Source: Trinity, Robert Morey, Chapter 2, pp. 21-37
| The Humanist A Priori | The Christian A Priori |
|---|---|
| Man starting from and by himself without any outside information can understand himself and the world around him. | God has revealed to us in the Bible the information we need to understand ourselves and the world around us. |
| Man is the measure of all things, including God. | God is the measure of all things, including man. |
| Man created god in his own image. | God created man in His own image. |
| If God actually exists, he, she, or it is unknowable. | We can know God because He has revealed Himself. |
| Theology is the study of man's feelings, hopes, wishes, and fears. | Theology is the study of God's self-disclosure in Scripture. |
| All concepts of God are relative, subjective, cultural, and existential. No concept is true or false. | To think of God in any other way than how He has revealed Himself in Scripture is idolatry. |
| The Word "God" can mean whetever you need to find self-fulfillment. | There is but one true God. All other gods are false. |
| All religions are "true" to the degree they satisfy the psychological and social needs of those who believe in them. | Christianity is the one true religion. All other religions are false and idolatrous. |
| Everything is relative. There are no absolutes. Man is accountable only to himself. | God has revealed in Scripture the absolutes by which He will judge us one day. |
| History is an evolutionary chance-driven process which does not follow any predetermined plan or path. | All things happen according to the will and predetermined plan of God. Things do not happen by chance. |
| History has no meaning other than what man projects upon it. | Everything has meaning and significance because it is a part of God's plan of the ages. |
| All beliefs arise from the surrounding culture which is the product of meaningless chance. Thus all beliefs are meaningless. | Christianity is not derived from culture, but from Christ. Its source is special revelation and, thus, it has meaning. |
| The Bible is guilty until proven innocent. | The Bible is innocent until proven guilty. |
| The Bible is not inspired anymore than the Qur'an or the Vedas. | The Bible is the inspired Word of God and all other books, such as the Qur'an, are false in content and satanic in origin. |
| We must get "behind" the text of the Bible to the psychological makeup and experience of those who wrote it. | We must not venture beyond the text into wild speculations as to who was feeling what. To psychologize the Bible is to corrupt it. |
| We must project our own subjective feelings into the text to understand what the text is saying to use today. | The meaning of the text lies in the text itself and not in the interpreter. |
| The Bible is fraudulent in its claim of authorship. Moses did not write the Pentateuch, Isaiah did not write Isaiah, Daniel did not write Daniel, etc. | The Bible was written by the authors assigned to each book. Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Isaiah wrote Isaiah, etc. |
| The Gospels were written by early Christians as a witness to what the word "Jesus" meant to them in the context of their lives. | The Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. |
| The Gospels do not tell us anything about the historical Jesus. | The Gospels tell us who the historical Jesus was and what He said and did. |
| The Gospels are fictional in nature and contain myths and legends created by the early Christian community as a faith response to their existential encounter with the Other. We need to "get behind" those myths to get to the historical Jesus. | The Gospels give us a true historical account of the birth, life, ministry, teaching, miracles, death, burial and resurrection of Christ. There are no legends or myths in the Gospels. |
| All attempts to "get behind" the Gospels to the real Jesus have failed. No one knows anything about the historical Jesus. | The historical Jesus is revealed in the Gospels. We can know who Jesus is only by the Bible. |
| If Jesus existed, He did not think of Himself as the Messiah or as God and He did not claim such to His disciples. | Jesus knew that He was both God and Christ. He taught His disciples that He was such. |
| Jesus was "divine" only in the same sense in which we are all divine. | Jesus Christ was the only incarnation of deity. |
| Jesus was mistaken on many things. For example, He thought that the end of the world would happen in his day. | As incarnate deity, Jesus was not mistaken on anything. He did not teach that the end of the world would happen in His life-time. |
| The apostles mistakenly believed that the end of the world would take place in their life-time. | While the return of Christ could take place, the apostles never claimed that it would definitely take place in their life-time. |
| If someone uses the terminology of contemporary philosophies to express his ideas, then those ideas actually come from those contemporary philosophies. Common terms imply common ideas and origins. | You can use contemporary terminology while deriving your ideas elsewhere. It is a logical fallacy to think that common terms means common ideas or origins. |
| Since the early Church used Platonic terminology in its creeds, it derived its concept of the Trinity from Plato instead of from the Bible. | Early Christians used those contemporary terms which best expressed the teachings of Scripture. They did not derive their ideas of God from Plato, but from the Bible. |
| Paul created Christianity out of the pagan Greek mystery religions. | Paul did not derive the Gospel from the mystery religions. God revealed it to him through special revelation. |
| The attributes of man determine the attributes of god. What man is, God can be. What man is not, God cannot be. | We must not make the error of thinking that God is like us. |
| Christianity as a religion was not created by Jesus but by Paul. If Jesus were alive today, he would not be a Christian but a Jew. | Christianity is the religion based upon the person and work of Christ as interpreted by the apostles. There is no conflict between what Jesus and Paul taught. |
| Since god is created in the image of man, no god should be conceived of as being greater or better than man or as having greater capabilities than man. | God is better and greater than man in all respects. Any god made by man is not worthy of respect or worship. |
| Since man is personal and finite, then God must be finite and personal. | God is both personal and infinite at the same time. |
| Since man is not a person or being but only a process, then God must be a process as well. | God is a perfect Being and not just a process. The continuity of God's Being is the basis of His personhood. |
| Since man cannot know or control the future, then God cannot know or control the future. | God both knows and control the future. |
| Since man is not omniscient, omnipotent, immutable or perfect, the neither is God. | The one true God is omniscient, ominpotent, omnipresent, immutable and perfect. Any god less than this is not GOD. |
| Since any god which man creates would be comprehensible to the man who created him, the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God is false. | God is incomprehensible in the sense of man's not being able to fully understand or explain God. Any god that we could fully understand and explain would be less than what we are and hence no God at all. |
False interpretations usually arise because the reader is not paying attention to the text. Thus, the authors of Scripture warn their readers not to twist what they were saying (2Pe 3:16). Twisting Scripture is effected by doing the following:
The Bible cannot be interpreted just anyway one wants. This is not how we treat other literature. The Bible should be
subject only to those normal rules of interpretation which we all follow when reading any piece of literature. No special
rules should be used which, if applied to any other, ancient or modern literature, would be disastrous.