John Pacheco (RC) on Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Doctrines that Can be "Deduced from Scripture"

  

As the Confession makes plain, there are two ways of learning about the truth in Scripture. The Scripture will either reveal the truth explicitly or it will do so implicitly. While we can understand how a proponent of Sola Scriptura will claim that all things fundamental to salvation are clear because of explicit teachings in Scripture, it is very odd that they would do so when the teachings are not explicit. As the Confession admits, there are truths in Scripture which are implicit, which, by good and necessary consequence, may be deduced from Scripture.

 

Yet, this begs many questions:

 

1) How much deduction is allowed?

2) Does not more deduction make the conclusion less clear?

3) What if someone disagrees with the conclusion which is derived from logic of the accepted explicit truths?

4) Who decides if the deduction is to be accepted or rejected?

5) Can we use an implicit truth as a premise in an argument which forms another implicit truth?

 

. . .  as far as the Westminster Confession goes, the system of Sola Scriptura (and its principle plank of perspicuity) is greatly compromised by introducing the principle of deduction. By permitting an exegete to deduce doctrines, the Confession has put no boundary on how much deduction is acceptable. In fact, as more deduction is proposed on a question, a truth becomes less and less perspicuous, even though, objectively speaking, the proponent of the question may be correct in his conclusion. (John Pacheco, “The Noose of the Westminster Confession hangs Sola Scriptura,” Catholic Apologetics International, August 10, 2002, copy of article in my possession)

 

Discussion with a Disingenuous Baptist (Adam O'Flynn aka "The Christian Warner")

Update: Adam keeps trying to get the video taken down. So here are the Zoom details so you can download it:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/7nHap6qpk3cP_TzDGl0t2Yri8PT4TBVfHl4QaVak9bMElayg7fGfK2hUfN0qLHXX.T680M5GqWnNx1naG 

Passcode: 4r@?FP!+

Please download and upload onto your own youtube and other channels. You have my express permission to do such.

Baptist Apologist Embarrasses Himself against Informed Latter-day Saint

Emma Smith: Untold Stories That Will Change How You See Joseph Smith

 

Emma Smith: Untold Stories That Will Change How You See Joseph Smith

Absolute Mad Lads - Mary

 I am a fan of "Count Dankula," and he has just posted a video on Mary. While I disagree with the high Mariology in the video (he is Eastern Orthodox), I found this to be a fun episode (and I do enjoy the topic of Mariology, too):

Absolute Mad Lads - Mary

Walter C. Kaiser Jr. et al.: Gideon was Not Wrong to Request a Miracle in Judges 6:36-40

  

6:36–40  Was Gideon Right to Test God?

 

Was Gideon wrong in asking God for reassurance by means of a wet or dry fleece? Had not God made his will clear to Gideon already at the time of his call (Judg 6:14–16)? While it is understandable that Gideon was apprehensive over his impending conflict with Midian, given the disparity in the number of weapons and men and the morale of the soldiers, he was still wrong in doubting God. Or, at least, that is what some contend.

 

Did Gideon use a proper type of test? Supposing a test is permissible, isn’t it wrong to ask God to accommodate our weakness, to assure us through physical signs or miracles of a word he has already spoken?

 

One further objection focuses on the fact that Gideon did not keep his word. Gideon promised that he would know God was going to use him to deliver Israel if God made the fleece wet and left the ground dry. Though God complied, Gideon insisted on running the same experiment in reverse fashion before he would believe. So what can we say, not only for Gideon but also for modern believers who wish to use similar tactics in order to validate the will of the Lord for them?

 

Some who object to Gideon’s method for discerning God’s will feel that he was not really desiring to know the will of God. Instead, they say, Gideon was angling to have that will changed!

 

This does not appear to be the case, based on what we are told in the text itself. Such an assertion tends to psychologize Gideon. How can we penetrate into his heart and mind and say what it was that Gideon was feeling or hoping?

 

Clearly, Gideon struggled. But he wanted God to provide his overwhelmed mind with more evidence for the words “as [God had] said” (Judg 6:37). He was responding to God’s call (Judg 6:14–16). Thus he was hesitant, but not unbelieving.

 

What about the matter of asking for signs? When we do so, are we acting like the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day, who always wanted a sign? And how specific is the will of God in our ordinary life? Granted, in revelation God often gave specific, detailed instructions for particular actions. But is Judges 6 an invitation for all believers to demand similar specificity? Must the will of God be a dot with a fixed point and nothing else?

 

Gideon’s boldness can be seen both in his asking for a sign and in his specifying what that sign should be. The sign, though simple, involved a miracle. He would place the fleece on the leveled ground where the people threshed their grain (probably in the entrance to the city gate). If the dew was on the fleece alone while all the ground was dry, then he would know that God really would use him to deliver Israel from the hand of the Midianites.

 

The next night, using rather deferential language, he asked that the sign be reversed, with the fleece being dry and the ground soaked with the dew of the night. In both instances Gideon’s request was granted, confirming what God had promised—that his strength comes to peak performance and full throttle in our weakness (2 Cor 12:9).

 

Thus Gideon’s faith was supported. The phantom fears that had haunted his countrymen about the Midianites no longer afflicted him. Before setting out to overthrow the Midianites, he had approached God in prayer, and there he had found his courage renewed and fortified. His importunity was not wrong. And actually he provides a model for us: when we are beset by internal struggles and when challenges seem too great for us to handle, we must go to God in prayer.

 

Nevertheless, this passage does not give encouragement to those who assume they can expect God to attend each of his instructions with whatever signs we may request! God could just as well have refused Gideon’s request. The fact that he didn’t does not set a precedent to which any and all believers may appeal in their moment of distress. God may be pleased to repeat such an act of mercy, but he is not bound to satisfy our desire for visual, physical miracles to confirm his will. Whether he does so rests in his hand alone. (Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce, and Manfred T. Brauch, Hard Sayings of the Bible [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1996], 192-93)

 

Thomas Rees (Unitarian) on Baptism for the Dead in 1 Corinthians 15:29

  

Paul’s Argument

 

Some of the Corinthian Christians denied the resurrection of the dead, and Paul advances three arguments to convince them that the dead will be raised: (1) “If there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised,” but Christ is raised (1 Cor 15:13, 20). (2) If the dead are not raised, why are men being baptized for the dead (ib 15:29)? (3) Why should the apostle himself wage his spiritual warfare (ib 15:30)? The first argument rests upon the central fact of Christianity, and the other two are appeals to the consistency of the Corinthians, and of Paul himself. Whatever “baptism for the dead” meant, it was, in Paul’s opinion, as real, valid and legitimate a premise from which to conclude that the dead would rise as his own sufferings. The natural meaning of the words is obvious. Men in Corinth, and possibly elsewhere, were being continually baptized on behalf of others who were at the time dead, with a view to benefiting them in the resurrection, but if there be no resurrection, what shall they thus accomplish, and why do they do it? “The only legitimate reference is to a practice … of survivors allowing themselves to be baptized on behalf of (believing?) friends who had died without baptism” (Alford in loc).

. . .  

The Difficulty

 

But why is all this ingenuity expended to evade the natural meaning? Because (1) such a custom would be a superstition involving the principle of opus operatum; and (2) Paul could not share or even tolerate a contemporary idea which is now regarded as superstition. To reply (with Alford) that Paul does not approve the custom will not serve the purpose, for he would scarcely base so great an argument, even as an argumentum ad hominem, on a practice which he regarded as wholly false and superstitious. The retort of those who denied the resurrection would be too obvious. But why should it be necessary to suppose that Paul rose above all the limitations of his age? The idea that symbolic acts had a vicarious significance had sunk deeply into the Jewish mind, and it would not be surprising if it took more than twenty years for the leaven of the gospel to work all the Jew out of Paul. At least it serves the apostle’s credit ill to make his argument meaningless or absurd in order to save him from sharing at all in the inadequate conceptions of his age. He made for himself no claim of infallibility. (Thomas Rees, “Baptism for the Dead,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. James Orr et al., 5 vols. [Chicago: The Howard Severance Company, 1915], 1:399, emphasis added)

 

Hyrum Andrus (1952) on Micah 4 (cf. Isaiah 2:2-5)

 When offering the various definitions of “Zion” in Latter-day Saint thought:

 

4. To the location of the “mountain of the house of the Lord,” Micah gave the name of Zion, as he predicted its establishment in the “top of the mountains” in the latter days as a place distinct from Jerusalem. There had formerly been a Zion and a Jerusalem in the land of Palestine, but “the prophet Micah, ‘full of power by the spirit of the Lord, and of judgment, and of might’ predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and its associated Zion, the former to ‘become heaps,’ and the latter to be ‘plowed as a field’; and then announced a new condition that is to exist in the last days, when another ‘mountain of the house of the Lord’ is to be established, and this is called Zion.” In many Latter-day Saint sermons in the belief has been expressed that this prophecy is in process of fulfillment at the present day by the activities of the Church in the mountainous regions of the West. This definition is in close alliance at present with that given under the former heading, differing only by stipulating a definite location of the Church at a given time. (Hyrum Leslie Andrus, “World Government as Envisioned in the Latter Day Saint ‘City of Zion’” [MA Thesis; Brigham Young University, 1952], 8-9)

 

 

According to Mormon interpretation, Micah, the ancient Israelite prophet, spoke of the latter-day Zion as being synonymous with “the house of the Lord . . . in the top of the mountains” (i.e., while Zion is located in Western America). Following its erection a subsequent era of peace wherein men would “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks” was to follow. Paralleling these peaceful conditions, Micah states, “the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Joseph Smith spoke of these two points government by noting: “Now there are two cities . . . a New Jerusalem to be established on this continent, and also Jerusalem shall be rebuilt on the eastern contingent.” (Hyrum Leslie Andrus, “World Government as Envisioned in the Latter Day Saint ‘City of Zion’” [MA Thesis; Brigham Young University, 1952], 95)