Thursday, February 22, 2007

Is "All truth God's truth" really true?

I have heard many Christians say "all truth is God's truth." This caused me discomfort because it doesn't seem biblical. I came across this article (while looking for something else) and thought that it had some very good points. Its from PsychoHeresy Awareness Ministries. I haven't yet checked out their website, so always proceed with caution, but I found this article honoring to the Word and the Lord.

Quote:

Lately, however, the important theological category of general revelation has been broadened to include all truth-claims made as a result of human efforts to understand the many aspects of the created order. Those who have broadened the category argue that the Scriptures are indeed the "special" revelation which God has left to us and that, because God is the Author of the entire created order, whenever men discover "truth" in that order, we can refer to that humanly discovered "truth" as "general revelation."....

Bookman summarizes this issue of Coe’s bibliology in a personal letter to us, in which he says:

The issue here relates very directly to the character of inspired Scripture. Wisdom literature, such as that which is represented by the sage in the book of Proverbs, is one of many precious and profitable genres of biblical literature. But the recorded message of the sage, no less than that of the prophet, the Gospelist or the writer of a New Testament epistle, is authoritative and dependable simply and only because it was breathed out by God (2 Tim 3:16). The prophets received their messages by means of dreams (Num 12:6); that doesn’t suggest that the dreams of men today are just as authoritative as those of the prophets. The sage normally received his message by means of observation; it is erroneous to conclude that therefore the observations of any man are as authoritative and/or dependable as those observations of the sage which are recorded in the pages of sacred Scripture. Note carefully that the debate here is not whether any of the observations made by human beings might be true. Rather, the debate is whether the observations of men today ought to be regarded as possessing the absolute certainty and/or normative authority which the Bible possesses in all of its parts. The words of the sage are not certain and authoritative because they were discovered by observation, any more than the words of Jude are certain and authoritative because he cites them from the apocryphal book of Enoch (Jude 14). The words of all biblical writers are authoritative because the recording of them was done under the careful supervision of the Holy Spirit which is known as "inspiration." To regard the words of men as possessing the same sublime dignity and ultimate authority that the words of the Bible possess is remarkably dangerous (italics in original).

Unquote.

For the whole article go here.