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Learning What the Dialectic is and Identifying It is Not Easy
Posted : 26 Oct, 2011 04:13 PM
Learning What the Dialectic is and Identifying It is Not Easy
God's way of communicating has always been the didactic. When Satan
tempted Christ in Matthew 4: 3-11, Satan's temptations didn't work on Jesus.
It didn't move him one inch off his "thesis." He answered the devil
with the didactic, "It is written" (Matthew 3: 10).
But Hegel and then Marx and Freud decided that there is no God and
began to say there is no absolute
truth and no absolute morality. Everything is an opinion. Remember the
"Hegelian dialectic?" Remember "dialectical materialism" in Marxism?
The dialectic can be used in Christian or secular Internet forums almost as well as in face to face groups, and without a trained facilitator. To some extent, having lived within a society and church system that uses the dialectic as its main form of dialogue, many learn something anyway about being a facilitator of the dialectic.
In Christian dialogue, the person who wants to cause others to accept his interpretation of scripture or wants to defend his position against another or others who do not agree, may use the dialectic. Or, a member of a forum who just wants to argue endlessly may use the dialectic.
One reason its hard to understand what the dialectic is, as opposed to the didactic, is because there are several ways of using the dialectic. The dialectic usually side steps the "thesis" stated, and comes against the thesis from the side in some way. In other words, the dialectic often avoids directly opposing the thesis of another, and uses a flanking maneuver, which may be done in an obviously contentious way, or not in such an obviously hostile way.
It may be a mistake to make statements without quoting scripture when an opponent is around who continually uses the dialectic. However, when you quote a scripture the user of the dialectic can come back, with "Yes, but..." and either actually quotes other scriptures which he interprets to mean something else, or just makes statements that sound like scripture, or hints at scriptures. If the person who is the target of the dialectic comes back with explanations, the dialectic user will then have an opportunity to get him into an almost endless dialogue in which the opponent uses the dialectic.
If you know that your opponent makes use of the dialectic a lot on forums, it is best not to answer him at all.
When statements of doctrines are made without quoting scripture this gives the user of the dialectic a chance to lure you into a dialogue in which the "facilitator" of the dialectic may lead you on until the topic is changed to another and eventually the user of the dialectic will make a statement which is intended to "educate" the other readers. One example of this process is when one tries to state the idea that the spiritual is often given in figurative language, without citing scriptures which support this position. The "facilitator" may then ask questions and lure one into a new or related topic. After the dialogue goes on a while - which seems endless - then the "facilitator" might come up with something like the followers of Christ assumed to be true in Acts 1: 6, on a physical kingdom on earth being the kingdom of God. They asked Christ "Wilt thou at this time restore again the Kingdom to Israel?" What kingdom of Israel did they have in mind? It was not the kingdom that Christ had been teaching. He said
in John 18: 36, "My kingdom is not of this world." And when Satan offered to give Christ the kingdoms of this world in Matthew 4: 8-9 Christ did not dispute Satan's authority over the kingdoms of the world. Instead Christ answered, "Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Christ answered with the diadactic, "It is written."
Since the devil controls or highly influences all the physical kingdoms of this world, then any physical kingdom of this world would be in part run by Satan. The followers of Christ in Acts 1 were probably referring to the kingdom of Israel in the time of David and Solomon, and wanted to know if Christ was going to restore that type of physical kingdom. Solomon went beyond the rest of God (Genesis 2: 2, Hebrews 3:11, 18, 4: 1-11) which is the seventh day or number seven into number eight (Revelation 17:11), in which he made use of the authority of God in pretending his kingdom of man was that of God. In fact, the Masons say their goal is to re-build the temple of Solomon, which is a metaphor for their "great work" which is all in the spirit of anti-Christ.
One scripture that can be used when the "faclitator" using the dialectic tries to promote a literal-physical point of view on Christian doctrines is I Corinthians 2: 14, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."
There are some other tactics of the dialectic. One is to slightly or badly misrepresent what another has said, and began a dialogue in this way. Another more nasty use is to call the other bad names, or imply such, which can get into what is called "trolling" or troll behavior on secular Internet forums.
The man who knows more about the origins and use of the dialectic than any other at this pont in time is Dean Gotcher. He is an interesting combination of scholar and Remnant Christian evangelist. His web site is:
http://authorityresearch.com/
http://authorityrese...n Gotcher.htm
See also: http://www.concerned...rs.com/gotcher/
Defeating The Diaprax: Dean Gotcher
www.christianmedianetwork.com/index.php?page=gotcher.htmCached
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Mr. Dean Gotcher is the founder and director of the Institution For Authority ... Dean Gotcher's weekly broadcast on the Christian Media Network runs every ...
Dialectic and Praxis: DIAPRAX and the End of the Ages
www.crossroad.to/Quotes/brainwashing/dialectic-gotcher.htmCached - Similar
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DIAPRAX and the End of the Ages. By Dean Gotcher. http://www.authorityresearch.com - January 2002 (more added later). Please read the whole article here ...
Dean Gotcher is on Internet radio at:
http://www.geomedianetwork.com/
Check the Program Schedule. It looks like Gotcher is now on at 6 to 6:30 AM Pacific Time
Tuesdays and Thursdays and 10 to 10:30 AM Pacific Time on Mondays.
Listen to Gotcher until you have a better knowledge of what the dialectic is. He calls it the diaprax.
Some dialogue is not dialectic. When someone asks a question and the other answers with what he believes to be the truth, this is dialogue but not the dialectic. The problem is that Christians have been conditioned by the culture and by their churches to see the word of God as being less than absolute. Therefore, they think they can have opinions on the word of God. Christians fail to think about scripture as being like basic mathematics. You would have a very hard time teaching sophomore college math courses by the dialectic. One reason why Christians today do not see the absolute nature of the Word as being like math in its truth (I am not saying that math is spiritual, but only that the Bible and Math have absolute truth) is because of the conflict Westcott-Hort set up in 1881 between their Greek Text and the long relied upon Textus Receptus, and also the huge number of English translations, all at least slightly different in order to copyright them.
Dean Gotcher, the authority on the dialectic, on his website, www.auithorityresearch.com ,has a section on why he uses the King James Version. He says "Today there is a major move to confuse the Protestant Church and bring it back under Roman Catholic rule (the "ecumenical" movement). By discrediting the use of the Textus Receptus as God's Word, examining (and thus negating) the Word of God in the "light" of Gnostic text, the Protestant Church is being seduced, deceived, and manipulated, drawn away from the preaching and teaching of sound doctrine and into the dialoguing of mans opinions. "
Gorcher also says "Most Christians who detected the error of the "Church Growth Movement," the emergent church, etc. were using translations from the Textus Receptus (King James, Geneva, Tyndale, Luther, etc. bibles) They discerned the compromise, i.e. the structural change of the word of God, and the resulting humanism being practiced within the "contemporary" church, by their having been raised in Churches using translations from the Textus Receptus. The use of contemporary translations (based upon the Alexandrian text and Origen and his distorted Gnostic writings resulting in Vaticanus B, Sinaiticus אּ, etc., which are the basis for new testament Greek textual study and translations today, i.e. Nestle, Aland, Metzger), has pulled the church into basing 'truth' upon the opinions of men, i.e. apostasy."
A guy on a Christian forum asked: "And what happens when two people, both of whom swear holy spirit inspiration, come to mutually exclusive understandings about what scripture says. Shouldn't be a problem if scripture is like basic mathematics, should it? "
When men like John Darby, C.I. Scofield, Lewis S. Chafer, Charles Ryrie and John F. Walvoord set up a theology which "simplifies" the Bible to a starting point of three postulates (literal interpretation, All physical Israel as God's people and a body of Christ different from Israel, the Capital C "Church"), which does not agree with Scripture for a number of key verses related to these starting points, then you have "mutually exclusive understandings about what scripture says."
That is, even when these key scriptures relating to the starting points are put out on the table, the followers of this theology usually will not change their positions. They are not the only ones in Christian discourse (arguments) who use the dialectic in an attempt to defend their theology. But because they are the majority of those who claim to be Christian, the larger amount of dialectic in use is that of the dispensationalists arguing for their theology.
They will not admit, usually, that they are arguing from the point of view of a man made system and not by the older protestant method of using scripture to interpret scripture. And a lot of dialectic, as battles of opinions, come out of this refusal to acknowledge they are starting from their theology in understanding these key texts.
As far as both "swearing by Holy Spirit inspiration" the dispensationalists usually cannot hear the point of view derived from comparing scripture with scripture and acknowledging that dispensationalism is a man made system of interpretation.
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