I understand and sympathize but I have to ask: is there any English translation you have ever read that tries to clearly relate in English the uncertainty/conditionality/doubt/"if-then" of the three "this generation" passages of Matthew, Mark and Luke? If you have I'd like to know which it is because I have been unable to find even one that does so. Only interlinears show it, and only a handful of commentators found it even worth mentioning, apparently. A few say it's very important to correctly understanding these passages. Most, if they note it at all, dismiss it as meaning nothing worth commenting on (apparently). I do not believe God intended it to mean nothing; but we wouldn't know of it from English Bibles...unless you're aware of one that spells out the subjunctive?
In another post, I related that I hold to a Mid-Acts Dispensational Hermeneutic, only after the fact of my studies of any subject within Scripture. Meaning, my studies of one subject or another - through recurrent patterns - has thus far continued to result in the fact of Mid-Acts.
I do not hold to an idealist [symbolic], nor to a preterist, nor to a historicist, nor to a futurist view going in. I simply study a thing out according to basic rules of grammar and recurrent patterns and let the chips fall where they may..
I find that this allows me to learn from any school's particular view, and for that matter; from any person; even someone I might hold n very low regard as to their ability to think outside the proverbial box.
For me, the issue is what I might learn, not what I might feel a need to hold onto.
This is going to necessarily lead to some differences in my understanding on some things with others - including those who hold to Mid-Acts.
You'll never find me asserting "that's not for us," for example. Because, for all that actually communicates to another individual in the absence of what all is behind that declaration, I might as well have related "the bottle is half empty" to someone just as dead set on viewing it as half-full.
We human beings each tend to take our respective perception of things as "the truth."
I'm fine with that, because I am about learning about things and how they work; not about needing to be right, as that is one heck of a way to end up at a one size fits all blind spot.
I've noticed you and I differ on some understandings, for example.
That we differ on the sense of the Matthew 24 passage, is not surprising, then, as our respective approach obviously differs in some area.
Personally, I continue to find differences with others fascinating, even where said difference is with the occasional one size fits all fool that someone like a Teltelestai continues to represent.
That's some accomplishment on the part of an individual such as he; that the brief moment they are reflected on, the sense is that of the brief annoyance that is that of a gnat.
