Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
I appreciate your candor. You admit Gaffin was in this discussion and could be relevant to the issue at hand and that you don't recall what his arguments were. But, you won't even bother to read it because your mind is made up. Furthermore, if you were to read it and found the arguments coherent you still wouldn't accept it because of the first premise.
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Not a very fair assessment of my comments — or the truth. I said I had read it sometime earlier and that the content had made an impression that remained, but that I could not recall specific details and did not have the desire to approach it from the angle you desired.
The impression was of an alternate Lee. Someone who was overly stuck on the idea that "life giving" associated with "spirit" had to mean Holy Spirit when the context said "altered body" or "body of a different kind." As I recall, the only one of the Three with an image was the Son. And his image was somewhat altered in resurrection. And Paul is talking to the Corinthians about the body they will have in resurrection. It is described in a manner that is both physical and spiritual (sort of ghost-like). And that is what was seen with Jesus after his resurrection. He was there, then not there. He didn't need to ascend into heaven — only to disappear once more without reappearing. But he ascended for the sake of the followers to make it clear that the appearances would be ending.
Yet, as he said, he was always with them.
Gaffin, like Lee, has forced onto the scripture his overly-narrow view of words. Awareness reposted a portion. And there it was, just as I had said I remembered.
So dismissing my position as lazy scholarship is rather shoddy on your part. Do you disagree that I have addressed Gaffin reasonably according to what he said even if I did not bother to do it by dissection? I have read it. It was not impressive as having (finally) provided a reason to accept the insertion of a partial-sentence declaration on the Trinity that had no bearing on the larger discussion in which it is claimed to exist. A declaration that would seem as ridiculous as that dog with the speaking collar in
Up! that would suddenly look off to one side an shout "squirrel!" then return to the conversation at hand.
Your statement that you will not "carry my water" shows that you cannot be bothered to make a point that you think is there. And that I did not see when I read through it some time back.
The passage is clear and complete, and includes the challenged phrase without reference to the Holy Spirit. It stands as coherent and cohesive. If you want to join Lee to shoehorn the Holy Spirit into the conversation, then you need to provide something that is better than another outlier opinion. One that provides a reason to reconsider. I saw nothing. And you want me to dissect why I saw nothing to make me reconsider. You want the portions that I did not think worthy of reconsidering? Try the whole thing.
He unites the earlier discussion of Christ's resurrection with the following discussion (in response to the question "
But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?") as if it is still a discussion of Christ. When he says "
In all of Paul, as far as I can see, there is no assertion about the Spirit’s activity as pivotal, even momentous, as this" he has ignored that there has been no mention of the Holy Spirit for some period of verses, possibly even for the entire chapter, before or after. Unless you
have to read "life-giving spirit" as meaning the Holy Spirit.
In other words, Gaffin has declared it as so, but not provided a reason that it is so. I read on and find Gaffin to be consistently doing what Lee did. Insisting that because a word, or words, that have multiple meaning, are found in some other places to have the meaning of the Holy Spirit, then they must here as well. Yet, accepting the multiple meanings, it should not be so easy to completely ignore the context that screams for one of the alternate meanings.
In short, I have reread most of his little tome and found that he keeps inferring that it must be there because it has to be. He is clearly the kid with a new hammer. And everything looks like a nail. And the marks all over the walls, furniture, etc., prove it.
If you think Gaffin has made a point that is worthy of reconsideration, then you pull it out and demonstrate how it is not just another "I just see nails" presumption. Otherwise, your claims of my "intellectual complacency" are appearing to be a cheap shot intended to undermine my position without anything but insults. In other words, a strawman.