Since Holding claimed the question about priesthood authority did not implicate his "bailwick" (area of expertise) he didn't comment on it. However, we can take PrimtiveCash's concerns one point at a time and provide what would qualify as a biblically justified response. In doing so, we'll uncover certain bases for skepticism and therefore infer the real reason Mr. Holding retreated from what is otherwise a straightforward question with biblically straightforward answers: You start trying to 'explain' why the authority of 1st centuy christians cannot be detected among 21st century Christians, and you run the risk of convincing yourself that the NT promises are nothing but empty idealism, and are accordingly reasonably rejected by non-Christians.Primitive Cash2 weeks ago (edited)I’ve an unrelated question about Priesthood authority in this day vs in the times of the New Testament: Is it relevant to have authority from God in this age? If so, How does one know without question that a faith genuinely has said authority? I was LDS, and I once believed I had authority from Him to heal the sick, give blessings, and cast out demons, but I have found evidence that makes such assertions questionable at best.
2 weeks agoThat kind of question is not my bailiwick. Anyone else want to try?
Logician_Bones1 week agoWell, not sure what you mean by "authority" but the last bit reminds me of the findings I've mentioned before on here reported through CMI re: Alien Intrusion with modern evidence that Christians who call on Jesus to stop experiences faked by demons are indeed freed from the experience (evidently demons masquerading as alien abductors). The Bible does suggest this sort of thing. I don't see much else if you mean in the miraculous category and have talked about why miracles are normally reserved for credentialing authorship of new Scripture and the canon is now closed. The protection from demons makes sense as possibly a nearly sole exception since demons aren't supposed to be intervening in the first place so aren't part of the normal way the world works that God normally lets happen in the fallen world so that miracles can be reserved for credentials of the Bible. This doesn't necessarily include all healings; it's only publicly proveable miracles that have to be reserved normally, but I wouldn't say "authority." We request things of God; it's up to him, since he alone is omniscient, which to actually say yes to. (And be very careful with claims that a yes answer HAS been given in the sense of miracles of intervention versus timing; most humans aren't good at judging that kind of thing.) If you mean authority in some other sense not sure but you suggested the answer yourself; go by evidence.
Primitive Cash1 week agoLogician_Bones Thank you.
Leonel Huicho1 week agoBy Authority I Guess You mean authority to Interpret Scripture, It was always something Inherited, In Earlier Judaism for Example, God allowed scribes to modify certain passages as long as their teachings weren't altered. Regarding if Certain Religious Institution has the authority, It depends on a lot of factors, But One of them that I would be on how much they hold to the teachings of Christ, The early Apostles and the early Church.
Primitive Cash2 weeks ago (edited)I’ve an unrelated question about Priesthood authority in this day vs in the times of the New Testament:That's probably why Holding backed off...you are doomed to a land of necessary subjectivity if you try to "prove" that any biblical truth about 1st century Christians is applicable to 21st century Christians. Jesus not coming back for 2,000 years doesn't sound like "quickly". Holding will reply that he is a preterist and thus isn't bothered by the failure of Christ to float down from the clouds in literal fashion as expected by billions of Christians today. But the one bible verse that nukes Preterism is Acts 1:11...a verse that completely forbids spiritualizing the 2nd Coming the way Preterists necessarily do:
6 So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, "Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?"
7 He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority;
8 but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth."
9 And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.
10 And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was going, behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them.
11 They also said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven."
12 Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey away. (Acts 1:6-12 NAU)
Anyway, back to Primitive Cash:
Is it relevant to have authority from God in this age?As long as you believe Matthew the apostle authored the gospel now bearing his name, the answer is "yes":
First, in Matthew 10, Jesus authorizes the original disciples to go around doing miracles, vv. 1-16.
Second, Jesus then follows up immediately with statements that apply to equally well to future generations of Christians, vv. 16-28.
Third, Jesus follows up with statements that most Christians today apply to their own modern situation vv 29-42
Fourth, the allegedly risen Christ specifies that his disciples are to take ALL the teachings they received and pass them on to future Gentile converts. It's the part of the Great Commission most people miss:
18 And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.Since Matthew 10 is clearly part of the "all that I commanded you", this Great Commission was also telling the apostles to convey to future Gentile converts those comments Jesus made in Matthew 10...which would mean commissioning and exhorting new Gentile converts to perform miracles by the authority of God:
19 "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,
20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." (Matt. 28:18-20 NAU)
1 Jesus summoned His twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. (Matt. 10:1 NAU)Since it is only dispentationalists who have any prayer of trying to delimit the "all" of Matthew 28:20, I suppose Mr. Holding will, upon reading this, suddenly discover the blessed assurance of dispensationalism, then protect his pride by the childish thing he does best...hurling insulting epithets at anybody who differs. As if to disagree with Holding's bible bullshit placed one on the level of those who deny the existence of trees.
The gospels have more of the same. For example, all scholars are agreed that John is the latest of the 4 gospels, which means he wrote likely around 80 a.d. when the original apostles had mostly died off, yet as long as you insist it was apostle John who wrote it, then it must have been apostle John who was encouraging just any reader to not only believe upon the basis of his words (20:31), but that Christians in future generations would do even greater miracles than Christ did:
10 "Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.If John was writing these things around 80 or 90 a.d., its pretty clear that he was assuring even the new Christians of the same decades that they could do 'greater' works than what Jesus himself did.
11 "Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves.
12 "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.
13 "Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
14 "If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.
15 "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.
16 "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; (Jn. 14:10-16 NAU)
Holding will try to escape the obvious falsehood of the promise by spiritualizing "greater works" and then pretend that these only refer to canonizing the NT, or successfully evangelizing Gentiles, or anything else that can easily escape positive falsification, but the immediate context requires the "greater works" to be "anything" the converts ask (v. 14). Later NT authors did not allow any exegetical room for the possibility that god might not want to heal the person you ask god to heal:
13 Is anyone among you suffering? Then he must pray. Is anyone cheerful? He is to sing praises.Holding will say God's sovereign right to say "no" to such prayers is assured by other bible verses, but
14 Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord;
15 and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.
16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. (Jas. 5:13-16 NAU)
a) bible inerrancy is an obviously false doctrine that not even inerrantists can agree on, despite more than 50 years of trying. Just ask Holding how stupid and obstinate people like Norman Geisler are. Then watch him change his tune when you ask whether Mike Licona's openeness to error in the bible make him worthy of equally insulting invective. Therefore, the doctrine does not deserve to be exalted in anybody's mind to the status of governing hermeneutic, forcing the reader to believe that the only interpretation of a bible verse that can be correct is one that can be harmonized with the rest of the bible, and;
b) because bible inerrancy is so unsettled and controversial, we can only do good things by refusing to use it as a check on the accuracy of an interpretation of a bible verse, remain open to the possibility that the NT author spoke in contradiction to something else in the bible, and demand that one's interpretation be based on the author's own assertions. As soon as you start using outside data (bible inerrancy, social sciences, whatever) to help interpret the bile verse, you are imposing things on the text that could just as easily be wrong as right.
Therefore, we have a reasonable rational basis to say "fuck you" to bible inerrancy, reject using it as a hermeneutic, and insist that limiting ourselves to the text as much as possible is probably going to yield a more objective interpretation. Thus it cannot be unreasonable to say James intended this promise to be unqualified, and therefore, to charge him with error since the promise is obviously empty. Therefore, we are not "ureasonable" to say that Jesus and others in the NT promised the unqualified future generations of Christians the authority to do miraculous healings, etc. The fact that such things obviously never happen today, does not mean this interpretation is false, it means the NT authors were giving the readers empty promises.
Back to Primitive Cash:
If so, How does one know without question that a faith genuinely has said authority?That's a good question since there is no particular denomination or group in the history of Christianity that can show they have any more ability than the others to fulfill Jesus' promise to effect miracle healings.
I was LDS, and I once believed I had authority from Him to heal the sick, give blessings, and cast out demons, but I have found evidence that makes such assertions questionable at best.The dilemma here is whether Christian apologists can convincingly mitigate the failure of such biblical promises by pretending that such promises were so limited to certain early groups that the apologist can reconcile the "truth" of such promises with the obvious fact that the promises do not hold up for today's Christians.
For the fuckhead who thinks I blindly presume the biblical promise of miraculous healing never happens when I cannot possibly claim to have such extensive knowledge of world history, they are advised that I posted a direct challenge to Craig Keener to back up his claim that ANY miracle has happened within the last 100 years. He has never responded to the challenge. See here and here.
Then let such fuckhead Christians remember that many of their own are "cessationists" who are Christian in faith, but who insist the age of miracles died out with the apostles, and thus such Christians are no more impressed by "modern accounts of miracles" than I am. Richard B. Gaffin writes such an article for the Christian apologetics site "whitehoseinn", see here. He is a Calvinist, which means he disagrees with Calvinist Steve Hays of Triablogue, who believes miracles still happen today. Apparently, not even joining the right church and believing the right theology does anything to guard against your falling into error.
It's almost as if there's no god guiding this bullshit, where people end up after serious bible study is determined by nothing more than their ability to learn and their circumstances. The idea that god is "guiding" them is total dogshit.
Let's continue responding. Next item up for bids is LogicianBones, who seems to think excess verbiage might hoodwink the more gullible into thinking he has anything to say that remotely scares off skeptics:
The right or power from God to cause miraculous healing.
but the last bit reminds me of the findings I've mentioned before on here reported through CMI re: Alien Intrusion with modern evidence that Christians who call on Jesus to stop experiences faked by demons are indeed freed from the experience (evidently demons masquerading as alien abductors).But this avoids the real question. The issue is not whether demons take form as space aliens to divert Christians away from important subjects, but how we can know which Christians today have authority from god to perform any type of miracle.
The Bible does suggest this sort of thing.hence, the problem created for you and your inability to point to any miracle in the last 100 years that you think is the most impervious to falsification. You don't dare suggest an example without running the risk of having it shoved back in your face with empirically justified contempt.
I don't see much else if you mean in the miraculous category and have talked about why miracles are normally reserved for credentialing authorship of new Scripture and the canon is now closed.Sorry, I've never heard of any "miracles" being done to "credential" any scripture authorship, whether the bible or otherwise, nor am I aware of any "miracle" done to demonstrate that the "canon" ever became "closed"...unless you equate mere historical happenstance and unwillingness of some of the church to expand on the canon after the 4th century, to be a "miracle"?
The protection from demons makes sense as possibly a nearly sole exception since demons aren't supposed to be intervening in the first place so aren't part of the normal way the world works that God normally lets happen in the fallen world so that miracles can be reserved for credentials of the Bible.Hurry up and give us one modern-day miracle that you think is the most impervious to falsification.
This doesn't necessarily include all healings; it's only publicly proveable miracles that have to be reserved normally, but I wouldn't say "authority."Oh, name a "publicly provable" miracle.
We request things of God; it's up to him, since he alone is omniscient, which to actually say yes to.No, you simply mistake systematic theology for the Holy Spirit, and then you use the rest of the bible as the rose-colored glasses by which to interpret otherwise unqualified biblical promises that believers will do miracles. Read James 5:15, the context does not permit reading a "but maybe God for sovereign reasons might not do a particular healing" into it. And I already showed the reasonableness of skeptics and others to reject using bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic. So you are stuck with an interpretation of a biblical promise in James 5 that normative and non-controversial rules of interpretation shows to be reasonable, despite the fact that the promise thus proves to be empty. That is, the bible's assurances of how "authority" manifests itself in the life of Christians, are nothing but unrealistic idealism gone to seed. FUCK YOU.
(And be very careful with claims that a yes answer HAS been given in the sense of miracles of intervention versus timing; most humans aren't good at judging that kind of thing.) If you mean authority in some other sense not sure but you suggested the answer yourself; go by evidence.But the dichotomy between one's interpretations and the "teachings of Christ" is false, as you don't know any teaching of Christ apart from interpretation. Fundies are constantly talking about how something in the bible doesn't need interpretation, but they are sadly mistaken, the very act of discerning what the text means, constitutes "interpretation". Even if reading the front page of yesterdays New York Times headline involves using less controversial assumptions in the interpretive process.
Thanks for clarifying. Might be nice if the Christian believers in modern-day miracles actually produced the one they think most impervious to falsification, and accordingly stick their necks out, instead of ceaselessly hiding behind a subterfuge of methodological disagreement. See how I steamrolled Steve Hays and his attempt to pretend that skepticism of miracles is unreasonable, here. How does Hays keep the door open to miracles happening to day? By using absurdly low standards of evidence, then accusing skeptics of being unreasonable when they demand that such miracle evidence meet the same level of criteria used in most criminal investigations.
The LDS faith appears to exhibit many factors that reflect what is shown in the Bible, yet I see evidence that they are NOT the religion with His authority.From what I wrote above, you can see why: They start trying to answer your question in any serious way, and a brick wall of "why is there no serious evidence for the perpetuity of any spiritual gift today" will hit them at about 184 mph. So by pretending "that's not my bailwick" one can escape such certain embarrassment. Now leave Mr. Holding alone so he can fly 1000 miles to give his next "bible doesn't teach a flat earth" lecture to the next group of 25 people.
Because the bible promises all believers the ability to work miracles, which means it sucks to be you, an inerrantist who never sees any contradiction between bible promises and reality. you aren't going to make a reasonable case that spiritual gifts were restricted to the 1st century, so if they fail to manifest today, its because the bible promises otherwise are empty.
I would suggest that unbiblical religious views may go for that idea because they're sharing a bit of the concept of humanism -- wanting to be gods to some extent themselves, rather than admitting we're purely created by God and he has all the "authority" in the normal sense of the word). He gives us delegated authority with constraints and consequences if we behave immorally, but not inherently for miracles; why single out miracles?Ahhh, you are backtracking already. You BETTER try to think of some way to exempt the miraculous from this discussion, otherwise, you'll have to explain why modern Christians cannot produce any evidence that they ever perform any of the healings or miracles which the NT promises to all future generations of believers.
The only reason I can think of is for evidential purposes, but my answer covers this already. We already have sufficient evidence from the miraculous historical support for the Bible which stands for all time and all people.You are also high on crack: I've been asking apologists to hit me with whatever argument for Christianity they think the most impervious to falsification, whether historicity of Jesus' resurrection, of fulfillment of messianic prophecy, or proof of bible inerrancy, or whatever. So far, nobody from Mr. Holding's gang has dared confront me with any such thing. Getting their ass kicked all over hell and back probably doesn't help promote their agenda of confident dogmatism, so naturally, they bow out. This is true also for Hays, Engwer and the fools at Triablogue, who clearly know about my challenges, but don't do jack shit about it.
We shouldn't need more more more; that's actually a kind of mental unhealthiness to constantly need something new when the old is sufficient (along the lines of what James said about failing to do what the Bible says being like a person who looks in the mirror and walks away and immediately forgets what he looks like).Then count me out: i'm only asking for one solid pro-Christian argument that actually works. So far, you lose. I've already answered the Josh McDowell' bullshit, and I constantly answer Triablogue and other apologists. If you think you have anything more powerful than they have, feel free to drop by, and let's get started with the one argument you think is most impervious to falsification. Otherwise, take your confident rhetorical posturing and shove it up your loquacious ass.
It probably turns into a sort of circular-reasoning trap where they are so used to pushing the supposed importance of authority for no obvious reason other than self-serving ones that then all else becomes judged by this, kind of like "sovereignty" for Calvinists or "reason" (falsely so-called) for atheists or fundamentalism for fundies.Wow, you mean even after you accept christ, there's no guarantee of being transformed into Christ's image? Then apparently the promise of salvation is empty, since any change you made to your sinful self since you "got saved" can just as easily be explained in purely naturalistic terms.
I think it's reasonable simply to ask that those claiming such things are necessary provide sound, independant support for this claim,Ok, I see nothing in the present world that indicates ANY part of the NT is still valid today. Any truths about today's Christians are easily explainable in purely naturalistic terms, which means it is reasonable for the skeptic to reject the notion that today's Christians have experienced ANY type of "miracle". For the last time, if you think that's wrong, take the one miracle you believe is most impervious to falsification, and let's get started.
and if they can't, then we don't really need to disprove it per se, but have no reason to accept it either. (And it should also be enough that we do have sound support for the Bible!)Since you are preaching to the choir, I no more need to "refute" this than I "need" to refute the Brownsville Revival.
