um, err, that is its reson d’etre… Scripture is primarily about God/theology. A scientific paper is on science, An article in a magazine or newspaper is journalism, an historic paper is on history and Scripture is about God.
Different scrutiny.
Theology is weighed against personal belief and experience. it is also weighed against cohesion and culture. Some of it is weighed against consistency and itself. And some of itis weighed against outside sources, like secular records or non cannon papers.
The Scripture was written by fallible men, that were no more infallible on matters of science or medicine than they were on theology, correct?
Did God somehow work to ensure that the theological parts of Scripture were indeed inerrant or otherwise avoided significant error, while he simply chose not to similarly guide statements or or sentiments that didn’t fall into that particular category?
So we can be confident that the theological claims about God in the Bible are actually true and reliable and reflect reality solely because a group of fallible, ancient people arbitrarily decided it was so?
Within the church on earth there is hierarchy. I am subject to the authorities of the churches I lead worship in. I have qualifications recognised within those churches. So it must be. Scripture is a human construction and therefore comes under human jurisprudence. The claims of Godly participation come from itself. It is basically the same as claiming your own authority, Without God in person (explicit and unequivicable), there can be no other authority on earth.
The bible is Scripture for Christianity , and the Old Testament is recognised by Judaism and Islam. Hinduism has its own scripture (Vedics) and so on. It is the only way religion can functoni without God being tangible.
You’re welcome to believe so, of course. But just logically speaking… if that is literally all Scripture is, then it has no basis to claim reliability for truths that lay beyond human perception (God’s being, character, actions, promises for eternal life, etc.), any more than any other human writing, be it the Bhagavad Gita, Mein Kampf, or the most recent horoscope in National Enquirer.
Humans simply don’t have immediate access to any such knowledge, and any such claims about God or theology from any human, unless they were somehow simultaneously revealed by/from God, are nothing more than utterly baseless human speculation.
And who is to say that the writers of Scripture did not?
If you are expecting automatons controlled solely by God the you have not understood Scripture. it clearly shows God working through fallable humans. There is nothing in Scripture to indicate that it was written directly by God, in fact the stories are full of human farailties and mistakes.
There is a big difference between dictation and inspiration. The first involves God taking over, the second involves the human interpreting what is shown to them.
In truth God could have taken over the writers but that is not the God of Scripture.
A very strange selction of writing.
The Bhagavad Gita comes under the global view of Scripture.
Mein Kempf is a personal struggle of a man who the whole world sees as the Devil incarnate.
Horoscopes come under the Global view of pseudo religion based upon inanimate objects having some influence over us. It is also specifically rejected by the Bible
Now, if you had mentioned the Koran, or the Vedics, or even the Book of Mormon there might have been something to talk about.
Christianity is not unique in considering itself unique. It almost goes without saying. If it is not unique why persuade all and sundry to join? Islam is more unique in accepting the validity of other faiths…(Possibly because it limits who can join them)
At the end of the day we are left with personal faith and beliefs and there it must stay until or unless God fully reveals Himself.
You missed the point: “Human language is incapable . . . .”
This fits the scriptures: remember when Jesus could do no miracles due to the people’s unbelief?
The problem isn’t God, and it wasn’t then, either; the problem is us. It would be astounding if any of the tongues of men could communicate clearly much at all about God; even the tongues of angels (if there is such a thing) are almost certainly inadequate!
The amazing thing is that God manages to get a few things through to us despite ourselves.
One may as well ask why a historian of ancient China doesn’t give lectures in astrophysics.
Why should God have to satisfy the curiosity of humans in a brief period of history when that isn’t His object? His object is to talk about the relationship between Him and us.
The idea that for the scriptures to be true then they have to be authorities on everything does not come from scripture; it cannot be found there. It comes in fact from scientific materialism, which starting in the early twentieth century became the dominant worldview – and that worldview is inherently atheistic.
The scriptures repeatedly tell us that their point is to tell us about God, i.e. that their purpose is theology. But nowhere is it written that they intend to teach history, or science, or the weather, or any other such matter of interest only to modern first-world minds.
This question itself reveals that you’re not thinking about this properly: you are insisting that God had to communicate in ways comfortable to you rather than speaking in terms the various original audiences the pieces of scripture were aimed at. If you were to meet an ancient Israelite and point out that the first Creation account gets certain facts wrong, he would stare at you and wonder what you were talking about, not because he thought that those facts were right but because the point is utterly irrelevant to that kind of literature!
Consider along with this that what we translate as “word” in both Hebrew and Greek means “concept” far more than it means “individual vocable” – it is, after all, the Ten Words according to the scriptures, never the “Ten Commandments”, and the ten are not individual vocables, they are in some instances rather lengthy with more than one sentence – yet each of them, each of what we tend to label a Commandment, is called a “word”.
So when we are told that the scriptures are “God-breathed”, it is the concepts that are breathed, the “words”, and not the details; the Spirit chose men and prepared them so that when they put quill to papyrus they would use their own ways of expression to get across the concepts – and if their science didn’t agree with ours, that’s just too bad; the “mail” was for them and if we want to understand it we have to approach it with minds set to their ways of speaking.
The beauty of the canonization process is that the decision started at the bottom, with local churches, and slowly worked its way up. It isn’t just the testimony of some batch of bishops, it’s the united voice of the churches – catholic in the true sense of “from the whole”.
No – because that’s not how it happened. Establishment of the canon was a matter of “What is to be read in church/worship?” It began the moment one church asked another, “What do you guys read in worship?” and churches started swapping copies of Paul’s letters. As the question rose up to higher levels, from single churches to local groups to wider ones, the level of unanimity was astounding: in short order, nineteen of the books we count as New Testament scripture were affirmed as being proper for reading in worship (the rest took later).
We have confidence because the selection was plainly guided by the Spirit speaking through local churches until the lists reached higher and higher to bishops and patriarchs and councils – those councils were doing little but affirming what the numerous local churches had decided and agreed to: these are the books to read in church, these are where the message is found, these are the authority for things theological.
Which is one of the reasons I rejected Roman Catholicism: if the books were just chosen by a few people, why trust them more than others chosen by a few people?
It’s the catholicity of the scriptures that gives them authority – the Spirit speaking through the churches.
True, though Richard has the muddled idea that one religion’s scripture is as good as the next.
With the difference that Christianity is unique: in comparison, all the rest are the same, teaching that we earn God’s favor; Christianity tells us that we can’t earn it but God gives it anyway. My history of religions professor put it this way: there are two religions; one says God can be bought off, and the other says God made the payment Himself – not just that God can’t be bought, but that He isn’t interested in anything we might perceive to be payment.
Including the stories that communicate all the basics of Christian doctrine, presumably?
Hence I am still struggling to understand your basis for believing any of these Christian doctrines that have no basis except that they are derived from stories full of human frailties and mistakes.
Why should that be a problem? Are you perfect? If you want a perfect example look at Christ, but I would have thought that more fallible examples are much more easier to understand and emulate
Why dp yu concentrate on the negative. Is the glass half full or half empty? There is little or nothing withi our world that is 100% efficient. Predators fail, obviously defense mechanisms in prey fail. All human designed motors are less than 100% efficient. Roads need repairing. Things decay. You are not 100% efficient and are subject to injury, aging and change. why must Scripture be perfect?
Oh, it would be so much easier if you could just read, understand and do. No though, no doubts, no intelligence.
There is basic logic involved in the discussion… let me take an example:
Will God resurrect humans at the end of time and grant them eternal life?
Logically… This is a question that no amount of human intelligence, courage, wrestling, reasoning, ingenuity, speculation, wishful thinking, hopes, logic, or the like can answer. There is no scientific experiment, no logical deduction, no thought experiment, no observation, no empirical data… there is no way for a human to answer that question at all… much less a fallible human susceptible to making errors.
So If this doctrine, this belief in resurrection & eternal life, is based 100% on the speculation or invention of fallible humans, then it is simply worthless. Why in the world should you or anyone else embrace a belief about such an idea? On what rational or logical basis? if it is the raw invention of human speculation or wishful thinking, then there simply is no rational or logical basis for believing it to be true (beyond just more wishful thinking on the part of the adherent).
The doctrine of resurrection comes directly from the Gospel, that is Christ. The Gospel can only be found in Scripture. So if you are going to question the validity of the Gospel you are basically claiming that Scripture is false or a fantasy, or a con, or whatever.
I could point you to some people who have tried to disprove the resurrection
Who moved the Stone by Frank Morrison is the classic example of someone who set out to ridicule the Gospel and ended up believing it.
There is a limited amount of reference to Christ outside the Gospels. The guard’s report given at the end of Matthew’s Gospel has apparently been told and told. as an attempt to deny the resurrection. Circumstantially the dramatic change of the disciples and the subsequent spread of Christianity can be claimed as a sort of proof. Normally if you kill off the leader the movement crashes and burns. the idea that a lie could produce such a result is almost as unbelievable as the resurrection itself.
Scientifically impossible? Actually there is evidence that the human body can be resurrected, although three days is currently too long a gap for modern medicine.
But the problem is that, as Paul states, if the resurrection is false then the whole Gospel collapses and we are to be the most pitied.
If you are going to talk logic, God, by definition should have dominion over His creation and therefore be able to create, kill and raise to His hearts content. regardless of what we can do.
So it boils down to this:
Does God exist?
Do you accept Scripture as a valid guide to God (and Christianity)
Can you see beyond the need for proof?
Can you allow yourself to accept the Christian message regardless of how it is derived?
A no at any point is probably terminal
However
Why should it matter?
If this life is just all we have, then all you can do is make the best of what you have. Worrying about an uncertain continuance serves little or no purpose. Too many people spend too much time concentrating on the next life and forget to live this one. I do not believe that the only reason for this life is as a right of passage to eternity.
Regardless of any thoughts about Salvation, or Eternity, the man point of any religion , Christianity included, is to help you live this life, not the next one. The guidelines about selflessness, honour, judgement and so on are primarily for living now. If you see no need to worship or even acknowledge God then so be it. The principle of freedom of choice should include the freedom to deny or refuse, or ignore, without predjudice or retribution. Christianity has the Last Gasp lifeline. It exists as a sort of safety line against coersion. You do not have to believe!
As far as I am concerned, my faith is not about eternity, it is about aligning myself with God who I see as the ultimate good and therefore the only way to live. Eternity? I guess I will worry about that when my time comes. For now I have a life on earth to live to the best of my ability.
There are discrepances in the Gospel narratives much like you might get from witness statements at a crime scene. There are also different perspectives and purposes. Matthew is trying to prove that the Jews should have recognised Christ as the Messiah. Mark is giving them an excuse by claiming that Jesus tried to keep the truth of Himself a secret. John uses action and words to promote his view of the Gospel and doctrine, regardless of whether they happened together or even years apart. Luke claims a dispationate approach but emphasises the message to the gentiles.
Scripture is not about truth, it is about doctrine and, to a greater of lesser extent, indoctrination. It uses the information and comments on it to make its points. That is neither deceitful, nor error. It is part of the genre.
You ask what seem to be simple questions, but they are not.
The evidence for Christ’s Resurrection is enough to “convict” Him of rising in most courts in the world. From there proceed to trusting the sources which tell about it.