Replies

Sounds like the same thing you are saying.

Yep. And on another note. The BIble never claims to give exhaustive knowledge of God or anything else. But it claims to give sufficient knowledge to know God and to live a holy life. Notice that no book of the Bible tries to engage in systematic theology. There are many things stated as being true statements about God, about man, about the world that aren't necessarily able to be fitted into a system. Trying to do so and attempting to fill in what we think are the gaps and then claiming Biblical authority for those extrapolations or inferences or apparent connections because they are connecting, in our mind, teachings which do carry Biblical authority is a mistake and can lead to much grief. But some people do not like the feeling of not knowing an answer to a question and resent being told to pay attention to those things that are absolutely required and leave the rest up to God to reveal in the fullness of time (if ever). I believe this desire to have everything charted out, fully defined, completely systematized, and under one's complete intellectual control, is itself a manifestation of that desire to be God that was the core of the original sin. We are creatures. We are dependent both in nature and in fact. If anything, the point of the teachings of Jesus and the apostles in scripture is to remind us that he is the vine, we are the branches. Our life depends on being connected to him. We're children of God; we're servants. For the realization of our salvation we don't have to know everything the Father or the master knows. We just need to trust and obey in what we are told is sufficient for us to know. And we're told that if we do just that, we will know in our own experience that what Jesus has said is true. Some would scoff at this as being simply credulous, but this heart of trust lies at the center of a loving relationship: the child asks his father for fish to eat, trusting that he's going to give him something good to eat. He doesn't construct an elaborate mechanism of verification through which he can ascertain for any given thing the likelihood of it being granted him if he asks at this versus that degree of intensity of desire. In other words, he lives with his father as a trusting child, not as a possessor of a system (or magic lantern) to be finessed.

The Bible never claims to give exhaustive knowledge of God or anything else. But it claims to give sufficient knowledge to know God and to live a holy life.

AMEN! The Bible gives us everything we NEED to know, not everything there IS to know.

There are many things stated as being true statements about God, about man, about the world that aren't necessarily able to be fitted into a system.

That is true, however I would say that overall the Bible does reveal "a" system. As you say it doesn't explain everything, but my view is that it does explain a lot of things. Our God is a rational God, and many teachings in the Bible do seem to go together quite nicely. I wasn't sure if you were arguing against "any" system or not. (Probably not.)

The BIble never claims to give exhaustive knowledge of God or anything else. But it claims to give sufficient knowledge to know God and to live a holy life

Assuming you'd agree that faith comes first, as a gift of God, are you saying that until you get the "sufficient knowledge" of God from the Bible you have no idea what you believe in? In other words, it's not through the faith that you come to know God, but through the Bile?

If that is the case, then we must assume that Abraham did not know God because he didn't have a Bible to read. And neither did Noah nor Moses.

In other words, until you read the Bible, so that you may gain "sufficient knowledge" of God, your faith is blind!