On one of my recent posts, a person commented: I’ve heard the danger of reading cult literature because “words have power” or something, and that to actually fight spiritual demons would open one to a world of things most people really couldn’t cope with. How can one be sure what is fiction, “truth/partial-truth in story […]
Flannery O’Connor and hell
“It takes two to love. It takes liberty. It takes the right to reject. If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.” Flannery O’Connor, 1959 Mary Flannery O’Connor was a southern writer and a Roman Catholic. She died in 1964 having written two novels and 32 short stories. […]
On freedom and the wrath of God
I was just reading a transcript of an interview from 2008 on Ancient Faith Radio in which Frederica Mathewes-Green was interviewing Fr. Ted Stylianopoulos. At one point Father Ted says: But you notice, in Romans chapter 1, as God Holiness encounters the plight and sin of humanity, He doesn’t do something additional to punish them. […]
John 6 was not just offensive to Jews
Huw, another blogger, comments on the Gospel of John, chapter 6. St. John 6 is the chapter that has Jesus’ teaching on eating his Body and drinking his Blood. The Gospel is offensive. It was so to some early Jewish followers and also to some Gentiles who heard it. So it is to many of […]
Of Bible, interpretation, and Supreme Court judges, part 07
Here is the bottom line of what I have been saying. In almost all scholarly fields, when questions of knowledge come up that are hard to solve, they are referred to a group that represents the community. The larger the “truth” that is being debated, the larger and more representative is the group to which the argument is […]
Of Bible, interpretation, and Supreme Court judges, part 06
So, what solutions have the law, science, and, yes, the Church come up with in order to minimize bias and misinterpretation? Yes, what do all three fields share in common as a way to overcome the inherent bias of humans? Interestingly enough, all three fields have “developed” the use of a panel of multiple people […]
Of Bible, interpretation, and Supreme Court judges, part 05
In 1950, a work destined to become a classic was released, Protestant Biblical Interpretation by Bernard Ramm. It quickly became a textbook used by a huge number of Protestant seminaries. It was one of the last hermeneutics textbooks of wide acceptance that still took the viewpoint that by the use of a type of “scientific” […]
Of Bible, interpretation, and Supreme Court judges, part 04
So, if our civil system relies on both written law and common law, are there any western systems that fully and only rely on written laws, with no common law? Well, actually there was an attempt at such a system. What is that system? The Code Napoleón of France, promulgated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. […]
Of Bible, interpretation, and Supreme Court judges, part 03
OK, so in the USA (and the entire British Empire) we run a mixture of written law and common law. While we say in the USA that the Constitution is the maximum law of the land, that actually does not say as much as we think it does for a two reasons. One is the […]
Of Bible, interpretation, and Supreme Court judges, part 02
Now yesterday, I laid out just some of the very conservative approaches to constitutional law in the United States. But, those are not the only interpretations, and they do not take into account a very important concept called “common law.” You see, our system of justice is not purely written law based, it is also […]
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