Michigan Virtual Camp Meeting 2020: Forward to the Finish

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

On the Unity of the Church

Fernando Canale

02 Our Adventist Journey: From Unity to Division

03 The Cause of Division: Macro-Hermeneutics

04 The Christian Journey: From Division to Unity (Roman Catholic Ecumenism)

05 Sola Scriptura Christianity: From Division to Unity (Biblical Ecumenism)

01 Unity? My Personal Testimony

And the explanation I suggest to you, it is connected to your salvation.

What I want you to understand is what we are going to go through now, which is not a common thing to be presented in a camp meeting or in a church.

It's something that I presented for years and years and years to my students, the pastors in many classes at the seminary.

But it is necessary because your salvation is by faith, but faith is connected directly on your understanding of God.

And how do you develop this understanding of God?

OK, there may be many sources, either the Bible or the Bible plus other sources.

Yesterday we spoke that other Christians, they go to the Bible and other sources.

Basically, they call it tradition, but it could be kind of break down into many sources.

So, please, keep that in mind, because now what we are going to ask is how do we hear the Word of God?

And so now you have to focus on the process that you are actually doing now, because Now what are you doing?

Not the Word of God exactly, but you are listening to a fellow human being.

Now Jesus, the greatest revelation of God, taught us how.

He came here as a human being so that he could talk to us directly.

So basically what I am trying to say is that if we were to meet Jesus, Jesus will have the same tools that I have to communicate with you, basically.

Which means that in order for me to have faith, I need to be aware of the process of interpretation.

Because Not everyone understands the Bible in the same way, and why is it that they understand the Bible in different ways?

So, you see in this slide, there you have the slide, a Basic diagram of what happens when you know anything.

There is a microscope with something underneath that you can look at and develop a knowledge of, right?

It could be what I am talking now, or it could be these beautiful flowers that are there, or you try to know the carpet, or the piano, or music, or whatever.

There is always a capability that we have in our minds to receive information through our eyes or through our ears or through our sensory perception of things that are outside of ourselves, and then inside of us, through our brains, we process them into knowledge.

So what happens is that what is outside is now inside.

So the flowers are there, but they are also inside here, so that then you can close your eyes and you can remember.

And I am bringing the computer because we know, at least these days, we have more information about this thing that we had when I started using this analogy.

So in the next slide, we have this diagram.

Instead of having 1 individual, we have 2 individuals.

If I am trying to, or concentrated my knowledge on the organ and you are concentrated your knowledge on the flower and then we report what we know, is there going to be a difference?

Because I am thinking on this object and you are thinking of the other object and therefore the reports will be necessarily different.

But what happens if we take, as in this slide, 2 individuals, no, the previous slide, we have these 2 individuals that have different backgrounds.

1, the 1 on top, is a student of science.

The second 1 is a student of theology, probably from Notre Dame.

I didn't have another way of letting you know graphically that this was a religious individual, so from Notre Dame, but it could very well be a student from the seminary.

If we put these 2 students with different backgrounds, 1 doesn't know the background of the other, okay?

And they see the same thing, would the report be the same?

So the difference in the report, the difference of the perception, the difference of the knowledge come from inside.

Inside, which means the experience that they had before coming to that object.

So to that, in the next slide, we see the cause of diversity.

The object is the same, but each individual brings to the object of knowledge, under consideration, different life experiences.

The computer, you know, can process things, files, a PDF file there, but the computer can process the PDF file with different applications, correct?

And the applications will work in the same file producing different results.

So if you have a Kindle application you can apply to the PDF file and get an e-book, but you will not get a printed book.

To get a printed book, you have to go to some other place in Amazon, create space, and apply another application to the same file, and you will get a book, but not a picture.

See if you want a picture from the same file, you have to apply another application, and then you will have the picture.

The same brain can process the same issue with different applications.

In this case, the application will be different life experiences.

So the computer will be the human, the file will be the Bible, and the applications will be prior experiences that people bring to read the Bible.

An atheist will read the Bible and will consider that an old human book of fables.

A scientist, unless it is a Christian 1, will read the Bible and see in it the result of evolution.

The child has very little life experience, Right?

Jesus said that we should enter into the kingdom of heaven if you were as child.

So basically, I think that he was saying, you have to come to me and leave aside all your human and listen only to me.

But the child will go to the same Bible and find simple stories about God.

I hope that this is clear to you up to this point.

This is the process from which or through which we come to know.

By the way, what I am saying to you is a simplification of philosophy.

So what I am telling you is not something that I have invented.

I am just illustrating this thing to you.

Philosophers that study how do we know, they come up with this basic structure.

They come up with many other things that I do not take from them, because then they begin to interpret and take assumptions that are not coming from the Bible.

But this is just a description of what we actually do.

All these life experiences, now we are going to define under the category of presupposition, which is a supposition that I have pre, before I know.

Before I know, I have something in my mind.

When I was a child, everything that I had in my mind was the things that my mother taught me, right?

But then I began to read and read and read, and then, you know, this thing begins to fill.

Still it's not filled after 74 years, there is much more place, and in my case many things are deleted, but that's another story.

I came with some problems of hard drive there, and the memory's not working well, but my wife has a good hard drive.

Presuppositions are, what are a presupposition, a definition?

Presuppositions are all the contents of human experience that the human being brings with him or human beings brings with them to the task of interpreting the data or whatever comes to their attention.

All the contents of my life, so everything that is in your memory.

When you are listening to me, everything is there working.

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On the Unity of the Church

03 The Cause of Division: Macro-Hermeneutics

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