HOW APOLOGETICS & ECUMENICS MISS THEIR TARGETS

© 2007 by Orchid Land Publications (20070402, 20070406)

     In defending a religious point of view against others, arguments for or against this or that teaching typically ignore the fact that a given term or teaching means different things in paradigms constituted by axioms that are contrary. 

   Given a relevant axiom, the truth or (as the case may be) falseness of a teaching becomes inarguable.  This being so, discussions of separate teachings─which mean different things in different paradigms and which are true or false according to the differing axioms of different paradigms or points of departure─won't have much effect.  The approach is the Achilles' heel of much apologetics.

     If your paradigm does not distinguish (energetic) nature from essence, 2 Pet. 1:4 cannot and will not mean what it does to the Greek-language author of that verse.  (The same is true of the 26 references to energy in the epistles attributed to the Apostle Paul.)  In fact, 2 Pet. 1:4 will have to be understood non-literally─as a union of ideas (for Thomists) or as a legal covenant (among Protestants).  If your axioms so dictate, you cannot literally accept John 3:5, 6:53-54 or St. Paul's view that marriage is a sacrament (Greek mysterion).

    If your translation fails to distinguish likeness (an inalienable part of human essence and therefore not forfeitable but shared by all humans) from assimilation (of human nature) in Gen. 1:26, you will not be able to understand

√ that the likeness cannot be lost from human essence

√ that the assimilation has been lost from human nature until restored through Grace

If Grace is uncreated divine Energy, God's Nature, as Eastern Christians think (but not as either Roman Catholics or Protestants teach), then the absence of Grace (a state called hamartía in Greek but always mistranslated in the West as "sin") can be inherited.  You will see that another's sin (Greek hamártēma) or guilt cannot be inherited, but only its effect in the absence of Grace (hamartía ).  The Western error of a newborn's having inherited "original sin" is due to a failure to understand what the Greek words mean in the paradigm of all writers in Greek from the time of Aristotle (who invented and defined energy in his Physics and Metaphysics).  All Western translations that this writer is aware of translate Gen. 1:26 with the silly redundancy "image and likeness" . . . and, as already said, miss the sense of Paul's 26 uses of energy terms . . . and what Grace means.

     What is the import of such considerations?  If the meanings of the terms that doctrines consist of are argued over and the paradigm axioms that cause them to mean what they do to different parties in a discussion,

IT IS OBVIOUSLY THE AXIOMS THAT DETERMINE WHAT THE
TERMS MEAN THAT SHOULD BE UP FOR DISCUSSION

not the terms themselves.  Otherwise, the resulting semantic impasse causes the target of the effort to be missed.

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