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Marketing in Confusion: A Response to Dale Tuggy, Part 2

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 For Part 1 Right Out of the Gate It suffices to say that I was immediately struck by the opening sentence and the error inherent in it: In trinitarian tradition, the one God is the Trinity. Notice the problem? If not, read the sentence again, slowly. The problem is literally the matter of the article “the”. I mean, there are other problems but for the purpose of this examination, we need to focus in on the use of language, and the language that the writer, assuming that this is Tuggy, uses is very important.   With that being said, note the two related phrases in his opening volley “ the one God ” and “ the Trinity ”. One needs to ask, does Tuggy define these two phrases anywhere in his presentation? Reading through, I cannot find any sufficient definition of what Tuggy means by  “Trinity” or “the Trinity”. But he does give us a definition of “God”, at least as far as what needs to be concerned, and he does this in the first premise of his stated argument: when Tuggy says “God”, what

Marketing in Confusion: A Response to Dale Tuggy, Part 1

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Introduction Theologically, I am a Trinitarian both of necessity and of conviction. Part of this is because I was raised to be Trinitarian, but also this is because I have to be able to interact with the revelation of God in and through Scripture. I believe that Scripture teaches us of a God who is completely unique, transcendent and disconnected from human affairs and yet is fundamentally immanent and completely concerned with human beings.  This duality conflict with what one finds in the so-called “God of philosophy”, a God who is distant, emotionally disconnected, unavailable, and unknowable in any real way. Our knowledge of this God is purely by inference. Such a God doesn’t really care about the world or people. This kind of God is fully acceptable to atheists and secularists because it makes no demands upon them. It appeals to those who proclaim man’s autonomy because it has no desires or, if it does, it is subject to man’s whims. But what of the God of the Bible? How do we det

Cornering the Market on Morality

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Introduction We would like for moral questions to be simple: X is bad, Y is good. There is something about clear-cut moral statements that is both refreshing and freeing…until it intersects with something that we like to do, then situations tend to get a little sticky. We don’t necessarily like the fact that there can be an exception to a rule, or that exceptions themselves can have rules. We tend to want to live in an all-or-nothing state: either something is all bad, or all good. Christians, especially, seem to live in this state of haze between moral poles of rigid objective morality or utter subjectivism. As I’ve written elsewhere , I don’t think that it’s necessarily possible to live a moral life with any consistency without both and to try to force the issue induces something of a fallacious dichotomy. Probably one of the clearest examples where this dichotomy seems to appear, biblically speaking, can be found in the law, where we have--principly--the apparently strict admonition