@user9712 "the OT is concerning historical fact" ... says who?

@svidgen Young Earth Creationists, of course. ;-)

@DavidStratton Oh, David Stratton! David Stratton!

@DavidStratton How did you become a young-earth Creationist?

@DavidStratton Did you become a young-earth Creationist prior to becoming a committed Christian, or did you become a committed Christian prior to becoming a young-earth Creationist?

I simply decided to take the Bible at face value. There's not much more to it than that. I became a YEC adherent before I became a Christian. Believing something in your head isn't the same as going all in.

@DavidStratton What does "at face value" entail?

@DavidStratton How did you accept fundamentalist theology? Why not liberal theology?

@DavidStratton How did you become a Sola Fide Guy?

@DavidStratton Are you a Baptist, an Independent Baptist, or a Fundamentalist?

@DavidStratton Would you consider yourself "Evangelical" or "Fundamentalist"?

@DavidStratton Do you hold Baptist theology? How much of a Baptist are you?

@DavidStratton If you are Protestant, how would your Baptist theology fit within the framework of Protestantism?

@DavidStratton How often do you proselytize? How exactly do you proselytize?

@DavidStratton Did you ever condemn the thought of young-earth creationism?

@DavidStratton @DavidStratton! Long time no see.

@DavidStratton Not sure why I double-@'d you.

@DavidStratton In any event ... since you took the initiative to answer my question, dare I ask what gives the YEC's the authority to make such a proclamation?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what's more helpful to answer -- by what authority one believes the OT is historical fact, or to what it means to believe the OT is historical fact.

@Anonymous As a courtesy, one ping is enough per message. Now David will have 9 messages in his inbox, but realistically it is just you pinging him 9 times for the same message.

@svidgen Well, it's a little less than 9 ^^^ :/ lol

btw, last time you were in here someone accused you of never reading and just typing on and on, then he said he was going to ignore you, which you laughed off.

I thought it was funny.

He had problems with me too.

@svidgen Authority is held by those with the power to enforce. In this case enforce is teach. That's why governments and churches have killed some of history's brightest teachers; they were just too influential.

The point is, anything less than a church-state has no functional authority on such matters.

@fredsbend You're talking about svidgen, right?

@fredsbend What did you do?

@fredsbend wrong authority concept. The authority concept relevant to biblical understanding, which the Church claims to possess, is an act of submission to an author. The Catholic Church claims it via apostolic and papal succession and tradition. So and so learned from and was ordained And validated by so and so, etc... Ultimately until you get to Christ, the author himself, who declares Peter an authority.

The whole reason we (Catholics) lay claim to any authority at all is because it's rooted in submission to the author, who explicitly validates the Church's authority. So, to ask "by what authority" is to ask by what lineage or "validation" one can interpret the author's work.

@svidgen We don't think YEC's have the authority. But, for the sake of argument, we believe that since God wrote the Bible, and God is infallible, and knows everything then GOD has the authority to tell us what is the accurate description of the beginning of the universe and all time.

Since He said, in His infallible Word that He spoke all of creation into existence, and took six days, who am I to argue with Him?

Yeah, I understand the possibility that it's figurative, but it's just simpler to simply believe.

And I'd rather simply believe His word than some earthly "authority". Rejecting earthly authority is a Baptist distinctive that I am a strong believer in.

@Richard stated the reasoning behind such a though process so well. ;-)

@david but we're taking about books. Human words. If you understand them incorrectly, outside of their authority, the risk isn't looking like a fool here, it's precisely the consequences that make you shudder.

@svidgen The crux of your argument boils down exactly to how we interpret Matthew 16. DID Christ declare Peter's authority? Maybe he did, but there's certainly no across-the-board agreement on that. And if He did, by what authority did Paul rebuke Peter for Peter's insistence on works based salvation?

It's the same old argument, still unresolved, two thousand years later. I doubt we'll ever agree on it in this life. I'm OK with the possibility that I might be wrong, for the record, however.

I simply accept the Protestant view, and can't reconcile myself to the Catholic or Orthodox view.

@David that doesn't address the question though. Take Matthew 16 out of the question. Pretend the Catholic Church doesn't exist. In that void, by what authority does anyone claim a proper understanding of scripture?

It's not dissimilar from asking about any other written work. If you're not the author himself, or the author hasn't signed off on your interpretation of his works, you're basing your understanding on theories.

What distinguishes one interpretation, YEC or otherwise, from theory. By which I mean, "not known to be the author's intended meaning."

I understand what you're saying. It's the entire basis for the rule against Truth questions. But if you follow it to the logical conclusion, you end up with the fact that none of us can be absolutely sure. You, me, Caleb, anyone. Anyone can make up any wild claim and there's not an absolute way to disprove or prove the claim.

I don't claim to know absolutely.

I claim to believe.

there's a difference. I have an understanding that my knowledge is finite. There's an understanding that I might be wrong. I'm very, very attuned to that possibility, having been an atheist not that many years ago.

I was dead sure that God was made up and that Jesus was merely an invisible friend for the weak-minded fools that couldn't cope with life without such an invisible imaginary friend.

Do you feel at all as though you may be selling yourself short again?

I now beleive that I was an ignoramus then.

No, not really. I am just cautious about being too sure of myself. I have a healthy distrust of my own perceptions. I trust God to know more than me, and I think that's wise.

By extension, I mistrust everyone's perceptions to a point. I think we're all finite, flawed beings.

That's a pretty standard theological view of man's nature anyway.

Sure. But, How do you know your trust is in God?

And not a false notion of God.

Or worse, your own little voice, claiming too be the voice of God inside your head?

That's my point. I don't know. I believe, but I don't know. Not intellectually, anyway.

Curious: How do you know? How would you answer that?

As you said, knowing in the strict philosophical sense is out of question. But, that doesn't prohibit our beliefs from being tightly united with reason.

Agreed.

It may take me a moment to articulate this...

OK. In the meantime, if you're wondering how do I, personally, use logic and reason and test what I believe to see if it makes sense, and is not completely heretical , see this

Scripture was interesting before I understood Catholicism. So was science. And math. And the strange honor given to Mary. And the saints. ... Everything was interesting. Once I understood the Church, and Who the Church says God is, not only were All these things interesting, they started to become fantastically understandable and interrelated.

I don't want to be rude but it's 1:08 in the morning and I need to get up in a few hours for work. it's time for bed. I'll stop back in tomorrow to see what else you've posted... I really am hoping you'll expand on that last statement.

I'm interested in hearing what you mean by that, and how the teachings of the Catholic Church ties it all together for you.

It's the same time here too. Was just up to feed a baby and conver YECs...

Since you're off, I'll expand on it later. When I'm not on my phone. Very slow editing ...

@svidgen I understand the Catholic position very well. What I don't understand is how that is a useful argument to convince anybody to convert. When the Church had a grip on the state, you converted and obeyed under pain of beatings, death, torture, torture followed by death, and even beatings followed by torture followed by death.

They had the power to enforce it.

Today, not so much, thank God.

I would hate to be beaten for disagreeing with the clergy.

A similar situation exists in some Islamic countries.

"Heretical" ideas are persecuted with force, rather than attacked with sound reasoning.

So all this is to say,

Every time I hear a Catholic go off on this I wonder what kind of "motivation" for submission he would be okay with under a Church state.

Really, though. What exactly is authority if there is no power behind it? Redefining it as submission to your predecessor is a re-appropriation that I don't think is going to work. It's paradoxical.

The only real power the Church has today is excommunication. Well, people who don't like the teachings of the Church probably don't want to be in the Church any more anyway.

@fredsbend Tying authority to power was a perverse redefinition of it. Authority is first and foremost an act of submission to something. Even in the perverted, power-laden notion of authority, in cases where it's a mere matter of power, we just call it power. We call it authority when the power is tied to knowledge of and submission to of a body of law or some other higher cause.

A police officer is an authority when he submits to the legislation and the government. When he's not acting in submission to the society he's sworn to serve, he's not operating as a police officer. He's operating as a bully. And the courts are charged with the responsibility to recognizing when the officer has acted under proper authority or as a bully.

His authority operates independently of his power.

Or rather, his power operates independently of his authority. His responsibility is to submit his power to his authority, which is in turn under submission to higher authorities.

In terms of the Church, the power of the Church as Church is limited to those areas in which Christ explicitly granted authority. And the power is only valid to the extent that the operating member is acting within the bounds of His authority.

Historically, members of the Church have gone rogue. This no more diminishes the authority of the Church than does a police officer going rogue diminish the authority of the courts to subsequently determine his guilt.

If we can see in one case how individuals exercising their power outside their authority does not diminish the larger authority, we should be able to see it elsewhere as well. Trouble is, we have a tendency to wrap higher authorities -- and even the author himself -- up into the power abuses of the lesser authorities, whom often are revoked of their authority in such cases.

@DavidStratton It's largely inarticulable, I'm afraid. The Church believes itself to be the extension of the Incarnation through space and time. And the best validation of that isn't in scripture. It's the Eucharist. It's that the Church continually participates in the sacrifice of Christ, it extends that sacrifice through space and time. It extends His forgiveness through space and time. It offers itself to the world en persona Christi.

It's not so much scripture that validates the Church's authority. It's the Church's authority, the fact that the Church submits to the Christ and perpetuates His mission and His sacrifice through space and time, that validates the scripture.

The fact that scripture refers to the authority of the Church is more of a happy accident.

And the fact that scripture explicitly states that all of scripture and all of history is "unlocked" by the slain lamb of God (Christ crucified) is powerful validation of precisely what the Church does: It submits to God, in a mystery beyond it's understanding, and perpetually participates it the sacrifice.

It puts Christ, The Way, and The Truth at the absolute forefront.

Without the intense focus on Christ and His sacrifice, and therefore the "intense authority" of the Church, scriptural interpretation is a free-for-all. It's meaningless in and of itself.

And it's that same intense focus on Christ that brings sense to everything else. It's what allows scripture to be read with deep and varying insights without infracting upon the Truth. It's what permits science and math and philosophy and art to be sensible. It's that we're working with the creation of an mysterious, intelligent, and incarnate God that we can relate all aspects of creation together -- that the creative process is ultimately the same everywhere.

... or something like that. I need to get back to work.