By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

People find it absurd, scandalous or even blasphemous if I say that I evaluate the various doctrines and schools of thought in the Christian world using the scientific method but in reality that’s what all the theologians do or pretend to do.

Take a Calvinist, what is he doing when he takes a dozen or so verses that seem to support the concept of total depravity, or an Armenian, some verses to the opposite effect? What they both are doing is gathering evidence and drawing conclusions, and then consolidating them in to an “ism” or a hypothesis.

But,you know what, after spending hours on poring over the manuscripts and studying Greek and battling with the nuances of Greek grammar, many a bible scientist, like the secular ones forgets that what he has come up with is not the revealed word of god but a hypothesis and so he forgets the last step, the empirical step, the part that’s the reason the theory exists: The question “Does it work?”

And so the forgetful Bible scientist often does exactly what the world does, name calling, mud flinging, “TheCalvinists are bigots the Armenians are fools the Catholics are not Christian and anyone who disagrees with me is a sinner bound to the 7th hell.” Smug, self-righteous superiority complex.

I’veseen it in church I’ve read it in books I have read it on the net and I’ve seen it in peoples attitudes and it cannot be denied.

Now for the forgotten last step. What works? What are the fruits of these isms. Now if you think it is absurd and irrelevant to ask scholars these questions remember the “by their fruits you shall know them”. What fruits? Love, joy, peace, long suffering etc. that’s what we are talking about, and me the CC/DC asks “does going into ecstasies into the tense of the Greek text and the number of manuscripts that have the verse and the opinion of the hundreds of scholars that have written result in these, or is the strife the smugness the self-righteousness the bitterness fruits of the same spirit?”

CC/DC thinks not.

Indeed by their fruits you shall know them

CC/DC stands for confused calvinist dysfuntional christian