Joseph Smith - ""I prophesy in the name of the Lord God, and let it be written--the Son of Man will not come in the clouds of heaven till I am eighty-five years old."
Ellen White - "Time is almost finished. Get ready, get ready, get ready.' ...now time is almost finished...and what we have been years learning, they will have to learn in a few months."
Charles Taze Russell - "we consider it an established truth that the final end of the kingdoms of this world, and the full establishment of the Kingdom of God, will be accomplished by the end of A.D. 1914"
John Nelson Darby - "We insist on the fact that the house has been ruined, its ordinances perverted, its orders and all its arrangements forsaken or destroyed; that human ordinances, a human order, have been substituted for them; and what merits all the attention of faith, we insist that the Lord... is coming soon in His power and glory to judge all this state of things"
From July 22nd, 2011, 06:37 PM, Post #11, by Hilston, on the link below…
http://www.theologyonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75224
Originally Posted by Hilston
Again, this explanation does not even come close to addressing even the small sample of glaring contrasts I outlined above.
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Originally Posted by tetelestai, previously
This belief is the teachings of Darby, Scofield, Chafer, Bullinger, Sir Robert Anderson, Stam, and other men.
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Originally Posted by Hilston, previously
How is this relevant to what the Scriptures teach.
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Originally Posted by tetelestai
None of these teachings were ever taught before Darby.
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Originally Posted by Hilston, previously
Regardless of what we're talking about -- whether it's a future tribulation or Calvinism -- it doesn't matter who taught what and when, as long as it is taught in Scripture.
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Originally Posted by tetelestai
Nowhere in the Bible does God tell Paul that He is going to keep all the really important stuff hidden for 1,800 years.
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Originally Posted by Hilston, previously
It is your assumption that it has been hidden. I don't believe it has, but it's irrelevant. If the Scriptures teach it, that suffices.
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Originally Posted by tetelestai
You will claim that I am basing my argument on silence. However, you are making your argument on speculation.
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Originally Posted by Hilston, previously
The difference is, it's not my argument. I'm merely showing how absurd your argument is. If the Bible teaches it, that is sufficient, regardless of whether you can find some flawed, fallible, partisan human being to corroborate it or not. You are a respecter of men and of flawed human consensus, as is evidenced by your desire to defer to some extra-biblical authority to tell you what to believe. It isn't rationally sound, it underestimates human fallibility, and commits a logical fallacy.
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Originally Posted by tetelestai
I can prove I read a book, but I can't prove I didn't read a book. You want me to prove that these teachings didn't exist. No one can prove a negative.
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Originally Posted by Hilston, previously
On the contrary, I want you to see the absurdity of your argument. I want you to see and acknowledge that Calvin faced the same charges that you are launching at me. They were not relevant then, and they're not relevant now. Anyone who embraces Calvin's anti-papist teachings on the basis of consensus is dishonoring the very spirit of Calvin's opposition to the papists.
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Originally Posted by Hilston
All of the so-called "early church fathers" taught things contrary to Scripture. Their antiquity is irrelevant to what the Scriptures teach. To measure the verity of one's doctrine according to the teachings of fallible men, whoever they may be, and however long ago they lived, is folly, according to the Scriptures. Let God be true, and every man a liar.
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Originally Posted by tetelestai
You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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Originally Posted by Hilston
And you can't love and cuddle the bathwater with the baby, which is what you're doing by granting so much authority to your so-called "fathers."
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Originally Posted by tetelestai
God tells us that pastor teachers will be gifted with the Holy Spirit to teach. That means that even though many false teachers have come and gone throughout history, the truth has been passed down by some pastor - teachers.
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Originally Posted by Hilston
What you've basically said here is that the Scriptures are insufficient in and of themselves. When Paul describes the giving of gifted men to the church, he is not saying that we should blindly follow them or defer to their consensus opinion. He is merely describing the way the Body of Christ operates, in contrast to the patriarchal and sacerdotal hierarchy taught in the circumcision gospel. The final arbiter of whom should be considered a pastor-teacher, evangelist, etc. is the Word of God, not the consensus of men.
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Originally Posted by tetelestai
Which means that some of the men had to teach the truth, which means that an absence of the truth for 1,800 years cannot have happened.
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Originally Posted by Hilston
That's what the papists said to Calvin. Here is what Calvin wrote in the introduction to The Institutes:
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Nevertheless, they cease not to assail our doctrine, and to accuse and defame it in what terms they may, in order to render it either hated or suspected. They call it new, and of recent birth; they carp at it as doubtful and uncertain; they bid us tell by what miracle it has been confirmed; they ask if it be fair to receive it against the consent of so many holy Fathers and the most ancient custom; they urge us to confess either that it is schismatical in giving battle to the Church, or that the Church must have been without life during the many centuries in which nothing of the kind was heard. ... in calling it new, they are exceedingly injurious to God, whose sacred word deserved not to be charged with novelty. (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 8).
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Originally Posted by Hilston
Don't you see? You're making the same argument that was laid against Calvin, 475 years after Calvin originally first penned it. At the time, Calvin was up against 1,500 years of church history. Why was it not okay for the papists to challenge Calvin with 1,500 years of church history, yet it's okay for you to challenge me with 1,800 years of church history?
Hilston
No, Hilston, apparently Teltelestai does not see - but what can you expect from the double-talk that is Teltelestai's ideas out of books, at the same time he erroneously asserts his seemingly endless ignorance that the Spirit is still revealing things to men outside of the Word.