Missing The Prophetic Forest For The Trees

Discussions of prophecy fulfillment often get overly focused on a certain aspect of a passage to the neglect of others. A lot of attention will be given to how to render verse 16 in Psalm 22, but other parts of the psalm that are significant will be ignored. Or whether verse 6 in Isaiah 9 is identifying the figure in the passage as God will be debated while other parts of the passage that are important don't get discussed.

One Way To Judge Skeptical Claims About Prophecy

Skeptics often object to Christian prophecy fulfillment on the basis that the prophecies supposedly are too vague, that many people could be said to have fulfilled the passages, that it's easy to fabricate alleged fulfillments by reading a later figure into the Old Testament, etc. One way, among others, of responding to such objections is to ask the skeptic to illustrate his claim with other historical figures. What sort of prophetic argument can be made for Buddha or Muhammad, for example? I've written about this subject before with regard to Muhammad, here and here. Another example of this kind of thing is the dismissive comments skeptics often make about Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy. See how much worse their explanations of the passage are. See my post here responding to Carol Newsom's commentary on Daniel, for example.

Advocates Of Baptismal Regeneration Rely On Implicit Arguments

In a post last year, I discussed several implicit lines of evidence for belief in justification apart from baptism among the early extrabiblical sources. As I mentioned there, all of us rely on implicit reasoning across many contexts in life, including when making judgments about Biblical and patristic issues. You wouldn't be able to function for a single day in your life without relying on implicit reasoning at some point. I gave some examples of how advocates of baptismal regeneration use some implicit arguments to support their own position. Yet, people often reject implicit arguments because of their implicit rather than explicit nature, or they assign implicit arguments less significance than those arguments actually have. Even many opponents of baptismal regeneration seem to get taken in by that sort of bad reasoning, to the point that they won't cite any extrabiblical sources who seem to support their view in an implicit way, since the evidence isn't explicit. Whether that's due to peer pressure, confusing a preference for explicit evidence with a need for it, or whatever else, it's a mistake.