JoToP
12-16-2004, 09:55 AM
After having debated various doctrinal issues over the years, I’ve discovered some very interesting things about the way in which many Christians approach their faith that I find interesting. It’s my hope that, in this thread, we can explore some of these approaches and take an honest look at some of the presuppositions behind the broad evangelical handling of Christian doctrine because, in spite of what some "pop-churches" are saying, true and biblical doctrine does not divide, it unites. It is not cold and impractical, it is vibrant and very devotional. This is the way Christians have valued biblical truth for centuries and it is interesting to me that we are now living in a time when biblical truth (doctrine) is held as relative to the tastes and predilections of the individual.
This is the result of a choice that has been made over many generations by Christians in the West (Europe and America). This choice has a long history. During this history there have been millions of words written on both sides of the choice. People have literally died in the conflict over this choice. Huge movements have ensued and whole institution have risen while others have fallen.
The choice has to do with the nature of man. Christians have had to make the choice over the last two centuries about who they would listen to in order to evaluate the human race itself, whether they would listen to the voice of men or to the voice of God. Today, very few ordinary American Christians are even aware that this long conflict even took place because very few Americans, including Christians, have any kind of unified, continuous concept of history. Too many have accepted the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) ideal that all of the past has been leading up to the present and that since the present is the "best of times", the past is irrelevant (much the same as the dispensationalist’s view of the Older Testament).
Whether you are a Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Anglican, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Nondenominationalist, Quaker, Church of Christ, Seventh Day Adventist, Nazarene or whatever you may be, your Faith can be traced back to a people who once held that God could not be known unless he revealed himself to man and that man himself could not be known to himself unless he was revealed by God his Maker. As time has gone by, though, theologians within each of these denominations have toyed with a different idea and have listened, gradually allowing the ideas to sink in and take deeper shape, to the different voices. Our generation in Western Christianity is the result of these new voices which have lured us away from the basic truths so well known to our ancestors, truths they were willing to die for, truths that gave them the strength and courage to topple tyrants and build new civilizations.
Most historians agree that the germ of much our thinking begins with John Locke. To some extent, I agree. Locke was not a great scholar, he refused to listen to the vast majority of most wise luminaries of his day and pursued his own line of thinking to his stated conclusions. One of those conclusions was called empiricism. It is the belief which arises from the skeptical rationalism of earlier philosophes (Enlightenment thinkers who were trying to piece together meaning after the shocks of losing the medieval perspective) that people come into this world with a blank mind (tabula rossa) upon which is imprinted all of the experiences, training, education, etc. of that persons life and that this collection of experiences is the pool from which a person will formulate knowledge. Much later Sigmund Freud will construct his theory of psychology upon this concept and, through the passage of the twentieth century, these and other concepts cropping out of rationalistic positivism will leach into Western Christian theology through a progression from Immanuel Kant through Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albert Ritschl and then through Karl Barth to the present day. If you do not know this history, you need to study it. You may find that the source of many of your beliefs come, not from the Bible but from these and other Christian philosophes.
This is the result of a choice that has been made over many generations by Christians in the West (Europe and America). This choice has a long history. During this history there have been millions of words written on both sides of the choice. People have literally died in the conflict over this choice. Huge movements have ensued and whole institution have risen while others have fallen.
The choice has to do with the nature of man. Christians have had to make the choice over the last two centuries about who they would listen to in order to evaluate the human race itself, whether they would listen to the voice of men or to the voice of God. Today, very few ordinary American Christians are even aware that this long conflict even took place because very few Americans, including Christians, have any kind of unified, continuous concept of history. Too many have accepted the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) ideal that all of the past has been leading up to the present and that since the present is the "best of times", the past is irrelevant (much the same as the dispensationalist’s view of the Older Testament).
Whether you are a Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Anglican, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Nondenominationalist, Quaker, Church of Christ, Seventh Day Adventist, Nazarene or whatever you may be, your Faith can be traced back to a people who once held that God could not be known unless he revealed himself to man and that man himself could not be known to himself unless he was revealed by God his Maker. As time has gone by, though, theologians within each of these denominations have toyed with a different idea and have listened, gradually allowing the ideas to sink in and take deeper shape, to the different voices. Our generation in Western Christianity is the result of these new voices which have lured us away from the basic truths so well known to our ancestors, truths they were willing to die for, truths that gave them the strength and courage to topple tyrants and build new civilizations.
Most historians agree that the germ of much our thinking begins with John Locke. To some extent, I agree. Locke was not a great scholar, he refused to listen to the vast majority of most wise luminaries of his day and pursued his own line of thinking to his stated conclusions. One of those conclusions was called empiricism. It is the belief which arises from the skeptical rationalism of earlier philosophes (Enlightenment thinkers who were trying to piece together meaning after the shocks of losing the medieval perspective) that people come into this world with a blank mind (tabula rossa) upon which is imprinted all of the experiences, training, education, etc. of that persons life and that this collection of experiences is the pool from which a person will formulate knowledge. Much later Sigmund Freud will construct his theory of psychology upon this concept and, through the passage of the twentieth century, these and other concepts cropping out of rationalistic positivism will leach into Western Christian theology through a progression from Immanuel Kant through Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albert Ritschl and then through Karl Barth to the present day. If you do not know this history, you need to study it. You may find that the source of many of your beliefs come, not from the Bible but from these and other Christian philosophes.