In Reply to: Re: good point posted by Acheick on October 24, 2003 at 06:27:43:
I wanted to wait a bit longer to address that subject, in fact I already once wrote about it, but it went down in the internetnirvana...
simplemindedness, don`t mind me please, is a
biblical virtue, w h e n (note the condition) you
have a strong link with the Lord (that is not with yourself, meaning promoting your egoistical nature & ideas & wishes foremost, sometimes as you say in German, the desire is the mother of the thought)
however we`re not always so heavenlyminded, that`s when it can pay to be a bit sceptical, I could
agree to that & the more you read the Bible & are in dialogue with others, who do the same, you can more & more get a glimpse of how things are meant, but we often fail to even do the things which are obvious & not hard to understand & it can be a mindtrap to get bogged down with things which are highly complicated...Luther was against theorising
lots about doublepredestination, why this guy & not the other is chosen (just read Romans 9 & see whether you "easily" understand it; after Luther the subject got pretty debated in the 16 century, as I read in a book about the history of dogmatics & one guy went insane over it, no joke..)...Berg for that matter was pretty disgusted with the complicating of things in theological seminaries, as he observed it & as he
explained it in a letter, stomped out of one lesson, saying you just need to know John 3: 16
to help evangelise the world...it`s not so easy to
beat this one, although I realised, you need a bit more scripture to continue in your life for & with the Lord...
Now I noticed that on this board there seem to be quite a few people with a craving to k n o w
things better...(including myself!!!!!)
Before I joined the family I had studied at university a bit math & even after leaving 2 semesters more, but left it...logic is wonderful,
love even more so...
Already before joining the family I came across
the name of this famous Austrian mathematician,
Gödel
who, during world war 2 went to the US & even Einstein hadgreat respects for him...in a seminary about the philosophy of mathematics I first heard of him -- I read in a book few years ago, that he also gave some "proof" for the existence of God,
haven`t understood it though at that time---
One thing Gödel proved, for which he seems to be
most famous for, is something of the like:
In a theoretical, logical system compounded of
elements which are at least equally in magnitude
as the set of the natural numbers, you can always
make statements, which you can neither prove nor disprove...when I first heard that, I thought
math won`t help me too much on my path finding the truth...(& lets face it, theology has at least as
many elements as the set of natural numbers, so there you can make always statements too, which you can neither prove nor disprove...it`s obvious
for me, so I might as well like not knowing things
; ) )
In addition to that, we know, that in math we have to be very often satisfied with approximation...
I have a book by ukrainian mathematicians called:
Tracing logical catastrophies, it shows the errors
pupils & students do & which we`re prone to ourselves, it looks all logical in the beginning & at the end you have a unlogic, contradicting result...Or think of the optical illusions, lines
which seem to be bend but aren`t...there are really amazing graphics...think of the pictures
of Escher, if you know them...think of the equasion of Heisenberg, that you cannot know the
impulse & location of a particle at the same time,
if I remember right...one journalist wrote in the
year I joined at christmas about this relativity,
this unsharpness as far as words, semantics etc is
concerned..he used John 1...in the beginning was
the word...now logos can mean different things,
but they translate it always as the word...yet this
unpreciseness in words give also room for doublemeaning, for jokes, poetry etc....
We see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: n o w I k n o w i n p a r t ...but
then shall I know...
I saw a report on TV about life after death experiences...one girl experienced this, besides
floating & flying around somewhere, she got immediate, clear answers to anything she asked in her mind, but unfortunately forgot them once being
over here again...
Well, I wait with some of my questions, I see people over here don`t seem to have the answers
(sometimes pretending to have`m for gainsake)...
& besides happiness is not proportional to the amount of knowledge you have..i like the verse about the peace which passes all understanding...
So for many verses you get as many explanations as there are people...I have a Bible commentary from the Dallas Theological Seminary...they are quite fair...at very difficult verses they give the various interpretations which float around...So
far I have to unfortunately observe, that there is
no narrow, sharp theological line about everything in the Bible & that after thousands of years with tons of scholars, yet love can ^"understand" about anybody!!!!!!!!!!!!!!