Hegelian Dialectic or "Consensus Process"

Faith & Science Conversation
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James:

“Why are you here, Shannon? Are you here for fellowship with brothers and sisters in Christ? Or are you here to make accusations, point fingers, and throw bricks around? One of the rules of this forum is that you should assume legitimate Christian faith on the part of anyone who does not explicitly identify otherwise.”

It was for fellowship. One had shared “What is Biblical faith?”

When that was shared it was rejected. Yes, I recognize one of the rules is to “assume legitimate Christian faith" of anyone who does not explicitly identify otherwise. We agree that there are many different faiths out there. It must be established that there is only one “Biblical faith”.

When one shares studies of the faith from the Word of God and the responses are only rejection, what source are we to use to establish what is legitimate Christian faith? BioLogos? or the Word?

Basically BioLogos is saying to assume everyone is saved, but when sharing the teachings from the Word everyone has different responses to His Word. The evidence is clear, not all are saved. To tell others everyone is assumed to be of the truth is deceiving others.

Matthew 23:13 KJV

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

Matthew 23:15 YLT

`Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye go round the sea and the dry land to make one proselyte, and whenever it may happen–ye make him a son of gehenna twofold more than yourselves.

Matthew 23:15 NIV

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

Jesus told the Pharisees they made converts twice the sons of Hell.

  1. false doctrine of works
  2. Prevented people from going to and receiving the true gospel.
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You seem to be conflating “the Word” with only those people who share the interpretation you have of it. The mere words on the page have to be understood and you seem to be saying that what you understand is simply what is written. That is naive.

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No, that is not what BioLogos is saying. It’s not possible for anyone to have absolute knowledge of someone else’s faith. What the forum guidelines do ask is that you do not question of the faith of fellow Christians here simply because you disagree (unless they specifically tell you they are not Christians at all – for example, there are some participants here who identify as atheist or agnostic, or something other than Christian). It doesn’t mean that everyone here is automatically a Christian.

And yes, different Christians will have different reactions to “the teachings from the Word” because there are many different viewpoints within Christianity, as this forum demonstrates. Participants hail from many different denominations and while this can cause disagreements, we aim to disagree respectfully. It’s not our job to act as gatekeepers about who is “in” or “out.”

Anyone here can get a concordance and copy and paste lots of verses with key words. That doesn’t mean we are in possession of the one-and-only “correct” way to read the Bible.

Do you see how it can come across as patronizing to say you need to teach us all about what “biblical faith” is? We really aren’t all completely ignorant about faith and the Bible. Simply putting the adjective “biblical” before something doesn’t automatically make it correct.

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Christians put their faith in Jesus Christ, not in the Bible. (Or Bill Klein, for that matter.) btw, you should visit the NYC subway system. Would-be preachers occasionally hop on the subway cars, preach at people, and then jump off. You’d have a captive audience.

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This is a dichotomy which exists only in your mind. Nobody has claimed that BioLogos is the source to establish what is legitimate Christian faith. You seem to be setting yourself up as such an arbitrator, however.

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Only one? The Zoarastrian Magi that heralded the young Christ: was their faith biblical? [I know - there are those who’ve insisted that the Magi must have been spiritual descendants of Daniel or such, so as to Judaize them, and thus even discretely try to baptize them yet further into a Christianity that didn’t even exist yet - but no matter - the Bible has no lack of examples here.] What about the Syrophoenician woman - not an Israelite by any stretch of the imagination as Jesus himself not-so-gently reminds her. Was hers a biblical faith? Or Naaman the leper commanding an enemy nation’s army. Was his a biblical faith? Neither Christians (nor the Jews before them) own God. Christians today like to think they own all property rights to God. Jesus’ own hometown folks also thought the same, and when Jesus unloaded on them in his first hometown sermon, it became clear in a hurry that God was not to be the private property of any one religious group - not even the chosen nation of God! They were so ticked they nearly threw Jesus off a cliff! Would you join such a mob today, Shannon, when Jesus asks you to broaden your horizons about who God is and just who all it is that God reaches out to? Christians say they are all about Christ, but then they refuse to look at what he did and what he taught. I think you’re faced with a choice here: will you follow the narrow ‘scriptural’ traditions of men that want to use the Bible to carve up society into insiders who think of themselves as having exclusive, privileged access to God, and the outsiders who don’t? Or will you follow Christ instead?

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Ecumenism welcomes any and all opinions and beliefs, any and all faiths, any and all doctrines, any and all truths, any and all portrayals of love, any and all different gospels, any and all different Jesus’s…EXCEPT as defined and described from God’s Word. Thanks for all the responses.

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You are not the sole determiner and explainer of what God’s word says.
[edited to add: and neither am I. What I enjoy about this forum is that its purpose is discussion – different people can talk about different ideas and I can read a variety of responses that helps me learn more about those topics and the people discussing them. When there’s only one answer to everything, there’s not much point in having a discussion.]

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Nowhere have I claimed to be.
Who is? Do you disagree with Pastor Bill Klein? I have not see anyone on here correcting his teachings but only rebuking it because it does not line up with their belief.
I thought believers with the same faith minister to one another?

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Sometimes ministry means unsettling a person. If I’ve settled on things that are not true, then the kindest ministry a friend can work for me is to unsettle me.

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This thread involved someone else – either way, yes, I disagree with anyone who uses a few out-of-context Bible verses and misunderstood philosophy to assert that a group of people reaching a consensus about something is somehow anti-God. How else do you think the biblical canon was decided in the first place?

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Yes! Proverbs alludes to seeking counsel with the wise men; Hebrew culture used the wise men at the gate… Most churches use a group of wise people to decide, not just the pastor (especially those with deacons and elders). All of these are experts of the field. It is Biblical to depend on more than oneself. It sounds like this is a strawman.

Proverbs 11:14 Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.

Proverbs 15:22 Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.

Proverbs 24: 6 For by wise guidance you can wage your war, and in abundance of counselors there is victory.

Matt 18: 17 If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

Also,

This has got to be one of the most misunderstood verses in the Bible. I don’t think you mean it this way, but without properly assessing it, anyone can use it for anything they don’t like. And doing so runs the risk of someone improperly spiritualizing their point of view over others as being part of the end times rebellion against God, instead of kindly discussing things as equal Christians and followers. Shannon, I don’t think you mean it this way; but please know that it can appear hurtful. Please catch me if I sound hurtful, too. Thanks.

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I’m sorry, but disagree with who? I have never heard of this guy, and have no idea if he has anything worthwhile to say.

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I wouldn’t say the appropriate word is “rejected,” so much as “challenged.”

Some of the stuff that you’ve been posting does make valid and important points, and I think we should all be quicker to recognise and acknowledge that. But some of these points need qualification; some of them need to be clarified; some of them aren’t all that coherent; and some of them are simply factually wrong. What we are attempting to do in these discussions is to filter out the factual inaccuracies, falsehoods and irrelevancies, to seek clarification where clarification is needed, and to see what good there is that remains.

For what it’s worth, I think the article you posted makes a very important point that we should perhaps consider carefully. It does itself a disservice by getting into discussions about “Hegelian dialectic” (which add nothing to the discussion and only make the author look like he is trying to show off), but it does raise a valid and important point that we need to beware of falling into a kind of blind groupthink, and personally I agree that we shouldn’t just automatically view consensus – not even expert consensus – as if it were the final word on everything.

Having said that, some things are consensus by merit of being well-established facts with proven practical applications, so we can’t just dismiss consensus out of hand because we don’t like it either. So some kind of discussion about when we can and can’t legitimately take expert consensus with a pinch of salt is indeed warranted. I’m pretty sure your input on that particular discussion would be more than welcome.

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Yep. And I see contradiction between the practices of many ministries and the Bible.

And how ironic that this passage is constantly used by men to support doing exactly this – making this the excuse for using belief in their doctrine as the measure of all goodness. Is this really what the passage was about?

Timothy 4 I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: 2 preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. 3 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.

Hmph… when was this altered to say “I charge you replace God and Jesus to make yourself the judge of the living and the dead: refusing to be convinced of the truth, ignoring rebukes for the lies you tell, have no patience for any disagreement. For the time is here when people will not accept your authority to dictate the only teaching to be considered sound, but all who study and seek to understand what they are talking about must be condemned because they do not accept the teachers you have accumulated for yourself to suit your own liking, but will have the audacity to turn way from your myths and wander into the truth that God shouts down from sky and up from earth, even daring to read the Bible for themselves.”

Here’s how so many of these ministries work: A group gathers, and has agreed beforehand that each in attendance will ultimately surrender his or her own personal position on any given issue to what the leader has decided is “sound” doctrine and there will be no discussion, questions, or thinking about it. Then this dictator will tell you what people and activities are to be considered evil, who to vote for, often speaking of a war waged between good and evil, so that you can be sure to be on the only good side which is their ministry and nobody else.

I don’t have a horse in the race with regards to Hegel. But I am concerned about the methodology used here.

April 23, 2008

David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061

David W. Cloud is founder and director of Way of Life Literature, a 29-year-old Fundamental Baptist missionary publishing ministry.

HEGELIAN DIALECTICS IS EMPLOYED BY COMMUNISTS

How is this any more relevant than the fact that serial killers have used cars and kindness? The Bible has been used by all kinds of villains including KKK and Nazis to advocate and defend slavery, genocide, torture, mass murder, and much more.

It is far far far more valid to turn this around and judge groups by the methods they use rather than judge methods and things by the villains who have used them for horrible ends. Case in point, should we not judge the honesty and reliability of this ministry by the use of dishonest tactics of rhetoric like this?

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Well put. Crowd mentality is a scary thing, and quite impulsive.

Thank you for putting both these counterpoints in.

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Is there a way to say this more graciously? It seems to be applicable here:

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People have. You just summarily dismissed them and cited them as opinion despite using the same wall of proof-texting that you do.

As for ministering, that is definitely true. Especially the Holy Spirit working through Scripture and other believers to build up the body. There is a clear other agenda here that has been entirely discussed which limits this aspect.

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Enough of this. I know exactly what you are trying to do here, and I won’t have any more of it. We both know real scientists care nothing for vague Prussian musings when studying the world around them. If Evolution were simply the product of dialectics, I doubt any non-resident of the Hegelian sphere would swear by it, and I’m sure you’re well aware of the funny mustache man and his affinity for Social Darwinism.

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Couldn’t have said it better myself. Whenever I see terms such as “Hegelian Dialectic” being bandied around, it just makes me think that the author is either (a) trying to show off, or (b) putting up some kind of a smoke screen. It’s very easy to sound intellectual by throwing out the names of some random eighteenth and nineteenth century German philosophers and some random philosophical concepts with names ending in “ism,” but all that proves is that you know the names of some random eighteenth and nineteenth century German philosophers, a few big words ending in “ism,” and how to type them into Google. It’s a completely different matter altogether to make a coherent point and present it in terms that your audience can understand, let alone back up your point with evidence.

In any case, philosophy is not a subject that interests me much. The highfalutin questions that philosophy discusses are all very interesting, but they are of no practical use in the Real World whatsoever. If I’m writing some computer code, I don’t respond to failing unit tests by dismissing the errors as “Hegelian dialectic.” I have to roll my sleeves up and fix them. What Kant or Schiller or Schopenhauer would have to say on the subject is irrelevant.

Then of course, there’s this:

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