ABLE TO BE TAUGHT
11/08/24 08:22
We can if we are acolytes of political correctness make up our morals as we go, postulating any fashionable version of the knowledge of good and evil and its current obsession as our ‘light’ and deeming those who oppose us of having a mental disease, namely ‘phobias.’ Then promoting the additional accusation of they who differ from us as being non-loving. Apart from being the humanist version of ‘legalism’, this practice panders to those who make morality out of ‘taking offence’. It does not address the issue of the effect and probable degradation of society. Its recourse is no more sophisticated than the slight of hand we know of as ‘calling names.’
TRUTH CHOOSES YOU.. IF YOU CAN LISTEN
Douglas Campbell writes, “I have been saying for some time now .. that we do not choose the truth; it chooses us (and it "chooses" us in the right, loving way, of course, not as one option among many but in a covenantal commitment of election).
TRUTH NOT MADE UP
Furthermore, truth is objective. Nothing we do or say can change it. Truth exists whether we like it or not. But it is a personal truth, and so it comes to us with expectations that we must learn, and it is enfolded in and mediated by a tradition.
WORLD NOT FLAT BECAUSE SO MANY THOUGHT IT WAS
True freedom is found only as we submit ourselves to this tradition, patiently, obediently, learning to do the things that we were destined for since before the foundation of the world, having been set free through Christ from those things that were really constraining and enslaving us, namely, sin, corruption, and death.” (1)
PSEUDO TRUTH UNDERMINES ITSELF
We can be enslaved by degrading immoralities and enslaved by versions of religion. What we call ‘sin’ is the result of living outside of God. It’s the effect of ignoring the Christ and doing what seems right in our own eyes. Such a course is innately disintegrative and debilitating to the human condition. In the matter of Christianity, we cannot just ‘make it up’ and think there will be no effect on our quality of life. Gospel Truth is objective, coming to us from the Holy Spirit, the Bible, the Church Fathers, Reformers and those who minister an undiluted Gospel of grace and transformation.
TRADITION
Campbell is correct about ‘tradition’. If our beliefs are not within the tradition of the universal church it is probable that we are not Christian, even when we fall within that designation.
We can if we are content with being inert, live in our bubble of received incorrect ideas. I mean faulty versions of the Gospel. If because of this bubble and the opiate of stupor it produces, we cannot be taught, we are of all people most miserable since we resist the Light of our true discipleship and sonship and settle for our idol or received ideas. Thus rather than being bigger on the inside than we are on the outside in the Real Gospel we are midgets thinking we are tall.
Campbell asserts, “Learning constitutes growth in freedom as we learn to do things here, most important, to be better covenant partners with God—which is an increase in our freedom in terms of capacity.” Capacity to be more Godly, more human, and more genuine agents of Christ’s Kingdom Life.
(1)Douglas Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics The Triumph of Gods Love. p 215
