Posted on 04/14/2018 11:42:11 AM PDT by pcottraux
Twitter: @DepthsPentecost
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Thanks for the thread.
It is a danger. Even Paul was fighting deception in the church from almost its very inception.
The Council at Jerusalem addresses some of the issues that had come up in just a few short years.
Yes, atheists and those opposed to Christianity are great at what they think is the *gotcha* game.
Except they really don’t know what they are talking about.
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You are precisely right about the passage in Job. A lot of what Job’s “friends” said sounds pious and like wise sayings from God. They have that ring about them. But they were wrong. God said so Himself:
Job 42:7
And so it was, after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, that the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My wrath is aroused against you and your two friends, for you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has.”
In Job 42, God cancels the words of Eliphaz: “My wrath is kindled against Eliphaz; for he has not spoken the truth concerning Me as My servant Job has.
And, like the article says, we have people out there willing to make doctrinal statements based on what Eliphaz said, particularly in Job 22. Amazing, isn’t it? Like the essay here implies, context is everything when it comes to hermeneutics.
One of the biggest errors I see in denominations is the practice of eisegesis....reading something into the text that isn’t there to support a dogma. It leads to a lot of bad theology.
Excellent post!
This is meant generally to everybody.
The danger in picking and choosing scriptures to form one’s beliefs on his very big and cannot be understated. That very thing is behind every erroneous teaching found in Christian religions today. I won’t go into specific examples because that would only invite debate with hard feelings all around. I will respectfully point out that selective use of scriptures as a basis for dogma goes back to the very first Council at Nicea in the fourth century.
In the 19th century, though, one-half of the Adventists present for the Great Disappointment, as some still call it, in 1844 chose to use actually look up all the scriptures in any way bearing on biblical topics and only articulate an understanding after doing that and exhaustively looking up all occurrences of keywords in those scriptures for the same purpose as well. If you would like to know why that last just look up the Hebrew word “nephesh” (soul) sometimes in a lexicon and it will become very clear why they did that. What they learned would surprise most and is why Satan has worked hard since to undo the results of their labors. Sadly one of his efforts that is to continue in the errors of William Miller, has been very successful in that effort of his.
I am not a Seventh-day Adventist and they would see me as in the part of the movement they still derisively still call the “Second Day” Adventists though that isn’t entirely correct either.
While laborious, that is the best way to figure out what the Bible teaches in my view. One irony is that I sometimes get accused of cherry-picking scripture by folks at times.
BTTT
Except they really don’t know what they are talking about.
I don't like to generalize, but that's simply been my experience debating atheists over and over again. Sometimes they call me a coward for declining to debate, but I've come to view it as a fruitless exercise. My experience is that most atheists are trapped in cognitive dissonance and are unable to see out of their naturalistic bubble...and the "debate" usually consists of gotcha questions and straw man arguments ("Hee hee! You believe in an invisible man in the sky!").
I find it intellectually unfulfilling and a waste of time. So many atheists are trapped viewing Christianity in the Sunday-school-religion form. Which is why they make stupid arguments like "snakes can't talk!" or what-have-you.
Thank you!
Done!
I used Job because it's one of the best examples of flipping through the Bible and stumbling across "great" scripture...only viewed through context, they're not so great after all. It's a great way to illustrate that believing the Bible is the Word of God doesn't necessarily mean that every isolated scripture is the absolute truth. If that were the case, we could pick out quotes from Satan and hail them as truth as well.
As I mentioned at the end, the most insidious lie isn't the bold-faced one, but the lie disguised in some truth. It goes all the way back to the garden of Eden: the serpent took God's Words, and twisted them enough to fool Eve.
So much of prosperity gospel preaching sounds just like Jobs worthless friends.
I’ve run into those on FR and told them that if they want an excuse to reject God, they need to find a better one because that’s pretty weak.
You could well be right about that, though I personally think that it goes back much further than that. The Nicene council did serve an important purpose at the time (condemning Arianism) but some ill came from it as well as you pointed out.
One could argue that selective scripture misreading goes all the way back to the dawn of Christianity itself. You can find numerous examples of the Pharisees doing this as they opposed Jesus, and many early church Christians themselves were guilty of it (as I often point out, is why many of the New Testament epistles were written in the first place).
I try to be sympathetic towards other viewpoints. But if I were an atheist, I sure wouldn’t behave or act like most of them do. I recognize that even if the Old Testament stories aren’t historically true (a view I don’t share), they still would hold value as mythological lessons in morality ...dismissing the entire Bible because “snakes and donkeys can’t talk” is a pretty bone-headed way of looking at it.
I’ve noticed that parallel before also.
We see the same with the corrupt leadership of Israel during Christ’s earthly ministry. Some of them were described as covetous. Annas was the high priest who, according to Josephus, ran the moneychanging operation in the courtyard of the temple where the Lord twice removed them. Jesus called it a den of thieves. Annas and his four sons and one son-in-law all took turns being priest due to his bribery of the Roman authorities. There positions as priest, high priest, and members of the Sanhedrin were lucrative jobs.
Contextually, when Jesus drove out the money changers, He was defending the right of Gentiles to worship outside the temple which the corrupt leaders had turned into a stinking zoo.
Jesus spoke of those who devoured widow’s houses. Yet they were glad to take the widow’s last farthing into the treasury. That last farthing was sort of a last straw with God. Jesus said the temple had to come down.
Some of these TV preachers will con widow ladies on a fixed income to donate money using credit cards with the premise that God will bless them financially, but this of course leads to financial disaster.
Bible Passage Tennis Volley. Theologians thrive on it.
“Sometimes [atheists] call me a coward for declining to debate, but I’ve come to view it as a fruitless exercise.”
Most of the time people do not believe the Gospel because of issues of morality and character rather than logic, reason, or evidence. That’s why these debates tend to be fruitless.
But sometimes God intervenes in their lives to prove He is real, if they are really open-minded enough to receive it. He did that for Larry Nevenhoven, who writes for WND:
http://www.wnd.com/2018/04/do-we-still-need-prophecy-and-spiritual-gifts/
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