People argue about this because…
in the process of inspiration of the Bible… if God was unable or unwilling to prevent historic, scientific, or other factual errors from being included in his communication, then how or why exactly can we assert that he kept theological errors from similarly being included in “the message”?
All or nothing. Is that it?
An engine is never 100% efficient but it serves. Scripture has its place. It is all we have. None of Christ’s disciples were perfect. Why should the writers of Scripture be any better?
It is not a case of inerrancy or perfection it is a case of inspiration and faith. We have been given the intelligence to distinguish and make up our own minds. We do not need to be spoon fed or shackled to Scripture.
Richard
Fair enough, but then what percentage of God’s revelation is true and how much is erroneous? 50/50? 90/10? 10% true and 90% erroneous? and how exactly do we determine?
If the basic answer is that we can “make up our own minds”… then what you’re left with is essentually, "all those parts of God’s revelation that i personally agree with are true, whatever i personally disagree with are the erroneous parts, no?
if so, in what possible sense is it revelation?
Wrong question.
Scripture is about our understanding of God. It is not a theological manual. It is not “al lor nothing” It is not even all the same sort of writing. Ever heard of poetic license? What about Song of Solomon (Songs). Are the proverbs from God or the wisdom of Solomon (human) Does it matter?
Stop trying to make Scripture what it is not. It is not a handbook on cosmology or even the history of creation. It is not in competition with human understanding and science.
Scripture is a unique form of writing. It has its own form, rules and understanding. If I have to tell you thins then you do not understand Scripture.
Richard
some unknown percentage of said Scripture’s claims about God which are completely erroneous, of course.
You are welcome to believe that Scripture is how you describe it to be, but an inescapable logical consequnce is that it can give us absolutely no information about who God actually is, ignorant as we must therefore be about which claims about God’s character or actions are or aren’t erroneous, or which descriptions of him actually came from him or were the result of baseless human speculation or flat-out error.
Is DNA fingerprinting circular reasoning when used by forensic scientists in court?
Also, DNA maternity and paternity tests are considered valid by all US jurisdictions that I am aware of. Do you think these are circular reasoning?
We first have to ask if it is our understanding of scripture that is in error instead of scripture itself.
For example, Cardinal Bellarmine’s problems with Heliocentrism:
“But to wish to affirm that the sun is really fixed in the centre of the heavens and merely turns upon itself without travelling from east to west, and that the earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves very swiftly around the sun, is a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the theologians and scholastic philosophers, but also by injuring our holy faith and making the sacred Scripture false.”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
However, in the same letter he also said this:
“Third, I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the centre of the universe and the earth in the third sphere, and that the sun did not go around the earth but the earth went around the sun, then it would be necessary to use careful consideration in explaining the Scriptures that seemed contrary, and we should rather have to say that we do not understand them than to say that something is false which had been proven.”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
DNA fingerprinting is within the human genome. It has nothing to do with Evolutionary Ancestry across species (classifications notwithstanding)
When will you understand that you are comparing chalk and cheese?
Says who?
Scripture is not an authority on science, or cosmology, or medicine, or even human thinking.
It is not about truth or lies, accuracy and error. It is about understanding. What the writers understood. What the readers (listeners) understood. What it tell about human relationships with God. It also tells or mistakes and misunderstandings. It is not a simple answer to questions about truth or inerrancy. Truth abut what? Inerrant about what?
Richard
You are arguing against DNA being used to establish ancestry between humans, within the species. This is what you were responding to:
“If we came across a human skeleton we couldn’t say who their ancestors or descendants are, short of DNA sequencing.”
You also seemed to question DNA based studies on historic human migration patterns. Again, this is DNA comparisons within the human species.
Says you, unless I have completely misunderstood your position - are you affirming that 100% of Scripture’s claims about God are inerrant? If not, then by definition, you are affirming that some percentage of Scripture’s claims about God are erroneous… or am I completely misunderstanding you?
And, if I understand your position, neither is it an authority on God?
Then you do not understand my position.
Why continue Inerrancy? It is so Black & white.
Scripture is written by humans, whether inspired or not they were not writing as automatons.
Scripture is not about right and wrong. It is not abut truth and lies (falsehoods) , or at least in terms of assertions. It is Scripture. And if that does not answer you then
And scriptural criticism is not about right or wrong either.
Richard
Maybe I could ask a different way:
Does Scripture give us ANY specific, discreet, objective fact about God about which we can say it is “true”?
How long have you got? (I doubt that either you or i have enough time to read or write it)
In short, of course.
The problem is really that it is not a case of quoting this verse or that one. The Bible is understood as a whole. Most of the problems come when people start to break it down. Verses may be good for reference but they sparked off more heresies than anything else.
Richard
No worries, for the sake of discussion I’ll settle for one… what is one specific, discreet, objective fact about God about which you would affirm it is “true”?
God is the creator!
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
Look, I could reel off the names and titles of God or Christ. I could claim the Trinity but that is in dispute. I could claim God is Love but then have to explain His clear acts of aggression and anger. I could also claim that God is beyond our comprehension which is less than helpful.
If you described your self would it be:
etc,etc etc
Trying to encompass God means that and more.
And trying to summarise Scripture is virtually impossible briefly.
I am not trying to awkward, just pragmatic.
Put it this way, when asked God said
I am who I am.
To the Patriarchs he was known by who He associated with: the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob.
To the Israelites He was known by His acts: He brought them out of Egypt.
Elijah knew Him in the silence, Moses on the Mountain.
it goes on and on.
Richard
LOL Probably.
Sweet.
Yes, but we have some ‘broken records’ around.
That’s coming from the wrong side, indeed an enlightenment sort of side. The question is what God intended to do, and it certainly wasn’t to satisfy the monkey curiosity of twentieth-plus century first world people. The whole point of a Designer communicating with His critters is message, and since a message is best communicated in terms and fashions that the critters understand, then “nothing else matters”; He will communicate using definitions of truth that the various target audiences hold. We aren’t the target audience for any of it, we’re reading other people’s mail – other people whose ways of communicating and view of what truth is are sufficiently alien that the efforts that most science fiction writers manage in their novels pale in comparison, so if we want to actually read that mail instead of arrogantly thinking it was written in our terms then we have serious work to do.
And a huge part of that work is to make it across the void to where the operating definition of truth had nothing to do with getting scientific or historical facts correct but with sources who could be trusted to do what they say and who were in positions of authority to speak truth – and thus the criterion for “this is true” was who said it, or in the case at hand Who said it.
Then since those ancient people had views of the world and of reality that from our enlightenment-type perspective are “wrong”, we should not just concede that there could be “factual errors” but predict that there will be!
I’ve pondered sometimes what could be changed in the Old Testament writings so it would speak better science or whatever without (1) changing the message or (2) making the original audience go “Huh? What??” The only firm one I’ve come up with is that God could have told them that the rim of the big bronze “sea” in the Temple that was ten cubits across would be thirty-one and a half cubits around – that’s still not perfect, but for most practical purposes 3.15 is a decent approximation of pi!
None of it is erroneous unless it fails to get the message across, and if any of it had failed at that then I doubt it would have gotten into the canon. Again this goes back to the operative definition of truth; we insist that being scientifically and historically accurate is required because we are imbued with scientific materialism from birth, but back in Bible days it wasn’t the “what” but the “Who” that mattered: if Yahweh was the source, that was all that mattered. Plus as I noted, making it scientifically and historically accurate is a demand on God that fails in multiple ways; it could change the message, or it could have baffled the audience, but perhaps most importantly we have to ask, “Which science? Whose history?” Insisting things be 100% scientifically and historically accurate is a losing game because we don’t have all scientific or historical knowledge and no scientist will claim that everything we think we know is even ultimately correct!
So how do we determine? We study the literary genres and language and culture and worldviews of the original writers (as far as they can be determined) and of the original audiences, and we read the scriptures from that proper perspective. Doing so it almost invariably happens that an abundance of meaning pops out that we never can get from just reading in translation, and if we get something wrong it will be less wrong than if we go it on our own.
Acknowledging that ancient writers wrote for their own audience and not for us does not mean we must conclude there are errors. The moment you introduce the idea of “percentage” you are no longer working within a biblical worldview.
Indeed the complaint is much like whining about the house painter you hired failing to shampoo the carpet and fold the laundry: the painter has a specific task and not any others. When the Spirit selected writers, He had a specific task for them, and it wasn’t to teach science or history or even to worry about those things at all, it was to engage the people created by God to be His family in a dialogue about “get[ting] back to the Garden”.
Only if you think God had any inclination to get sidetracked by making things fit the modern worldview of scientific materialism.
That does not follow.
A couple of my favorite novels are written with each chapter presenting how a specific character sees things. For a few chapters it isn’t evident that the ways they view the world, including what they consider to be facts, not only don’t match but probably don’t match the reality contained in the author’s sketch of that fictional world, but then it becomes important to sift out what is slanted, what is misrepresented, even what is flat-out falsehoods by each character in order to really follow the action.
That these novels ultimately make sense can be attributed to the ability of readers to find what is consistent and to demote what isn’t. If humans can do that with novels, we certainly can do the same for the library we call “the Bible”. Indeed given all our different ways of looking at things, as communities we will do even better at such sifting. The early church kicked off the process by establishing the canon, and theologians down the centuries have continued it by discarding dangerous errors as they arose, and by now there is what C S Lewis once referred to as a united voice.
I think this is part of why no scripture is to be interpreted solo – going solo we are more likely not to catch the errors we make, but in a “chorus” errors stand out far better.
That is such a great statement I’m not sure it can be repeated too often! At the very least it ought to be on the page right before Genesis in every copy of the Bible.
Wow – that was essentially the question around which an entire scholarly course was organized! It ends up having to deal with the philosophy of language, specifically its inherent limitations for expressing things, and then its capacity for communicating divine truth in the first place, as well as tackling the old question, “What is truth?”
Graduate level course, full term, three or four credit hours. At the end, we would have responded to you, “Human language is incapable of stating discrete, objective facts about anything that is not itself discrete and objective; in the case of the divine, it may be that the best we can do is analogy, and where analogy is to some degree successful human language still lacks the capacity to be clear and/or exhaustive”.
First, shorten it: “God is”.
Then tackle nature or essence, such as: “The Word was God”.
Then we can move on to attributes such as Creator.
Excellent.
Yes, I’m familiar… the graduate level of linguistic study that concludes that our omnipotent, omniscient God who created our very minds, bodies, and capability for language, is incapable of clearly communicating to us any relevant facts or details about himself, his actions, character, commands, promises.
Well, any of the items you listed as believing (trinity, God as creator, his various attributes)… for you to believe that requires that you believe that the authors of the Bible did not err when they relayed that information.
My basic question is, why are you not subjecting the theological claims and perspectives of the Bible to the same scrutiny or skepticism as you seem to give its historical or cosmological perspectives?
In other words…
If Scripture is not an authority on science, or cosmology, or medicine, or even human thinking, then on what basis are you claiming that it is an authority on theology?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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