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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The Svendsen/Pacwa Debate

See here for comments about and audio from Eric Svendsen’s recent debate with Mitchell Pacwa on authority.

12 comments:

  1. Sounds like ES is not personally happy with his own performance. Loved the comment someone left to him: Yes, you could've been better, but you also could've been as bad as Fr. Pacwa.

    I have been reading Svendson's "Evangelical Answers" and I strongly recommend it. For sale at Dr. James White's site, btw.

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  2. I don't understand why "the White question", nor the question of "what is your list of infallible beliefs", much less "where is your infallible list of infallible beliefs" are all supposedly clever questions or supposedly detrimental to Pacwa's case. I can picture protestants nodding furiously as these were asked, but I don't know why.

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  3. Looks like Svendsen has yet another canon theory: "we know what the canon is because we are his sheep and hear his voice".

    That of course begs the question, is anybody who ever had a different canon to Svendsen therefore not Christ's sheep merely because they disagree with Svendsen?

    And if you can assume something is true purely on the basis that you are Christ's sheep therefore what you believe is His voice, is his voice, then why can't we believe Tradition on the same basis?

    And if the opinion of Christ's sheep is the starting point for Svendsen's epistemology, shouldn't he start off his search for truth by finding Christ's authentic sheep, aka the Church?

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  4. Orthodox,

    We've been over such issues with you in the past. You've repeatedly ignored or distorted what we've said. See my previous comments on passages like 1 Corinthians 14:37 and 1 Thessalonians 2:13. And David King has explained to you that some of the church fathers advocated a similar view. I explained the difference between personal reasons for accepting scripture and reasons that are objectively verifiable in a forum such as this one. You keep ignoring what you've been told.

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  5. Jason, I'm not commenting on your theory now, I'm commenting on Svendsen's. Y'all have a different theory.

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  6. Orthodox wrote:

    "Jason, I'm not commenting on your theory now, I'm commenting on Svendsen's. Y'all have a different theory."

    Explain what the relevant differences are.

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  7. Well for a start, Svendsen never implied that historical investigation of authorship was a criterion, let alone a primary one.

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  8. Orthodox wrote:

    "Well for a start, Svendsen never implied that historical investigation of authorship was a criterion, let alone a primary one."

    As I suspected, your objection isn't even relevant. I was addressing one means of arriving at a canon, the one you characterized as "we know what the canon is because we are his sheep and hear his voice". You're changing the subject to another approach, namely the historical approach Steve Hays and I have been discussing lately. But telling me that Eric Svendsen didn't mention that historical approach doesn't prove that what I've said about the other approach is irrelevant to what Eric Svendsen argued.

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  9. Nothing you said previously answers these questions.

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  10. Orthodox wrote:

    "Nothing you said previously answers these questions."

    If that's true, then why didn't you say so earlier instead of making an irrelevant comment about the historical argument for the canon? The reason why your first two replies to me in this thread were irrelevant, and the reason why your third reply makes a false assertion without any accompanying evidence to support it, is because you don't know how to defend your initial comments in this thread. What I demonstrated in our previous discussions, from passages like 1 Corinthians 14:37 and 1 Thessalonians 2:13, for example, does answer your questions. And what David King wrote in response to you in another thread also answers your questions. That's why you ignored so much of what we wrote, eventually left the discussions, and have been trying to avoid addressing what I've said in this thread. I doubt that you'd be behaving this way unless you knew that you were wrong.

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  11. Cue the song...

    "Somewhere out there, Jason thinks he answered the questions".

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  12. Orthodox writes:

    "Cue the song"

    I told you about specific discussions we had (for example, http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/03/eastern-orthodoxy-without-appeal-to.html). If you don't remember them, and you want to repeat arguments already refuted, then that's your problem, not mine.

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