So, off the back of Feel, I've been thinking about how Greek Philosophy has crept into our thinking and negatively influenced us. For those of you who are sold out on Greek philosophy, I don't hate Greek philosophy, and I do think it has lots to offer us. I'm just here wanting to think about one point that appears to me to clash with a biblical worldview.
The element I'm thinking of in my white, middle-class, Western-influenced-African culture which has been influenced by Greek philosophy is obviously our emotions. We seem to believe that emotions are to be suppressed and controlled, rather than understood and dealt with (if they are seen as bad) or cultivated (if they are seen as good). It is, perhaps, more accurate to say that only a portion of the population has taken on this understanding. There is another section of the population who are suspicious of reason, and believe we should follow our feelings or desires. In the post on Feel, Grace helpfully points out that Elliott is close to swinging the pendulum in that direction. Although we shall not directly deal with this other part of the population, the points below will be framed in such a way that my line of response to this group shall be evident.
As evidenced by the fact that you are reading what I have written, I am part of the generation that blogs. Those who find themselves a part of this generation probably blog thanks to a slightly overinflated ego. One of the most common threads in these blogs is that of criticism because there's always someone who's doing or saying something stupid. They're all a bunch of hypocrites though...
For a few months I have been considering writing something brief on a remarkably popular line of reasoning that is often employed and yet, utterly fallacious. I began thinking about writing this after proofreading an essay for someone at college who made this mistake. I began actually typing stuff out after John MacArthur did it.
From lying in a game of Survivor in front of millions of viewers in order to win the million dollars, to a dummy pass in rugby for a clear run to the try line: a great deal of gameplay involves deceit to some degree. The question raised is, how much of this is innocent fun and how much is sinful?
Hebrew authors, it seems, have a propensity towards the prodigious use of direct speech but rarely reported speech and it seems clear that they were willing to summarise conversations into little speech bubble type reports which they recorded in direct speech.
I wanted to make the title, "God is History" but that doesn't work practically as well as "Theology is History". Of course, "Theology is History" doesn't have quite the same provocative effect. So instead, I went with something that actually describes the content of this post. I've been thinking recently about the relationship between history and theology. This, particularly with reference to Old Testament narrative; how we are to regard the literary nature of narrative arguing theology to actual history. I've come up with three points because Bible college has had an effect on the structure of my thinking. This is my thinking thus far:
