Some say one thing, and some say something completely different

[Pudgy]

Well … I have found in life that the more words a person uses to explain contested ideas, the less likely the premises of the arguments are valid.

Juan, you are very articulate and easily understood, and logical and coherent.

But I cannot bring myself to give fealty to anyone but God and Christ.

If I was a United States Marine, of reasonable intelligence, I would of course know that most Officers were petty, deeply flawed, arrogant, presumptuous and likely to view me and my fellow Marines as career building cannon fodder.

But even in the Marines you are not required to obey an illegal order.

So, who decides what is an illegal order?

You do.

You may be shot or hanged, (or disfellowshipped) but it is better than living an unexamined life in a pseudo- fantasy.

[Juan Rivera]

39 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

Well … I have found in life that the more words a person uses to explain contested ideas, the less likely the premises of the arguments are valid.

Juan, you are very articulate and easily understood, and logical and coherent.

But I cannot bring myself to give fealty to anyone but God and Christ.

If I was a United States Marine, of reasonable intelligence, I would of course know that most Officers were petty, deeply flawed, arrogant, presumptuous and likely to view me and my fellow Marines as career building cannon fodder.

But even in the Marines you are not required to obey an illegal order.

So, who decides what is an illegal order?

You do.

@Pudgy I hear you, but here’s  what worries me about that simplicity principle you mention and then I’ll leave you alone. Either you are using simplicity as a criterion for truth, or not. If you are, that's using a human-derived criterion (i.e. human philosophy) to judge what content gets to count as divine revelation. That's making 'divine revelation' in your own image. On the other hand, if you're not using simplicity as a criterion for truth, then there is no reason (other than rhetorical) to appeal to simplicity as a reason to adopt your own view rather than the JW perspective.

The working philosophical assumption that theology and ecclesiology must all be simple it’s an assumption which the person is presupposing that it all must be simple, and that because what I'm saying includes digging deeper into things, therefore it cannot be true, because it is not simple, or at least as simple as your position. But that’s just making theology conform to your own philosophical presuppositions, rather than being open as a child to whatever level of complexity, sophistication or simplicity is to be found in Jehovah’s self revelation. It is  his revelation, not our creation. So if we are to be open in faith, we have to be open to whatever God reveals, rather than try to force it into our preconceived notions concerning what it must be like. So if Jesus established a congregation with a Governing body, and entrusted to her the scriptures, then persons of faith should embrace it rather than reject it and replace it with something simpler. Given your simplicity principle, any person could reject your theology as too complex, and replace it with simpler theology still. There is always someone with a position simpler than one’s own.

So let me leave you with one last thought to think about and perhaps you can see where I would like to focus my efforts and attention in the closed forum or elsewhere. I believe once you and other current and former Witnesses start seeing this distinction, it would be the equivalent of "taking the red pill” or leaving the set of "The Truman Show".

It seems to me that if we are not going to worry with distinguishing false teachings from true teachings , then while we might possibly continue to argue that there are grounds for thinking that Jehovah has communicated something to mankind, somewhere at some time (i.e. given a revelation), a stance of ambivalence with respect to the need to distinguishing which current explanatory or descriptive accounts of that revelation match what Jehovah intended men to know (true teachings), over against errant disfigurements of what Jehovah intended men to know (false beliefs), has the practical effect of undermining the very notion or purpose of any divine revelation at all. 

Such a stance explicitly, and in principle, shrouds the content which Jehovah intended to reveal within a cloak of human opinion from which it cannot escape to reach the mind of any modern seeker as a revelation from Jehovah distinct from some other fellow human’s opinion. And this would mean that the purported answers concerning human meaning and destiny which Christianity claims to provide are just opinions and can, therefore, command our assent no more than the thousands of other competing truth claims about human purpose and destiny which are all around us in a pluralistic society. The Good News reduces to an opinion column and so becomes old news. If all Christianity has to offer modern man is yet another wacky set of notions about Jehovah, afterlife, morality, etc. – then to hell with it. The whole point of a “revealed” religion is to offer truth claims which ostensibly stand in contrast to what man can know, or guess at, on his own. Hence, a revealed religion which simultaneously, and in principle, claims that what God intended to communicate to men via revelation is no longer decipherable beyond the level of that same human opinion to which we all had access before ever exploring revealed religion, simply defeats the very purpose of revealed religion. 

What is special about the Good News, or the deliverances of Christianity regarding human meaning and destiny, if we give up on the distinction between True beliefs and false ones? I, for one, cannot say.

Regards,

 

 

 

[Pudgy]

After all those words, and you cannot say …

I like my system better.

[Juan Rivera]

1 minute ago, Pudgy said:

After all those words, and you cannot say …

I like my system better.

@Pudgy Let me try one last time. To boil it down for convenience, my central argument has been that, without an infallible interpreter of divine revelation, we would have no way of distinguishing between what's objectively divine revelation and what's only human opinion about the scope and interpretation of the sources. That distinction is not primarily about how we attain certainty. Rather, my argument is about how we identify the primary subject matter of theology, i.e. divine revelation itself. Now if the subject matter of theology were primarily a set of texts and practices, make that set as broad or narrow as you please, then theology would be just like other disciplines such as philosophy, history, and sociology. Accordingly, it would not require positing inerrancy or infallibility. We would study the texts and practices, come to reasonable but provisional conclusions about their truth and/or value, and call some of our conclusions our theology. That's the methodology in departments of "religious studies."

I spent some time in that methodology when I was younger, and I learned things thereby. But as Christians we know that such a merely human discipline does not suffice for the purpose at hand. Thus, even though it often utilizes methods of inquiry like those of other disciplines, theology itself is not like other disciplines. What we're after in theology strictly speaking, as distinct from natural theology, which is a branch of metaphysics, is identifying the content of something we could never know or identify just by human inquiry, i.e. what Jehovah has revealed. And we take for granted that Jehovah is "infallible," in the sense that he knows whatever can be known, and can neither deceive nor be deceived. So, we want to know how to identify what Jehovah himself has revealed, as distinct from, but not always as opposed to, what mere man has said or done about him. The latter is not protected from error, and hence cannot be relied on for knowledge of what Jehovah has revealed.

In the nature of the case, knowledge of something as divine revelation can only be attained by recognizing certain sources of information as produced or authorized by God and thus protected by him from error. My argument is not over that point, but over the scope of those sources. 

Given as much, another way of putting my central argument is this: Without a living body that is divinely authorized to speak with divine and thus infallible authority, we would have no way of distinguishing reliably between theology and religious studies. That's because we would not even have a way of definitively settling the question what the relevant sources of transmission are, much less what they mean. You might personally choose to regard a certain set of texts, i.e. “Scripture," as the inerrant "Word of God," which is what you do; you might regard certain early interpreters of those texts as pretty reliable guides to interpreting them, which you also seem to do; you might even recognize certain traditions and concrete practices as relevant sources of information, which you could do consistently with your position. But your grounds for doing so would be human reasoning and opinion alone, not the teaching of any living body whose leadership we recognize as authorized by God to speak definitively in his name. Hence, all your conclusions would remain fallible and provisional. But you don't seem any more content with that than I am, nor should you be. That is why I've said to you before that your only alternatives to such an infallible interpretive authority are "rationalism" or "enthusiasm," whose concrete correlates would be an academic governing body. There is no third alternative that does not reduce to one of those two, or to some ramshackle combination thereof, such as (JW insider)  (if I’m not mistaken) idea that the scope and meaning of the biblical canon can be recognized with certainty by a combination of literary/historical analysis and the inner promptings of the holy spirit.

 

Hopefully that clears up what I’ve been meaning to say. Thank you for you time, I’m bowing out.

[Pudgy]

I can describe in ONE SENTENCE all that I need to know about theology.

1.) Pick any scripture and read the page before it and the page after it, in context.

All else is possibly interesting, but not essential.

 That means to avoid distractions, ad nauseum, you can safely ignore it.

[Juan Rivera]

32 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

I can describe in ONE SENTENCE all that I need to know about theology.

1.) Pick any scripture and read the page before it and the page after it, in context.

All else is possibly interesting, but not essential.

 That means to avoid distractions, ad nauseum, you can safely ignore it.

@Pudgy I wish that was true. Believe me, I really do, it would of made my life so much easier growing up and I would of avoid so much heartache and suffering and could of used that time energy and efforts and investing it in the ministry helping others.

But If that were true, disagreement regarding which doctrines are essential could be due only to illiteracy or malice. But when we engage in on-the-ground dialogue with Christians in other interpretive traditions, we find that the people with whom we disagree on such matters are generally neither unintelligent nor malicious. That implies that resolving the disagreements regarding which doctrines are essential is not as simple as pointing to Bible verses. Otherwise, after the last five centuries of reading and studying Scripture, then even if there was not an initial agreement concerning the meaning of Scripture, there should be at least a convergence of biblical interpretations among all students of Scripture. Instead there has been a continual multiplication of doctrinal disagreements among the various traditions. For these reasons, Scripture alone is not capable of answering the "essentials" question.

We have a five-hundred-year experiment called Protestantism. Protestant history is a history of fragmentation upon fragmentation, dividing not over what was believed to be secondary issues by those separating, but over what was believed to be orthodoxy and heresy. People do not break unity over issues they themselves believe to be secondary, indifferent adiaphora. Someone could claim that in each such case someone was failing to engage in honest exegesis, but it seems to me that such a claim would be ad hoc. There is no good reason to believe that in each case of  fragmentation, one or both sides were being dishonest in their exegesis of Scripture. The evidence is to the contrary. Likewise, someone could claim that in each case of fragmentation one or both sides did not have the spirit. But again, that would be ad hoc. Moreover, honest exegesis in the present is not bringing denominations back together. Given all the exegetical work published in academic journals and books over the last few centuries, which denominations have reconciled because of it? None if any. And again, it would be ad hoc to claim that they are not doing so only because of dishonesty or exegetical ignorance. Do we see all New Testament scholars moving toward one denomination’s theological position, over the past 500 years? No. All this shows that personal interpretation of Scripture is not a reliable way of distinguishing fully and accurately between orthodoxy and heresy.

[Pudgy]

 

—————————————————

You make my points even better than I can ….

[Juan Rivera]

3 hours ago, Pudgy said:

 

—————————————————

You make my points even better than I can ….

I don’t understand what you mean Pudgy😔 … sigh….

[Srecko Sostar]

12 hours ago, George88 said:

tax-gatherer

I found one article to educate me more on about this. https://www.evidenceunseen.com/theology/historical-theology/tax-collectors/

 

I don't really understand why Jesus would use a tax collector in his teaching about internal relationships among fellow believers.
The tax collector was a legally appointed person from the Roman authorities. Nobody likes taxes and tax collectors, both before and today. I will use the cynicism of GB who said that "Jesus did not promise perfect spiritual food". Jesus also did not promise that you will not be taxed by the authorities. He did not promise that taxes would be low. He did not promise that injustice would not overtake you. And so on and so forth. Finally, JWs boast of being completely law-abiding and paying (unjust) taxes, both in the 1st century and today.
Furthermore, everyone will agree with what @Juan Rivera said about ex-JW status. Ex-JWs fall into the category of "neighbors" just like tax collectors and Gentiles.

In the light of the comments that are presented here and emphasize the need for less influence of the written word, the Bible, and a stronger influence of the interpretation of the written word by those who are "authorized and appointed" to interpret it, then the existing interpretation of completely ignoring excluded JWs would need reinterpretation.
Among other things, JWs go to prisons to convert people who have been marked as criminals by a "higher authority", who they say is appointed by God to their position. The same elders who are cordial with the prisoners despise the ex-JW when they see him on the street. That's a normal state of mind and emotion, right? That was Jesus' intention in his teachings, from chapter 18?

 

[Srecko Sostar]

10 hours ago, Juan Rivera said:

I have no interest in your legal and lawyer arguments, I deal with theology.

No problem. I respect the choice. Individuals within the JW congregation do not need to deal with the legal aspects of their faith, but that is why the legal status of believers in the Church is dealt with by the WTJWorg Corporation. This means that individuals, belonging to each congregation, will be exposed, without their knowledge, to every legal move by JW lawyers.

[Srecko Sostar]

8 hours ago, Juan Rivera said:

@Srecko Sostar “Inspiration”is a technical term that refers to the inspiration of scripture and that term is used in 2 Timothy 3:16 and that’s the only place the bible uses that word: Inspiration. It refers to the written or verbal revelation that Jehovah gave. Guidance(spirit led) refers to the holy spirit prompting to truth. In Acts 15 the apostles are speaking on their own authority given by Christ, and they are deemed with this authority because they are the ones taking the lead and governing the church. The reason they can do that is because they are guided by the holy spirit, but is not because of inspiration. Claiming they were inspired in Acts 15 when the passage nowhere mentions they were inspired its an unfounded deduction. This is similar to the Apostles in the first ten to fifteen years of the Congregation (before any Scripture was written), when exercising their authority over the Christian congregation as their appointed representatives, and yet not speaking inspired Scripture.

I think you are equating inspiration, with the assistance of the holy spirit. The holy spirit works in and through the fallible Christian congregation not apart from it nor does it dispense with the human factor.  With respect to the notion of the holy spirit’s  guidance of the Governing Body, the events of the Jerusalem council in Acts can again be helpful. It is important to understand that the spirits guidance of the Governing Body  is not to be thought of as magical or mystical, or in any manifest way noticeable in the concrete reality of the Governing body’s activity. The spirits guidance is more subtle, powerful, and comprehensive than that. In reading the account of the gathering and conducting of the Jerusalem council, there does not appear to be anything especially divine about how the proceedings develop. There is heated argumentation and debate, and finally, after various opinions and objections had been placed on the table, those taking the lead (James and Peter)speak and make something like an executive decision with respect to the question of circumcision. From a purely human point of view, it does not appear to be much different from what one might encounter in a Fortune 500 board room. And yet, when the decision or decrees of the council are drawn up for promulgation to the various congregations, it includes a rather extraordinary claim regarding the identity of one of the parties involved in the process. For it begins: “it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us”. This correspondence between the activity of the Governing Body and the spirit in promulgating definitive teaching is the prototype for all their activity going forward.

 

Yes of course, we could establish a clearer meaning of the terms "inspired" and "led". For this purpose, a book should be published on JWlibrary, so that believers can be educated.

From my point of view, I accept the idea that the ant is not "inspired" but "led" by the HS as it walks the underground corridors in search for food.

[Srecko Sostar]

7 hours ago, Juan Rivera said:

@Pudgy I wish that was true. Believe me, I really do, it would of made my life so much easier growing up and I would of avoid so much heartache and suffering and could of used that time energy and efforts and investing it in the ministry helping others.

But If that were true, disagreement regarding which doctrines are essential could be due only to illiteracy or malice. But when we engage in on-the-ground dialogue with Christians in other interpretive traditions, we find that the people with whom we disagree on such matters are generally neither unintelligent nor malicious. That implies that resolving the disagreements regarding which doctrines are essential is not as simple as pointing to Bible verses. Otherwise, after the last five centuries of reading and studying Scripture, then even if there was not an initial agreement concerning the meaning of Scripture, there should be at least a convergence of biblical interpretations among all students of Scripture. Instead there has been a continual multiplication of doctrinal disagreements among the various traditions. For these reasons, Scripture alone is not capable of answering the "essentials" question.

We have a five-hundred-year experiment called Protestantism. Protestant history is a history of fragmentation upon fragmentation, dividing not over what was believed to be secondary issues by those separating, but over what was believed to be orthodoxy and heresy. People do not break unity over issues they themselves believe to be secondary, indifferent adiaphora. Someone could claim that in each such case someone was failing to engage in honest exegesis, but it seems to me that such a claim would be ad hoc. There is no good reason to believe that in each case of  fragmentation, one or both sides were being dishonest in their exegesis of Scripture. The evidence is to the contrary. Likewise, someone could claim that in each case of fragmentation one or both sides did not have the spirit. But again, that would be ad hoc. Moreover, honest exegesis in the present is not bringing denominations back together. Given all the exegetical work published in academic journals and books over the last few centuries, which denominations have reconciled because of it? None if any. And again, it would be ad hoc to claim that they are not doing so only because of dishonesty or exegetical ignorance. Do we see all New Testament scholars moving toward one denomination’s theological position, over the past 500 years? No. All this shows that personal interpretation of Scripture is not a reliable way of distinguishing fully and accurately between orthodoxy and heresy.

Given that Geoffrey Jackson, authorized GB representative, has publicly stated, confirmed by the court seal of the ARC, that the WTJWorg GB is not the only body in this world that can give valid doctrines when representing God as God's speaker of faith, (opposite to your view about GB) then this exposition about different interpretations from different sources is redundant, in the sense that it does not lead us to any single human authority on this issue.

Perhaps the difficulty arises from the fact that all the religious sources discussed are in a phase, a state called "spirit-led." GB is in such mental state. Perhaps other churces have different view and think they are inspired or something else. Should find out. It is obvious from everything presented that being "led by the spirit" is a very weak, flawed, uncertain and imprecise way of establishing true faith in God (without written Bible text).