You remember that we have intended to construct this site to help serve as a thinking person’s guide to mentoring life’s journey--especially in so far as that relates to core spiritual, moral and ethical concepts that emerge from a reading of the Bible as a whole.
This section is for those who wish to lift the hood of the car (as we expect that all of you would want to do) and take a look at the workings beneath. It’s not a bad idea to check under the hood because often that’s where the heavy theological, philosophical and hermeneutical lifting is being done. Space will not allow us to start from scratch, as it were, but by disclosing at least some our thinking--as near the foundations as we can--and
by making important referential gestures to places where you can do further investigation, we think you can begin to think more critically about them. So where do we come down on some of these key issues as they relate to spiritual formation?
Moral Language Issues
It’s a given that the New Testament (hereafter NT) authors were trying to communicate by means of what they wrote. Just what they meant to say and to whom is another thing. So is the question as to whether we currently have what was originally written. The discipline of textual criticism is the attempt to get as close as we can to the original manuscripts (autographs) by means of comparing extant copies and tracking them backwards in time. It’s our contention that as a result of that discipline (discussed elsewhere on this site), we have a reasonable facsimile of the original text for the NT canon. Two exceptions (of some length) in two books need to be noted: in the oldest manuscripts we do not find John 7: 53 - 8: 11 and we do not find Mark 16: 9-20; therefore, it doesn’t seem prudent to base a great deal our ethical or spiritual formation theology in what is exceptional to these passages. However, we’re not calling into question what those passages teach about Christian morality, however, since they do not appear in the oldest manuscripts it is possible and perhaps somewhat more likely than not that they were not in the original text. Therefore, it seems wise not to use these texts as foundational for forming our opinions about what the NT as a whole teaches about ethics and spiritual formation.
Another hurdle to understanding what was meant by the text and then translating that culturally to our own is whether or not the NT authors were aware of and using ethical concepts that lend themselves to an accurate cultural translation. The writers of the NT were for the most part in a geographic location (Palestine) that placed them in between the Greek/Roman culture and at least the Persian culture. Surely it is reasonable that they would become somewhat familiar with these cultures since they were in a crossroads location and thus, it seems reasonable (and we should not be surprised) they may have used some of their linguistic expressions, illustrations and so forth. Perhaps our best shot at getting what the text means to say would be by trying our best to understand these cultural and linguistic contexts and what role they may have played in the NT writers effort to communicate their ideas. Were the writers using technical language or not to convey what they meant to say about spiritual formation?
If it were the former (NT writers were aware of and were using ethical concepts that lend themselves to clear technical translations) of those two options, depending on whether we were doing our research using original language sources or by studying translations of the text, it might help if we or the translators took that into account. This might help us when we try to culturally translate the meanings of the teaching. That’s because on the one hand, much of what is involved in Christian spiritual formation seems to have strong ethical and moral implications and on the other, our contemporary technical language into which it could be translated, because of its cultural clarity for us, might help get us off on the right track and allow us to see things we might not. That could be extremely useful to getting the essence of the core NT ideas on spiritual formation translated cross culturally.
However, having conceded these potential challenges exist we find that it does NOT lead us necessarily to conclude we have communication deal breaker; in fact, they may not present a problem that’s too great to keep us from getting pretty accurately what was meant. We simply have to dig in and do the homework. And there’s good reason to think that even with many transmission issues and interpretation issues, even in translation, we can, with hard work, get closer to the intentions of the authors and editors of the NT. Despite the objections of Da Vinci code enthusiasts and concerns raised by the even more formidable and academically competent Bart Ehrman, we see no reason to throw in the towel and give up. Because of length considerations we refer to you to other assets on our family of sites for you to take a look at regarding theological acuity issues raised by these people.
We will next explain where we see ourselves ethically situated. We have come to the conclusion that the proper category to translate the thrust of New Testament ethical language is cognitive rather than non-cognitive (merely emotive). That is, we think Christian moral terms are best thought of as propositions that can be either true or false and not just attitudes or feelings of distaste or imperatives intended merely to shape the behavior of the hearers. We think Christian ethical language is meant to be understood as objective in the sense the language is attempting to describe something that is to be discovered rather than merely constructed by humans. It is true we construct concepts to describe as best we can what we believe we’re discovering, but what we are discovering is what it is independent of our cognition.
We are convinced Christian ethical language is attempting to express moral reality. We believe that morality is ultimately grounded in God’s nature and character (rather than merely His will as some Divine Command ethical theorists do). We do not hold the view that the Bible requires us to be ethical fatalists; we hold the view that God commands things because they are right and good and further that He cannot, ceteris paribus, by His commands make things that are wrong, right.
It’s true that we have to have a pre-conceived notion of the “good” (an epistemic issue) to know or recognize that God is “good” (a metaphysical issue), but the epistemic issue is not the same as the metaphysical issue. Which is to say that the epistemic issue does not affect God’s aesity: God’s metaphysical goodness is not dependent on our notions of goodness, but our knowledge of God’s goodness is dependent on our notion of what goodness is. We further think that our notions of what goodness is are part of the rational endowment we have inherited as a part of being made in the image of God, which to one degree or other has been corrupted.
Further we hold that “God talk” (the concepts by which we speak of Him) is best understood as univocally conceived, but predicated analogically (avoiding equivocation) because God is in a significant sense greater than the finite terms we use analogically to describe Him. We do not pretend understand God fully or think our language about Him captures all He is, but we do know of Him and have some understanding and cognitive grasp of His essential character as revealed in Scripture and nature.
Theistic Realism
We think the proper way to think about Christianity is that it is a part of the set of theistic realist religions that hold that God exists and the way He exists is independent of our ideas or conceptions of Him. That is, we do not construct Him nor do our ideas and conceptions that we construct to describe Him necessarily mean they are correct. Our ideas and conceptions of Him are more or less true dependent on whether they correspond to His actual attributes and character.
Epistemic Issues
We hold that belief that God exists is a warranted belief that does not need further propositional justification if formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, in circumstances that are conducive for the properly functioning faculties to form such 
beliefs. Another way of saying this is that we hold that belief that God exists is a properly basic belief that needs no propositional evidence to make the belief more rationally acceptable. That is not to say that the total of propositional argumentation (what some call natural theology) does not represent some evidential weight, but the Christian’s knowledge of God is rational without it as long as there are no outstanding undefeated epistemic defeaters for those formed beliefs.
Post-modern Issues
Briefly our view of the metaphysics of theism is that Christianity is a theistic realist religion that does not construct God but rather constructs concepts and ideas that attempt to describe His true attributes. That position situates us as opposing a radical (metaphysical) form of post-modernism that would assert that ultimate moral reality is not a certain way independent of minds or, because we may not have access to it, a metaphysical position that holds the only reality we know is our epistemic appropriation of it.
These latter two notions seem to fit better in non-theistic worldview than in a view of the world designed by God, who is not only interested in our forming beliefs which allow us to survive, but also in many widely experienced situations, knowing the truth especially about Him. It is from these truths that we know about Him and what He has further specially revealed about how his Creatures should form their character, that we know or grasp how we individually and corporately should engage spiritual formation in theory and praxis.
We also wish to say that we do not hold a radical view of narratives such that they are the only way to help us understand God. We do think narratives, which often can be reduced to propositions and other propositional knowledge in the text, together help us understand to a greater degree God and spiritual formation