not to participate. You even end this conversation with a lie. No sense reasoning with a lier.Clete said:
This is a contradiction. The truth cannot be irrational, by definition.elected4ever said:
What's false about it?
I wasn't making any commentary concerning your participation. I simply summed things up in response to the fact that you don't seem to want to participate any longer. If you do want to then that's really great by me!
You have it backward, I choose not to believe something if it is irrational, not the other way around. My opinions about what is and is not right have no bearing on whether or not something is rational. That's what makes it a valid tool to use in the determination of truth; it's objective.
Has it not been you position during this whole conversation that spiritual truths need not be rational? It very clearly has been your position. You are affirmatively stating that there are truths that do not conform to the three laws of rational thought. Your position, by your own admission, is therefore irrational by definition (in other words its not just my opinion).
elected4ever said:
But there is no way to use this hermeneutic properly, it is a bad hermeneutic to rewrite a plain text such as "The Lord took away" while saying "Let's not be wooden".Clete said:
What then is the meaning of "the Lord took away" and "the trouble the Lord brought on him" then, as described not by Clete, but by a published commentary? I don't want to have people making stuff up (you once claimed it was a figure of speech), and I think that is what is happening.
The natural sense of "the Lord took away" (simpleton that I am) is that the Lord took away.
This would be why I ask for your meaning from a published commentary, I don't think the meaning here is variable.
And saying it's not so doesn't make it not so. And where does the Bible speak of God's attributes as some quantitative, and some qualitative?
Those would both be qualities, you know, for power is not a quantity, instead, it has a quantity associated with it.
What would my definition of love be, may I ask? Clete knows so much about me!
I agree that "quality" is different than "quantity."
No need to bless anyone, then?
Unless however, you are perfect in knowledge, you will have some incorrect views which you think reasonable (as we all do). So then we must not reject out of hand views which seem to us unreasonable on the face of it (remembering that God's ways are not our ways) for as it turns out, we might be the ones who are wrong.
Right here is what I was responding to: "Here are countless Verses where Elihu tells Job that he is crazy and God both didn't and wouldn't do this..." but that was Patman saying this, so I think I got my wires crossed. Do you in fact agree that God does bring affliction even on innocent people at times?Philetus said:
Nothing could be further from the truth. I am telling you that the rationality of man is not the rationality of God. If what I think you are saying here is that the rationality of man is irrational in light of God's truth, then I can accept that. but you seem to make no distinction between the two.
