I really do not want to argue with you, but I want to point something out.
The Gospel of John begins, “In the Beginning was the Word./Logos, Jesus Christ.” Since the Bible uses the capitalized Word to refer to Jesus at this important place in the Gospel, I think that it is important to keep this perspective. That is that Jesus Christ is God’s Living revealed Word. The Bible is God’s Holy written word.
Yes, the Bible is very important, but Jesus Christ is the living Alpha and Omega of our faith. We can also talk to Jesus through prayer which makes Him a resource deeper in some ways that the Bible. Again it is a matter of perspective and you did put Jesus before the Bible in your list which is very good. Maybe you could have added prayer to the list.
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Thanks for sharing, Jay. That’s fascinating. I was born into those culture wars and am still trying to tangle my way out without catapulting to the other extreme.
For a while I liked the idea from the Chicago statement of the Bible being “inerrant in all it affirms,” which seems a bit more specific than a blanket statement of “inerrant.” But I like this “perfect with respect to its purpose” too. Because we really have to have a purpose in mind before deciding these things, as we would with any other kind of written text. And while it’s only really applicable to the gospel of John, the last verse in chapter 20 resonantes with me:
But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
Laura,…interesting to figure out what book you and Boscopup are referring to…there is another book — though we are now off topic for this thread – where the author has some specific thoughts about Nephilim and etc. As for who was being condemned in that Flood – yes, I think the Gen 6 episode is something which that author says was part of what led to the Flood…But it is his thought or theory. You are wondering this because the Flood was regional not global???
thanks for sharing, Jay. It was interesting to hear about your spiritual journey and your thought process which has led you to conclude that inerrancy is wrong. I have more thoughts on the topic, but I would need to put them together more clearly before posting them
Yes, I think that is the issue – if the flood was regional, and there is no evidence that all of humanity was completely wiped out 4,000 years ago, then what was it about this particular segment of humanity that God decided to wipe them out for? It could be because of general evil, but the Nephilim angle is interesting, even though it’s mostly speculation.
Putting thoughts together clearly has never been a prerequisite for posting. Just ask me … haha
I think the point about the regional flood is that it’s simply a historical basis for the biblical flood. The biblical author “exaggerated” (Walton’s term) the details to make a point about the universal nature of human sinfulness. The ancient “regional flood” was literal in the sense that a flood actually happened; it was not literal in the sense that God sent a flood as judgment on a particularly bad group of people who lived in the region. Make sense?
If you are short on time, you can also look up “John Walton flood” on YouTube and some videos will come up with him explaining a synopsis of his book (also other videos of him explaining his model for Genesis 1 and for Adam and Eve by searching “John Walton the Lost World of Genesis” or John Walton the Lost World of Adam and Eve")
@Jay313
My question is how would the term you use in your podcast:
differ from the definition of inerrancy as explained further up in this thread?
I have the impression that some of the reluctance to accept the term inerrant has to do with the assumptions people make about what the term means when used as a theological term (as opposed to a dictionary definition), which are different.
Stepping away from the theological understanding of the term inerrant would bring some risk: allowing rather loose interpretations of scripture and allowing us to each create our own “Jeffersonian” / edited Bible, so to speak.
I don’t think “infallible” claims too much. Essentially, it means that the Scripture will inevitably achieve God’s purpose. This is no different than what Isaiah said:
“For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven,
And do not return there,
But water the earth,
And make it bring forth and bud,
That it may give seed to the sower
And bread to the eater,
So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth;
It shall not return to Me void,
But it shall accomplish what I please,
And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.
To most people, people in the pews and many pulpits, “biblical inerrancy” implies something even their own biblical scholars and theologians do not mean by the term. But they don’t know that. They, the people in the pews and pulpits, think “biblical inerrancy” means that our presently existing best translations of the Bible, or at least the best existing texts of the Bible in the original languages, contain no errors or discrepancies of any kind. For thirty-four years I have made a habit of reading to theology students the qualifications of “inerrancy” contained in the Chicago Statement and in the textbooks of leading conservative evangelical theologians and asking them to comment on them. (One leading conservative evangelical theologian says that “biblical inerrancy” is compatible with “inerrant use of errant sources” by biblical authors!) Almost to a person the students have scoffed at the term “inerrancy” when it is so qualified . They affirm that this—“inerrancy” as explained and qualified by the Chicago Statement and by leading conservative evangelical scholars and theologians—is not what their pastor, their parents, their Sunday School teachers, taught them about “our inerrant Bible.” What they were taught was that “inerrancy” means there are no discrepancies of any kind in the Bibles we actually have—insofar as they are good translations.
That’s the far end of the spectrum. @Laura quoted the Chicago Statement saying the Bible is “inerrant in all it affirms,” which also comes down to the author’s main purpose. That means the author may make a mistake of detail, but since that was not the main purpose of said author’s communication, then the mistake doesn’t matter. I can provide concrete examples, but the point is that the theologians have a different idea of inerrancy than the folks in the pews. “Perfect with respect to purpose” still comes down to the same thing, which is – What was the main thing the writer wanted to communicate to the original audience? What is the enduring message today? Those are questions that biblical scholars labor over every day, but the answers don’t always match what the person in the pew expects to hear.
I sometimes struggle with the notion as to why there would be errors in scripture in the first place. If God inspired the biblical authors, why didn’t he give them a helping hand?
The idea in Christianity is that God inspired certain men to transmit the story of Jesus and spread the message. Some of these men, through God’s inspiration, wrote some documents about it, which is today, the Bible. God Himself was not involved in the process of the authorship of this text. “I don’t know why God did it that way” is one thing. “I can’t think of any reason why God would do it like that so it’s absurd/wrong” is an argument from personal incredulity fallacy.
Well said. Those are probably the two main complaints that I see against belief. “God should’ve done it this way! Why would he do it that way?” Both can be collapsed into, “I would’ve done it differently.”
Just as with “inerrant” where we can list as counterexamples a number of insignificant errors, so with “infallible” we can list cases where the Bible has indeed lead people wrong to do things which are evil. That is why some care is needed in explaining what we can take these words to mean.
No matter how much we may believe that the Bible is the word of God, it is nevertheless written in human languages with all of its many flaws and weaknesses. Therefore since the very language in which the Bible is written is anything but infallible then how can anything written in such a medium be infallible? Therefore on the face of it the claim look completely absurd to me.
That is what had me digging deeper to seek in what way it makes sense to say that the Bible is infallible. And thus I found it in the fact that we do put trust in the Bible, myself as much as other Christians, so that I will tell people to read it for themselves – believing that through the Bible God can work to accomplish what He wills in the lives of those who read it.
I suppose “general evil” would be the rationale behind much of what is said in Genesis 6: 5-13. This would include all humanity in that case, since “general” is not a localized term.
I was intrigued to see the phrase ‘pain in his heart’ in Genesis 6:6 to describe God’s feelings about human behavior — that is, lawlessness as translated in vv 11 and 13… Some — or at least the commentary I looked at (NICOT) said this pain and lawlessness is the cumulative effect of all that occurs in Genesis 3: to 6:4…You can read that on your own.
As for the infamous Nephilim — mentioned only twice in the Bible – there seem to be an array of ideas, mostly speculation as you noted. Hard to know how to explain it. I recently read Michael S. Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm: recovering the supernatural view of the Bible…he gets pretty detailed on all of this, cites a lot of biblical and extrabiblical and “not at all biblical” ancient Mesopotamian sources and seems to support a particular view of who the Nephilim were.
He would not be the first to do so. As you said there is a lot of speculation about that issue…
P. S. I should note that Heiser seems to support a supernatural origin for the Nephilim and suggests, at least, that the Nephilim mentioned in Numbers might not be quite the same as the ones named in Genesis 6. His book is challenging and, no doubt for some, controversial. But – just from the conversation you and Boscopup were having – I suspect he is not the only one to muse on this subject.
It seems wrong to say that that the Bible is not inerrant, but I really think that it is wrong headed Primarily because it places our focus on the Wrong place, the Bible, instead of Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
“In the Beginning was the Word.” Evangelicals have been puts their faith in Gen.1, when they should have been putting their faith in John 1 or more specifically Jesus Christ the Word of God, rather than the Bible the Bible the word of God. The power of the Bible is Jesus Christ, not its inerrancy.
Also the Bible includes both the Old and New Testaments so if we say the OT is on the same level of dependability as the NT, which we know is not true. However what I see in Evangelical circles are becomes Legalistic as they minimize the difference between the Moses and Jesus.
Jay, if I understand him properly found though God is not looking for us to construct a philosophy to save us and others, but to follow Jesus. This led him to Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and I think we basically all agree with him, but Tolstoy and Wittgenstein rejected philosophy and we cannot.
When John wrote, “in the Beginning was the Logos,” he reconciled theology (Jesus) and philosophy (Logos) in a way that is unique in that time to this. Wittgenstein was right in saying that traditional philosophy is about the physical, while God is about the spiritual. Jesus the Logos shows us how to bridge this gap.
How is this possible? With God all things are possible. God is, in particular the Holy Spirit, which is why the Trinity is so important, is Love. Love is not a feeling as we have been told. Love is a Relationship, contrary to philosophy. Word/Logos/ Jesus Christ tell us how things, people, ideas, and God are supposed to relate to each other. Science tells us how the universe fits together, how it relates to itself and others. Philosophy correctly understood tells about the structure, meaning or the Logos of Reality. Theology tells us how we are to relate to God, others, and Reality.
I do not think that inerrancy contributes to this. I think that inerrancy has contributed to the terrible mess we are in. We need to change the discussion from the Bible to the Logos.