Help with question from my philosophy prof friend

God, Christ, & The Holy Spirit
DanielGracely
Posts: 115
Joined: Thu Jun 10, 2010 9:43 pm

Re: Help with question from my philosophy prof friend

Post by DanielGracely » Tue Sep 14, 2010 8:08 pm

Darin, Sorry; found it by googling it differently:
"The meaning of" foreknowledge Edgar.
It is available at evangelicalarminians.org. Here is the link...

http://evangelicalarminians.org/files/E ... wledge.pdf

...and here is a brief excerpt from the article. I have removed the supporting footnotes for ease of reading. Speaking of foreknowledge Edgar writes:
It is exegetically incorrect to consider only those passages where God is the subject. Still, this approach is common. The assumption involved in so restricting the study is that the meaning is different, and not merely modified, when God is the subject. Several reasons show this approach to be incorrect: (1) The meaning of a verb is not dependent on, nor does it vary with the subject of the verb. (2) Other words do not have a different meaning when used of God. How do interpreters know that this one does? (3) God has given Scripture to communicate to humans. He uses human language with its normal meanings. If words have different meanings when God is the subject, the interpreter cannot know what they are, nor if our concepts about God are accurate. (4) Why would God deliberately make the communication difficult? Why would He use words with different meanings than normal when He could use readily available words that clearly communicate? If this term normally means “foreknowledge,” but when used of God, it means “electing love, intimate knowledge, or determining choice,” why use it here? Why not say, “electing love.” Such an approach is illogical. (5) If words do not have their normal meaning when used to describe God, there can be no objective control on interpretation, leaving each interpreter to read in his theological opinions. Thus, to study only those uses of proginwskw where God is the subject is defective hermeneutically and logically.

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