Excerpt from the book: Heber Campos, Eu Sou
When God created us, He endowed us with a sense of truth printed on our souls and eager to have it. This sense of truth was disfigured by the Fall, but it is very strong in the minds of those who have been redeemed by God.
- However.
- Because of our finitude and divine ability to remain hidden (Deus Absconditus).
- Intact and inaccessible.
- And cannot be found by their creatures.
- We cannot obtain the truth about him unless it turns out to be known.
- We know that we can know the truth.
- Which is hidden in God.
- Because God is the personified truth and the revelator in words.
Because truth is one of God’s attributes, it is important that we begin to know it. This truth is partially revealed in the works of creation, because we and the things around us are his works and reflect, to some extent, a certain truth about However, I know these things because I read in the scriptures that we are his works and that we are created in Christ Jesus. If God had not revealed his truth, neither in creation nor in verbal revelation, we would never have access to it. That.
Truth is in God’s mind and men cannot seek it with their own resources, even if they were in a state before the fall. God has limited us without access to His spirit. The situation becomes even more complicated when you look at the In this case, man not only cannot not know God, but also does not want to know who the true God is, because of his internal indispositions against God, he can even deny not only the possibility of truth is known, but also his moral responsibility to it. Moreover, because of his fallen nature, man always tries to create a substitute for God and his truth.
As we have already mentioned, God is inaccessible to the human spirit, in this sense Christians of reformed orthodoxy insist that the human spirit alone cannot obtain anything from God if it is not made known. Morris says that man, as a man, has no access to God’s inner life, has no knowledge of God’s essential being. Theology is not a study of “God in Himself”, but of “God as he has revealed himself”.
Therefore, when we do theology, we do so not on the basis of “God Himself”, but on the basis of what he has revealed of himself. Scholars of theology cannot therefore have access to God, but only to his revelation. God cannot be discovered or sought. However, we can seek his revelation, whether in nature or in the scriptures, so we cannot believe in a theology that does not take divine revelation into account.
However, all these Christians believe (by the revelation that the Spirit has internalized to them) that “all the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth” (Psalm 25:10) and that Jesus Christ is the truth (John 14:6). . All the truth that God made known to men was hidden in his mind, so He let us know everything he made known to men. In that sense, according to Burridge, every truth we know is analog; that is, he agrees, he corresponds, but he is not completely identical to what is in the perfect spirit of God. Is there an analogy between what God says to his creatures and what he knows infinitely and perfectly?
The system of truth developed by Christianity must be rooted in the nature of God revealed to them, so that our knowledge is better understood it is necessary to organize and systematize it, through systematization we learn to connect the truths that are given to us. Through systematization we learn to combine important ideas into groups, so that the material is well organized and facilitates to our finite mind what is simple for the infinite mind, if the truth is not systematized, the structures of our thinking quickly become more complicated Therefore, we need to concatenate ideas to facilitate our understanding of the truth.
God, because of his infinite mind, does not need an organized system. Your very mind has knowledge of all things without necessarily having to be organized as we need it, because of the finestitude of our minds. The systematization of ideas is unique to created beings, not to the Creator.
The Creator has an absolute unified spirit that we try to understand through his revelation. As Creator, did you design us to know exactly what you want us to know?To the extent that we systematically use God’s methods, our study will produce ideas consistent with truth as it exists absolutely in God’s mind.
We are still fallen creatures and, to obtain ideas consistent with God’s truth, we must also have divine operation within us, allowing us to correctly read the revelation that he gives us of himself, which is verbal (supernatural revelation) and non-verbal. (natural revelation).
This is the only way we can, by appropriately apprehending God’s truth, teach it to men effectively and accurately; it is an apologetic task involving the knowledge and apprehension of truth; That is why Paul, writing to Teta, said that the old man must be “attached to the faithful word which is according to doctrine, so that he may have the power both to exhort with a just teaching and to convince those who contradict” (Tt 1:9).
We live in a time of repugnance for written confessions, a time of aversion to assertive dogmas. Some claim they don’t need a creed because they have the scriptures, and that’s enough for them. We must do everything we can to make sure people have a correct idea of what beliefs and confessions are, and how important they were and should have. The preservation of truth in a systematic manner Truths distributed through the scriptures can and should be placed locally for a better understanding of our finite mind Beliefs and confessions can help us better understand the truth of the spirit of God that he made available in his verbal revelation. It is a theological naivety to oppose confessionality. Without systematizing truths in writing, we run the risk that error will infiltrate the life of the church.
If the beliefs or beliefs that govern our understanding are not written, they exist only in our minds and transiently in spoken words, making it difficult to examine our doctrines in the light of the standard of God’s Word.
Like it or not, we all do theology when we interpret a text of Scripture, it is the model of all ages versus divine revelation, in the very distant past, when there was only the written Pentatheal (and some prophetic writings circulating among the people), immediately after the return of Babylon’s captivity, we know that Ezra read the scriptures (Pentateal) with the help of some leaders of the people. After reading the scripture text, we are told that they “gave explanations [ ?From the book of the law?] So you understand what you read?(Born 8. 8) They have made “theology”, that is, they have interpreted for the people the meaning of God’s law.
If no interpretation or explanation of the scriptures beyond the mere quotation of the texts is allowed, disclosure would be inaccessible to most people. Only linguists could read or understand the Bible in their original languages. You can’t comment on what the Bible says in other languages. you just read the scriptures.
What is extremely curious is that our duty to interpret the text for the people of God is based on the passage quoted from Nehemiah, which today, for us, is normative, because it is inspired by God. The principle is that we must all interpret the Scriptures, and this has been reported in the book of Nehemiah. Scripture teaches us that we must interpret it according to itself, through its teachers. This means that our beliefs, or beliefs, must govern what the teachers teach.
If the formulation of our beliefs and confessions is not desirable, what we believe cannot be examined and corrected by an objective model of God’s revelation.
All men have beliefs, written or not. If they are not written, then it is difficult to examine beliefs according to the Bible. Undritten beliefs tend to contribute to confusion and heresy. By clarifying things, boundaries, beliefs, and written confessions help identify the denials of biblical authority and protect against the elevation of human ideas to a position like that of the Creator’s revealed truth.
Therefore, if we do not put what we believe on paper, we run the risk of losing that content and making it difficult to review, which is probably the main reason for rejecting confessionalism.
The practice of confessionality is rooted in a biblical example in which church decisions were confirmed in writing and transmitted to other brethren who were not part of the leadership group. The example is recorded in Acts 15:23-29, when the Jerusalem The Council (composed of apostles and elders) came together to address the problems affecting the entire nascent Church; resolutions were written and sent to churches to correct and educate their members; it is the interpretation of God’s written truth that has served as the basis for the church to sharpen and direct its faith.
The practice of formally writing what is believed to have its origins in very distant times, since the beginning of the Christian Church, men have recorded what they believed in, which was the product of divine revelation, as well as the interpretations they received from revelation.
God has spoken, let us hear his word
This is the first volume of a series of five, unpublished in Portuguese, on the biblical doctrine of God’s verbal revelation.
Professor Dr. Heber Carlos de Campos is a renowned systematic theologian and Presbyterian pastor who combines academic scholarship, biblical orthodoxy and pastoral heart and carries with him a monumental responsibility to produce a dogmatic on a subject of vital importance for theology and religion: Christian churches.
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