It should be kept in mind that “teaching by contradiction” was an accepted method – it even gets used in the Old Testament, so we shouldn’t be surprised if it happens in the new as well.
“Explaining away” is liable to miss, and mess up, both sides of the ‘contradiction’.
And thus some contradictions must be accepted and allowed to stand.
Exactly. The church didn’t choose, it recognized. It’s the catholicity, that the canon came from the whole – all the churches – that is the authority. Once the early church was done asking each other “What do you read in church?” there was no further authority to change things.
And interestingly God seems to be okay with that.
Yes. There may be real contradictions but as I wrote, I am cautious to claim that. In many cases, I have noted that the apparent contradiction was just my misunderstanding. When I learned more about the passages and the overall message of the biblical scriptures, the apparent contradiction disappeared.
Some teachers say that the three keys to correct interpretation are the context, context and context. That includes wisdom because without understanding the context, you probably do not understand the whole message correctly. I guess the importance of context is familiar to you because you wrote:
And if a particular apostolic teaching seems to contradict the words of Jesus or his way of action, the former should be understood, without discarding it, as a response to some specific need or situation.
Certainly, I do agree that it’s impossible to comprehend any text or statement (including the biblical texts and statements) apart from its context.
To employ philosophical concepts in order to elucidate the biblical doctrines is an ancient and universally accepted practice of the Church. Otherwise we wouldn’t have even the Nicene Creed. Obviously, such elucidation attempts may instead lead to errors. But it seems to me that divine omniscience is also the perfectly classical and widespread theological notion that corresponds with the New Testament without a slightest exegetical difficulty.
Not the same thing: the Nicene Creed begins with scripture and picks up tools to clarify things. Doing theology by employing human philosophy is taking an exterior worldview and definitions and forcing them into theology.
I don’t see it. What’s evident from the text is that God knows all hearts, and beyond that is able to know anything He wishes. Functionally that’s perhaps a subtle difference, but I don’t like asserting what I can’t find in the text.
I appreciate this observation - the distinction being as to whether Scriptural writings had conferred authority, or inherent authority… if the church chose which books to “become” inspired, then the authority was conferred onto them from an outside source, but there is nothing inherently authoritative about the words, truth, or the like within the writings themselves. And this seems to me untenable… a work that is inherently non-authoritative in matters of theology (i.e., non-inspired by God) doesn’t magically become inspired by God because God’s church chose them to be part of a canon - even if hypothetically I granted the church full authority and infallibility to do so, the scriptures themselves simply aren’t inspired by God.
But if the works of the Bible are inherently authoritative by virtue of their being inspired by God, then the church can’t “confer” authority onto these books, the books already have said authority, and what they did was “recognize” the authority that was already there by virtue of their inherent inspiration.
I think it was J.I. Packer that gave the illustration, something like “The church no more gave invented the canon of the Bible than Isaac Newton invented the law of gravity… both simply recognized and documented what was already there.” Or something like that, don’t have the exact quote handy.
I agree; but this clarification has gone far enough down the road of logical inference to throw the entire Church into disorder. I mean that “consubstantial with the Father” is a perfectly orthodox statement - but it is not a biblical concept; it is a logical inference from what’s written about the Father and the Son in the Bible.
I would say that even in the Old Testament there are plenty of biblical passages (cf. Isaiah 40: 22-28, Jeremiah 23:24, Proverbs 8:31 - just the first few I happened to remember now) that proclaim God’s limitless power over humanity and the entire world, God’s limitless knowledge of everything, and divine presence everywhere in the created universe. Why can’t we translate these biblical ideas to the language of philosophy?
Whether He has that power or not does not mean He wields it. Scripture would imply that God holds back.
because it is ambiguous in terms of practicality. What God can do and what He does are two different things. Scripture shows both. It shows God wielding power but it also shows Him staying His hand. The net result is we would have to second guess God. Not a good idea.
Richard
Those verses do that, certainly.
But they don’t indicate that – they only indicate that He can know whatever He wants.
Proverbs comes closest to it, I think:
“The eyes of the Lord are in every place keeping watch on the evil and the good.”
So long as the ideas are being translated into philosophy and not ideas being imported from philosophy. The latter is why there were so many Christological heresies; people kept trying to interpret the scriptures to fit philosophy and gave us Arianism, Adoptionism, etc.
Well, I’m certainly not trying to take some definition of omniscience and make the God of the Bible correspond to it. I’m just saying that God who has been incessantly creating and supporting all the existing things is obviously aware of all these creatures at every moment of time. I don’t care whether this idea fits into some extra-biblical definition of omniscience or not.
Yes, the “Creation is present tense” argument is a good one; one presumes that God doesn’t do things without being aware of them – though it might be countered that He isn’t necessarily aware of all the details, that it’s just the natural laws that He maintains; that, however, is one of those fruitless questions there’s no point in pursuing.
It’s the kind of questions seminarians love to pursue over beer and pretzels on a weekend evening. 
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