Hi, I moved the old Talk material from Sola scriptura to its own Talk archive page, with a link at the Sola scriptura talk page. Hope you don't mind, but I also edited your comment, just removing the part about deleting the old discussion. It seems to be the convention to archive old discussion rather than delete it; for example, Resurrection of Jesus Christ's Talk page (I think). I truly appreciate the work you're doing, and hope we can agree on a balanced NPOV article. Wesley
- Thank you Wesley. I'm looking forward to seeing what you might want to revise in the re-written article. Mkmcconn
Hold everything. Upon re-reading, I now understand why I haven't understood some of the things you were saying. We have been using the same word to refer to two different things! You are the word predestination where I am more familiar with the term omniscience! I have read a bit here and there about how various Christian groups believe in something else called predestination; but this use of the word had to do more with Calvin's views, which are actually a somewhat separate idea. I think that the problem with the article, as it currently stands, is that it doesn't yet make clear in the beginning that this same word has many different uses. The same problem used to exist in the entries on prayer, propehcy and revelation, where people used the same word to descrive radically different ideas. Wikipedia now has clear descriptions of these different meanings. Perhaps we could compare the structure of those articles, and apply it to the predestination article. I am thinking that the article should start out by saying something like: RK
- The term predestination has a number of uses. Some Christian groups, especuially those influenced by Calvin, use this term to describe a pre-judgeing by God of a person's afterlife fate before they are born. Another distinct use of this term in Christian communities is to refer to the consequences of God's omniscience. In this latter view, it is held that God is both omniscient and atemporal (out of the flow of time in our universe) and thus sees past, present and future. Given this belief about God, one can say that God knows the future, and hence futures can be said to be predetermined, while at the same time allowing for the existence of free will. Other faiths (such as Judaism) accept te possibility that God is atemporal, but use the term omniscience instead of predestination.
Any thoughts? RK
- I like the direction of this, and I'm grateful for the efforts you are making. I've left fuller comments at Talk:Predestination Mkmcconn
Just put in a very brief stub for Maximus the Confessor, per your request. :-) Wesley
Just noticed you're interested in writing about ecumenism. When you get to that, you might want to take a look at the religious pluralism article. It could probably use some help itself, plus some material there could probably be moved to or replaced by a good ecumenism article, with a link from religious pluralism pointing to it. Wesley
- Thanks for the Maximus the Confessor article. He's a particularly interesting fellow. The article on ecumenism is going to be especially tricky, and probably unavoidably will invite conflict. I'll try hard not to touch off the powder. -- Mkmcconn
Got a real tough question for you: Can you define "Christian" in strong enough terms and with enough detail that we can apply this definition to any church and determine whether it is or is not Christian? (Hint: all Christians believe or do this; no Christians believe or do that.)
I think this would accelerate the completion of the Jehovah's Witnesses article. --Ed Poor 17:28 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)