God's Eternal Purpose

[awareness]

Originally Posted by zeek

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.

Then what you are saying is: William Miller, Pember, and Lee, (my examples) piecemealed the Bible into grand speculations, were/are wrong (the Great Disappointment and such), yet trying by such piecemealing justifies the effort (for you).

I think you might be right if we factor in the entertain value of such speculations.

And yes, we Christians need entertainment. And their speculations, I admit, tho wrong, are still entertaining.

Playing in the sandbox of our imagination is fun ... I have to admit that. So I concede your point.