Here's a quote. A quote about foundations and starting points. What do you make of it?
And so the biblical mindset starts with the assumption that God is the center of reality. All thinking starts with the assumption that God has basic rights as the Creator of all things. He has goals that fit with his nature and perfect character. Then the biblical mindset moves out from this center and interprets the world, with God and his rights and goals as the measure of all things.
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... I wonder who that's from :)
I would prefer to say that Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is our foundational assumption. In Jesus we see that "God has basic rights as the Creator of all things" but we also see Jesus did not hold those rights tightly, but became nothing out of love for us and supremely for his Father.
The difficulty I suppose if you do not locate what he affirms in the person of Jesus Christ is that you don't really know who this god is that has all these rights and goals. We probably end up projecting some kind of beefed up human onto the statement, and all of a sudden that's really bad news...
I still think he's right to say those things are foundational assumptions, but if they are stripped of the person of Jesus Christ they are found in then its (i) incomplete; and (ii) ugly.
I'll look forward to the corrections.
I'm not a great fan of the 'rights' language. Otherwise I'm torn. If you start with this foundation, the incarnation and especially the cross will take you completely by surprise. I think that is probably an effect they ought to have. But then, I wonder whether they take you so completely by surprise that the cross ends up being a new foundation/starting point.
Certainly when you find yourself looking back at this foundation from the cross you will realise that it means something very different from what you expected. Perhaps it will turn out that this is so drastically the case that actually the cross should be the foundation in the first place.
Yeah, what Dave and Daniel said.
Or, in my words:
Foundational, yes. (including that God has 'rights' as Creator)
Enough/ adequate to properly describe the foundation, no.
But that's partly my 'generally supra' instinct showing itself.
Some of it might depend on how the 'goals' God has as Creator are expanded on, and how much they're allowed to be a part of the foundation of all thought.
My vote? It assumes the conclusion then concludes nothing.
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Hi all,
I started writing a comment, but that turned into a post and the post is looking like turning into a series.
Anyway, here's the first part of my answer:
https://christthetruth.net/2009/10/30/theo-centric/
I basically think that 'God-centred-ness' needs a lot of content added to it before it's more than trivially true and that the content given as regards God-as-Creator and consequently His 'rights', fills it with a very unhelpful trajectory indeed.
Thanks for your thoughts, I think we're all within the same ball-park of basic critique. But maybe future posts will flesh out differences? We'll see...