Herb,

 You wrote:  "How did Ellen steer the fledgling Adventist movement through the theological/philosophic mine fields in the nineteenth century, without whom we would exist today as only a footnote in the pages of American religious history? "

This is the premise on which is your foundation?  If so, why is there so much controversy and lack of coherence in Adventism today?  If the church has successfully weathered the theological and philosophic mine fields of the 19th century, it would have been the first century since the Resurrection to have done so.

 From its inception, the church has been plagued with heresy and various doctrines illustrated by the many warnings in the NT.  When has the church ever been free of dissent and acheived such utopian harmony?

 Or, am I misreading you?

Herb, I think your latest posts proves the artificial nature of your so called ellipses of truth. Here you simply assert EGW lead you to this great understanding that there is no such thing as a circle of objectivity and the circle of subjectivity. How did she do that? In the world of philosophy and religion there is no such thing as a circle of objectivity. So there has always been a mixture of objective and subjective elements. You declaring certain philosphers to be on different poles is just as artificial as you ellipse.

Perhaps I am just not understanding you. Maybe you can give some examples of purely objective Christian information. You could cite something from the Bible, say "in the beginning God created". Is that objective...no it is not, the objective part is that those words were written the subjective part is what do those words mean, what value or historical relevance that document has, what does God mean? Other than the objective statement that there are some actual words, (lower Criticism) we have very little objective information. The battle between Christians or within the Adventist church is not the words (lower criticism) we can agree with the scholars that we have pretty good translations of the words and the words are found in the manuscripts that we have compiled into the Bible. The battle is always on the meaning, the interpretation. I guess I don't see any value to your ellipse of truth.

Thanks, Elaine and Ron: You are asking the right questions and perhaps that is why I suggested a Part 3!  True, Adventists have not been the swiftest in recognizing EGW's enormous theological insights that illuminate the biblical metanarrative. You both have every reason to wonder why so much rhetoric and hazy thinking continues to confuse so many. IMO. The ultimate ellipse is God/Man, Authority/Human responsibility (able-to-respond), Grace/Faith, etc. Does that put a little more light on what I mean by the ellipse of truth?  Cheers, Herb

No I can't say it helps at all. Lets take your statement:

--The ultimate ellipse is God/Man, Authority/Human responsibility (able-to-respond), Grace/Faith, etc. Does that put a little more light on what I mean by the ellipse of truth? --

Which is objective God or man? Which is subjective God or man? In that one Man is the most objective, we know he exists, God we subjectively believe in based upon a few objective things such as life and complexity but are particular views of God are very subjective.

Authority or human responsibility, which is objective and which is subjective? We can say God has all authority, not too objective since we had to arrive at God through subjective reasoning in the first place. Then again how much authority do we say God has, does He create every human being, even the ones born with half a brain who die in a couple days or those that the body miscarries? 

If I wanted to use a circle instead and the one foci would be God then all points would be equal distance from the foci. God is the center man is a point on the circle, Grace of God is the foci, faith is the point on the circle. The authority of God, responsibility of man on the circle. 

Here is the problem though, what if I said the Bible is the authority would it be the foci for everything on the circle. No becase God is the foci. In that case it would be the inspiration from God as foci, Bible on the circle. Still I have not solved the problem of objective information verses subjective information, it cannot be solved, and it is not solved by saying they each are seperate foci in a ellipse either because they are artificially assigned a foci position.

Pure pleasure to see/hear minds trying to express fundamental facts. I think the ellipse metaphor is simply another way of explaining "things as they are."  To stress a transcendent God (one who must reveal Himself to be known) without proper stress on a responsible person (one able to respond), we fall into the trap of objectivism--a problem with many idealists and religionists who think in terms of some kind of predestination. To stress the responsibility of man and his freedom at the expense of the objective reality of the transcending God, one falls into the historical swamp of subjectivism. The truth of the ellipse holds divine communication and human response in proper relationship.  That relationship is signalled by the NT word that we translate as "faith." Cheers, Herb

You know Bill, get off this new kick of yours of calling me a Catholic. You don't know what you are talking about. And pointing to the Reformation as if it contains objective truth is just silly. They, all those leaders disagreed with each other, they started churches that disagreed with each other.

But then how can you point to the Reformation and then deny personal enlightenment. 

I think you are the example Herb is looking for, someone who sees so subjectively that their subjectivity is thought to be objectivity, their ellipse is then two poles of subjectivity and all objectivity is lost...all real reason is gone. What  remains can't get along with anyone unless it conforms to their subjective reasoning which is pretending to be objective. Honestly that is why Progressive Adventists are not able to get along with Traditional Adventists, why no one gets along with fundamentalist Christians. Because at the heart of things the fundamentalist and the traditionalist are decieving themselves.

Herb tries to rectify the situation by saying there are the two foci of subjective and objective and we must realize we have to have both to understand God. But as long as people think their subjective is objective Herb's solution does nothing. Granted we need subjective and objective, but they are both used in a reasoned argument, that is the problem, when the reasoning is so totally invalid yet accepted the seperation from thinking people becomes insurmountable.

Herb, your analogy sounds intellectual, but your thinking seems pretty muddled to me.

1. Your Pole A and Pole B examples don't appear to align with any definition of subjective and objective that I am familiar with.

2. Your analogy seems to complicate and confuse a very simple concept. Choosing the best course or persepctive in life often requires avoiding extremes. This idea can probably be applied to the search for truth. But, not sure it makes sense to apply it to truth itself.

3. Not sure the evidence supports your perspectives on EGW, either. She may have preserved a religous/social movement, but how can she be credited with steering Adventism through the theological mine fields. We have for generations driven from the church those who oppose a doctrine that she endorsed that clearly contradicts Hebrews 12. Also, she makes many statements that appear to support the extreme views on both sides of the same issue without providing a clear method to reconcile them and arrive at truth.

Consider your H2O analogy a little closer. No one thinks of water as a properly balaced hydrogen and oxgyen mixture. Because you don't get water by simply mixing hydrogen and oxygen together. And you don't get truth from simply mixing insights from the two extremes.

Water is formed by two hydrogen atoms molecularly bonded to one oxygen atom. Water has distinct properties and is a stable identifiable substance of its own. The totality of the truth about hydrogen, oxygen, and water includes the very specific ways in which hydrogen and oxygen interact at a molecular level to form water. Your H2O analogy is a good one, but you needed to take a bit further to get its greatest value.

Perhaps you are oblivious to the schisms in Adventism, but they are many and consequential. They will continue until we develop a more mature perspective on truth. Our journey toward knowing truth is stalled because too many of us are afraid to move beyond the limited and incomplete (which also means distorted) truth we inherited from the pioneers (including EGW).

The secret to deriving the truth from all of the conflicting perspectives is Jesus Christ. You might say that the way to combine the hydrogen and oxygen of truth to get the "water of life" is found in Jesus Christ. Only He can make the truth an identificable and stable substance in our lives.

One must give credit to EGW for the enthusiasm with she endosed the 1888 message. We are still struggling because we missed an opportunity then. EGW was apparently not the one called to lead Adventism on that next leg of the journey, but she certainly endorsed the message that pointed the way.

Thanks Rudy, I agree that the labels of objectivism and subjectivism are tossed around too freely, depending on one's presuppositions. You may not have read my latest post above that reflects one simple way I think Truth is found in what happens when Pole A (God) and Pole B (humans) understand each other. A self-communicating God makes men and women "in His own image," that is, made to respond to His communications (responsibility). Truth is always expressed in some form of the ellipse-- law: (constitution precedent/living document; music:classic or rock; etc. Objectivity (order, harmony, etc.) connected with Subjectivity (feeling, reason, relevance, etc.) 

Truth does not happen to us until responsibie men and women acknowledge with trusting obedience the wisdom of God.Otherwise, it is only a bunch of information that one accepts or rejects.

 The history of philosophy has been a jungle of changing who is the subject: the man thinking or the thing being studied, etc. I am primarily interested in how Truth comes to us today--from God to man, from grace to faith, etc., and always in that order for the Christian. Is that easier to understand? Cheers, Herb

Elaine Nelson

Herb, I know you are a very deep thinker, but it's so deep that I'm unable to grasp the concepts you are trying to present.  Perhaps it's because I'm too dense, but I have read a little philosophy and psychology as well as many other genres, but I am failing to understand the analogies as you have presented to us.  Please help those of us who are unable to grasp your ideas.  If it's logic, I miss it. 

Elaine Nelson

Herb, I know you are a very deep thinker, but it's so deep that I'm unable to grasp the concepts you are trying to present.  Perhaps it's because I'm too dense, but I have read a little philosophy and psychology as well as many other genres, but I am failing to understand the analogies as you have presented to us.  Please us those of us who are unable to grasp your ideas.

Elaine and others: A pleasure to discuss important concepts with gracious people. It seems that I am attempting to say too much in a limited space. Perhaps Part III would help if interest continues. IMO, I am trying to look at truth in terms of how we can understand "things as they are."  When one asks, "Where is God?" Some would say, "Up there!" Others say, "In my heart!"  Who is right?

Of course both are! God is both objective and subjective, a truth that can not be said unless in an ellipse. A personal God, as authority speaks first, and man as a responsible (able-to-respond) person "responds" with NT faith. We can't have one without the other if Truth is to be discovered and appropriated. It seems that there are endless examples wherein theologicans and philosophers divide the ellipse into two circles. That's why we have idealists and realists/naturalists fighting each other for millennia.

 In other words, both are right in many respects but they miss the whole truth if they each resist the fundamentals that divide them. Example: those who define faith in terms of "belief" of information and those who define faith in terms of feeling. Of course, NT faith incorporates both concepts because it requires a hearty response of "Yes" to whatever God has said. . Help me if this does not help.  Cheers, Herb

Elaine Nelson

Ah, that does help.  I'm beginning to see the direction of thought you are taking.  So far, so good.  We will await the continuing discussion for clarity.

The assertion of Herb in "the Ellipse of Truth [Part 1]" that "truth" ("Truth"?) should be understood as having (at least?) two foci (as in an ellipse) or poles-objective and subjective components-seems to me to be avery helpful suggestion.  However, I was at a loss to understand what seems to be, on one hand, his equation of the "objective" component/focus with "transcendence" which equals "revelation" and, on the other, the "subjective" component/focus with "immanence" with "the humanresponse, such as reason and feeling."  I must admit that I was very confused.  I guess my confusion, in part, comes from not being a trained theologian.

In "The Ellipse of Truth-Part 2" there was some clarification of Herb's point that contrasted the views of Barth (described in terms of "Transcendence, Theology, Revelation") at one pole with those of Bultmann, Descartes, and Tillich (described in terms of "Philosophy, Reason, Natural Theology, Empiricism") at the other pole.  In this context, there is his suggestion that the ideal would be "to transcend this Objective-Subjective Dichotomy" and an assertion that if "Adventists do not, we are no closer to the truth thananybody else."  (This is one statementwith which I really agree).  Finally,there is the insistence that Ellen White in her writings transcended the dichotomy.  I must admit that I fail to understand this statement.

I think I share, to a large degree, Ron Corson's suggestion that there is "no actual objective truth in any form of metaphysical [religious] thought."  I would slightly modify such a statement to suggest that I am not aware of any major Adventist religious proposition that can be regarded as an "objective" statement about the world.  Perhaps the problem is the definition of the word "objective." Perhaps, if Herb would offer an Adventist religious proposition which he regards as an "objective" statement, I would be in a better position to understand his characterizations.

Erv

Erv, as usual, graciously senses that I did not fully explain myself in 800-word submissions--and as I have said before, that suggests we need at least Part Three to somewhat bring clarity to a concept that may be new to some. I am simply trying to look at "things as they are" and then see if any relevance jumps out for us today. In other words, as John makes clear in his epistles, we don't know Truth until what God has said finds a ready response in NT faith and that's why he likes to use the Greek word for "experiential knowledge." Without that human response of "Yes" there is only a mass of information that he reads in a history book.  But if we look for Truth in human reason, research, feeling, etc., ONLY we end up within the camp of subjectivists with all kinds of interesting opinions.

If we look at the act of knowing without reference to the ellipse of truth, we get into the age-old see-saw of whether man is the subject or the object of his thought or sight is the subject. That is an entirely different world of thought, completely different from what I have been pointing to.

I know I have been teasing some when I said that EGW has been the only thinker since Paul who has transcended the objective/subjective dichotomy.  Let's see if I can give you some examples in Part 3. IMO, what we are discussing zeroes in on the recovered distinctiveness of the New Testament gospel.

As far as suggesting at least one objective thought that Adventists would propose, I would have to fall back on the ellipse of truth. I can not make an objective statement, such as "the seventh day is the sabbath" without recognizing that I have also accepted the validity of the Fourth Commandment and the theology of Jesus. Thus, the ellipse: revelation speaking to me who responds with intelligent, trusting faith. I can't have one without the other.  Cheers, Herb

As for the 800 words, what possible reason is there for such a limit. This is a blog and text is cheap. Seriously cheap very little megabytes needed for multiple pages of text. That is something you all should consider abandoning.

As for your ellipse I sense a little better what you are trying to say but fail to see much value in it. Even if your ellipse idea is correct you would have varying intersections of where different peoples views meet even if they were working from your too poles. Even acknowledging one person is using subjective and objective ideas to make up their theology or philosophy knowing that they are using info from those two poles does not help us much if at all. The only thing that helps if when we know specifically what their ideas are and they express why they arrive at them. since we all value different information and concepts differently we have to assess their statements with our statements. 

So I don't think the ellipse helps us nearly as much as the simply acceptance that we don't all agree and we don't have to agree on everything. The real problem comes from the conclusions people make whether they are using your ellipse idea of not, when they say you must believe as I believe to be in my church to teach in my school to be saved by my God, that is a manifestation that destroys.

Ron: Addressing your opinion that we should abandon our 800 word limit (it's actually 800-1000) for blogs, the industry standard for blogs averages between 500 – 600 words because attention span is so short. According to Site Meter stats the average reader spends 96 seconds reading the average blog.That's about half of Herb's current blog. Others are even shorter to rank better on Search Engine Optimization.

Hope that clarifies things better for you.

Marcel Schwantes

Online Editor, Adventist Today

Hello Marcel:

If you guys were seriously concerned about hits then you would not go two weeks between blog posts. Short attention span theater is not all that germaine to those really interested in theology or philosophy blogs. Now if I am looking for some brief statement and a link to a news article then a short blog entry would be expected.

Then again if something is confusing and makes little sense it is doubtful many people will read to the end of the article let alone bother with part 2 a couple weeks later. Site meter and industry standards don't mean a whole lot to the reality because for the site meter people are searching for something and they can tell very quickly if the article applies to what they are looking for. Those people aren't going to read an article unless it fits what they are looking for whether it is 500 words or 1500+ words. No doubt we would all help if we put an abstract of our articles, I might try that sometime and see how well it works or how easy it is to do it.

While I have your attention, is there some way you can make this text box visible to the spell check of the google toolbar.  I hate not having my spell check working here.

Herb,

Remember you from Homeletics at PUC in 1955.

So, it seems you're still alive and well after

54 years...good for you!

I've spent 30 years preaching and revivals

in various Adventist churches.

That was a great joy...lifting up the Lord Jesus Christ

to others.

BUT...believe me:

"There will be no Adventists in Heaven"!

For all in Heaven are followers of the Lamb.

Very few SDAs know anything about the joy

that comes with the Chfristian life.

SDAs are taught by those who have never known

this joy themselves. Pastors, teachers, and parents

were brought up not knowing anything

about salvation!  I have been saved

for over 50 years and don't ever plan

to be 'unsaved' or lost! 1 John  talks about those

who KNOW that they have eternal life!

No, sadly, most SDAs do NOT know of the joy

of salvation and where they're going to spend

eternity!

If a person is a Christian...they've got something
very important to say!

"Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!!!

your friend in Christ,

Bill Mead - www.mead-page.com

Herb-

I believe you can and should make a simple explanation of what you believe in the allowed number of words. We should not have to have a degree in religion to understand your points.

Truth Seeker