The Black Cat In the Dark Room
"My philosophy teacher in college once said, "A philosopher is a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat, that is not there."

"..It is one thing to say that you use principles in Scripture to build a system, and quite another to say you can do what ever you like. Likewise, it is one thing to build a system on 'necessary consequences' instead of actual Bible texts and admit that logic supplied many of your 'facts,' and quite another thing to build a system with logic and then boast that your entire system is totally biblical. It is one thing to believe you have caught the cat,1 but it is quite another to bring him out of the dark room of your own prejudices and sit him under the clear light of biblical texts of Scripture..." (John Reisinger)

" Sometimes, the Bible doesn’t give you enough evidence, one way or the other, to settle a question beyond the possibility of a continuing discussion and debate. If this is true, and if the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit does not remove this ambiguity, then there are points beyond which dicsussion and debate ought to proceed only with considerable and generous amounts of respectful humility." (
The Humility Zone)

One of my convictions is that I do not have to have hard, set in stone, convictions on every last little detail of theology, and that there are areas of theology where I should hold my own convictions with a loose hand, and a great deal of humility. The above articles by John Reisinger and Michael Spencer articulate some of the same concerns. To say such is not a deniel of the sufficancy of Scripture. On the contrary it is an affirmation of the sufficency of Scripture. I've seen ministries where it was insisted that the "black cat" was indeed in the room. What I saw in those ministries was not very pretty at all. In fact it often became really ugly. We have not been called to the boundage of men.

Sola Scriptura!

~ The Billy Goat ~