[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
This is exegetically irrelevant nit pickery Christopher. While the phraseology is somewhat divergent, the intention in all cases is clearly pretty much the same and would have been understood as such by those to whom he was then speaking. Heck we even understand correctly 2000 years hence. Nobody has to qualify this with “unless you’re and axe murderer”. Everybody knows what it means. I have to say that you are still not as coherent as I’ve known you to be in the past and some of this doesn’t sound like you at all. You haven’t been eatin those funny little cacti that grow down there have ya Chris? That’s no way to have beatific visions ya know. You forgot Matt 22 btw.[/quote]
Nit pickery? You seem to have an allergic reaction to making distinctions among things, lately. Not sure…do they have cactus in Detroit? Can one be allergic to cacti?
Though I have to admit, when it comes to explaining away St. Peter’s instruction that there is no private interpretation, you are the king of nit pickery. So, I guess you’re more than able to call it when you see it. 
Though, you didn’t exactly explain how your claims are true. So, how come if the phraseology is divergent (the Golden Rule and Jesus’ teaching), how is the intention the same? If we can understand it 2000 years hence, how come people don’t seem to actually understand it?
Yes, axe murderer…that is why I used a more common/normal example in how people follow the Golden Rule, but fail to live up to Christ’s teaching.[/quote]
- What your analogy is meant to convey, I assume, is that there is more than one way to fulfill the Golden Rule, depending on HOW exactly a particular person wants to be treated. However, there are multiple ways of defining what it means to “love oneself” as well. You do realize that ancient philosophical schools in the Greco-Roman world disagreed tremendously over what constituted “loving oneself,” don’t you? Some believed that causing love oneself entailed avoiding pleasures that could eventually negate one’s ability to experience pleasures in the future (like drug abuse, etc.), while others maintained that the pursuit of absolute pleasure, even at the cost of one’s higher faculties, was “the good.” So depending on who is reading Jesus’ words, one could come away with wildly different understandings of what Jesus meant by “loving oneself.”
The point is, there is an inherent ambiguity in BOTH the golden rule (WHICH YOU CANNOT DENY THAT JESUS ALSO TAUGHT, AS IT’S ATTESTED IN THE TEXT) AND the love command, but that ambiguity only exists when you are reading them out of context. Neither the love command nor the golden rule were meant to be interpreted outside of the rest of Jesus’ statements. Jesus’ sermon on the Mount not only tells us what constitutes obedience to God, but also shows us how to engage our capacity for moral reasoning in accordance with God’s will. You cannot take the golden rule or the love command out of context and expect to understand them.
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Your analogy is terrible. I don’t know anyone who claims to be “following the golden rule” by participating in the debauchery characteristic of most fraternities. People who join fraternities aren’t generally trying to live their lives “according to the golden rule.” That’s just silly.
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2 Peter 1:20-21, grammatically speaking, is a VERY difficult passage to interpret, and since i have to go, I cannot engage in a systematic exegesis of it right now. However, two quick points - (1) it is NOT an indictment of what you would call “the private interpretation of Scripture;” in context, it is most certainly a statement against the notion that prophetic utterance has its origin in the prophet rather than God; (2) the object being interpreted “privately” is NOT Scripture, but PROPHECIES WITHIN SCRIPTURE. Thus, at the very least, you have NO legitimate basis for extending the boundaries of that object beyond particular prophecies. You do realize that there are a variety of genres in the Scriptures, right?
