The Phoenix

Well then, the same must be true for worldviews, ethics,...

Sat, 25 May 2013 01:37:30 -0400

Well then, the same must be true for worldviews, ethics, science, metaphysics, etc… Right?

When someone asks me about Westminster...

Fri, 24 May 2013 01:12:33 -0400

calvinwouldbeproud:

spiritualinspiration: The LORD merely spoke, and the heavens...

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:46:17 -0400

spiritualinspiration:

The LORD merely spoke, and the heavens were created. He breathed the word, and all the stars were born. (Psalm 33:6)

fuckwooper: money is so stupid and unnecessary we’re meat creatures on a rock floating in space and...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:13:59 -0400

fuckwooper:

money is so stupid and unnecessary we’re meat creatures on a rock floating in space and our entire lives are dominated by little bits of paper

That's a really great explanation but why crucifixion? Could he have died in another way and still saved us from the penalty of sin which was death?

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:06:19 -0400

Perhaps he could have died another way, but God decreed that it would be by crucifixion. Crucifixion represents that in Christ’s death, he was bearing the wrath of God for the sins of humanity. In Galatians 3:13 Paul says “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” He is quoting Deuteronomy 21:22-23 which says that anyone who is “hanged on a tree” is “cursed by God”. On top of this, we see in Isaiah 53 that the Crucifixion was prophesied hundreds of years before it happened. Christ was crucified for our sins, and bore the wrath of God in fulfillment of the Scriptures.

as a gay christian THANK YOU for being a decent person. i love jesus so much, and am so thankful to him for everything but honestly the lack of compassion in christian culture makes me sad. it's not some us vs. them thing, it's about loving your brothers and sisters.

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:44:03 -0400

This is an encouraging message to receive. I’m glad that you feel welcome here. I agree that the Christian culture does seriously lack compassion. Historically speaking the church has always cared for the downtrodden and for those that they probably disagreed with. Christ always ministered to and was present in the lives of the “sinners” but never condoned their sin. The same is true today, he loves me and is present in me, and yet does not condone my sin. If we are really being “conformed into the image of the Son” through communing with him in his death and resurrection, then our lives should look as much like his as they can. This means loving those we may disagree with.
Be blessed friend!
-Brandon

hi revelation19..i just want to ask you this question since you have a lot of knowledge about God..why did Jesus have to be crucified on the cross? dont get me wrong, i love jesus and i believe in him.. whenever i ask other people about that, they would always say that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins. but would he really have to be crucified and suffered on the cross? yes.. God already planned it but isnt it enough that He preached the gospel? why wud he have to experience dat?

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:37:31 -0400

This is a really great question. Basically, Christ died on the cross not only to save us from our sins, but to save us from the penalty of our sins. The Apostle Paul says that “the wages of sin is death”. When we sin we are in essence rebelling against God. We are telling God that we think we know how to achieve fulfillment better than he does and that we think we can do a better job at being the God of our lives than he can. And we all do this every single day. Now, God is a holy and just God who cannot allow crimes to go unpunished, and since humans are the ones who are committing these sins, it has to be a human to pay the penalty. But no mere human can pay the penalty for the sins of all human kind, only God can do that. So God came down from heaven in the flesh and dwelt among us. He lived a perfect life so that he could give us his righteousness and he died on the cross to take upon himself the penalty that was due to us for our sins. Basically he traded his righteousness for our sin and the wrath that should have been on us. Christ had to die on the Cross because the wages of sin is death.

Be blessed,
-Brandon

How my semester ended...

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:37:00 -0400

Somehow I made it out okay…

What I just did to my Medieval Church exam...

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:50:00 -0400

And my first year of seminary is in the bag.

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:13:24 -0400

And my first year of seminary is in the bag.

THE STATE OF MY APARTMENT AFTER FINALS HAVE ENDED

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:21:45 -0400

maryhomegirl:

"You can always see who’s a legalist because he can’t laugh at himself. He’s the one going around..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:20:00 -0400

“You can always see who’s a legalist because he can’t laugh at himself. He’s the one going around saying, ‘That’s not funny.’”

- Timothy Keller (via jspark3000)

CH 211: The Medieval Church

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:26:37 -0400

Authority and Exegesis in the Medieval period:

Authority and the role of scripture coincide in the middle ages.

When the reformation came, views of the Bible changed entirely. The exegetical methods used, the way it was viewed. Luther and Calvin were wrestling original language studies, grammar, context. They were doing grammatical historical exegesis. People saw this as a huge shift from the medieval exegetes. Some say that the Reformation breaks with the medievals and takes us down a path that ends with the Liberal schools with their higher critical historical method. But the problem is that they are saying that the reformers were setting up a higher critical method. So the current reformed understanding of scripture hasn’t gone far enough.

So is this an accurate understanding of the reformers and is it an accurate understanding of the Medieval period? Were the reformers really breaking from the Medievals that radically? Well… no.

Calvin was focused on understanding Christ in the text and God’s revelation of Christ in the text…. So how do you get from that to German liberalism? What really sets up the rise of german liberalism is not the reformers, but the enlightenment. Kantian epistemology sets up the idea of the pnoumenal (which we have no access to). So the germans were basically looking at authorial intention, not the divine authorial intention, but human authorial intention. This is the basis of criticism.

Some would say that the medievals were naive or ignorant because they didn’t have the resources that the reformers had. There is some truth to this, sure, but it’s not so discontinuous as it is made out to be, the jump was not all that radical.

Medievals held that scripture had four senses (quadriga). There were literal things that were going on in scripture and spiritual things going on. So they tried to distinguish letter from spirit in every text.

There was the

Literal/Historical interpretation
Allegorical interpretation
Tropological interpretation
Anagogical interpretation

The literal tells us what happened
The allegorical tells us how to understand something else in light of the allegory
The Tropological gives us a moral declaration (how we ought to live)
The anagogical draws us to higher things

Beyond the literal you have faith love and hope. The allegorical is faith, the tropological is love, and the anagogical is hope.

The literal sense is the foundation of all the others. To understand the rest, you must understand it’s history. Before you can understand the temple as symbolic of the church you have to understand what the temple really was literally. So the charge that they didn’t care about literal exegesis is simply wrong, it was actually the backbone of the rest of their exegesis. Also, they didn’t just over allegorize everything, Allegory really represented mystery. There is a literal sense, but there is some mystery to the revelation. The allegorical interpretation is attempting to unlock the mystery, and they mystery is Christ and the church. The allegory was specific to unveil and reveal Christ to his church. It was not just allegorizing things to be whatever you wanted them to be. They had a unity in their understanding of scripture in that every story was literal and true but had an allegorical sense that relates to Christ and his church. When they say allegorical sense, they are moving from the historical to the spiritual and it always is to be understood in light of Christ and his church. The Tropological understanding flows seamlessly from the allegorical. Wherever there is allegory, there is an imperative, you are to do something with that allegory. The text must restructure what you say and do. The anagogical sense always points the reader to the time where Christ will return in glory. Every passage points you to the telos. It always points you to the endgame of what God is doing. Every passage must be interpreted in light of this.

They understood the Christian life as being a progression from conversion to purgation (a purging of your sin and junk causing you to progress to union and vision of Christ). You were moving to that vision where you and Christ will unite. It a progression from conversion to purgation to union. The movement is vertical, the same way Christ ascended. To them sanctification impacted not just your spiritual nature, but your physical body as well.

Do the reformers completely abandon the quadriga?

Some say that the break was not from the medieval to the Reformation eras but from the Reformation to the Modern eras. Reformation and Medieval fall into the “pre-critical” exegetical method. The Reformers take the 4-fold sense and collapse it into two. The quadriga becomes a 2-fold sense of scripture. The reformers start with a literal historical and then employ all of the new tools that they have to understand the historical literal sense that the medievals did not have. However, they do not abandon the deeper spiritual truths present in the text. The three spiritual senses become one spiritual sense. The reformers do not shift away from the spiritual. They are not critical. The German liberal criticism completely abandons the spiritual, the reformers don’t.

So what changed? If the reformers were using the same method, what was different?

Within the context of the medieval church, you have two approaches to the church tradition. There is Tradition 1 and tradition 2.

Tradition 1:

a single source authority. They understood that the truth of the faith was in the Bible , it contained all of the truth of the faith. There was an additional authority of tradition that is unwritten and carried on by the apostles. The ultimate authority is always in Scripture. Everything you need to know about Christianity is in the Bible. Tradition is a complementary source, but never authoritative and never considered revelation.

Tradition 2:

A 2 source approach. Christianity owes equal respect to the Bible and to ecclesiastical tradition contained in both written and unwritten tradition. The Apocrypha and the writings of the apostles successors. The authority of the Bishop of Rome (the Pope).

The 2 source begins to dominate more and more and more. So methodologically the reformers were the same as the medievals but they were much closer to the single source understanding of authority. That is why they came to different conclusions. Sola Scriptura was an attempt to bring people back to a single source understanding of authority.

Scripture corrects our tradition. Claiming that “that’s just your tradition” is basically saying that your own tradition is as authoritative as scripture. It’s another form of medieval 2 source, ecclesiological tradition authority.

"You're not God, so nobody appreciates your condescension!"

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:44:26 -0400

calvinwouldbeproud:

Angelina Jolie isn’t my wife…. so why would I care about her boobs? Even still, if she...

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:42:00 -0400

Angelina Jolie isn’t my wife…. so why would I care about her boobs? Even still, if she was my wife, I would probably care more about her well being than her boobs.

If Arminianism is true, then "once saved, always saved" isn't. If you got yourself in, you can get yourself out.

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:23:00 -0400

It seems like some Christians think that sin is bad because it’s embarrassing. No, sin is bad...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:23:28 -0400

It seems like some Christians think that sin is bad because it’s embarrassing. No, sin is bad because it is a rebellion against a holy God. The more we know God, the more we realize the severity of our sin.

There can be no separation between true knowledge of God and a true worship of God. Theological...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:09:19 -0400

There can be no separation between true knowledge of God and a true worship of God. Theological knowledge is not sufficient for Christian growth. You need to be changed by what you learn. It shouldn’t simply affect your mind, it should also affect your heart.

The manic scribblings of a seminary student….. also known...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:00:00 -0400

The manic scribblings of a seminary student….. also known as studying for my Doctrine of God final.

apologeticsnstuff replied to your post: apologeticsnstuff replied to your post:… I didn’t make...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:12:09 -0400

apologeticsnstuff replied to your post: apologeticsnstuff replied to your post:…

I didn’t make an argument, merely a suggestion for your line of reasoning that avoids admitting a counterfactual that is logically impossible.

Well, all I’m doing is basing the counterfacutal’s impossibility in God’s decree rather than in a logical necessity that is ad extra.