But what does this mean exactly? Simply a witness in your own heart? Doesn’t this boil down to subjectivism–it’s God’s Word because I feel it is? How is this different from the Mormon “burning in the bosom.” God apparently has told them that the Book of Mormon is God’s Word as well. . . . You’re sure that God isn’t really speaking to them, but you expect people to take seriously your claim that God has spoken to you. It just starts getting crazy.
Where did I say that it was a matter of feelings at all?
Part of the cryptic and symbolic nature of language, and the compression necessary to post here, is that complex reflections and realizations get compressed.
‘Did I hear God rightly?’ is everyone’s question. Insisting that one cannot know, or that it is always some ‘burning in the bosom’ (not my phrase, not my experience,not even close) that God speaks, indicates a curious lack of faith. Can and does God speak to the individual believer? We all say yes, even these Catholics who are hoping God will speak individually to each Protestant and tell them to join up with the Church of Rome.
The internet is replete with conversion stories in every direction. You can find journeys home to the Catholic Church from the Orthodox and Protestants, journeys home to the Baptist Church from the same, journeys home to the Orthodox from Protestants and the Orthodox, journeys home to LDS or Islam or Buddhism or fried chicken or sexual transition. All seem to follow the same pattern of a realization that the old way was wrong and the new way was right.
You have asked that question: how do I know? I guess we can add epistemology to my list of suggested topics. How do we know anything? If I get an impression or something I check it out. Over the years I have come to the realization that God did really speak to me, although I cannot p(name removed by moderator)oint the day or the time or the method or even the thought. Intellectually that stinks, because I like everything laid out in syllogistic perfection with comments at the appropriate place, but that’s not how life works. It makes sense to me that God spoke, and spoke clearly enough for me to know it was Him.
Note that I don’t dismiss intuition and feeling at all. They are part of the picture. But they aren’t the whole picture. And short-circuiting the question of what role one’s intuitions/feelings have by asserting baldly “God told me so” is unreasonable and unconvincing.
Also, I’m very skeptical that you really have a personal conviction that God has told you that every single book in the 66-book canon, taken individually, is inspired. You really have a “witness of the Spirit” or whatever you want to call it about the book of Nahum?
Where did you get that from? If the Bible is God’s Word, then every book in it is it also.
I had, if you wish to call it so, a ‘witness of the Spirit’. Now I have faith.
Following on, you will ask, what translation? Why not the 73 book canon instead of the 66 book? What about the end of Mark and the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery? At that level, I don’t know in the same way. God spoke and these are the translations from the inspired autographs. We try to do the best we can in being as faithful as we can in representing it as well as we can in English so that we can learn of Him. Somehow He works in that process, although we can expect mistakes along the way. Yet none of the textual deviations in the Greek New Testament manuscripts in their thousands requires a change in doctrine. God is actively involved in the transmission of His Word and in the reception of it by each of us.
To ignore how the Bible came to be? It came to us via fallible leaders within the Catholic Church, beginning with the fallible apostles. Could you provide the quote from V2 that you are referring to?
