Dr. Rasmussen:

Dear Christians, if you have been thinking that the Bible is the highest authority *on the grounds that was inspired by God*, then, to be consistent, you should also believe that if God inspires a personal dream or insight from God’s Spirit, then that too has the highest authority (for the same reason). But if you believe the dream is NOT the highest authority on the grounds that you are fallible in your discernment about whether that dream is truly from God, then, to be consistent, you should also believe that the Bible is also NOT the highest authority for the same reason — i.e., because you are fallible in your discernment about whether a given text or your interpretation of it is from God. Consistency invites us to compare apples with apples. This tweet is for those who may been comparing apples with oranges.

https://x.com/worldviewdesign/status/1705648876206887272?s=46&t=tCL3kvVxuI5hHl08w81wug



Paul Manata:

God told me in a dream that you’re wrong about this. Can my dream bind your conscience now? Bind the conscience of the community? Private revelation to just me binding the conscience of the community of the faithful? Any better medium you can think of to do a job like that?

https://twitter.com/paulmanata/status/1706112335406911740?s=46&t=tCL3kvVxuI5hHl08w81wug


Here is my friend Jimmy Stephens’s take:

1.) This assumes the vague, inchoate, confusing, hard-to-remember, & often incoherent experiential horizon of dreams is interchangeable with the medium of written text.

Yes, God has designed to communicate through dreams in the past, but with rare exceptions, dreams are so epistemically frail on their own that they require explicit divine interpretation (Genesis 41; Daniel 2).

2.) This assumes private revelation – private exchange for that matter – is interchangeable with public. Not only do humans plan speech for, address, and generally interact with groups of people differently than with individuals alone, the same is by and large true of the God of Scripture.

Dr. Rasmussen is like someone who thinks a Twitter post, phone call, and dinner conversation won’t make for any difference to exchangeable content – a universal blunder of social network sites.

3.) Revelation is a historic progression. God does not reveal everything available to modern Bible readers to Noah or Abraham. It takes time before He reads the last chapter of His story to His children, so to speak.

There’s that old idiom that the Old Testament is Christ concealed, where the New Testament is Christ revealed. Not only does the clarity and scope of God’s revelation generally increase over time, but God’s intervention in human history has shaped the timeline to magnify and bring to a focal point the events of Jesus’ life.

Dr. Rasmussen has neglected and so tacitly flattened this historic perspective.