So are both the bizarre interpretation of the bizarre 1 Peter 4:6 special revelation, or just the latter or neither?
Your question isn’t clear to me. But I gather you want my commentary on that verse and how it does or doesn’t fit as revelation or as rational.
Given that we have no way of empirically observing what all happens with the dead, any knowledge given about that would have to unambiguously count as revelation I should think.
Regarding the rationality of the verse; It seems to be a straightforward enough claim: that the dead are still subject to judgment, and therefore were granted spiritual life / opportunity as well. I don’t see anything irrational about the claim, as fantastic as it sounds to our mortal ears.
Of course we cannot know him fully, but that does not mean we cannot know truth about him or that we cannot truly know him.
We can’t possibly even remotely know God in any way except our epistemology of the revelations of the OP. I no longer know Him as Killer or any literalist, textist, Biblicist way.
I’m sad for you.
It’s interesting that you choose to take 1 Peter 4:6 literalistically.
You know, do you, that God never would nor never has revealed himself in any direct, comprehensible, intelligible manner to anyone?
This sounds like rather confident and certain knowledge about what God would or wouldn’t do!
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Just contributing to the discussion with questions I thought were relevant.
I certainly don’t believe that creed either, as should be obvious from that weather discussion we had not so long ago. I just don’t understand this way people have of equating miracles to violations of the laws of nature which God created. I believe God created for a relationship. Neither no interaction nor absolute control sound like a healthy relationship to me.
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I guess it depends one what we mean by “know God.” In some ways I think we can know God better that we can know ourselves. He is not this mess of contradictory desires of both good and evil like we are. However I believe in an infinite God and so the notion of knowing God in His totality is a downright absurd idea for us finite beings to entertain. I believe that getting to know God is task without end and is part of the substance of eternal life.
I’m happy for you.
It’s bizarre that you should choose to make that inference. Why did you do that?
[My apologies Dale, please see.
So, I’d better answer even though I didn’t mean this verse at the time: 1 Peter 4:6 For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.
because incidentally I do take that literally in that Peter - if it was him - meant what he said. However if the tenses are correct then there are multiple interpretations:
The gospel was preached to the dead after their deaths. Which is erroneously fed back in to I Peter 3:18-20
The gospel was preached to those who have since died.
Either way, they are on their way in the transcendent; all is well for them.
How do you interpret it?]
We all have that.
[quote=“Klax, post:178, topic:43599, full:true”]
I am assuming you mean, what is Truth.
John 14:6 Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him."
Jesus is the Truth. He came just as God foretold through the prophets. He taught the ways of the Kingdom of God. He died in our place as God foretold He would. He rose from the dead as God foretold. He ascended to Heaven and sits at the right hand of God as our intercessor. The Spirit of God was sent to those who believe in the Son to testify of the Son. There is no other true Jesus than this one. There are those who preach and believe in a false Jesus who they have imagined by their own vain reasoning, but there is only salvation by faith in the Jesus that the Father foretold through Moses and the prophets.
Isa 53 Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? (Indeed, who will believe?) 2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. 3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Who will be the one who does not despise or reject this Jesus? Who will esteem Him more than their own life?)
4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. 6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (It pleased the Father to offer up this Jesus as a sacrificial lamb. The offering of His blood and soul paid the price for our forgiveness and freedom from the power of sin.).
7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth (Behold! The Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.). 8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken (God killed this Jesus for the sins of the people). 9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering,(This Jesus is our guilt offering) he will see his offspring and prolong his days (Jesus will rise from the dead), and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. 11 After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light [of life] and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. 12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. ( This Jesus, the Lamb of God that was slain for our transgressions (sins) has become the intercessor and salvation to all who put their trust in Him.)
This is the Jesus that was foretold by the prophets. This is the Jesus who was born of Mary. It is this Jesus who preached, “Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is near”. This is the Jesus who was offered up by God as a sacrifice lamb to pay the debt for our sins. And it was through the resurrection of this same Jesus, that freedom from sin and eternal life is obtained, for those who give all their trust, love and obedience to this Jesus that God promised through Moses and the prophets. If a person does not abide in this Jesus he has no part in Christ or God’s eternal kingdom.
Those who do not believe this good news will grope around in the darkness of their own vain reasoning until the day they die. Then they will be raised up to stand before the Lamb of God to be scrutinized and judged.
It is this Jesus that is, THE TRUTH .
Yeah, I want Jesus to be God incarnate because that means there is transcendence, that existence has purpose, that all will be well for all the trillions of humanity that there will have been by the time we’re done in another hundred thousand years or so - wherever you are, you’re closer to half way, half the time - as it has been from eternity for the infinity of other conscious creatures for whom God incarnated. That’s true. Our stories of the meaning of Him otherwise aren’t the truth of course.
Martin, choose to put your trust in the God who spoke in the scripture that was quoted and in the Jesus that it spoke of. Choose to believe.
Sorry for the lack of clarity, but you ran most well with it.
Particularly as I got the WRONG Harrowing of Hell reference. I meant I Peter 3:18-20
So my apologies to you and Peter.
Furthermore although my question stands for those verses in chapter 3, they cannot be considered in isolation from the one in chapter 4.
For now, you will be glad to know, I’m hoist with my own petard.
But to summarize, revelation only works at all in the person of Christ. Not in virtually anything said especially about the meaning of Him, even by and to Himself.
I do exactly that Cody. That’s what exercising faith is.
ahhh - well … a very interesting accidental choice then, given how much it overlaps with your intended reference. I guess it’s good for us all to get our ‘invasion of hell’ passages sorted out.
I think this too must stand as revelation for the same reasons I gave prior.
Regarding rationality; this collection of verses gives a bit more to chew on. I don’t know if some part of it caught your attention as particularly hard to see in any rational context? Is it the apparent appeal to something like substitutionary atonement? The apparent distinction drawn between flesh and spirit? The preaching to the dead? Or the likening of Noah’s flood to a pre-figured ‘baptism’? Any one of those by itself might warrant being a project unto itself to draw out - hence my appeal for further specificity.
All of the above. And more: The Flood didn’t happen for a start. The rational, minimal, parsimonious interpretation is that ‘Peter’ is taking about the pre-incarnate Jesus, the pre-Jesus Jesus, i.e. the God of the OT visiting the demons in Tartarus before the Flood. Myth upon myth upon myth. What’s revelatory about it? From a pseudonymous source: ‘Many scholars argue that Peter was not the author of the letter because its writer appears to have had a formal education in rhetoric and philosophy, and an advanced knowledge of the Greek language, none of which would be usual for a Galilean fisherman.’. But not Silvanus, or Mark or another follower of Peter.
Why Peter chose to talk about this who knows. They had funny ways of thinking back then.
I can’t think of a specific revelation at all in the OT and the NT fares little better except in general as a couple of handfuls of genuine letters with the odd revelatory claim within a generation of the events claimed much later in the gospels concerning the embodiment of special revelation as, in Jesus.
Isn’t that a rather dogmatic reflection of those who say “not only did the flood happen, but it also had to happen in thus and such a way, submerging the entire planet as we moderns would now think of such things”? I don’t know how or why you would so hastily conclude that people never experienced God’s judgment in devastating flood waters that then became a symbol of that judgment in the Hebrew (and now Christian) narrative. For you to know for sure that this all cannot be in reference to anything historical would have to be rather … revelatory … would it not?
Okay. Maybe. Maybe even probably. But that wouldn’t change the fact that it’s part of the church’s received scriptural tradition.
Indeed. God seemed to enjoy intruding into their funny ways of thinking, and seems to not be above disturbing us in our funny ways of thinking today too.
I’m having trouble thinking of stuff from either testament that isn’t revelatory. In fact, isn’t that pretty much the entire value of the recorded scriptures to us? Stuff that wasn’t revelatory we could figure out on our own. So if revelation isn’t there, it wouldn’t leave us much anything of use. And maybe that is your facile conclusion about scriptures generally, but I suspect not.
For some reason, I just have an extra appreciation for you this morning (morning here anyway), brother Martin! As different as our outlooks may be on so much, and as mutually irritating as we may often be to each other - there is yet something there. Thanks for your continued thoughts and challenges.
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