Paul's Passing Thoughts

Labeling something with nomenclature that identifies something of high value as a way to lend credibility, and even circumvent scrutiny is the oldest trick in Evil’s tool bag. Hence, the “redemptive” historical method of interpreting the Bible. Supposedly, the Bible is a narrative about Christ’s works, and every verse must point back to that theme. Instead of the Bible being a full-orbed worldview, all reality is interpreted through Christ’s saving works, or “gospel.”

Let me just cut to the quick here: as a result of all of the study that Susan and I have done for this year’s conference, little more is obvious than the fact that the Reformers went to the Bible and interpreted it according to Plato’s worldview. They simply made Christ the “form of the good” or the perfect form, and made us the “lower forms” among “material objects.” Plato believed that only the pure forms of the good are “objective” and as you descend down to the “higher forms,” “lower forms,” “material objects,” and “images,” things are more and more “subjective.” Hence, the “centrality of the objective gospel outside of us” as opposed to “evangelical subjectivism.”

The Reformers even refer to the “golden chain of salvation” which is eerily reminiscing of the sophist familiarity of “the golden chain of Platonic succession.” Also known as the “golden chain of philosophers.”

Christ and the apostles interpreted the Bible grammatically and posed rebuttals with the minutest grammar rules. Christ argued for the resurrection against the Sadducees by citing the tense of “I am.” The apostle Paul argued for justification apart from the law by referring to the singular form of the word, “offspring.”

This argues for an empirical approach to the Scriptures concerning the literal meaning of words. This does not exclude the use of parables, metaphors, etc. as tools for understanding, but it does exclude the replacement of study and observation with meditation. The redemptive approach calls for meditation (or deeper understanding) of the only two things in our realm that do not change (supposedly): God’s holiness and our evil. This gives us access to the “unchanging truth” of the “object gospel.” In the selfsame tradition of the philosophers, Calvinist Paul Washer states that the gospel cannot be completely known.

Calvinists are really little more than a return to the elitist arrogance accompanying the propagation of the gnosis that plagued the apostolic church.

paul