Appreciate the thoughts, but I was asking the larger epistemological question. The fact that I don’t like something, or personally find it repulsive, is not evidence of it being untrue. There are all manner of things I wish were not true but they simply are. Reality does not conform to my preferences, nor yours.
“If that sort of God existed, I wouldn’t like him. Therefore that sort of God does not exist” is simply faulty logic.
So I grasp that you have a deep distaste for the portrayal of God you described above. But I am asking what basis you have for thinking that your beliefs are true.
If “acknowledging the existence of God” was the means by which salvation is received, I don’t think you’d encounter much disagreement. But I for one don’t know many Christians that think that mere acknowledgment of the existence of God is somehow sufficient for salvation… after all…
You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
First of all, I was merely suggesting in the short play that for “without excuse” to mean anything, there must be a path through general revelation to salvation–although I don’t know what it is. I did not intend to suggest that exactly what Jerry said was sufficient. (1)
Secondly, while I agree that mere intellectual assent is not sufficient, I never agreed with people quoting the passage from James about demons to make that point. For given that there is no known plan of salvation for demons, their lack of salvation, even though they do believe, has no relevance for us for in drawing conclusions about our own salvation. Even if demons did more than “merely believe” there is no indication in scripture that they’d be saved.
(1) As a Calvinist, I don’t believe anything is required for salvation. God will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy. I tend to think that the route of hearing the gospel and responding and working through your salvation is the normative case, and we should all act as if it is required, but God can save whomever he wants, regardless of what knowledge they have acquired.
I thought you were an evolutionist. What’s all this concern about death, mayhem and destruction? I thought that was all part of life.
Here is the problem with messily ole human reasoning. We are bias towards ourselves. We want what WE want. Then we create a God like us.
There are a few things that Martin’s reasoning left out of the God equation. Like God is HOLY, JUST and RIGHTEOUS. Sin is repulsive to God and will not abide in His Kingdom. Because you left out these tiny characteristics of God’s nature you overlook a few others. He is long-suffering, merciful, kind, forgiving and willing to execute His Son in your place for all your wicked deed, words and thoughts. He is also LOVING, and that is why He sent Jesus to be executed for our rebellion.
Jesus showed God’s love by saying, “REPENT, FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS NEAR.” The GOOD NEWS is that in God’s long suffering with wicked mankind, He still offers a way out of the judgment and condemnation that we all deserve. It is through trust, love and obedience to Jesus, the Lamb of God that was sacrificed for the sins of the world. Now stubborn, rebellious man still chooses to reject that offer because they love sin more than holiness. So, there is no way they will enter God’s kingdom, they will be cast out, and justly so. They don’t want God’s holiness now, so they won’t get it later.
Your reasoning has failed you. Your understanding is not a revelation from God by the HOLY Spirit. It is a revelation from Marvin’s spirit. You a mere creature judges his Creator, that ought not be. Matt 7:21 "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
God is kind enough to reveal Himself to us; we have a record in the Word of God. He shows us His Holiness, Righteousness, Justice, Mercy, Kindness and Love in the scriptures. (DON’T MESS WITH THE SCRIPTURES). If a person rejects the God who can foretell the future and has the power of life and death, he is not acting reasonably or in his best interest.
I know you have gone through a lot in your life but there is still time to start over. The thief on the cross did.
This is how I understand what Special Revelation is, or this is what it means to me. (An in-depth debate on what others think it means is not necessary.) God talking to people and telling them what He is doing or will do is Special Revelation because unless He revealed it, we would not have known it by our senses or reasoning. So, when you look at creation and see the knowledge and understanding and wisdom it took to plan out everything and then create it, it is obvious there is an all knowing, all understanding all wise Almighty God. It is obvious that it didn’t just happen by its self. So with what I would call Natural Revelation (using our senses and reason) we can come to the knowledge that there is an all powerful God but still not know Him intimately.
Special Revelation is God pulling back the veil that hinders us from seeing and knowing what He is doing. He does this by stooping down and talking to us and revealing to us His thoughts and plans. That’s what He did through the prophets or in Abraham’s and Moses’s case, He or The Word did it in person. Without Him doing this we would not have the scriptures that we have. What we may have had was a record of wars, who lived where, who gave birth to who and so on. But through God giving us Revelation we can now understand what is happening behind the veil. The eye of our understanding is opened and we begin to understand the character of God. For example, if God hadn’t given us the knowledge of His interactions with Adam and Eve and how he told the serpent, Gen 3:15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." We would not have had the first prophecy of the coming savior and therefore had no expectation of Him. If God had not revealed Himself to Abraham we would not have had the knowledge of a righteousness that comes when we trust, love and obey God. Think of all the times the Spirit spoke to prophets and revealed so many different things God said and what He was doing and would do in the future. Without God speaking to mankind we wouldn’t have a personal relationship with Him.
All of creation cries out there is a God, that is obvious. But we need Him to reach out to us personally and talk to us, speak His Word to us, to give us His Word and Spirit to convict us of our sins. Jesus is Thee Special Revelation of God.
Scripture is the Special Revelation of some accounts of God’s interactions and words to mankind, sooooooooooo DON’T MESS WITH THE SCRIPTURES
Those emphases do not help your argument any. (They rather detract from it.)
It is not ‘messing with scripture’ to recognize that there are multiple uses of the Biblical Hebrew word for an indeterminate period of time, that period determined solely by context and only traditionally translated ‘day’ when associated with the six creation periods delineated in Genesis 1. The context in Genesis 1 is unique in all of scripture, the very creation of the universe, space and time itself, and it happened only once. A plea to a meaning in another later context is illegitimate. A similar argument is true for ‘morning’ and ‘evening’.
Earth’s morning has long since passed and its day nearly spent. Its evening will be over when the bright Morning Star returns.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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That’s nice mate. Really. But you can’t, no. We’ve all gone through much I’m sure. In our helpless privilege. Imagine how much worse it is for the half of the world living on a dollar a day.
Every time I encounter your God I think of this and the Eumenides.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Because we all know what love is. See. And there’s always Stephen King’s appalling Revival, one of the nastiest books I’ve ever read. If God is as we made up, He’s that bad. How many people has Satan actually killed? And God? If God the Damner, God the Killer, God the Sadist, God the Psycho, God the Inadequate Incompetent Self Righteous Racist Sexist Homophobic Murdering Genocidal Maniac is real, remember, smile, it’s a good life.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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I don’t want or need anyone to die instead of me. I honour Jesus for His faith by which I know that all will be well. Happy to blaspheme with that. Happy to call white white and black black.
The only way for a person to benefit from Jesus’s faith is to be in Him. As all mankind is in Adam and therefor have his nature, we must be in Christ to receive any benefits from Him. That’s what Jesus did for us on the cross. He took humanity into Himself and in Him our old man was executed and in His resurrection a new man was created. To enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must be born again. Literally, but not physically. John 3:3 In reply Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” It is only through His death and resurrection that our spirits are made new.
Gal 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!"
We all know the sins we have committed and no amount of good deeds will release us from sins power, but God did what no law, good deeds or will of man could do, He circumcised our spirits from the power of sin that is in the flesh nature. And He makes those who trust in the work of Christ on the cross new creations. Born anew. Not by the will of man but by the will of the Father. It is Christ in us that makes us united to the Father as He is united with the Father. Jesus is everything to the Father and it is only by being united in His death and resurrection that we are made a part of Christ and thereby enter into God’s Kingdom and family.
You say you want Jesus to be God incarnate but you wouldn’t even know about Jesus if it wasn’t for the scriptures. It’s the Jesus of the scriptures that said, “You must be born again.” You want Jesus to be real yet you won’t see Him for who He is. He is the Jesus of the scriptures! Don"t you see the need for deliverance from the power of sin now. Not just forgiveness, but Christ living in you delivering you from sins power.
Here is a personal thing that God did for me that showed me just how powerful the execution of my old nature is. Not to long after I was overwhelmed with the knowledge of my sinfulness (conviction) and I put my trust in Jesus and what He did on the cross for me, I met a girl that I had known before I loved Jesus. Back then we had sinned together for a short time, about a week while my girlfriend was on vacation. (But I was a “nice” guy, really.) Well I talked to her about God and got her to go to church with me (she was a “good” Catholic, even when we had sinned a few years before). We hung out a few times more and I would always talk about God. One night we went back to her place and she went into her bedroom and came out in a night gown. I won’t go into to much detail but just a little more. Basically she wanted to have sex. She started to come on to me strong. Now the very thing I would have loved before Christ set me free, now made my stomach sick, literally. I told her I had to leave, she begged me not to, but I left. The next day I called her up and told her I didn’t want to see her anymore because her affections were sinful (it’s called fornication) and it would not be good for either of us.
As the apostle said, “For freedom sake, Christ set us free”. No law, good intentions, good deeds or man’s reasoning will kill the nature of the flesh and create a new man with the nature of God abiding in you by His Spirit. It’s all there in the words of the Jesus you want to be real. It’s in the apostles writings too and in the prophets. This is the work of God and it is a marvelous and wondrous thing.
Your still trusting in your own reasoning to understand the Father but it is by His Spirit He makes these things known. And in Christ, who is the fullness of the Father, His exact representation that you will come to know the Father. But again, it is the Christ of the scriptures, the one that you have his words right with you in a book. Don’t try to conceive of one with your own reasoning, look to the one that gladly revealed Himself to us already.
As this topic is about Revelation, you need Special Revelation from God, it comes by looking to the true Jesus and is work on the cross.
I’m on your side and fighting for you:)
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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As I acknowledged and freely acknowledge and bow the knee. He did NOT have to die for my sins. Or what? He had to die to prove that He was divine by resurrection, that there is transcendence. That’s postmodernism for you.
Do you have any confidence in Paul’s writings at all. If you do see what he says again (as I’m sure you have read them before) about Jesus. Dont just trust in your own reasoning. You know you could be wrong. Impossible I know but you may be.
Here is an addition to my post about that girl.
This is a different experience I had in 9th grade. During the summer just before school started I had read where Jesus said if you look at a woman and lust after her you commit adultery. Well I had been lusting since at least 3rd grade, you know, looking at Playboy and peeping in windows. Well those words hit me pretty hard so I told myself I wouldn’t lust. So I go to school and those words revealed to me how often I was lusting. I tried not to but it was too strong. I tried for a day, then I decided it was impossible so I quit thinking about it.
Now the difference between then and what happened after I turned (repented) to Jesus was in 9th grade I new it was wrong but His words were like a law to me that I had to obey. But when the Spirit brought conviction again when I was older, this time I added humility, sorrow and an understanding of Him giving His life for me on the cross for my sins. With that I turned to Jesus and called out for mercy and forgiveness, and in a moment of time I died and raised to a new life in Him.
Law in itself does not have the power to save a man from the power of sin, but Christ carrying us with Him in His death and resurrection does. It is the actual execution of our old man, a circumcision of our spirit from the flesh. We are no longer slaves to sin. Free men in Christ. Free now to serve Him in righteousness and truth. I once was a slave but now I am a reborn free man.
That’s what Christ did on the cross. He didn’t have to be resurrected to prove He was divine, He raised from the dead to give us eternal life. He didn’t have to leave the Fathers side and come to earth to prove anything, He did it for us. As Jesus said, “No greater love has a man than he lays down his life for a friend”. But Christ did that for me when I was still His enemy. That is the Christ of the OT and the New. That is someone you can place all your trust in.
I will attempt one last time, to ask what logical basis you have for your claims, and after that will have to give up and conclude you have nome (beyond your personal preference of what God should or shouldn’t do… I get that you personally don’t think that many of the behaviors attributed to the God in the Bible are loving. Very interesting. Let’s grant that for the sake of the argument.
So at best, and as generously as I can be, then, we have arrived at the following non sequitur…
“If this God existed, he would do some things that are malevolent. Therefore, this God does not exist.”
There again is no logical basis for the conclusion. Might we try one more time?
I forgot to ask you a question.
Do you still lust in your thoughts after women or men?
You don’t need to answer me, just something for you to think about.
If you do, you know that is not loving your neighbor don’t you?
Late to the party but I wanted to chip in a few thoughts on postmodernism since I brought it up.
The Bible may contain objectively true moral statements, but even Christians cannot agree among ourselves on a uniform interpretation of them all. It seems that even if we did possess objective moral truth people still wouldn’t agree about it. (Witness the lengthy discussions here about commands in the NT.) And I haven’t even broached the topic of how we apply the moral truths we do understand. …
If objective moral truth exists, it rests solely in the Godhead and is therefore unattainable in this life. All theology is application. Very few of the moral questions that I face in daily life are directly addressed in Scripture, and when I’m unsure which choice is right or wrong, I may pray for an answer, but the Lord doesn’t answer me in audible statements. The simple fact that God is true doesn’t mean I have unimpeded access to that truth.
Good summary. You’ve been practicing! None of us is God, and none of us have a monopoly on the truth. We need the perspective of other people to gain a more well-rounded view of the truth. There’s nothing opposed to or destructive of Christian thought here.
The way you use consensus reminds me of the role Hans-Georg Gadamer assigned to “tradition,” or culture. In his book Truth and Method, he saw it as a medium that filtered out interpretations of the world that hadn’t stood the test of time. Of course, there are subcultures that adopt a counter-cultural consensus, but that’s another discussion.
Two important distinctions. Not all truths are created equal. The rules of logic, math and “facts” about the physical world fall outside cultural considerations. They aren’t subject to consensus. Matters of morality, values, and aesthetics fall outside the factual realm.
Yes, but some wrong answers are closer to being correct than others.
You’ve read too many apologists! “Robust” postmodernism is about the only kind you hear about from those guys. Epistemic humility is a good way to put it.
Yes. As Wittgenstein pointed out, “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”
Like Mervin, you’ve been reading too many apologists. Some postmodernists may say that, but postmodernism per se doesn’t require a person to deny the existence of truth, absolute or otherwise. It’s simply a recognition that the absolute exceeds our grasp. We can’t put our arms around the infinite or fit it into our little minds. Nevertheless, some wrong answers are closer to correct than others. All of us try to have “true” beliefs. If I believed your perspective to be closer to the truth than my own, I would adopt it. I’m sure the same goes for you. You haven’t persuaded me yet. Nevertheless, you do come up with some interesting objections, so here we are.
Since Christy admitted to being a postmodernist, I’ll admit to being a Christian existentialist with postmodern sympathies. haha. Here’s what I mean: Kierkegaard famously said, “Subjectivity is truth.” But he didn’t mean what you think. What he meant was that everyone must appropriate the truth for themselves and live it out for it to have meaning. Theology is application. I may believe all the “correct” truths about God, but if they have no impact on my behavior it means nothing.
A positive application of postmodern thought for @Daniel_Fisher …
Why four gospels instead of one “official” story (a la Mohammed or Joseph Smith)? Does the different perspective and presentation of each author add to our understanding of Jesus?
Didn’t James KA Smith write “Who’s Afraid of Relativism?” That sounds provocative.
Your explanation really helped there, Jay. I definitely have postmodern sympathies too.