Ha!!!
Here´s a story for you! True and I just found it out!!!
As you know I have a foolish penchant for martial arts. For a long while I have wanted to learn a Northern Chinese Gung Fu ¨set¨ often referred to in books and by practitioners called Tam Tui or ¨springing legs¨.  I am an avid learner of ¨sets¨ or kata or hyung/ poomsae etc. Practise routines you can call em.
So, while I was replying to you earlier I was also downloading some vid clips I had found of Tam Tui. Brilliant I thought. I can finally study the set.
Hah.
As I played it I found myself watching the dude do a set I learned years ago and I had always known it by the English name ¨Foot Snapping¨
I had been wanting to know something and had been seeking it for years, only to find at the last I was already familiar with it!! (although there was some variation)
I think this is a small frame pic of what is happening in relation to the Allah question. A Muslim can seek the face of God and be converted, only to find that in many respects he already knew Him- even thought there is more to learn.

[quote author="Owen Atkins"]
Not bad, certainly limited and definitely not available to everyone. Limitations can be the constraints of IQ, education, emotional draining or overload, cultural factors which alter not the depth nor the capacity but perhaps the direction and structure of the thinking. We should approach the intellectual as useful but with caution that accepts that what we call ¨intellectual¨ can be nonsense or a source of befuddlement to others. I guess I am really putting my oft stated limitations of logic case forth here.

Not that this point is even faintly relevant to a discussion of the Trinity, which can be understood by my 6 year old (and yours too, but I understand yours grew up ;-)

First to deal with the alternatives in the cognitive

Sure, and very important they are too. You won’t ever hear me denying their existence or significance. You may from time to time hear me saying that the conclusions derived are untrue or misleading, just as conclusions arrived at by reason may be untrue or misleading, if logic has been incorrectly applied, or if the assumptions that’ve been fed in aren’t worth a bag of dingo’s droppings.

BTW and just as a note of caution, I believe our intellects and reason have been harmed by the Fall just as every aspect of our humanity has been. I don’t believe that anybody can reason themselves towards God, or even has the capacity to do this—any more than they could ‘feel’ themselves towards God, or mystically perceive God using some occult spiritual capacity. I am not arguing a Thomist (as in Thomas Aquinas) line!

I don´t think you need be troubled by an emphasis on intellectual knowledge, except to allow for intellect to be influenced duly by other sorts of knowledge. Intellect that takes precedence over emotion can turn a person into a cold and judging character.

Well, OK, and here we are talking about problems quite separate from truth or falsehood of an idea—unless someone were to sneak in the idea that to judge something as false turns them into a “cold and judging character”. “That nasty maths teacher told me my quadratic equation was wrong”. “Well was it?” “Yes, but he didn’t have to point it out. I felt really happy with all the hard work I’d done until he did that”.

Now, you have been clear in stating that you believe strongly that the holistic approach is essential. I accept that to be true. So, consider, did Jesus or Paul place intellectual knowledge over love?

No. But let’s be careful about splitting doctrine from application. Love is founded on truth. Truth ought to be expressed in love. If I tell you a lie, I have not loved you as I ought.

The Trinity or the Devil model is over dependant on logic. It is either right or wrong. I am more inclined to continuum thinking where right and wrong are on a sliding scale. It is wrong to steal but it is more wrong to steal from the impoverished. It is wrong to kill, but less wrong to kill in defence of the helpless.
Unitarian views of God are wrong, but less wrong than pantheons, which are less wrong than animist spirits in trees and cuff links.

You might as well add that 1+1 does not = 17, but it is less wrong than 58. This plane fell out of the sky and killed everyone on board, but the mistake that caused it was not as bad as the plane that crashed into the mountain and killed everyone on board.

Or if you want to put it in relational terms (since I agree that Christianity is about relationship not mathematical certainty), you might as well say “Fred had an adulterous relationship with his wife’s sister, which is not as bad as having had an adulterous relationship with his wife’s best friend”.

I propose an approach something like this. Since, I suspect that our differences are more points of emphasis

No, to be honest, I think we are saying very different things about how God may be known.

1) Accept that others have different views and express interest before telling them (even by implication) that they are wrong. Listen first, speak later. (A lesson I expect to learn one day)
2) Accept that which is right in the views of others, without derision or a ¨yes, but...¨ and instead describe to them the vision of God that you (generic term) have.
3) Be gentle with self and others. Love your neighbour as yourself. Treat both with the respect that they deserve (generic terms here).

This I can agree with. However we have now moved outside the realm of truth and falsehood and into the realm of addressing people with humility, love, and respect, rather than with condescension, prejudice, and hubris.

You seem to have begun with the assumption that other religions are partly right. That is OK but needs to be argued for rather than asserted. How do you know that other religions are partly right? How do you know that Allah is something approaching the God of the Bible, rather than as I think possible, Satan masquerading as an angel of light? (Will I now be prosecuted in Victoria??)

I’ve begun with a very different assumption, which is that other religions are completely false and corrupt at the very heart of their being, representing an arrogant assertion of the self and human pride against the goodness of the Lord Jesus. I argue for my assumption on the basis that it appears to match most closely what I read in the Bible concerning other religions. You may not like this assumption at all, but if so it would involve you distancing yourself from what the Bible appears to be saying about non-Christian religions.

It may well be possible to suggest that I’ve argued in a way that is unloving, but this says nothing whatsoever about whether it is false;

or if you prefer, but I think is confusing on this particular question, on a continuum moving away from the right end of the spectrum and moving towards the wrong end, but again, your use of a spectrum analogy needs to be shown to be relevant to the question of the Trinity, rather than simply asserted

but if it is false as well as unloving, then it will necessarily follow that either the assumption is wrong or the reasoning on which it is based is dodgy.

Bec, I haven’t read that book. Are you finding it useful?

G’day Cheryl,

I am worried about this statement of yours, so I would like to clarify a few things if I may.

Also please keep in mind that I fully believe in the gift of prophecy for today and it is a gift I truly have been blessed in the past in it’s use.

Because the people who keep denying me keep telling me that it has to come from the bible. I’ve had several personal messages to not quote from the bible

I’m not sure what you mean by personal messages to not use the Bible, do you mean that people have pmmed you to ask you not to use the Bible or do you mean that you have had some spiritual messages from the presence telling you not to quote from the Bible?

There is one thing about prophecy that while it may not be Scriptures that you quote, it must be Scriptural, that is the message you speak forth must agree with the message of the Bible, the Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and therefore though the Holy Spirit can and does inspire people to prophecy today, because of his nature of total truth, any message the Holy Spirit inspires us to speak forth it must agree in totality with what the Holy Spirit has already said.

I"m sorry of I have misunderstood what it is you have said here.

Jesus Christ cleary made it clear that there is no other way to be saved except through him, there is no salvation within Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam etc, that is not to say that those who practice those religions can not be saved, they can only be saved through recognising who Christ is and following him only.

craig

Hi Cheryl,

Sorry to just step into this debate, but I find a few things in your last post confused me.

Mostly, I found it hard to understand the purpose with which you were writing.  This might be partly because I’ve only read a couple of pages backwards in the thread, but it would be helpful (for me at least!) if you could give the purpose (within the context of this discussion) of your last statement.

We sup from the sweet platter of salvation through faith and love with Jesus, but we find our stomachs turned sour as we realise the depth of our depravity and sin. To swallow the whole bible is not just to take the sweet, but to take the obligations and exhortations as well.

Sorry, I agree with what you say on the face of it, but what do you mean by it?  What point is it in support of in the context of this discussion?

Also, I don’t quite get your example about befuddlement.  Maybe I’m dull, but I don’t quite get your point with it!

In love,
Kutz

hi Cheryl,

I’m not really understanding your contributions to this thread, so I can’t really respond meaningfully. so if you don’t mind I’ll just keep addressing Owen’s arguments.

One suggestion though, your post lengths would be shortened considerably—and therefore be easier for everyone—if you just gave the bible passages you were referring to as references. This website gives automatic links to the passages we give here, eg if you click on John 3:16 you will be linked through to the relevant passage. Plus, most of us can look up the passage for ourselves either on the internet or in our own Bibles.

Hey Gordo
I thought I was addressing the query you made re different types of knowledge… what are they?

Not that this point is even faintly relevant to a discussion of the Trinity, which can be understood by my 6 year old (and yours too, but I understand yours grew up ;-)

Are you saying Trinity can be understood by all? I think not. It is a serious stumbling block that has given birth to many schisms. I think many of them have genuinely done so cos they really did n ot understand the concept at all. Some just refused it, but that is another issue cos they usually refused it cos it is not explicitly stated.

The rest of my post was probably unduly influenced by another factor. I should have remaijned focussed on the job at hand but I guess I was also targetting the Syd Ang approach of putting doctrine up as the first line of communication on any discussion about anything spiritual.
I’ll get back to your other points later. It’s a bit busy here today.

[quote author="Owen Atkins"]Hey Gordo
I thought I was addressing the query you made re different types of knowledge… what are they?

Yes, so you were, I was just comparing the point to the discussion at hand, ie Trinity, and it was a fair enough answer that you gave to the question I was asking.

I’m just saying you don’t need to be intellectually clever to understand the trinity. You need to be humble and to admit that there are things you don’t know. But as it is about holding certain truths in tension, it’s not really about logic or reason, even though I would want to insist that the trinity is not unreasonable.

For Christians, ‘understanding’ the trinity is like understanding how bits of a car work, not understanding the entire workings of an internal combustion engine, but still recognising that it will get you from A to B if you just get in and drive.

On a doctrine like the Trinity, knowing too much can even trip you up. The schisms and sects come about because people reject what God reveals about himself, not because people are not clever enough. I meet unintelligent Christians and smart heretics all the time. If the Trinity required intelligence to accept, all church members would need to pass an IQ test before walking into the building. Eek!

Gordon wrote:
Bec, I haven’t read that book. Are you finding it useful?

Hey G, am finding this v useful.  It is written really well, ie clear language!!
Am wishing that I had read more of it before the doctrine essay was due.  It has to be put down and placed on the backburner for the next 2 weeks tho :(

-bw

Hi Cheryl,

I don’t know about your claims about people’s attitudes here on these forums, in the most part I’ve found that if you take the time to understand their statements, then they’re quite loving.

But, to my point, could you help me out with my questions from above?

Cheers,
Kutz.

G’day Cheryl,

Short one. No quotes from the bible. At least now all those people who tell me to quote from the bible can now see that others are asking me not to.

I can see what is happening here, no one is actually asking you not to quote the bible, in fact that is very much encouraged here on the forums.

What they are asking you is to write the bible reference down instead of the whole passage, this makes it easier to read your posting and in fact one can open the bible passage in another window and read your post alongside your post. I used to do the same thing you do, and Richard from Padstow asked me not to and I took his advice on board and indeed it does make communicating a lot easier.

If you wrote Mark 3:1-5 down it is easy for us to look up the passage by clicking on it, and at the same time can read what you are saying about that passage.

craig

Gordo
I have a slight reprieve so here we go;

Well, OK, and here we are talking about problems quite separate from truth or falsehood of an idea—unless someone were to sneak in the idea that to judge something as false turns them into a “cold and judging character”. “That nasty maths teacher told me my quadratic equation was wrong”. “Well was it?” “Yes, but he didn’t have to point it out. I felt really happy with all the hard work I’d done until he did that”.

The cold and judging character stuff is, well the way many evangelicals are perceived. NOT ALL, OK. Syd Ang has a rep for it cos they insist on doctrine first, ask questions later. I think they are being unfair to themselves.
As for quadratic equations… gnnnhhh, that´s maths! Yuck. That is a digital discipline. You are right or you are wrong. Forgive me if I am wrong here, but relationships aren´t digital. They are on a continuum. But of course your claim is I guess, that it is all a matter of who the relationship is with. I agree with that, but you claim that God is not to be found at all in the supposed natures etc of any other deity.

You seem to have begun with the assumption that other religions are partly right. That is OK but needs to be argued for rather than asserted. How do you know that other religions are partly right? How do you know that Allah is something approaching the God of the Bible, rather than as I think possible, Satan masquerading as an angel of light? (Will I now be prosecuted in Victoria??)

I think we can find some agreement when a Muslim says that God is Compassionate, that He is just, and that He is merciful. In such claims I think there is an element of their conception of Allah being partly right.
I would venture a bit more difficulty with some of the more primitive conceptions of deity in the Hindu pantheon, but even there conceptions about God being love are common and partly right.
I think when we find attributes of other conceptions of deity that are recognisable as attributes to Yahweh, then we are seeing ¨partly right¨.
There are many attributes ascribed to Buddha that are thought of as attributes of Christ. If we decide that they are not godly attributes simply because they are placed where we don´t like them to be placed then we are in the land of bigotry.
(er not the land of a Bigger tree)

[quote author="Owen Atkins"]
As for quadratic equations… gnnnhhh, that´s maths! Yuck. That is a digital discipline. You are right or you are wrong. Forgive me if I am wrong here, but relationships aren´t digital. They are on a continuum.

Ah-ha! I knew you’d pick me up on that. Quite right too, relationships aren’t maths, for which we can thank God. However it’s all part of truth, and the point needs to be acknowledged even if we don’t apply it mindlessly. There is such a thing as right and wrong.

but this is partly why I said

[quote author="me"]Or if you want to put it in relational terms (since I agree that Christianity is about relationship not mathematical certainty), you might as well say “Fred had an adulterous relationship with his wife’s sister, which is not as bad as having had an adulterous relationship with his wife’s best friend”.

Which is exactly what you get in so many Old Testament passages where the OT prophets, in the name of God, hoe into people for whoring after foreign gods who are not really gods.

Indeed to understand the New Testament perspective on other religions, you need to have absorbed the utter rejection and despising of the other religions that goes on in the Old Testament, and the condemnation reserved for those who try and mix and match their favoured elements from each religion. The uniqueness and oneness of the God of Israel, Yahweh, is constantly spoken for, from the first chapters of the Bible through to the ten commandments and in every area of religious and political life through the entire history of OT Israel.

[quote author="OA"]But of course your claim is I guess, that it is all a matter of who the relationship is with. I agree with that, but you claim that God is not to be found at all in the supposed natures etc of any other deity.

That’s it, and I maintain that this is the Bible’s claim.

I think we can find some agreement when a Muslim says that God is Compassionate, that He is just, and that He is merciful. In such claims I think there is an element of their conception of Allah being partly right.
I would venture a bit more difficulty with some of the more primitive conceptions of deity in the Hindu pantheon, but even there conceptions about God being love are common and partly right.

If you don’t mind my saying so, this is sleazy politician-speak. The politician gets up and says “Our party is committed to justice, equity, a fair go for the kids, compassion for the poor, looking after the grannies, and a kinder, gentler future”.

Well yeah, so are we all, and your political claim to stand for this is so much hot air until we see what it means in practice. Who doesn’t stand for such things?

Similarly, with the God of Israel, he is to be ‘judged’ not against slogans with which we would all agree, but against what he actually does. It’s why his personal name “Yahweh"—I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be” is so inscrutable. It means nothing until you see how the God who bears this “name” actually moves and acts in the redemption of Israel from Egypt and from the gods of Egypt, “so that you/they/he[ie Pharaoh]/the world will know that I am the LORD”. The claim of Yahweh against the gods of the Egyptians was absolute and exclusive—and by implication, any other god who made claims tht threatened the universal rule of the one true God of Israel.

This is why commandment number one takes the specific action of God in redeeming Israel from Egypt and universalizes this to control the entire history and destiny of Israel (until such time as her Messiah should come and assume the mantle of universal rule for the whole of creation):

Ex. 20:2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
Ex. 20:3 “You shall have no other gods before me.

So: the River Nile was not a god or associated with any god, it belonged to the LORD. Frogs were not gods, nor were they to be associated with some Egyptian deity; the LORD could call them forth at will and make a pest out of their decomposing bodies. The sun was not a god, the Lord could blot it out with insect plagues and unlike the sun, could show his power in the middle of the night by killing the firstborn of those who rejected his rule, from Pharaoh down.

And if they were not gods, no other gods can be said to be gods other than the one God whose power transcends boundaries of time, national borders, and various divisions within the created order.

Of course it could be argued that the Egyptian gods show that they/we all have a basic belief in the existence of the divine at some level, and that there are certain Egyptian gods who may well have shown something resembling the idea of justice, love, or compassion. But the only real God, whose name is Yahweh, the LORD, showed what he thought of their versions of religion by acting decisively to demonstrate their impotence.

The whole point of the rescue from Egypt, from God’s point of view, was to demonstrate with devastating historical particularity that the claims of alternative religions were utterly false.

but this is partly why I said

I saw it but thought to comment anyway. I probably should have commented that you placed that adjustment/ caveat in.... apologies. I thought to, but got worried that I was gonna go for a Long Windedness award of some sort.

f you don’t mind my saying so, this is sleazy politician-speak. The politician gets up and says “Our party is committed to justice, equity, a fair go for the kids, compassion for the poor, looking after the grannies, and a kinder, gentler future”.

I may never recover from that low blow. Ouch!
Gordo, you asked me to not just make the assertion that other religeons are partly right but to demonstrate this.

How do you know that other religions are partly right? How do you know that Allah is something approaching the God of the Bible, rather than as I think possible, Satan masquerading as an angel of light?

Does your comment demonstrate that you are unwilling to accept that where they parrallel our beliefs they are still wrong. When another religeon denounces theft as being wrong then they are wrong in that denunciation BECAUSE they are not Christian?
If so then I cannot demonstrate this cos the doors are closed and the ears are pre blocked.
If another conception of God includes the notion that He is Love, I am arguing that that is Yahweh peeping through a veil. Perhaps you are arguing that the Evil One has total control there?
I cannot accept this.
Love cannot be else but the work of God. It may be twisted, warped and re drafted by priests and politicians into Euthenasia and Genocide, but its starting point is always from God. And I cannot accept that any genuine striving for God anywhere is else but a drive wrought by Yahweh.
Mankind may drive down wrong roads, but the urge to drive comes from Him. And there is always a hint of the real end of the journey.
If that is the case then the constructs cannot be wholly wrong. The morality of most of the world´s great religeons is too similar to the one we enjoy to be entirely wrong. can the Evil One even go near to creating morality?
No.
Can he be an exemplar of Love?
No

I wonder if you think I accept that any old god can be a substitute to Yahweh. Let me be clear; No.
There is no other god anyway. The problems with ¨other gods¨, wth idols is that they are two things simultaneously, they are Yahweh reduced (and often twisted) and they have the image of man imprinted on them- by men. Thus Yahweh had His prophets rail at the erection of shrines to other gods in the temple and in the high places, and in sacred groves.
And more,
in the OT the programme was about focussing the Jews onto the One God and to remove the idols from their midst. The bible is clear about this, they had to worship the One God, end of story. Only in Israel did this happen.
But that is not to say that the other nations who did not know Yahweh were entirely bereft of any hint of Him. Their gods probably always had hints of Him, even when they started off as just beings of power and indiscriminate choices.
The same remains true even now.
The Allah of the Koran has too much of Yahweh peeping through. There is much that we may disagree with in that depiction. And, if your arguement is that unless it is entirely correct then it cannot have anything of Yahweh in Allah, then of course your arguement stands correct.
If you accept that no conception of the divine can be free of the One True God, then, if there are similarities, then you must accept that Allah is, at least in part, Yahweh.
You do not have to accept the whole packege. I certainly don´t.
But if you see similar attributes, ones that cannot come from elsewhere than God mark you; like Love and Mercy and Justice. Then, Allah is ¨partly right¨.

Bother
I think I am up for the Long Windedness Award after all.

G’day Owen, Gordon.

I can see where you are coming from Owen, and I can see where Gordon is coming from as well.

Truth is truth and is summed up by Paul saying that when Gentiles do things naturally according to the law, without knowing the law then they are following the law. That my paraphrase and most likely way out of context.

Satan is a angel of light, his sublety is that he doesn’t come right out and go against God totaly, except for those who worship him direct, black masses that type of thing.

Satan will change things ever so slightly, it’s a bit like putting a fence up in a 14 metre front yard and putting it up on a 10 km square farm. If the fence is out by a degree or two in the front yard it won’t make a huge difference, but if it is out a few degrees on the farm, by the time you get to the other side of 10kms it could be out by quite a fair distance.

I think foundations are pretty important, and that Islam started a few centuries after Christianity was established is also important to take note of.

God can use the Quran to shine through his goodness and mercy to others, bringing people to him, helping them to set of on the journey to find Christ. Certainly though the Quran does not lead people to Christ or point them to Christ for forgiveness and salvation and it is in this regard that satan has twisted the whole concept of God and who God is.

Certainly when we look at the history of Christianity though, Christians did not help the situation either in the way the established Church persecuted the Arabic people which helped Muhummad turn away from Christianity and form his own religion, under the guiding angel of light - satan.

I think that Allah is not the same God as our Jehova God, as the only way to worship Jehova is through Christ and the Quran sidelines Christ as being the way to God, and being God himself.

Again though I will reiterate that I think God can bring people to start questiong who Christ is and to cause them to seek him more through the Quran, especially if that is the only writings available to people to read about Christ, and I think that is one thing we as Christians need to pray for Muslim people is that during the month of Ramadam, when they pray for God to reveal himself to them, that indeed he will.

I think we need to be careful to of realising that for many Christians they will not know much about the various doctrines of the Scriptures and that they will know that Christ has died for them and that they themselves are in relationship with God, forgiven through Christ, this might be the only thing they know and yet that is all that they require to get into heaven.

craig

Cheryl, I have never felt the need to respond to your posts; but feel that I need to address something that you have posted twice. I am not sure if you mean to say what you saying but here it is:

Yahweh is the creator of space and time, He created Jesus specifically to be the capstone to reconcile all humanity who honour Jesus back to Yahweh

If Christ were created then Christ could not be God.

The Arianists (who were around in the 300’s and have come back disguised as JW’s)) taught that Christ was God’s first and noblest creature. At the Council of Niccea (A.D 325) the church responeed to Arianism by affirming that Christ was of the same substance or essence as the Father. Thus there is one GOd, not two; the distinction between Father and Son is within the divine unity, and the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is. In saying that Son and Father are “of one substance” and that the Son is begotten but “not made”, the Nicene Creed rightly recognised that the man from Galilee is God.

Christ is ingenerate - there was never a time when Christ was not!

Please don’t think I am having a go at you, I am not. Perhaps you have just used the wrong words and you meant something other than what you have written. However; if you do actually believe that Christ was created by the Father, then you need to know that you have gone down a path that is not consistent with Biblical Christianity; it the path that Arians went down cenutires ago; and the path that the JW’s walk today.

Check out the Nicene Creed