CADRE Comments

"Mysticism is still very much alive, and still using spiritual intimidation to demean the uninitiated. People today who claim to have had heavenly visions or spellbinding experiences are often simply puffed up with idle notions, using their claims to intimidate others into elevating them. As the apostle Paul told the Colossian believers, that kind of mysticism is the product of an “inflated . . . [and] fleshly mind.” Those who embrace it have turned from their sufficiency in Christ, who alone produces true spirituality. Don’t be intimidated by them. Apparently the Colossian mystics claimed that anyone not having similar esoteric visions or embracing similar doctrines was disqualified from obtaining the prize of true spirituality. In reality they themselves were the disqualified ones. Mysticism is the idea that direct knowledge of God or ultimate reality is achieved through personal, subjective intuition or experience apart from, or even contrary to, historical fact or objecti

Argument: (1) we trust perceptions that work for us in navigating the world (2) we judge by criteria Regular. Consistent Shared experiences that fit this criteria we judge to be valid. (3) Religious Experience "RE" fits this criteria (4 )enables navigation (5) :. we are warranted to trust RE as indicative *We assume reality by means of a Jugement *we make such jugements based upon criteria *Because RE fits the same criteria we are justfied in making the same assumption; ie that these experinces are idicative of a reality. The criteria: If our experiences are: * Regular * consistant * inter=subjective * navigational Then we assume our eperience3s reflect reality. VIII. The Thomas Reid Argument. A. How do we Know the external world exists? Philosophers have often expressed skepticism about the external world, the existence of other minds, and even one's own existence. Rene Descartes went so far as to build an elaborate system of rationali

My argument "Community as author" postulates that if we don;t know the individual authors of the gospels we can still look to the communities that produced the gospels as the authors because they contained not only the actual authors/redactors but many eye witnesses, to the events of Jesus' life. That involves a discussion of the role or oral tradition in the making of the gospels because it was oral tradition that persevered the testimony of the  eye witnesses in the gap between the events and the writing of the gospels. Modern liberal theology has given the name "form criticism" to this discussion. Form criticism is a philosophy and methodology of Biblical criticism, "Criticism" in relation to the Bible does not mean talking about how bad the Bible is (too long and hard to understand) but refers to a means of analysis in a systematic sense. Form criticism seeks to analyze the historical development of  the New Testament by understanding the form

Skeptics of the New Testament usually assume a long gap exists between the events in the gospels and the recording of the events in writing. They further tend to assume that the first source of writing about these events was the gospel of Mark. Thus they assume events were exaggerated and miracles were made up and so on during this gap period. In this essay I am going to dispel this myth by demonstrating that there were written records of the gospel events that existed before the writing of Mark's gospel. I will further demonstrate that there were multiple sources transmitting the information. Mark's was not the first gospel written but merely the first of the canonical gospels to be written. None of the early works survive in MS form but we find traces of them in copies of latter works. Nor was Mark' the first teaching of the Resurrection. I. Traces of Gospel Material in Gap A , The circulation of Gospel material can be shown in four areas:  (1) Oral tradition  (2