James W Stark wrote:
.................................
> > George Murphy will not agree with my view, for he thinks that the
> > crucifixion changed God. I think this view is one product of Melanchthon's
> > Aristotelianism which spoiled Lutheranism. (I hold that Aristotle loused up
> > Plato, as Thomas did Augustine. Calvin stuck with Plato and Augustine, but
> > Luther's Augustinianism was diluted.) I hold that Malachi 3:6 is
> > unconditional. The crucifixion changed our relationship with the deity
> > because we are in time, but did not change God's eternal purpose. The
> > problem in communicating this to us is that we are so totally temporal that
> > we do not have language to match timelessness. The use of the past tense and
> > "beginning" in the first verse of John reflects the eternal Sonship, not a
> > time before the creation.
> >
> Such is the challenge of interpreting the crucifixion. God designed each of
> us to be capable of creating a unity out of a sample of reality. We do it
> daily with our vision. We sample reality with our eyes and conceive a whole.
> We are capable of doing this for any sample of reality that we take, even
> our worldviews. The deeper challenge is the selection of the fundamental
> assumptions. The crucifixion comes much later. ............................................
Your last sentence is an example of the basic problem I noted in an earlier
post. In selecting our fundamental assumptions The crucifixion & belief that that is
where God is revealed do us should come first, not "much later". Waiting till later
allows God to be defined in ways which are inconsistent with the the message of the
cross, & then we spend all our time struggling with the cross as a problem instead of
seeing it as a solution.
Theologia naturalis delenda est!
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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