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Thread: My Foundational Assumptions and Questions for Theological Debate and Christian Apologetics

  1. #1

    My Foundational Assumptions and Questions for Theological Debate and Christian Apologetics

    I'm new here. So I thought I'd start a thread that best illustrates where my heart is in joining this site. Please respond to my OP's 3 basic questions. I will delay my response until I have shared much of my personal testimony in a separate thread that will identify pivotal life experiences that clarify my current spiritual orientation

    (1) To what extent does my preconceived bias prevent me from engaging the unchurched and Christians from other denominations in honest and open intellectual inquiry into the issues that divide us?
    (a) Does my doctrine of biblical inerrancy prevent me from exploring a natural and logical interpretation of biblical texts and their historical background?
    (b) Am I willing to watch online videos that support positions I vehemently oppose in exchange for my opponent's willingness to watch videos that defend my position?

    (2) How seriously do I take as the starting point for my Christian apologetics and my response to controversial moral, spiritual, and biblical issues the need to educate myself about the best defense of opposing views? Many debates are won by the ability to outline the opposition's case more succinctly, clearly, and articulately than your opponents can do themselves.

    (3) To be epistemologically meaningful, philosophical and theological positions must be in principle falsifiable and testable. So Christian apologists should ask themselves, "If I am wrong about this issue, how could I ever discover my erroneous thinking? What sort of (a) experiences and (b) Bible linguistic and exegetical methodology, and (c) relevant historical and ancient cultural information might theoretically refute my longstanding positions on various fundamental questions? I will now attempt to clarify and illustrate (a)-(c):

    (a) SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES:
    (i) The Holy Spirit doesn't jump just because I crack my whip! In my lifelong observation, public prophesying and interpretations of messages in tongues are routinely embraced as authentic and are seldom subjected to the gift of discernment. Why? Because the egos of church leadership inhibit us from expressing our instincts about such manifestations. Therefore, as a teenager, desperate to hear a word from the Risen Lord in church, I reluctantly and bitterly came to the conclusion that most such manifestations are of the flesh and this insight blossomed into toxic doubt about all biblical revelation, doubt that was only relieved by my many personal experiences of the gifts of the Spirit.
    (ii) Do my personal experiences and observations of seemingly unanswered prayer seem to contradict biblical promises of supernatural possibilities? If so, how should I respond to this problem and how can I knowe that my response is adequately testable?

    (b) BIBLE LINGUISTIC AND EXEGETICAL METHODOLOGY:
    (i) Do I realize that the Bible cannot be accurately translated because there us often no one-to-one correspondence between Hebrew and Greek ethical and theological terms and modern English?
    (ii) Am I or my pastor qualified to correct for inevitable translation distortions by my knowledge of Greek and Hebrew? If not, is my pastor immersed in academic Bible book commentaries that focus on Hebrew and Greek nuance in adequate detail?
    (iii) When I exegete a text, do I do justice to its apparent meaning and context? Or do I prematurely invoke other texts that support my preconceived beliefs? In other words, do I often commit the sin of parallelomania by my irrationally forced interpretations to fit my theological agenda?

    (c) RELEVANT HISTORICAL AND ANCIENT CULTURAL INFORMATION:
    (i) Biblical language derives its meaning from its historical and cultural context. The cultural context often presupposes certain experiences. For example, many of Paul's epistles were written to refute opposition and heresies that have arisen since he founded these churches. Therefore, the better I understand Paul's opponents, the better I'll grasp the relevance of his epistles to our modern situation. All the imagery of the Book of Revelation had a particular meaning to John's readership based on their immersion in their culture and its mythic imagery (e. g. the meaning of "666"). How well do I grasp the cultural and historical context of biblical books?
    (ii) Does my spirituality unwittingly assume that the guidance of the Holy Spirit basically deserted the Church after the apostolic age, only to return to the Church during the Protestant Reformation?
    (iii) The Wesleyan Quadrilateral recognizes 4 essential tools that must "ste[e]r" our quest for Truth: Scripture, Tradition, Experience, and reason.
    What does it even mean to bypass these 4 tools and instead invoke the doctrine of Sola Scriptura?
    (iv) The modern church is in danger of unwittingly reading back modern theological talking points into a New Testament mindset. One remedy for such inevitable eisegesis is to acquaint oneself with early Catholic tradition, especially in the first 3 centuries, because these writings share the same culture as the NT church and benefit from surviving oral apostolic tradition. What role does Catholic Tradition play in the formation of my doctrinal beliefs? Am I even aware of how Catholic theologians ground their doctrinal distinctives in Scripture: e.g. the way of salvation, Infant baptism, Eucharistic Real Presence [Transubstantiation], confession of sins to priests, Papal infallibility, Purgatory, and prayer to the saints and the Virgin Mary? Or do I create a strawman caricature of Catholic theology, so that I can trash Catholic distinctives to justify my preconceived perspectives?

  2. #2
    Senior Member Tehilah Ba'Aretz's Avatar
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    wow! I'm tired of this conversation before it even begins.
    Preconceived perspectives? Preconceived bias? That would imply that I am ignorant and that's rather arrogant.
    And before you get into your Bible linguistic you might be interested to know that I read, write and speak Hebrew and also work well with Greek.
    Relevant Historical and ancient cultural information? Seriously? I am Israeli.
    Can we start over with a little less attitude?

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  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Tehilah Ba'Aretz View Post
    wow! I'm tired of this conversation before it even begins.
    Preconceived perspectives? Preconceived bias? That would imply that I am ignorant and that's rather arrogant.
    And before you get into your Bible linguistic you might be interested to know that I read, write and speak Hebrew and also work well with Greek.
    Relevant Historical and ancient cultural information? Seriously? I am Israeli.
    Can we start over with a little less attitude?
    I look forward to your responses when I develop this thread after I finish my testimony. I have an MDiv from Princeton and a doctorate from Harvard in New Testament, Judaism, and Greco-Roman background and am an academically published author on theological issues. I was a Theology professor for 12 years and was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard in undergrad Classics and Graduate New Testament. I have sent a grad student to the exciting archaeological dig at Bethsaida and his discoveries have led to him being featured on a Nova science program. Apparently, you are not a scholar. Otherwise, you would recognize OP as fairly standard academic methodology. I make no apologies for it.

  5. #4
    Senior Member Colonel's Avatar
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    Did you ever post on an apologetics site called Carm ?

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    Administrator fuego's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Berserk View Post
    The Holy Spirit doesn't jump just because I crack my whip!
    Smith Wigglesworth said, "When the Spirit doesn't move me, I move the Spirit".

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  9. #6
    Senior Member Tehilah Ba'Aretz's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Berserk View Post
    I look forward to your responses when I develop this thread after I finish my testimony. I have an MDiv from Princeton and a doctorate from Harvard in New Testament, Judaism, and Greco-Roman background and am an academically published author on theological issues. I was a Theology professor for 12 years and was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard in undergrad Classics and Graduate New Testament. I have sent a grad student to the exciting archaeological dig at Bethsaida and his discoveries have led to him being featured on a Nova science program. Apparently, you are not a scholar. Otherwise, you would recognize OP as fairly standard academic methodology. I make no apologies for it.
    More arrogance. You make my point. And, yes, I have a doctorate too. And yes, I have taught at university. (In Kenya.) Big deal! I'm not much interested in your credentials nor am I either intimidated or deeply impressed. Please stop making assumptions and get on with something that is worthy of discussion. There are a lot of very intelligent people on this forum. If you pay attention, you may learn a thing or two.

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  11. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Tehilah Ba'Aretz View Post
    More arrogance. You make my point. And, yes, I have a doctorate too. And yes, I have taught at university. (In Kenya.) Big deal! I'm not much interested in your credentials nor am I either intimidated or deeply impressed. Please stop making assumptions and get on with something that is worthy of discussion. There are a lot of very intelligent people on this forum. If you pay attention, you may learn a thing or two.
    It was YOU whose first post was merely an offtopic insult directed at me. That reaction is what I would expect from charismatic hubris. Kindly make a token effort to show that you are house-broken, so that I can at least try have a meaningful dialogue with somebody on this site. And please learn to read: my OP makes it clear that I will expand on my OP AFTER I have substantially given my personal testimony.

  12. #8

    How 'bout those Cowboys?

    Seriously dude, you need to rethink how you go about making an entrance. I didn't even bother to respond to that first post because it reeked of pomposity. When in Rome do as the Romans do. When in the world of Academia you can act like an academic. When in a forum of mainly non-academics it might be best to dial it back a tad.

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  14. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Jew and Greek View Post
    Seriously dude, you need to rethink how you go about making an entrance. I didn't even bother to respond to that first post because it reeked of pomposity. When in Rome do as the Romans do. When in the world of Academia you can act like an academic. When in a forum of mainly non-academics it might be best to dial it back a tad.
    "Non-academic" and just fine with it.

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  16. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by FireBrand View Post
    "Non-academic" and just fine with it.
    Fascinating! All I did in my OP was outline methodological assumptions for topics to follow and Fundamentalist Pentecostal trolls launch ad hominem attacks before they even hear what I have to say! That is truly low-grade spirituality, which anti-intellectual Pentecostalism has taught me to expect. In my experience, Pentecostals are like a myopic ideological Ghetto that is threatened by outsiders and uses disdain for academics to avoid the hard work of critical thinking to evade the need to see what they can actually learn spiritually from outsiders. As Gordon Edmunds, a wise older saint in the Pentecostal church of my youth once memorably told me, "You don't have to be stupid to be a Christian, but sometimes I think it sure helps!" Despite this, I will linger a little longer until I actually share some biblical insights. And I do love this caricature of the Pentecostal ethos that I once heard in a sermon and never forgot:

    "I like my religion the way I like my tea--hot. Because it's easier to cool a hot coal than warm up a corpse and I'd rather be a fool on fire than a scholar on ice. Amen? Honestly, brethren, I drive by some of dem liberal churches and I take my hat off out of respect for the dead!"

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