Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
My critique of the WL model of "God's economy is threefold: first that it has no basis - nowhere did Paul say, "God's economy is 'X'" and WL continued or fleshed this out. No, WL simply said, "God's economy is 'X'" and fleshed out his interpretation with various homespun analogies. . . .
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This is what so many have been pointing out, both directly and indirectly, for years.
Lee used analogies as proof of concept.
But analogies are, at best, a means of clarifying or understanding a concept that has already been proved.
In other words, you have to establish that something is true, then if that something needs further explanation, an analogy might be useful.
An analogy is descriptive. It has no power to establish, but rather to better understand something else. If you haven't established anything, there is nothing to which an analogy can be made.
An example I like is Lee's extrapolation in some verse (one of Paul's letters, but I can't remember which — makes me feel a little like the writer of Hebrews who says "and somewhere it is written . . .") where the Greek word used is one that has been transliterated in English to dynamo (not in the Bible as such). Then he goes on to bring every related bit of technology related to dynamos into the discussion. So a single statement of the power of God (or Christ) becomes evidence of the power plant, the wires, and the electricity — the triune God.
But nothing is actually there except the power of God. The rest is supposition based on milking a metaphor.
In the case of Lee's theory on God's economy, he creates a lens through which the entire Bible must be filtered, modified, and even excised because of his extrapolations as he declares "it is like when . . . ."
But worse than that, when Paul wrote those few verses in which the term "God's economy" appears (in some translations), he did not say that God's economy was something to teach. Rather it was the result of the collection of healthy teachings. So God's economy is not the source of how to teach, or what to teach, but is what comes from whatever is profitably taught. In other words, God's economy is a very broad thing that encompasses everything that derives rightly from the teachings of the word of God. It is not a limiter by which the word of God is straight-jacketed into some narrowly-defined thing (falsely) labeled "God's economy."
If God's economy is claimed to be a basis for dismissing the word of God as written in favor of something not written, or for simply dismissing parts of the word of God, then it cannot rightly be "God's economy." Maybe the economy of some"god," or self-proclaimed 4th of the godhead. (Can't call it the Godhead because there are only three in that Godhead.)