W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page, What is New
WHAT IS SHOWN TO BE SO
AFTER SOME 30 YEARS
OF WRITING, RESEARCH AND RELISH
What is shown ?
1)There is no philosophical problem left IF you follow he biblical prepositions fully. All the old chaos and contention has no answer to the simple and clear, direct and sustained, evidentially and progressively exclusive testimony of the Bible. You can ignore the answers, invent unbiblical ideas and even without realising, foist them ln the biblical model, but this is error. It does not affect the result.
At a detailed and related level, Jason Lisle's recent work, Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason is impressive.
2) The Bible alone makes these specifications which so answer the challenges of philosophy.
3) In particular, the area of law, freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, responsibility and duty on this basis is pellucid, all things being in principle coherent and expansively clear in principle, and the sin element of the biblical presentation, a child of freedom in man's construction, has many consequences, and often there is effort to hide it; but it is as impossible to do so as to brush tangled hair with a tooth pick.
4) This result of course, since the proposition is in principle total, to the area of foreknowledge, predestination, liberty, love and life, where the Bible-based solution given appears first in my M.A. (Hons. Melb.), Predestination and Freewill, and later in more detail in the SEVEN VOLUME SET , On Predestination and Foreknowledge, Liberty and Necessity, Responsibility, Duty and Creativity.
Outside the biblical parameters, mode and model this not only has never been solved by philosophy, but cannot be. This is part of the presentation, which focusses on the unique splendour, adequacy and wonder of this, the word of God, so long written for man.
5) In the theological field it is the same. Biblical discipline, adherence precisely to the text without flamboyance or dulness but careful fidelity attests what Proverbs 8:8-9 declares, namely this, of the works of divine wisdom in words:
"All the words of my mouth are with righteousness; nothing crooked or perverse is in them.
They are all clear to him who understands and right to those who find knowledge."
6) In particular, it has been found that as to method in identifying the word of God as truth, there is no inherent necessity to start with presuppositions, as some claim. It is a usefui method, but has no monopoly. It can be used with various methods to show the result, but the one formed and presented in this site, and first in my Th.D. thesis (1978) starts without presuppositions and is thus called ABC Apologetics (A-Presuppositional Biblical Christian Apologetics). The a- here means NOT. This method is more direct and thus depends on no such starting rung, and hence is preferred, though not exclusivistically. The concept is of an orchestra, each instrument making its contribution.
7) Following on from 5) above, there is a result relative to using the term 'incomprehensible' of God. It in a way like using the term 'illiterate' of a dictionary!
His word is indeed clear, though naturally it is deliciously challenging, and He even gives aid in no small measure in understanding it through the gracious working of His Spirit; and He is indeed the God of light, so that if one walks in Him, one does not stumble. Indeed, as I Timothy 6:16, God even is "dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honour and everlasting power."
That is why it is so wonderful that He became man to allow His eternal and living word, incarnate as Jesus the Christ, to be the light of the world! Man cannot anatomise God, but God can instruct, and in the Bible this is precisely what He has done, showing the everlasting truth (cf. John 14, Titus 1:2-3, Psalm 119 - almost passim, I Corinthians 2:9-13, John 14:6 with 8:40) and that, not with verboten or some kind of bureaucratic withholding, but even to the plateau of the "deep things". Certainly there is much more to come, but not to re-draft, but fill in as in a high power microscope, giving more directness and definition. HIS word as one finds constantly, does not bend with any circumstance, financial or political or military or personal but bends history to its shape. It is a marvel how this coheres with the freedom man has, a matter treated as in 4) above.
Thus incomprehensible, if one uses it, has to be conceived carefully. It then has to mean something like this: "thoroughly clear to understanding, and this without disharmony or obstacle, but vast in wonder with awesome heights and depths, not expressible in facile, superficial or simplistic terms, but adequately only by Himself, epitomised and expressed in Jesus Christ." Indeed, it is He who declared, "All things that the Father has is mine," as in John 16:15. He added this: "Therefore I said that He will take of mine and declare it to you." Made in God's image nothing hinders even this creation from such wonder, and indeed they will see Him face to face (Revelation). No iota of clashing components appears, if you follow His word.
How His people delight in His light (Jeremiah 9:23), in understanding Him, who does not change, is not a variable entity, in whom is no shadow of turning (James 1:17). "The heavens and earth will depart,' says Christ, shown in Matthew 24:25, "but My words shall not pass away." That is the difference between God and what He has made, except where He pays for and pardons some, bringing them to Himself for ever (John 5:24). Psalm 102 makes the same distinction and Isaiah 51:6 even given in effect, a pointer to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and shows in what manner haven and earth will depart, something of the inherent necessity.
Not only will His words not pass away, but as in I Corinthians 13:11, their revelation will be total when the time comes as in Revelation 22:5, John 16:15, and then what was in part, will be in whole, just as what was mortal is replaced by immortality. Apologetics deals with what is now revealed, not what is not; but then the full orb will be granted and the harmonies will be in their actualities revealed in their own depth, form and manner.
8) In a recent attempt to review the substantial scope of Isaac Newton's religious writings, it was stated as it were, in a cautious rebuke, that with reason you must not go too far, lest you begin to trespass into the substance of revelation.
In the setting was not far off, but it was Newton's TYPE of use of reason which was in view, in the context, and this is almost an inventive thrust or zweck, in the interpretation given of his religious writings. It began to be a name for a sort of imaginative vision tendency found in his writings, a call of some kind which in fact owed nothing to reason but much to a sort of scrutiny of the skies and of his own mind. This is not based on reason (for the normal logical operation of which see the trilogy, The Shadow of a mighty Rock), but on desire and a kind of inner fire, it appears. Certainly there is no logical structure to require it!
It is now time to reflect on this combination of modern pseudo-rational experimentalism in a world without truth, but where much in the way of a pseudo-imaginative, quasi-rational effort is made to bypass reason and assert what on that model cannot be asserted without self-contradiction. And that ? It is this: that if ANYTHING (such as making assertions about this neo-model) by short of truth, that if truth be not there, then there CAN be no truth in ANY such statements. Writhing in self-contradiction, they cannot even make the logical primary school status, but are gobble up in the haze of kindergarten.
Let us then reflect on what stands. Let no statement that reason's path is dangerous even appear on false definition: roving relish for imaginative, self-founded beliefs has nothing to do with reason. Nor is reason a supreme mentor re life. The ABC Apologetics work placed on this website does not make reason the way THROUGH final truth, but the way TO it (cf. Department of Bible ... Ch. 11, Bulletin 105).
In short, logic certainly requires and reason demands identifies, as in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock for example, the identification of God's word to man as what has been written in the Bible, and that, in written word, exclusively. God has not let Himself without a witness, as shown in Romans 1:17ff., and many are the sparks of armour clash as man tries to suppress His testimonies in His written word, the Bible as such. But it always fails as SMR systematically attests.
Unfortunately, this measure of concern about "reason" seen in one magazine earlier this year, seemed too close to a contemporary putsch moving on with a sort of released steam roller on a hill top type of energy, but in this case made dangerous by a LACK of gravity in another sense.
It is not, then, that reason needs to be violated any more than any other clear attestation of creation, salvation, of man's ruinous flaw and God's remedial action, at prodigious cost to His merciful heart, to impart a gift more stunning than the stars. It is AS crucially and carefully followed that it REQUIRES the recognition of revelation, not vaguely as the God of all precision lived in a mist, but with a flair of expression and action in close concert to which this race has been given even slightly near parallel.
In so identifdying divine and systematic revelation, reson no more creates it, than as a system, it creatred the universe, its habitat in man's mind, or the magnificent and startlingly straightforward cohesion in the way the universe verifiably WORKS and the way reason in man absorbs and understands it.
Further the LOGOS (of John 1, translatable, cause, reason or word) is there more than reason - but presented as reason's habitat, source for man a director for his errant or erratic thoughts. This is its deadly and delightful burden (cf. John 12:48-50). To the Bible, then,t hat Everest of creation's need,direction,explanationa ndsalvation, it gives irresistible attestation, leaving ALONE among religious writings of man, what meets no successful adversary, no overthrow, only erotic, erratic, irrational, ignorant assaults - and one fascinating attestation of this at the textual level is to be found in a recent work, that of Dr Jason Lisle, in his work, "Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason."
As to this word, logos in John 1, then, and its broader Johannine context, then is manifested as the word of the Trinity, its PERSONAL expression with intensive precision, and as to the Trinity, voice for all. John 1:1-14 shows the divine personality and its eternity (cf. John 8:58, 16:15) that invests this world, not as a soul or cloud of some kind of talkative dust (ludicrous and self-contradictory as that would be), but the wonderful glory of the creative God whose place and position accorded to man is a wonder of freedom mixed now by man's hand, with curse, desolation, folly and self-affirmation till, if it were possible, the stars would blush at growing humane effrontery. God however has other plans for freedom, when with tarred wings and feathery thoughts, it sets its brows like iron, which of course duly melts.Indeed, in large measure that is the history of human philosophy, and small wonder we read what is found in Colossians 2:8.
Applying these things to METHOD in Christian Apologetics, this emphasises the danger of the exclusivistic, presuppositional approach; for it is too concessive. That is its cardinal weakness. You do not have to go to such lengths, as if these approaches were in any sense parallel attempts. On the contrary, there is no place even for a plausible looking beginning to rebellion, rationally conceived and irrationally forwarded, but as in ABC Apologetics, we open as at a methodical and truths seeking carnival, the heavens and the earth, life and death, and all that is made, to open contest, no presuppositions and find that here there is not even a context. All but the Bible falls systematically apart, dust to dust.