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I am:

The Father of my children. By my will and desires have I raised them up in my values and morals. They are my progeny.

The husband of my wife. I protect her and am willing to die for her, and the children borne by her, if and when they are threatened. I will protect them at all physical and financial cost for they are MY sheep.

The son of my Father (and birth mother) who raised me to the same Godly values and morals and sent me forth to propagate according to his morals and values that he has handed down. My father will be beside me as I raise my family and protect them. His support is unfailing.

Is that so difficult to understand?

We have a Triune God.

The secret to understanding the Bible is simple.

You have to PERSONALLY KNOW the persons who wrote it; namely GOD, His Son, Jesus, and the people GOD selected to reveal it to us in the Books of the Bible.

Jesus gave us the clue, “... ONLY BELIEVE ...”. Jesus made that statement to a desperate young father .. as his daughter lay dying. All around the young father were his neighbors .. all of whom were telling him not to bother the Rabbi (Jesus), because “... your daughter is dead already.”

The first time I read that statement .. ONLY BELIEVE .. I knew I had discovered a secret .. I just believe Jesus is who He said He is .. and that He came from the Father, GOD.

Therefore, it’s not studying the Bible as only a historical or generational thing .. It’s GOD’s WORD to us .. for us. To instruct, to enlighten, to console, to uplift, to teach.

The Bible is more than a bunch of writing .. it is GOD’s WORD specifically for us.

The writings of the Bible exist as historical artifacts and may therefore be read as historical artifacts. To properly interpret a text we must seek to understand it within its historical context. We need to know all sorts of things: we need to know who wrote it and why; we need to know its intended audience; we need to know the literary genre to which it belongs; we need to know about the society in which the author and audience lived; we need to know the cultural and literary conventions of the time; we need to know the worldview the text inhabits, etc. Contrary to those who think that the "plain meaning" of Scripture is easy to determine, it is no easy thing at all. Witness the vast scholarship that has been devoted to the Bible over the past two hundred years.

Okay . . . ordinarily I wouldn't respond to such a post, and I most definitely do not subscribe to the Protestant concepts of "perspicacity of scripture" or sola scriptura; but what this author is saying goes way beyond merely dismissing those two positions.

Anyone who reads can see this is the standard excuse for dismissing Genesis 1-11 (along with Jonah, Daniel, and Esther) as mere mythology whose only message is as moral fables. The reference to the "vast scholarship that has been devoted to the Bible over the past two hundred years" makes this explicit. All Biblical traditions have scholarly traditions going back to the very beginning, but the past two hundred years have dismissed all this as primitive mythology based on acceptance of historical criticism, which is itself predicated on the unproven assumption that G-d could not possibly have inspired mere men to write down exactly what happened in these books.

So it seems the "neo-reactionaries" are as liberal, modern, iconoclastic, and free-thinking as any Bultmann or Wellhausen. Once again Adam and Eve get the shaft.

I am disappointed in you, NRx.

Beware the Xenoi Papades and their odd notions!

To the extent we can grasp the Trinity, or better said, experience the uncreated energies of the Most Holy Trinity (not of course its essence or the divine hypostatic union) it is simple, really:

“The Spirit of the supreme Logos is a kind of ineffable yet intense longing or ‘eros’ experienced by the Begetter for the Logos born ineffably from Him, a longing experienced also by the beloved Logos and Son of the Father for His Begetter; but the Logos possesses this love by virtue of the fact that it comes from the Father in the very act through which He comes from the Father, and it resides co-naturally in Him.
It is from the Logos’s discourse with us through His incarnation that we have learned what is the name of the Spirit’s distinct mode of coming to be from the Father and that the Spirit belongs not only to the Father but also to the Logos. For He says ‘the Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father’ (John 15:26), so that we may know that from the Father comes not solely the Logos - who is begotten from the Father - but also the Spirit who proceeds from the Father. Yet the Spirit belongs also to the Son, who receives Him from the Father as the Spirit of Truth, Wisdom and Logos. For Truth and Wisdom constitute a Logos that befits His Begetter, a Logos that rejoices with the Father as the Father rejoices in Him.

This accords with the words that He spoke through Solomon:’I was She who rejoiced together with Him’ (Prov. 8:30). Solomon did not say simply ‘rejoiced’ but ‘rejoiced together with’. This pre-eternal rejoicing of the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit who, as I said, is common to both, which explains why He is sent from both to those who are worthy. Yet the Spirit has His existence from the Father alone, and hence He proceeds as regards His existence only from the Father. Our intellect, because created in God’s image, possesses likewise the image of this sublime Eros or intense longing - an image expressed in the love experienced by the intellect for the spiritual knowledge that originates from it and continually abides in it.” St. Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science no. 36