Thank you for sharing your views!
Yet, I believe A8 is correct in his assessment that your epistemology and theology is essentially subjective naval gazing that lacks radical exteriority needed to lift yourself beyond your own horizon.
LOLOL! I have no idea how you got that idea. My epistemology puts my own musings way down the list. Even logic ranks #3 there.
Before I get into the meat of the arguments of the subject matters at hand I found your appeal for insularity from judgement as symptomatic of basic defects in your warrants and perhaps a whiff of an appeal to authority.
Hardly. When I said “I’d rather you not judge me at all” it was in reference to Matthew 7 – because whoever is judging another will be held to the exact same standard he is using. IOW, it was not for my sake but for anyone making judgments of another:
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. – Matthew 7:1-2
There is also that snaky problem Paul mentioned, that our judgments are self-condemning per se:
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. – Romans 2:1
Or in modern parlance, ’it takes one to know one.’ or to put it another way, the one who can imagine a thing is the one who speaks of it. The naïve person’s mind is clean and thus he has no basis to judge. Conversely, as the Sermon on the Mount shows, the thinking of the thing and the doing of it are equally condemning.
Finding no cause for your appeal to insularity from judgement we move on then to your self-annointed framework for personal judgement. [where I am using the fruit/tree test of Matthew 7 and the fruits specified in Galatians 5]
Your protest fails on “self-anointed” since the standard for judging whether or not to listen to a “prophet” is not mine but Christ’s. And as to the connection between the fruits described in Matthew 7 and itemized in Galatians 5:21-22, it requires spiritual discernment.
Clearly you are consistent in your degrading of Creation and a skepticism of reality that imply things may be appearances only. If this is not full blown gnosticism it closely approaches it.
To the contrary, it is geometric physics (Vafa, Wesson, et al)
From what I witnessed Scripture only serves your immanent epistemology, fit to explain your existential situation not something that brings you out your internal world. I think your oft-repeated mantra is telling in this matter.
As I have testified on many occasions, God the Father has revealed Himself in four ways:
1. Through Jesus Christ who is the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person – by whom everything that was made, was made, and for whom it exists and by whom it subsists. (Hebrews 1:3, Col 1) 2. Through the indwelling Spirit who reveals Truth to us and leads us. (John 14-17, Romans 8, I Cor 2)
3. Through the Scriptures, which I do often quote as most of the correspondents accept them as inerrant.
4. Through Creation itself. (Psalms 19, Romans 1:20)
I am not in an “internal world” – to the contrary, those who value sensory perception and reasoning above the person of God are the ones who are living in an “internal world”. Because of the observer problem, there is no objective truth from the perspective of the ego-centric. None of us mortals can step outside of “all that there is” – both physical and spiritual - for a panaromic view of reality. That is the domain of God alone. He alone is objective Truth. There is no other way to obtain Truth than through Him, i.e. the Spirit He has given us for that very purpose. (John 14-17)
This is not something I can reason with another person. Either they are led by the Spirit or they are not. But if they are led by the Spirit, they know some of the mind, the wisdom and the power of God. (I Cor 2)
IOW, hermeneutics are wasted on me though I'm sure many find comfort in them. But that's fine, we are not "cookie cutter" Christians.