Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Also apropos of nothing, really: it may well be that Lee's usage of "God's economy" wasn't his idea but was cribbed from the same 19th century sources that Vincent and Alford used, and which were often re-used by Lee with the barest of re-packaging.
|
I was looking at a parallel list of renderings for 1 Tim 1:4, and I noticed that both the ASV and Darby versions use the word
dispensation. It's kind of interesting when you consider how much Lee was influenced by Darby. Dispensationalism is another subject all together, but it seems to me that such a 'lens' goes hand in hand with an underlying presumption of understanding everything that God is doing.
Some like Lee have sought to define various 'ages', starting points, ending points, key players, God's 'thought' during that age. It all sounds not much different than what Paul calls "endless genealogies". I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with such a lens, but it all goes back to what is being presumed. If someone wants to presume that at a certain point in time, God was doing X as part of His plan, it may very well be a possibility, but the same token, the door should be left open to consider alternatives. More importantly, the whole point of what Paul was talking about is that such things are minor and it is questionable as to how much time/discussion they are deserving of.
If people want to obsess themselves with plotting events on timelines, or determining which person 'turned' each age, and so on, then they should realize that such an undertaking is a genealogy of sorts. Above anything else, it is a distraction from the more important things. Finally, to insist upon any extrapolated understanding or interpretation is perpetuating a 'myth', and that was exactly what Paul warned about.