Sources of Knowledge and Ability to Believe

[Axehead]

Atheists are no different than any you or I before Christ. We needed a revelation and they do to. I have never heard of anyone coming to Christ as a result of a debate.

 

[StanJ]

I completely agree Axehead. If God does not draw an atheist to the truth, he won't be saved no matter how good we are at debate. In my experience, it is useless debating an atheist. IMO they only thing that will help is a personal relationship with one, not debate.

 

[DanielGarneau]

Hello to both of you Madad, River Jordan, and to all of you following this thread,

I'm glad to be back onboard, reading over some of the material you have been writing.

I said a while back that I would provide more feedback on this thread whenever I could spare some time to do so, and here I am now !

Good subject Dan and one I love

What your talking about here are sources of theology, which are Scripture (reasoning), Traditions and Experience.
Every believer no matter what their belief has a theology and the above three sources are what informs our combined and individual theology's.

All three work together,

Scripture is the inspired Word of God and the primary basis of understanding Gods will. It sets in progress a solid foundation for forward moving faith.
Within an authentic biblical account accurately based on the original Greek or Hebrew texts we find the foundations needed in order to base our research and form our reasoning.

Tradition informs how we view and use Reason and logic, and to what extent we allow Experience to inform our theology. Traditions are a group of teachings which are handed down from person to person. This was originally associated with the “regula fidei”, or the rule of faith, things passed down from Christ to his apostles and then to the followers. The beliefs were later formed in to “Creeds” like the Nicaean Creed or the Chalcedonian Creed, which later became the confessions of the Protestant denominations. These traditions serve also as protection against the misinterpretation of the scripture forming a type of hermeneutical shield around them.

Experiences Some Traditions emphasize Experience, while other Traditions de-emphasize Experience. Experiences are events which affect only our cognition feelings: emotions, dreams, visions, or manifest as physical and spiritual healings tongues and prophesying, Interpretation of these Experiences informs our theology. For some, experience can make a person hyper spiritual and control their entire outlook, but for others, experience cannot be trusted and is never likely to be considered. . One of the greatest things that can happen to a person is in the experience of the supernatural, the opportunity to experience God in a personal and powerful way. This type of experience will inform your theology and alter in a big way how the other sources of are perceived.

Hello Madad,

I like this initial response of yours to my opening post. I just noticed that your main text places "reasoning" the Word out as part of tradition, which I would agree with. The reason I noticed is that your first sentence places "reasoning" within the Scripture category, which strikes me as not being where I would place "reasoning." We do our best to reason out what is the meaning of some difficult passages or teachings contained in the Bible, and sometimes this builds into traditions that may or may not be in accord with what Scripture itself teaches. My understanding is that we both agree on this, in spite of what your first sentence says.

The reason I mention it here is because I believe it may help shedding light on the observations made by River Jordan's post quoted below.

We also can't ignore the fact that there's a pretty extensive history of one interpretation of scripture or another turning out to be mistaken once more information came to light. I mean, Christians during the American colonial days opposed lightning rods because they believed they thwarted God's will (lightning believed to be a means of God's punishment).

All any of us can do is assimilate what information we believe to be relevant and choose for ourselves how to incorporate it into our beliefs.

Hello River Jordan,

If we understand our "reasoning" about the Bible as part of a traditional component and not as part of what Scripture says, then your observation illustrates why it is so important to be very careful about what we admit as coming from God's Word and what we acknowledge that we have inherited from tradition.

It stroke me a few years back that Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher, talks in some of his books about various trends of philosophy as being so many philosophical traditions. I found it interesting when I read this, because it helped me defend my faith before my master's thesis co-directors, stating as a matter of fact that there is no such thing as truth. These university professors presented themselves as adhering to humanistic, naturalistic, and postmodern philosophies. Ricoeur helped me understand that these approaches to understanding reality are in and of themselves part of a philosophical tradition.

My understanding of the example you draw out in the quote above is that this way of interpreting the Bible was part of a tradition but not of what the Scripture themselves teach. This is why protestant christianity tends to use their confessions of faith with the admittance that they are not to be taken with the same level of authority than the text of the Bible itself.

God bless !