Author:
Michael
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Date Posted: 07:59:31 01/06/02 Sun
To begin with, I would like to point out that my main focus in these discussions is our responsibility towards the divine Text. Roger, your comments are aimed towards homiletical arenas rather than what I would like to discuss.
That said, I will "give you the gratification" of responding to a few of your comments. We are called to utilize divine rationality as opposed to human reasoning; I have come to believe that they are two processes completely incomensurable; this does not mean that we cannot understand the heathen mind but that we are called to use our minds in a completely different way. The Word of God can penetrate human rationality - else none would come to any type of Faith. But we cannot present truth according to human reasoning.
Logic in itself, at least some categories of logic, are not necessarily exclusive to human (i.e. heathen) reasoning. According to the Deuteronomy account, we are called to deductively apply the Laws of God. God says "you don't eat unclean meat" and specifies that pigs are unclean. The Isrealite realizes that a specific pig is not to be eaten. This is deduction and it must happen everytime we live by faith.
My question regarding logic has to do with the limits imposed by logic. Traditional logic studies the relationships of propositions and the validity of propositional reformulation. Logical studies define meaning itself as the valid deductions from any specific set of propositions.
The question is intricate because most of us aren't familiar with the limits imposed by logic. Traditional logic studies only propositions bound by a copula ("to be" verbs) and therefore most propositions must be rephrased even to become the object of this specific study. Logic deals with classes (or types) and tokens; class exclusion, inclusion, membership, identity, etc. Of all the conditions necessary to formal logic (they're not all listed here), which ones (if any) impose some element upon the text which 1) is not present 2) is against Biblical precedent?
I made referal to modes of perception because these are conditions which many people impose upon the Text. The philosopher Kant emphatically affirmed Time and Space as modes of perception that we utilize to analyze phenomena. The Word of God, though, deals with Eternity and Heavenly realms, reversibility of the past and continuity instead. So in some ways, we have to be careful with spazio-temporal bindings in our study.
I hope this helps to clarify my questions. In our employment of logic (any type - not just traditional) do we impose any conditions upon the Text which it does not embody? Does God's Word justify _THE_WAYS_ in which we use logic as we approach It?
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