Labels: A Useful Tool in Searching This Blog

 When you you read one of the posts in this blog, there are several tools to enhance the usefulness of the post. The Labels tool is one of these. 

The current blog text which you are reading is in a white box. To the right of the blog text is a light-green box. Scroll down to the small white box which is below the light-green box. This white box is Pages. The listed pages are Home, About this Blog, Statement of Faith, and Statistics. Clicking on the name of one of the listed pages will take you to that page.

Home: At the end of the current posting which you are reading, there is a light green box with the name of Labels. These labels concern the subjects related to the current post at hand. An example of a label is "animals." Click on "animals" and the Labels tool will call up blog postings which list "animals" as one of their labels. You can use this tool to search for any subject, such as "sports," "trinity," "baptism," "book comment," or random things such as "chainsaw" or "dog poop." At the extreme bottom of the Home page is a full listing of every label which has been used on this blog, listed alphabetically. It is extensive but you can search it by scrolling down the page.

About this Blog: A statement of the philosophy of this blog and things which you may expect to see here.

Statement of Faith: I have seminary training but would not attempt to tell you what to think: I'm interested in challenging you to actually think. Many people, possibly most, don't. Read your Bible and let the Holy Spirit perform his teaching ministry.

There are three types of Christian doctrine: absolutes, convictions, and opinions. Only absolute doctrines are "fighting words." They are doctrines which must not be compromised even if they lead to heated arguments, splits, and expulsions. 

Demonstrating an absolute (salvation by faith and not by works), Paul publicly rebuked Peter (Galatians 2:11-19) over whether Gentiles had to adopt Jewish practices to become Christians.  

An interesting discussion of the ranking of doctrines: read especially the comments of PRMan99. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/58iiy5/doctrine_fundamental_secondary_tertiary/?rdt=41393

Statistics: This page lists the current historical number of page views for this blog and the countries from which this blog has been viewed.

The Acrostic in Psalm 119

Ancient Hebrew poetry has many conventions which are not immediately apparent to the reader, especially when it is read in translation as most of us, including me, must do.  I took several semesters of Hebrew in seminary but I have to admit that I barely understood what I was "learning" and today still understand it only in very patchy form. (Greek to me was much easier as it is Indo-European and is much more similar to English than the Semitic Hebrew.)

The rhythm of Hebrew poetry is irregular and is based on the accented or toned syllables rather than on meter as in English.  Rhymed word sounds are rare.  Refrains, repeated lines, sometimes occur.  The "rhyming" in ancient Hebrew poetry is based on parallelism of ideas in three forms: synonymous (the meanings of the lines are similar); antithetical (the meanings of the lines are opposites of one another; and synthetic (nouns correspond to nouns, verbs correspond to verbs, etc)

One convention of ancient Hebrew poetry which has received much modern attention is the acrostic, in which the first letter of each line spells out a word or makes a pattern.  Psalm 119 is such an acrostic.  Verses 1-8 begin with the letter aleph, verses 9-16 begin with the letter beth, verses 17-24 begin with the letter gimel, then daleth, he, waw, zayin, etc.  Acrostic patterns also occur in Psalms 9, 10, 25, 34,37, 111, 112, and 145.

All of these poetic conventions are human in origin and have nothing to do with the supposed Bible Codes which some believe that God has embedded into the Torah.

Who Am I?

All bloggers who use the Blogger service have statistical tools available to them so that they can track usage of their blog.  The types of information which we can see include the number of times the blog is viewed, the number of times each post is viewed, the type of operating system being used by the viewer, the search engine used to visit the blog, the search keywords, and the country of origin of the search. The statistical information is useful in better responding to the interests of our readers.  Your privacy is 100% preserved because we cannot identify individual visitors to our blogs.

Several persons have searched for me.  One person has asked about my "spiritual credentials."  The answer is that I am not your teacher, I am not your pastor; I am your Christian brother and I feel that this blog is my ministry to you.  This blog is for discussion of doctrinal and theological issues, current news as it relates to Christianity, the incredible diversity present among the ἐκκλησία through the centuries and especially today,  and the true basis of our unity, The Holy Spirit, who indwells every believer.  Most of all, this blog is a challenge to everyone to think, to not just accept the way things are, to wonder why things are the way they are, to challenge those things in our belief systems which are not biblical, and especially, to not accept the answers put forth by our modern relativist culture.

As to me, I am a Medical Technologist with a concentration in Hematology, the study of blood diseases like leukemias, anemias, and clotting disorders.  I work in two local clinical laboratories and have a certification by the American Society for Clinical Pathology .

In 1970, I was one of the three hundred who stood up and left in protest, along with our pastor, Dr. Herbert Gilmore, when The First Baptist Church of Birmingham voted not to admit Winifred Bryant and her daughter, Twila Fortune, who had made a profession of faith.  The reason they were refused membership was because they were black.

Led by Dr. Gilmore, we formed The Baptist Church of the Covenant, which is still active today in downtown Birmingham.  Both Winifred Bryant and Twila Fortune remain as members of the church.

The local church I currently attend has members of all races and nationalities.

In my early twenties, for two years I attended The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.  During this time, my interest in comparative religion developed.  Over the years I have studied the world's major religions and have discussed and corresponded with adherents of each of them.
I have also been in contact with numerous cultic and occultic groups including Wiccans, Pagans, Spiritualists, the Unity Church, the Unification Church, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Children of God, the Way, the Church of Scientology, and even the Church of Satan.

My interest in word origins and meanings led to my study of onomastics, the meanings of place names, and resulted in my book, An International Glossary of Place Name Elements .

I believe that I do have something to add to the discussion and I feel led by the Lord to do it.

On the Human Knowledge of Christ, Part 1

     For the next few days I will be posting, with slight editing and in short manageable segments, a paper I submitted on 3 Dec 1976 in Dr. Frank Stagg's New Testament Theology class at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.  My personal inclination is to take the Bible at face value but the issues discussed in the paper are important because others do not always do so.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

     "There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus."  So says the highly respected Albert Schweitzer.  Many modern theologians have felt this same way.

     There is a problem in recovering the exact words of Jesus but to declare that nothing can be known of Jesus or of his mind is a mistake.  It is also an error to declare that everything possible is known about the mind of Jesus.

     Dr. Frank Stagg, for many years a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary spoke to the issue; "The student of the New Testament cannot afford to be intimidated by what has been written in disparagement of a 'self-interpretation of Jesus.'  It is not naive to understand Jesus as concerned with his own identity and mission."

     It is also not naive to attempt to study the question of Jesus' personality, especially that part of the subject dealing with his human knowledge.

     Inherent in any study of Jesus' human knowledge is the question of Christology.  One part of this question which must necessarily come up is the problem of whether admitting that Jesus did not have absolute knowledge is also to declare that he could be in error.

     Traditional Roman Catholic scholastic theology attributed to Jesus a human knowledge of all created things of the past, present, and future, at least as far as these things were related to Jesus' work in salvation.  The scholastics also believed that Jesus possessed the beatific vision  from the moment of His conception in Mary's womb.  "Scholastic theology is not content that the soul of Christ knows all, but will have it that it knows all in all ways."  Earlier, Jerome, Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril of Alexandria all attributed no ignorance and no mental development to the Christ-child.

     The Catholic Fathers all rejected the apocryphal Childhood Gospels but they did not attack or condemn the portrayal of Jesus' childhood as being one of absolute perfection.

     The New Testament writers seem to have felt this same reluctance to attributing any sort of limitation to Jesus, especially concerning His inward nature.  They do admit that He underwent moral and spiritual growth.  They seem to regard Him as statically perfect.  This is the ground on which the Fathers and the later scholastics built.

     There is a middle view spoken of by Benjamin Warfield, "One fresh from reading the gospel narrative will certainly fail to understand the attitude of those, who we are told exist, who for example, 'admit his growth in knowledge during childhood,' 'yet deny as intolerable the hypothesis of a limitation of his knowledge during his ministry."

     Some theologians, such as E. L. Mascall and C. K. Barrett, believe that Jesus was in error on some points.  Barrett said it was necessary for Him to be in error to be fully human.