Speaking for myself, I didn't see the point in engaging with you in any detail because you proved that you were either incapable or unwilling to deal with what I said at face value.
You called me a liar for no other reason than that you could not accept what I said.
I repeated what I said several times but still you refused to acknowledge it, all the time claiming that I said something else.
Though you say I have misrepresented you in other posts, I just want to post something you said that shows you misunderstand the Reformed perspective and shows your tried-and-true surface-meaning of the text proves to be quite shallow.
Secondly, I don't exegete these passages to adhere to open theism. All I do is try to understand what the passages mean and be informed by them. Satan incited David does not mean that David was forced to do what he did. But it does mean that what David did was wrong and that David succumbed to the temptation. And inasmuch as God incited David to do it, again David didn't need to do it. God was angry with Israel for some unspecified reason and would have found some other way to bring judgement on them if David didn't want to command the census. It is tedious repeating all this. If David had not succumbed to this temptation the Bible would have just been written differently and you wouldn't be any the wiser. That's how history works.
If you recall this is from two passages:
“Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the army, ‘Go, number Israel, from Beersheba to Dan, and bring me a report, that I may know their number’” (1 Chron. 21:1-3).
“Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go, number Israel and Judah.’ So the king said to Joab, the commander of the army, who was with him, ‘Go through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, and number the people, that I may know the number of the people’” (2 Sam. 24:1-3).
First, you made a point to say that David was never forced to do this. That is one aspect of sovereignty that those who are non-Reformed misunderstand, and straw-man against Calvinists. God does not force anyone to do anything. When one chooses, they do so willingly (we can discuss that more later).
Second, you said,
"If David had not succumbed to this temptation the Bible would have just been written differently and you wouldn't be any the wiser."
Well, 2 Sam. 24:1-3 says that God incited David to do it, which you then used the word 'temptation.' [/quote]
But doesn't James 1:13 say, "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God,' for God cannot be tempted with evil, and
he himself tempts no one."
You have a problem because you have two parallel texts here speaking of the same events with two different agents 'inciting' David to sin. Again, David was not forced, he gave into the temptation. So, how do you respond when you this issue?
You don't You never resolved the tension in the texts. You merely gave me a list of synonyms for 'incite.'
The Hebrew word and usage in the OT is:
5496. סוּת suth (694c); a prim. root; to incite, allure, instigate:—diverted(1), entice(2), enticed(1), incited(3), inciting(1), induced(1), mislead(2), misleading(1), misleads(1), misled(1), moved(1), persuaded(2), stirred(1).
So, how can a plain reading of the Scriptures solve this problem? Or are you going to discredit my use of James 1:13? Did God 'incite' David to sin or did Satan do it? You referred to it as David giving into temptation, but God temps no one. Your interpretation is shallow because of your interpretive principles: face-value-reading. These texts require more than that to give a thorough answer. You left God to violate his own nature—He 'tempted' David?
You said repeatedly and incorrectly that my issue was that Calvinists added their own presuppositions. That wasn't what I said.
You said:
If you keep on developing this line of thought, as you read the Bible more, perhaps you will also realise that (Calvinistic) predestination is not in the Bible either and for the exact same reason that trinity also is not.
If (Calvinistic) predestination is not in the Bible, wouldn't you say then that Calvin, through his own presuppositions, came up with his own form of predestination, which I now add into my reading of the text?
I said that my creed was deliberately non-doctrinaire because I wanted to focus on faith and relationship and then you asked me about my doctrine of the deity of Christ and how my creed differentiated between me and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons. You asked this question several times even though I had stated clearly that my creed was not intended to be doctrinaire.
When I answered specifically about the deity of Christ, pointing out that the issue was one of relationship, i.e. my relationship with Jesus, how I worship him and so on, and not whether he was in substance God, you chose to completely misinterpret this as meaning that I held a doctrine of the deity of Christ and questioned me about that.
Any time you make a claim of what you believe the Bible to teach, 'relational theology' or not, you are establishing a doctrine. Your term 'relational theology' is a doctrine!
And I warned you of how different the theology of openness was and you did not heed it, all the time seeking to know what my doctrines were and how I used scripture to establish doctrine (which you lied about in saying that I claimed to be without presuppositions) when all the time I said that I wasn't trying to establish doctrine at all.
You made this claim:
I guess I am going to be somewhat reticent about trusting any interpretation you might place on a text written 3000 years ago or more in another language by a people with completely different cultural norms to your own.
So, why should I trust your interpretation of a text written 3000 years ago or more in an other language by a people with completely different cultural norms to your own? Oh, because yours is the 'face-value plain reading,' whereas mine is . . . not? A plain reading of the text is clear enough for one to come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ; however, there are many difficult areas to understand in the Bible; even Peter spoke of Paul's letters being that way (2 Pet. 3:16), which have been distorted because of that difficulty. So, there were people in that local context and culture, that misunderstood his letters, as with the other texts of the Bible. Do you think they failed to read them at face-value? Afterall, it should have been much easier for them being living on-top of context.
Is it a wonder, having treated me like this, that others are unwilling to deal with you?
But please don't by any means imagine that I or other open theists are unable to answer your question about John 6:64.
So, why have they not? If all is needed is a plain-reading of the face-value of that text, then why not respond? Why not simply point it out, within the text itself, what it means?
I can tell you that I am fully comfortable with every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
As am I
This is a great deal more than many of the reformed persuasion, who, unwilling to accept what the Bible says at face value in proper context, resort to all sorts of tricks and subterfuge, including claiming that some other text in the Bible 'clarifies' the matter or takes precedence,
So, was my use of James 1:13 to show that God doesn't tempt anyone to sin, which you referred to as a temptation, a trick or act of subterfuge?
that it is anthropomorphism, that it is mystery or resorting to spurious references to original texts as if to blind your hearers with science or many other such devices to avoid confronting what the text says. And you end up being so blinded by your own doctrines, that you can no longer see the obvious.
And that indeed is what has happened to you with John 6:64.
I appealed to being a finite creature who cannot fully know the mind of God, recognizing that, I hope I can use this Scripture, "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever" (Deut. 29:29). Or is that an act of subterfuge to support my position that we cannot know all things God knows? I think a plain reading of that text says that there are things that God does and know that are a secret to us creatures. Or, how about this verse, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings" (Prov. 25:2). Or, about Job 42:3, "Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?' "Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know." Job questioned God in 38:2 presuming he knew God's wisdom but obviously he concedes that he did not understand. So, do any of these verses plainly show that there is some mystery that we might have to appeal to? I would rather appeal to mystery then make the mistake that Job did, which God chided him for. However, God showed Job that allowing Satan to do what he did was ultimately for his benefit in the end.
Oh, yeah, as I was strolling through our previous discussion, you never did address my question about Gen. 3:15.
Bob Enyart
said that the seed/offspring of the woman in Genesis 3:15 is in reference to Christ. Now, I believe that as well. But in light of your comments regarding how you interpret the Bible, how can he believe that? I would have to assume you also share the same model of interpretation since you are both open theists.
Now, I have learned, however, that that is not the case among OTs.
However,
You did say that your method of interpretation is
“how open theists interpret the Old Testament.”
So do you believe this? If so, how did you arrive to this conclusion based on what you said?:
“The meaning of a text is determined by itself, not by some other text whether in the New Testament, the Old Testament or anywhere else. The principle that passages in the Bible are interpreted in reference to other passages is a false principle and leads to unpredictable and inconsistent outcomes. Each passage should be interpreted in its own local context and the sum total of all such interpretations in the whole Bible constitutes the written inspiration of scripture. This is an objective and consistent approach. If you introduce random passages as essential contributors to the meaning of some particular passage, then you bring randomness and unpredictability into hermeneutics.”[/quote]
How can you come up with that interpretation from a plain-face-value reading of that text?
I do want to say that in going through the posts on our first discussion, I did see on a post that I did mis-represent you when I asserted that you said that you are claiming to
not have presuppositions. And you were right, you did not say that you didn't.
So, for what it's worth, I do apologize for that.
