Scriptural Logic

Scriptural Logic i.e. logic which is defined by Scripture, taking the philosophy of Christianity and arguing for it based on the merits and cohesiveness of the Bible.

However for Scriptural Logic to be true or even plausible 1) God must be real, 2) God must be sovereign, 3) God must be Trinitarian, 4) God must be glorified.

First, if God is not seen as real then Scripture is nothing more than a compilation of odd stories to be used like Aesop’s Fables. For if God is not real, then Scripture is not holy, and it’s words are not useful apart from refutation against those misguided believers.

Second, God must be sovereign. He must be in absolute complete control of all things ever. Evil, good, bad, fun, sad all things must needs be under his authoritative control all lives all desires all wants. For if God is not sovereign then Scripture is not but a compilation of stories wherein God’s will is mutable and may be acted upon and changed by the will of man.

Third, God must be Trinitarian. God must be seen as acting and moving throughout the entirety of Scripture as the three-in-one God he is. For if God is not seen, as Trinitarian Scripture becomes the action of an ever-changing god who in one moment is capricious and in the next he is vindictive and teenager-ish.

Fourth, God must be glorified. The aim of all of creation, the end for which it was made must primarily be the glory of God. So it is understood that from creation to re-creation God has done everything, from the fall of Satan to the fall of man to the cross, from death to life, salvation to damnation, love to hate all things are done for himself, by himself to the glory of himself. Therefore in the gospel message God is aiming at glorifying himself by gather worshipers for his namesake.

If God is not about glorifying himself then Scripture can only be read as a God who is both merely responding to the wills of his subjects and is being vindictive and capricious for no reason.

Scriptural Logic is, or at least, should be apart of the Christian life, because in many ways God is believed only to be a stopgap for the times of life, which are difficult. Rather than life being pressed into the mold of God and the leftovers being thrown away, God is forced into the mold of life and is consequently a bastardized form of God, which is not God at all is leftover. But since it suits the shaper their belief is characterized by nothing else than mismatched verses and false pretenses.

Whereas in the process of Scriptural Logic one cannot at any one time say they have arrived at a point of understanding the Godhead and therefore they must, for they are forced to by sheer beauty, continually be in awe of the Creator of such a system.

Grasping at the Trinity

This weekend while we were in John 1:1-18 we discussed, in part, the Trinity, the doctrine of the person(s) of God. While Mathematically it makes no sense (3 is 1), and all of our descriptions of it fail (for all we have is what we know and all we know, save God, is creation) this doctrine is reasonable and sound.

Another way to say God is Trinitarian in nature is to say, “God is love.”

God is love means God is Trinity.

Let me explain.

God the Father is eternal. He is the most perfect Being in the entire universe and as such he deserves worship from all other beings including himself. Therefore he must love himself above all things. He, the Father, loves himself in such a perfect fashion so as to be the person of the Son. The love between the Father and the Son is so perfect and so complete so as to be the person of the Spirit.

And since God is eternal we cannot say that there was any one time when God was not God and the Trinity did not exist.

This love is one. It cannot be added to nor subtracted from. For we cannot say the love between the three was so perfect and so complete so as to create another being (for there is no other being).

3 is 1 and is stronger than any other number. Given three points you’ll have a triangle, the strongest form in geometry, engineering and architecture.

Yet the roles of these three (one) are different.

Think of a play. (This description fails in the end but serves a purpose)

Seeing the director as God the Father, the stage manager as God the Spirit, and the lead actor as God the Son. Such are their roles.

The Father oversees, coordinates and plans the play; he is the orchestrator of it all. The Spirit moves props and flats into position so as to make the movements of the Son effective. Thus all eyes are turned onto the Son, the one sent into human history to redeem.

Yet the Trinity is still beyond us and for that we worship God, because we must confess his ways to be higher than our ways and his thoughts to be higher than our thoughts and his very being to be higher than our being.