Bart Goddard wrote:
> wrote:
>
> >> If faith needs an object, then the phrase "place faith in"
> >> makes no sense.
> >>
> > ???????  Is it a blind spot with you?  Is it hidden or is it
blocked?
> > Your logic or reasonability is, to be kind, faulty.
>
> So you think that if something is too difficult for you
> to understand then it must be illogical?  That's not what
> most people use the word "illogical" for. (And the 50 students
> to whom I'm teaching logic to this semester
>
Logically, how is one not to conclude you to be the strutting peacock?
>
SNIP
>
> > This conclusion is almost laughable if it wasn't for being so
obtuse.
> > How many years and how many posts have I defended sola fide and
sola
> > gratia?
>
> The point here is that you are not consistant.  You give
> lip service to these concepts, but then you state doctrines
> which flatly contradict them.  If you weren't so illogical,
> this would bother you.
>

There is logic and then there is common sense.  There is reason and
then there is reasonableness.  I would really like to answer you, Matt,
Brenda and a host of others in a few brief paragraphs but what has to
be outlined cannot really be distilled to a few paragraphs without lots
of gaps and misunderstanding.  But. . . . I think I am going to at
least attempt such a ridiculous thing.

First off, I want to state this is going to be an apologetical
exercise, not a theological one.  Yes, for those who understand, there
is an important distinction to be made which I hope will become
self-evident as this paper proceeds.

Secondly, I am going to proceed to defend the point that Reformed
Protestantism is the ONLY system which can consistently provide a valid
defense for Biblical Christianity.  All of Catholicism (the Romanist,
the EO advocate, the Anglican) along with modern Lutheranism and even
the Protestant Arminian evangelical, stand opposite of the Reformed
position.  In fact, they all stand along side of the non-Christian
position.

In the past the doctrine of sola scriptura has come up.  Most have
ignored it, some have railed against, all fail to understand its
necessity.  This is so basic a tenant that it is what divided the
Reformed position from every other.  It alone stresses without asterisk
the self-sufficiency and therefore the ultimate sovereignty of God.
Now immediately I hear a howling of Catholic and Arminianist objections
-but hear me out.  For instance, the Romanist doctrine of God, which
also speaks of God's self-sufficiency, nevertheless compromises it to a
degree by its doctrines of baptismal regeneration, the veneration of
the saints, purgatory and all the salvific merits involved with each.
In doing so, it virtually ascribes to man a measure of
self-sufficiency.  The Pelagian, Arminian, EO catholic all do the same
in their subscription to their doctrine of free-will.  And by so
ascribing this measure of "free-will" self-sufficiency or ultimacy to
man himself, they have in turn painted God into a corner by forcing Him
to a measure to become dependent upon the will of man.

So immediately there arises the question of a principlization of
explanation.  The Reformer maintains that if God is self-sufficient He
is also thereby *solely* self-explanatory.  And if this is the case
then He is also the final reference point for all explanation of what
is.  Equivocating otherwise is like using a match to illumine the sun.
In point of fact, the very idea of a match was derived from the prior
existence and expression of the sun.  And God created the sun.  It
cannot have come into existence by itself or by chance.  God Himself is
the source of all possibility and therefore of all space-mass-time
factuality.

Now, on the otherside of the argument, to *any* measure or degree that
God is not self-sufficient and self-explanatory, he (notice I no longer
capitalized "He") immediately ceases to be the final reference point of
human predication.  Logically (Bart, Brenda), God and man become
partners in an effort to explain a common environment.  So in the final
analysis, facts are no longer what they are by virtue of the all
encompassing Decree/Plan of God.  They may in part be that but they are
also partly existing in their own power of self-determination.
Suddenly the human mind, the rationality of man, needs no longer
subject itself in absolute dependence upon the revelation of God as the
absolute and final authoritative.  Man may then defer to God as one
defers to a specialist or an expert who has greater knowledge and
understanding than he does, but he need not make **all** thoughts
captive to the obedience of the Expression of God.  (i.e. the Logos)

The whole problem of this becomes immediately evident when the issue of
the non-Christian position comes to bear.  For the Christian cannot, on
this asteriskian view, indicate to the non-Christian that the
non-Christian position is destructive of experience.  Nor can he make
plain to the non-Christian that Christianity will give him and will
_certainly_ give him, what he needs -external to his own weakness.  The
essence of the non-Christian position is that man is assumed to be the
ultimate/autonomous reference of the universe.  Man is to be thought of
as the final reference point in predication.  As Brenda has so
attested, the facts are that man's environment are "just there."  They
are assumed to have come into being by impersonal chance.  Possibility
is placed above both God and man.  The laws of logic are assumed as
somehow operative in the universe or at least as legislative for what
man can or cannot accept as possible or probable -let alone true.  Here
stand also the "traditionalist" (Matthew).

So how can we explain and verify what is? How can man interpret the
human experience?  The Reformed position is that he can ONLY do so by
presupposing that a Personal-Infinite is the final reference point in
predication.  Anything short of this in turn destroys experience
itself.  Here even the atheist stands condemned by his own experience
for his virtual negation of God must first presuppose the reality of
God.  One cannot deny the reality of the Infinite-Personal without
first affirming His existence.  So, Bart, one cannot "place their faith
in" anything without there first presuming there to be an object to
place that faith in.  History records that man cannot deny God solitary
without destroying the human experience itself.

Here we again come to address the Romanist and all his colleagues.  He
does not, in his methodology, affirm God as the Supreme Determinator.
("I'll be back!")  While he does, to be sure, agree with the
non-Christian position in assuming that man must deliberately be made
the final reference point of human predication, he yet does not clearly
insist that God be made the final reference point of all verification
and validation.  In other words, the Romanist and his colleagues
cooperate, commingle, compromise the Christian and the non-Christian
view as to the small matter of what is the Final reference point of
human experience.  Hence it cannot distinguish clearly between the two
positions.  Beyond this, it also cannot consistently illustrate the
ruinous failure of the non-Christian view.  And sadly, it must be
admitted it cannot consistently show that the Christian position means
salvation for the human experience.

At this point I will also say that thought they are no way to be
identified as with one another in most points, here the Arminian and
the Lutheran lies in the same bed.  For both hold out for a measure of
autonomy for man.  This is where they join the Romanist and the
Catholics, even though it is in a much smaller measure and a much
refined and defined explanation of it.  Again, ANY measure or degree of
autonomy ascribed to man implies a detraction from the self-sufficiency
of God.  It necessarily retains the implication that God can n o longer
be taken as the final reference point in human predication.  It is
expected, then, that such evangelicals, holding as they do in their
theology to the idea of man as having some measure of ultimacy, will
also maintain that such Protestants may, even must, join with
Catholicism in the defense of this point.  It must also be further
pointed out, that they are walking arm-in-arm with the non-Christian as
well.

The position of the Reformed view then stands absolutely contrary to
any degree of admixing the absolute sufficiency of God and any thought
of the sufficiency of man.  It maintains that man was created and
remains absolutely dependent and derivative of God -without any
compromise.

So here arises the initial point -sola scriptura.  The Christian has
and can only derive his convictions from the Scriptures as the very
infallible Word of God.  As The Self-Explanatory, God naturally speaks
with absolute authority.  There is NONE who stands beside Him in fact
or in theory.  It is the Logos of God who speaks to man in the
Scriptures.  The Scriptures are alive even as He is alive because they
are authoritatively identical.  Heb 4:12-13 so indicate that there is
nothing on earth to compare to the Living Logos.  "For the word (Logos)
of God is living and operative; ; ;able to discern the thoughts and
intentions of the heart."  Here is where Scripture stand head and
shoulders above all other sources of revelation, including the cosmos
itself and especially the traditions of man.  "And there is no creature
that is not manifest before Him, but all things are naked and laid bare
to the eyes of Him to whom we are to give our account (logos)."  Hiding
only hides from ourselves.  Nothing can be hidden from the Logos.
Revelation is God opening our eyes  to see our intentions and our
deepest thoughts as God sees and judges them.  The Scriptures not only
lay us naked before the Throne of God, but they lay us naked before
ourselves.  This is revelation.  Revelation is seeing what God sees.
Therefore the Bible does not appeal to human reason or logic as the
ultimate in order to justify what it declares.  It comes to the human
being with absolute authority.  Its claim is that human reason must
itself be taken in the sense in which Scripture takes it, namely, as
created by God and as therefore is derivative solely and properly
subject to His revealed authority.

Thus the Reformer maintains its independence of anything which opposes
-to any measure, sola gratia and sola fide.  It s required of man that
he regard himself and his world as absolutely and completely revelatory
of the presence and  requirements of God.  It is man's task to search
out the truths about God, about the world and himself in relation to
one another.  He must seek a "systematic" arrangement of the facts of
the universe.  But the "system" that he thus tries to formulate is not
the sort of system that even incrementally commingles the free-will of
man with that of the Sovereign Lord of the universe.

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