@Patrick: Patrick says: January 15, 2010 We cannot blame some SDA …

Comment on The hinge of our faith by BobRyan.

@Patrick:

Patrick says:
January 15, 2010 We cannot blame some SDA ‘educated’ among us for having a ‘plastic’ Bible, since the hermeneutic being favoured in some religion departments is the higher critical method, which emphasises the humanity of the Bible over the divine origin and authority of it. Given this hermeneutic, it makes all the sense in the world to bend the words of the Bible to conform to our more sophisticated understanding of everything pertaining to life, godliness and origins.
However, those of us who look upon the Bible as the Word of God rather than merely the ancient musings of ignorant and superstitious men, understand from what is written that when we truly say “On Christ the solid rock I stand”,

Amen and Amen!

in Christ,

Bob

BobRyan Also Commented

The hinge of our faith

@Ron:

3. Sources of Truth: To say that the Bible is authoritative, is not to say it is the only source of truth.

True.

The Bible says that GOD is the source of truth “When HE the Spirit of TRUTH comes HE will guide you into all truth” John 16.

So not only do we see “Truth” in what the Bible says – “SIX days you shall labor…for in SIX days the Lord MADE”

We also see “truth” in what God told his prophets even outside the Bible where Ellen White says God showed her the creation week and where she says that theistic evolutionism is in fact the “worst form of infidelity” 3SG 90-91.

WE also see “truth” in nature for as Paul said in Romans 1 “they are without excuse for the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen through the things that have been made”

Thus our study of the “things that have been MADE by God” is a companion and confirming avenue of “truth” with the Bible.

There are many kinds of truth the Bible says nothing about. For example, the Bible doesn’t say anything about the speed of light, or the length of the Amazon river

Indeed. It says that God created light Gen 1 and that God made the seas etc Ex 20:8-11, Rev 14:7 … and then when we study “the things that have been made” we gain additional detail.

4. The standard for truth set by the Bible itself requires confirmation of truth by sources outside of the Bible. For example, the Bible says that a prophet should be tested by whether what he says will happen, does happen. The trouble with that is that the test is totally worthless as a test looking forward. You can’t tell if the prophet is true until the critical decision time is already past. Even if the event does take place, the source of your knowlege that validates the prophet is independant of the Bible, either through history, or personal observation.

You have just presented us with classic “bait and switch”. Again – something that critical thinking will instantly pick up on, and a classic method in the science of propaganda. You started out with the claim that the BIBLE is to be tested using outside information – but then you provide an example where a self-proclaimed PROPHET is to be tested by events outside the Bible.

Ron
As I have pointed out before, it is impossible to arrive at the 1844 date “sola scriptura”. You have to appeal to secular history, and astronomy in particular to identify the date for the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. You might be able to be a Lutheran or a Baptist, but it is in fact impossible to be an Adventist “sola scriptura”.

wrong.

In that fallacy you have switched the meaning of sola scriptura to wooden structure that does not in fact exist. Sola scriptura is the argument that all doctrine is to be tested by the Bible.

hint – even Baptists and Lutherans use the 490 prophecy of Dan 9 to point to the affirming events of Christ showing that he is the promised Messiah.

No Bible scholars argue that the act of demonstrating that Bible predictions have come true – is a violation “sola scriptura” principles. No – not even Martin Luther made such a wild claim.

5. Nehemiah: I think Nehemiah is actually a good example of my point. How did that work for him? Did it result in people loving God and keeping the Sabbath out of thankfulness and joy? No, he only got temporary compliance thru force, but force didn’t win the hearts. Then following Nehemiah’s example, the Jewish people responded by creating more and harsher rules about the Sabbath until Jesus finally had to come and “break the Sabbath law” on purpose, just to show how wrong their approach to the Sabbath was.

Your appeal to fiction seems to be endless.

1. Christ never broke the Sabbath. You are simply taking on the role of the Pharisees to make that accusation against Christ. In fact Gal 4 states that Christ was “born under the law” and perfectly fulfilled it.

2. The error of the Jews was not due to a reformer like Nehemiah coming in and making the needed reforms within a theocracy. Your wild claim is akin to blaiming God for the presence of witches in Israel – since God made the law that they were to be put to death.

The paucity of logic in your argument is astounding.

Then, applying the principles of Nehemiah they tried to push Jesus off a cliff. As I understand it, Jesus wants our love, not our fear. I just can’t imagine Jesus behaving this way.

1. Jesus said “whom I love I rebuke”.

2. Jesus said “fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in fiery hell” Matt 10

3. Jesus said that the one who tries to bend and break the word of God and “teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven”.

4. Jesus said “think not that I have come to bring peace – I came not to bring peace but a sword”.

5. Paul said in Titus 1 that those who come from inside the church teaching false doctrine (BTW that would include those who teach “the worst kind of infidelity”) “must be silenced” with a compelling Bible based response to their wild fictions.

Your argument that the church should pay no attention to the attacks from within – attacks against fundamental basic Bible doctrine, is without Bible support.

As God told Ellen White – “to remain neutral or do nothing in a time of spiritual crisis” is regarded by God as the worst kind of hostility against God. And yet you appear to even advocate it!

6. Trust in God: Do you really? (Not you personally, I am using the royal you) It seems to me that you are afraid of God. You are afraid that if you or your child explores a new idea (evolution) you might accidently eat of the tree of knowlege of good and evil, and that God will dam your child in the eternal lake of fire.

All heresy is at some point “a new idea” be it Satan worship or whatever. Nobody condemns something because “it is a new idea”. You might as well have argued “the argument for evolution is conveyed in words – people should not avoid words”. You are trying to hide evolutionism under a rock — your shell game is not working the way you seemed to have at first imagined.

My God loves me enough, that he gave me a real choice.

True. you can choose to believe the Bible and be saved and walk with God or you can choose to undermine trust in the Bible and be lead down a path of self-deception.

Even if I ultimately reject him, Christ still doesn’t leave or forsake me, Christ walks with me right into the second death. (It was the second death that Christ died on the cross wasn’t it?)

God says “O WHY will you die – as I live says the Lord I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked”. If your claim is that God does not enjoy watching you choose a course that leads to the suffering and torment in fire and brimstone of the 2nd death – you are correct.

But that is sorry comfort to those who choose the 2nd death.

Ron

I happen to see evidence of evolution in the Bible.

We get that sometimes from our evolutionist friends – but what we SEE them do is ‘run away” whenever the Bible basis for creation is brought up.

So their wild claim appears to have no substance at all to it.

I see evidence of evolution in the writings of Mrs. White.

Well we can all agree that in 3SG 90-91 we see evidence that Ellen White actually WROTE ON that very subject – calling the wild notions about birds coming from reptiles and long ages of evolution “the worst form of infidelity”.

So I think we can all agree that you see evolution mentioned in her writings.

I believe that Adventist’s generally have mis-interpreted Mrs. White’s comments about Darwin.

And I believe that evolutionists on this very board have argued that “Ellen White was wrong” when confronted with the very direct statements that she makes on the subject of evolution in 3SG 90-91.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to look into that.

I believe that Darwin is a great man, because he spent time worshiping God in the study of nature and opened our eyes to God’s creative power in a way that no one else ever has. Is it any wonder that his work came into prominence at the same time the 3rd angel is reminding us to remember God as the creator? Isn’t it a little ironic that the man who did the most to reveal God’s ongoing creation scientifically was most reviled by those who claim the most to believe in God as the creator?

I “believe Darwin” when HE SAID that HE could find no harmony at all between the Bible and his views of origins demanded by his belief in evolutionism. I “believe Darwin” when HE SAID that after trying for years to imagine some way that both Christianity and his precious darwinism could be true – he finally rejected Christianity because he knew enough about evolutionism to know that they simply do not fit together.

I believe that when God confirmed that very point to Ellen White – that BOTH sources were in that tiny instance – on the same page.

So “yes” I do agree with you that there is a lesson to be learned from Darwin.

And “I believe you” when you say you are using Darwin as your model.

Your method seem to be to go from one level of error to the next resulting in even more “inconvenient details” stand in in the way of your goals.

At some point Ron, it pays to throw away the shovel.

in Christ,

Bob


The hinge of our faith

@Ron:

Shannon, With regard to Sola Scriptura, I actually agree with it in principle, the problem comes with the application. Here are some of the problems.

1. Interpretation: “Then, I come along and decide.”:
Even if everyone accepts the Bible as the final authority, there is still the issue of fallible human interpretation. A case in point, you and I both read the same Bible. You think that evolution can’t be true because God is the creator. I note that God is the eternal creator, and therefore it is impossible to truely believe in God as the creator without believing in evolution (ie. ongoing creation).

Indeed we often get that argument from our Catholic brethren – telling us that that Bible can “be bent” to whatever needs of anyone who wants to use it therefore sola scriptura is not a trustworthy solution – just as you have stated above.

But the careful student of the Bible quickly notices that there is “SIX days you shall labor…FOR IN SIX DAYS God MADE” statement in the Bible supporting Shannon’s position and there is NO “God is creator so believe in evolution” statement in scripture to support your fiction above.

Presto! the Sola Scriptura method is seen to work instantly.

More than that – in Acts 17:11 we see that this sola scriptura method was Sooooo trustworthy that even NON-Christians could use it to evaluate a Christian teacher of no less stature than Paul “Studying the scriptures daily TO SEE IF those things spoken to them by Paul were so“.

Who is to say which of us is right? If you appeal to the organized church’s creed, then you have already by definition sacrificed the principle of Sola Scriptura. You no longer believe in the Bible only, but the Bible plus the creed, or the Bible plus the majority opinion about what it means.

Good spin – but as we see from Acts 17:11 the sola scriptura method is so objective and so “doable” that even non-Christians can use it.

Furthermore – as Paul pointed out in Gal 1:6-11 “if WE or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel to you OTHER than the one you have received – let him be accursed”

Paul argued that proven Bible doctrine does have “value” – as it turns out.

But more specifically – the flaw in your argument is that we actually have NO evolutionist argument from the Bible supporting the wild factless claim that Moses was an evolutionist or that he taught his readers to believe in evolutionism.

We have NO evidence from scripture or from Ellen White’s writings that God instructed prophets to promote evolutionism.

So when it comes to a “sola scriptura” discussion – evolutionists do not even show up at the table!

2. The Spanish inquisition: History has shown that the egotism of the majority is highly distructive and that enforcing doctrinal purity by coersion is Satanic precisely because it does violence to the individual’s conscience and reason.

Certainly we can all agree that to force an evolutionist professor to stop believing evolutionism by torturing him (as was the case of the inquisition) is out of the question. If said evolutionist wants to pedal his atheist-centric doctrines or origins and get someone to pay him to do it – let him go to the public university where people actually WANT to pay him to do that very thing.

He need not seek to undermine the institutions of those who do not CHOOSE to pay him to do such a thing.

Using coersion by treatening a person’s job is acting on the same principle, and is dishonoring the memory of the faithful martyrs.

That is called the “fallacy of equivocation” my friend. You have equivocated between the acts of torture in the dark ages – vs the act of telling someone that they cannot force parents and students to PAY THEM to cram error down the student’s throat – but must go to some institution that WANTS to pay them to do that very thing rather than hijack the funds and resources of institutions that do NOT CHOOSE to embrace error.

Otherwise Calvinists, Catholics, Hindus could all DEMAND that we PAY them to come to our schools and teach their views or else accuse us of engagin in “the inquisition”.

Clearly there is a reason that your model above is called “the fallacy of equivocation”.

in Christ,

Bob


The hinge of our faith
Bob quoted Gen 7

21 And all flesh died that moved on the earth: birds and cattle and beasts and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man.

22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, all that was on the dry land, died.

23 So He destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth.

The clarity on that point was expressed so many different ways in the chapter – it is no wonder that many people choose to ignore those verses altogether.

@Geanna Dane:

Bob, thank you for making my point once again. You stated, “There is NO text in all of scripture where God says “I will destroy ALL living things that I have MADE” where the context is anything but global since God claims to be the maker of ALL.” You cited Genesis 7:4, which says “For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made.”

But we know for a fact THAT GOD DID NOT DESTROY ALL LIVING THINGS. In other words ALL was not global or literal.

We use exegesis to let the Bible speak for itself.

The funny thing about exegesis is that it requires that we take a both-and approach to the text not a snippet either-or solution. So when the Bible gives us the global scope — we take it literally. When the Bible says that the global scope applies to all animals on dry land that have the breath of life – we take it to be a literal global scope applying literally to all life on literal dry land that literally have the breath of life in them.

However – IF we were to make a doctrinal argument that “required” that we ignore the fact of 21-23 that sets the limit on what was killed at the flood – we would quickly get shot down by our non-SDA friends as teaching something that simply snippets some tiny detail out of Gen 7 then tries to argue that the text is not trustworthy because it supposedly goes too far.

The details in the text show that it applies to all life on dry land – which obviously has a global scope but cannot be stretched to include “all life in the sea”.

Again – just stating the obvious.

in Christ,

Bob


Recent Comments by BobRyan

Academic Freedom Strikes Again!

george:
By definition, I don’t believe in miracles or apocryphal, anthropomorphic stories about same.Why aren’t scientists observing them today if they occur?

Circular argument. If they were naturally occurring we would expect scientists to see that they are still occurring today. If they are singular events caused by an intelligent being – that being would be under no obligation to “keep causing world wide floods” as if “to do it once you must continually do it”. Armstrong went to the moon.. shall we argue that unless he keeps going to the moon so each new generation can see it … then it did not happen?

Your argument is of the form “all eye witness evidence to some event in the past is no evidence at all unless that event keeps repeating itself so we too can witness it”. Seems less than compelling.

“Could it be that science is better able to detect hoaxes and false claims?” As a rule for dismissing every eye witness account in the past – it is less than compelling. (even when that event cannot be repeated)

Evolutionists “claim” that dust, rocks and gas (in sufficient quantity and over sufficient time and a lot of luck) self organized into rabbits via prokaryote-then-eukaryote-then-more-complexity. But such self-organization cannot be “observed” today.

(What is worse – such a sequence cannot even be intelligently manipulated to occur in the lab)

By your own argument then you should not believe in evolution.


Academic Freedom Strikes Again!
@Sean Pitman:

Suppose you were at a crime scene … there is a tree limb on the ground and a bullet hole in the victim — “all natural causes”? or is one ‘not natural’? Those who say that nothing can be detected as “not naturally occurring in nature” – because all results, all observations make it appear that every result “naturally occurred without intelligent design” seem to be missing a very big part of “the obvious”.


Academic Freedom Strikes Again!

george:
Gentlemen,

What just God would allow an innocent child to be born guilty for the sins of a distant ancestor? …What if there was only One Commandment? Do Good. ‘Kant’ see a problem with that.

An atheist point of view is not often found here – but this is interesting.

1. God does not punish babies for what someone else did – but I suppose that is a reductionist option that is not so uncommon among atheists. The “details” of the subject you are commenting on – yet according to you “not reading” – is that humans are born with sinful natures. A “bent” toward evil. That is the first gap right out of the gate between atheism and God’s Word..

2. But still God supernaturally enables “free will” even in that bent scenario, the one that mankind lives in – ever since the free-will choice of the first humans on planet earth – was to cast their lot in with Satan and rebellion..(apparently they wanted to see what a wonderful result that poor choice would create). John 16 “the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin and righteousness and judgment”. And of course “I will draw ALL mankind unto Me” John 12:32. (not “just Christians”). Thus supernatural agency promotes free will in a world that would otherwise be unrestrained in its bent to evil.

3.God says “The wages of sin is death” — so then your “complaint” is essentially “that you exist”. A just and loving God created planet Earth – no death or disease or suffering – a perfect paradise where mankind could live forever … and only one tiny restriction… yet Adam and Eve allowed themselves to be duped by Satan… tossing it all away. The “Just God” scenario could easily just have let them suffer the death sentence they chose. He did not do that… hence “you exist” – to then “complain about it”.

4. Of course you might also complain that Satan exists – and Satan might complain that “you exist”. There is no shortage on planet earth of avenues for complaint. But God steps in – offers salvation to mankind at infinite cost to himself – – and the “Few” of Matthew 7 eventually end up accepting that offer of eternal life. The rest seem to prefer the lake of fire option… sort of like Adam and Eve choosing disease and death over eternal life (without fully appreciating the massive fail in that short-sighted choice).

In any case – this thread is about the logic/reason that should be taken into account when a Christian owned and operated institution chooses to stay faithful to its Christian mission — rather then getting blown about by every wind of doctrine. Why let the alchemy of “wild guessing” be the ‘source of truth’ when we have the Bible?? We really have no excuse for that. As for science – we can be thankful that it has come as far along as it has – but no matter how far back you rewind the clock of our science history – we should always have chosen the Bible over wild guessing.


Newly Discovered Human Footprints Undermine Evolutionary Assumptions

Ervin Taylor:
Perhaps Dr. Pitman would enlighten his readers what on earth “the neo-Darwinian story of origins” might be. Darwin did not address origins.

Origins of what?? the first eukaryote??
Or “origins of mankind”??

Darwin himself claimed that his own false doctrine on origins was totally incompatible with Genesis and that because of this – Genesis must be tossed under a bus.

hint: Genesis is an account of “Origins” as we all know — even though “bacteria” and “amoeba” are terms that don’t show up in the text.

The point remains – Darwin was promoting his own religion on origins totally counter to the Bible doctrine on origins. He himself addresses this point of the two views.


Newly Discovered Human Footprints Undermine Evolutionary Assumptions

Ervin Taylor:
Here we go again.If the footprints upon close examination, are determined not to be from a hominim/hominid, I wonder if Educate Truth (sic) will announce that determination.Or if the date of the surface is determined to be much younger, will there be a notice placed on fundamentalist web-sites.If you believe the answer to these questions are yes, I have a big bridge that I would like to sell you for pennies on the dollar.

Here we go again … hope piled upon hope…no matter the “observations in nature” that disconfirm the classic evolutionary hypothesis

Reminds me of “What we still don’t know” by Martin Reese and Leonard Suskind