But you believe it for a reason other than a proposition supporting it. It is on the basis of the Person testifying the proposition that you believe it.
The testimony of a person is a proposition.
It is your dlilemma, because you don't worship a God Who exceeds your propositional knowledge of Him. Your very refusal to accept the distinctiopn between personal and propositional binds you up to rational idolatry.
How can I accept a distinction that has not been demonstrated? Until you demonstrate that something personal can occur apart from something propositional, then I have no basis to accept a distinction.
Unless you have an actual interpretative problem with the way I am applying that text of Scripture then what the heretics do with Scripture is irrelevant. What is the chaff to the wheat? If my application is relevant, then the Scripture stands without need of demonstration; unless of course you reject the testimony of Jesus.
I did disagree with your interpretation. I said the verse supported my position rather than yours. The gift given is saving knowledge of God. Until you prove that saving knowledge is personal without being propositional, the verse offers you no support in the argument, but rather begs the question.
Mystics allow the unknown to impact the Christian life. Christians should not give themselves up to the unknown, 1 Corinthians 12:2, 3. This is yet another problem created by your commitment to rationalism.
I wonder if you are trying very hard to understand my words charitably. God's secret council is unknown, yet that council determines much about my life, and yours, and everyone else's life too. It is simply absurd to accuse me of limiting God to known propositions, when you argue against what is a plain acknowledgment on my part that God knows things that we don't, and never will--and those things still impact my life, though without my knowledge of how or in what specific case.
If you wish to knock down imagined specters and straw men, then don't let me interrupt you. When you grow weary you can begin interacting with what I'm actually articulating.
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So in other words, to ask a person to trust you is a meaningless question. It would be better to ask them to assent to the proposition that you will not do them wrong.
It isn't a meaningless question. To trust me is to trust what can be known about me. Saying, "I trust you," is identical to assenting to the proposition, "Joshua is trustworthy." The former is simply a different way of saying the latter, both of which are propositions (one about you, the other about me).
I once heard of a student of Clark's whose proposal to his wife consisted of "I have decided to adopt a policy of love toward you." Naturally, she refused to accept the ring until he said "I love you."
But honestly--trust is more than assent--it involves action (or at least a will to action).
There is a sense in which assent is an action, a will to believe. There is also a sense in which it is entirely passive, the most apt analogy being that of light striking the eye, which causes us to see. But God has created us in such a way that what we know determines what we do. When someone acts contrary to an expressed belief (assent) it isn't because belief doesn't lead to action, but because they did not truly believe (assent). Assent always leads to action.
It's interaction and connection of spirit. I know my friend in a way that I do not know Barack Obama even though I might be in the same room with the President and have seen him on television.
You're going to need to define what you mean by "spirit" here. When I say "spirit" I mean the mind. Do you mean an emotion? I'll grant that I feel a different emotion in the presence of my wife than I would in the presence of Barak Obama, but that's because what I believe about my wife is more satisfying to me than what I believe about Barak Obama.
I'm not necessarily claiming that the two are mutually exclusive, just that mere intellectual knowledge is not enough.
Well claiming doesn't do you much until you've demonstrated how knowledge can be other than intellectual. I'm still waiting for something other than question begging, bald assertions, and irrelevant and unsupportive examples.
Possibly a bad example. However, let's examine your knowledge of Luke. I may tell you all sorts of information about him, but unless you have an actual interaction with him, you cannot, in any real sense, be said to know him. Knowledge of persons is quite different, I would say, than knowledge of facts because this kind of knowledge requires experience.
If you tell me that Luke has brown hair, why can I not say that believe Luke has brown hair? What is the difference between your belief about Luke's hair and mine? I haven't seen Christ, but I know He is risen. I know this because it has been stated in Scripture. The eye witnesses knew it because it was demonstrated to their eyes. But they still inferred from the experience the meaning, and the meaning is a proposition that constitutes knowledge of what actually occurred. Throughout this entire exchange I've not denied that "personal" is a meaningful concept, or that is lacks value. All I've denied is that something "personal" is believed or known apart from the propositions that express whatever one marks as "personal."
What I'm saying is that truth happens on two levels--personal and propositional. While I reject Kierkegaard's irrationalist attempt to elevate the personal to the exclusion of the propositional, I also reject the rationalist attempt to eliminate the personal.
I haven't eliminated the personal. I've simply defined it in such a way that doesn't appear to make sense to you. I cannot help the fact that it doesn't make sense to you, but it isn't true that I've eliminated it in some way.
We have here two categories: The propositional and the non-propositional. In the second category are two subcategories: the nonsensical and the personal.
You really do make things up as you go, don't you?
I was tempted to put irrationality in there somewhere, but I realized that even logic can be nonsensical. As I have pointed out before, Jabberwocky is perfectly logical, and also absolute nonsense (albeit delightful nonsense). Irrationality may happen in any of the three categories.
Logic is not nonsensical. Only people's improper use of logic is nonsensical. Jabberwocky isn't nonsensical. It is a name of a fictional being in a poem. That makes perfect sense, don't you think?
Seeing as I define knowledge differently than you do, I'm just trying to figure out where your definition of knowledge leads. If to know a proposition is to understand it exhaustively, that would mean understanding its relation to every other proposition.
Seeing as you've never, to my knowledge, defined knowledge, I have no idea what you are trying to do. I've never maintained that knowledge of a given proposition implies a knowledge of all propositions. Nor has anything I've said implies such a conclusion.
