Wolfthart Panneberg basically said that the basis for faith in Christianity could be found in the reliability of the historical Christianity itself. Basically truth can be known plausibly with the facts of the past or within history.
This got me to thinking about the following, what if the Bible and its facts were 100% true in all known physical reality, would it remove faith altogether? What faith does it take to believe in something that is an absolute, at least physically speaking?
In this case it would seem that absolutes would nullify the concept of faith altogether.
In reference to scripture, this is not to say that scripture cannot be inerrant, but it must take into account both physical and spiritual realities to be fully inerrant.
If scripture were only spiritually true then that too would nullify our necessity for faith and belief because it (scripture) would simply become incomprehensible as a whole. How could we perceive fully of something we cannot experience temporally.
It would seem the bottom line point would be this: Some things can be explained in regards to the scripture physically, some spiritually and some by both, but they cannot be explained 100% of the time in both realities of understanding, otherwise we would become as God, knowing and understanding all things or better said we would be omniscient.
The statement and thought that God is good (in particular, always good) can be misunderstood if you merely think of God as being good in physical reality. This can take away from the truth that God is good. You must take into account the idea that God is good as a whole, and by that I mean God is good all the time whether physically observable and or spiritually observable. To say that God is not good because the little girl dies of cancer is to discredit and apply the potential for God’s divine goodness to physical reality alone. God is still good, but in this case Spiritual reality maybe be better equipped to explain and nurture the true goodness of God in that particular instance. Again in each circumstance one must weigh whether or not God’s goodness is observable to them physically and if its not then we should simply defer to the divine and attempt to understand his plan outside our observable reality. If we take this approach God would maintain his status as all knowing, all-powerful and always just and good.
