Tuesday 14 July 2015

"With all your, with all your, with all your MIND?"

I had a discussion with my wife in the car today about that verse in Deuteronomy:

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Matthew and Luke add: "and with all your mind" at the end.
Mark adds: "and with all your mind" before "and with all your strength".
John does not mention it.

What do you think the classic apologist's approach would be here? Obviously, they will be careful to respect the inspired texts and distinguish Mark's moment as separate from the Matthew and Luke accounts. But they will have harder work regarding this mind business, which is consistently added to this all-important Old Testament passage.

Obviously I am also interested if readers have considered that Jesus might not have been pointing these experts of the Law to love Himself. Many Trinitarians would not feel bound by that.

On the addition of "and with all your mind", rather than go through the details and options here, let me just point directly to the article I found that shows how this "addition" may have come about in the Greek.

http://christianthinktank.com/lovemindsoul.html

Monday 13 July 2015

Dry patch

Apologies for not much activity on the blog. I am very busy on a whole bunch of things - one of which of course is the paper I am writing on Trinitarian Interpretations. My focus there at the moment is mainly a chapter on contemporary theology, which is difficult to simplify for making the basic point of this chapter, that of those who fly the Trinitarian flag, they disagree on  every point of what Trinitarian means.

My favorite topic however is the ensuing part on second and third century believers, who did not have  Trinity yet (they did have trinity, small "t"), so I do dip into that a bit. Actually, I have a history book that begins just after this period, and I think I will include a couple of points about the fourth century as well. I am convinced as I read through the 300s and the various letters, edicts, councils, etc. that the first council of Nicaea in 325 was not a full Trinitarian text. No way.

It occurs to me that I have not yet seen any book on the Church's steps through the 300s toward full Trinity. There is a need there, for sure.

Oh wow, I just wrote a little blog post! Hurrah!