[zeek]

Originally Posted by awareness

I'm reading G.H, Pember's Earth's Earliest Ages again.

It's a hoot.

Pember is following the Millerites' Great Disappointment. But didn't learn anything from it.

No. Pember made the same mistake as Miller (and James Ussher too).

And Lee followed in the same mistake they made.

That mistake is turning the Bible into jigsaw puzzle pieces, and arranging them into pictures and ways that, aren't really there; like God buried a secret code in the Bible, that only special ones can find, see, and read.

Miller produced The Great Disappointment. And Pember's predictions, based upon the rise of Theosophy, Buddhism, and Spiritualism, that he considered were coming from descending fallen angels (Nephilim - "as in the days of Noah"), has also disappointed.

And now Lee, and his movement, has become disappointing.

Albert Einstein said: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

And yet this mistake, of thinking the Bible gives special messages from God, if the verses are reassembled, happens over and over again, with disappointment after disappointment.

When are we gonna see this method, of reassembling the Bible (into God's Eternal Purpose/Economy), for what it is: Insanity? and stop falling for it?

This is like critical theory of the grand narrative or meta-narrative. The term refers to a comprehensive explanation, a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of an as yet unrealized master idea. It seems if we take your criticism to heart we must abandon the theological enterprise altogether. I favor a more moderate view which recognizes that our system, no matter how brilliant it seems, be recognized as speculative, judged on it's relative merits and not treated as the ultimate truth. The human mind has an inescapable propensity toward understanding that drives us to theorize about what we cannot understand fully. Let us simply recognize it for what it is. People want to see the big picture. We speculate about how it looks from the divine point of view. The Bible is our telescope. But we are not omniscient. So our interpretation God's POV is always incomplete and skewed this way or that. Time to try again. Though we fall short, the insight we gain through trying justifies the effort, at least for me.