Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Intellectual suffering

I  really like this excerpt on intellectual suffering by Dr. Poythress from his book Inerrancy and the Gospels:
God and man have been reconciled, and so there will be fruit in the progressive reconciliation taking place in our hearts. Our hearts become reconciled to God not only in the sense that God forgives our sins, but in the sense that our hearts come more and more into submission and conformity to the mind of God and of Christ, who is the Logos, expressing himself in Scripture. Christ calls us as his disciples to bear our cross daily that we may "know him [Christ] and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death" (Phil. 3:10). We may therefore expect to have our minds and our hermeneutical principles and all that is intellectually dear to us suffer and be crucified and raised, in the process of having our minds  conformed to the rationality of the Logos (Rom. 12:1-2). Intellectual anguish among God's people is for our good (Rom. 12:5-11).

We may conclude that intellectual difficulties with the Bible are not, in the end, alien to the mystery of the suffering of Christ. In knowing God's Word we know truly, but not transparently, and not without being beset by mental anguish at times. (99, emphasis mine)

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