That depends on the definition of “inerrant”. If it refers to what the Hebrews meant by “word” then it’s the message that’s inerrant.
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In my view the message isn’t inerrant throughout. There are some univocal themes but parts of the Hebrew Bible correct other parts. Heck, Genesis 1 might be a correction of Genesis 2. Somehow they ended up side by side.
They aren’t even really about the same thing – just one reason I don’t get that some people think it’s one single story.
Genesis 1 depicts a radically different image of God in my mind. Highly anthropomorphic, primitive and incompetent. He has to fix his incomplete creation (lonely Adam) and parades all the animals before the man hoping a mate could be found. The creator in Genesis 1 has no need to fix His creation. It is deemed good.
This cannot be ruled out unless you assume the Bible is inerrant and univocal from the start and are willing to do a lot of mental gymnastics.
Theologically, I see Gen 2-3 as an ancient attempt to grapple with theodicy and it points out the reality of what sin does.
It’s hard to say the “message” is inerrant when the very first two chapters starkly contradict one another and depict different images of God and the first may very well be a correction of the older, second creation account.
Saying the message of both is merely that God is creator is reducing and diluting the content too much.
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Fair enough. what is wrong with that?
So how do you come to this conclusion having said what you said before?
Surely the fact that they are grappling implies that they are learning, and changing and growing. The whole point is that Scripture “evolves” (at the risk of scientific uproar) The view of God changes. and we need to know this. We need to understand how God has been perceived and revealed . Only then can we make our own mind up of how we understand Him.
Scripture is not about giving a perfect answer. It is about learning.
Richard
Inerrancy is usually understood as a logical inference from divine inspiration. God is omniscient, God doesn’t want to deceive the believers; thus, a God-inspired message must be free from errors. So far so good. But what is a divine message? Is it the main idea, the purpose of a God-inspired text? Or should one suppose that any description of a fact or event that is incidentally mentioned in the Bible is also a divine message? The inerrantists prefer the second option; hence they turn their own apologetics into the mockery of the Bible.
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Yes, that’s exactly what I mean while making reference to the “image” of Jesus.
Surely, what I say is not the universally accepted docrtine. Still I suppose that’s one of the best ways to deal with the complicated issue of biblical authority.
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Inerrancy is an excuse for quoting any piece of Scripture and claiming its authority. It is an excuse for not having to think or interpret beyond the obvious. It ignores any human participation in writing Scripture. It is an ideal promoted by one small verse in a pastoral letter, that, if it means what they think, negates all of Paul’s pastoral letters. Paul would not be vane enough to consider his own writing as Scripture.
Richard
Here I’d like to agree with you. Jesus Christ is the one who embodies and represents God’s nature. And his way was to consistently refuse to grasp or to hold any power. God is the only true power in the world, power pertains to divine nature - that’s why God is the only one who doesn’t need to put any special effort into retaining power. God doesn’t fight for power, doesn’t subdue anyone, and so forth. Any hierarchy, secular or ecclesiastical, reflects human misery rather than divine abundance.
Surely, when Paul writes about Scriptures, he points at the Old Testament. Nonetheless, we have a good reason to accept and cherish his writings as the divinely inspired Scriptures of the New Testament.
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I suppose it’s just an implicit part of the definition. A [true] prophet is a person who happened to avoid material errors while transmitting a divine message. So, I would rather reframe the question: why should one think that the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles (who have also claimed a divine inspiration) have received divine inspiration and have managed to avoid material errors while transmitting the divine messages? In a nutshell, my answer is as follows: I accept the prophetic writings of the Old Testament and the apostolic epistles of the New Testament as the divinely inspired Scriptures because they are related to the Gospels.
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I would rather say that the early Church has attested to the authenticity of the apostolic writings that constitute the New Testament (in this case, the term “apostolic writings” is used rather inclusively; the Church tradition doesn’t claim that Mark or Luke were the apostles themselves; so, an “apostolic writing” is a “writing that stems from the earliest Church, from the communities of the apostles and their disciples”). This testimony of the early Church was an acknowledgment of what they knew as reality - not a solemn proclamation that would have conferred a status of Scripture on the texts that hadn’t have this status before.
That’s why St. Irenaeus could name the four canonical Gospels in the second century, and Eusebius of Caesarea and St. Athanasius were able to list all the major New Testament books in the fourth century, before any Council has solemnly defined the New Testament canon.
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Of course
That isn’t the point.
The point is that the inerrancy doctrine is based upon one verse of Pauls’ second letter to Timothy. If the only valid reference is Scripture then Paul is invalidating all his own advice, not only to Timothy but to the other recipients. IOW it cannot be what he intended people to understand.
The validity of Paul in Scripture is beyond my pay grade (Hierarchy notwithstanding)
Richard
Nothing, but that is not how the Church proper or most Christian, past and present, have interpreted it.
Learning and growing means correcting. So yes, Jesus intensifies the law and corrects it. Genesis 1 corrects what sees as the mistakes in the older accounts. Matthew and Luke appreciate much of Mark but correct some of it as well in copying.
How can you then ask me how I can say that? When people say the message of scripture is true I don’t assume them mean the first creation story corrects the second. They mean the message of both is inerrant. But when one author corrects the message of another, this cannot be true.
Also, the learning and growing of scripture is someone’s negative. The genuine Pauline corpus had women apostles. Others writing in his name (Pastorsls) told women to shut up and make their husbands a sandwich. I see the message as misogyny, patriarchy and pulling the reigns on women too free in Christ for a proper Roman family.
Saying the message is inerrant is lip service for a defeated model of inspiration. It’s still clinging to certainty. We don’t have that and even if we did, we wouldn’t follow it, e.g. Paul treating marriage as only a last resort instead of a wonderful gift from God. Should I have put that in my wedding vows? “I’m only marrying you because I cannot control my sexual urges…” or when Paul tells people to stay in their position in life when saved (e.g. slaves). Is that normal Christian advice today?
Quite ironically, this verse ( 2 Timothy 3:16) does literally nothing to support the doctrine of inerrancy. Any theologian who believes that the Bible is authoritative as long as it establishes the universal theological and moral truths would, nevertheless, eagerly agree that the entire Bible is God-inspired and useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, for training in righteousness. To use these words as the inerrantists use them is a loose interpretation and nothing more.
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I think we qare at cross purposes. It would seem that you are not of the inerrant brigade but I am not seeing how you value Scripture.
Paul speaks from his heritage which is Judaism, and specifically Pharisaic. .Male dominance and sexual naivety are both intrinsic to those traditions. If we make allowances for this and transpose the cultural differences into our modern understanding then the principles are still valid. It is the difference between a strictly literal understanding and a considered one. Regardless of what we think of slavery, it was a valid status when Paul lived.
As I have been saying recently, we need t look beyond the details to understand what the Bible is teaching.
Richard
God uses it to bring people to salvation. It teaches us about God and it teaches me about Jesus but it has to be wrestled with and interpreted. There is also much in the Bible I don’t value. If you value if all my answer is shame on you. Rape, misogyny, dashing infants on rocks, stoning disobedient children, a bear mauling some young people etc…
I can accept a canonical dimension insofar as the hermeneutical framework accepts the individual voices of each works, doesn’t try to hide or harmonize the errors, doesn’t pretend the works (including the gospels) are history, doesn’t pretend it’s all univocal or inerrant.
That is not an easy task. That requires real soul searching, real research, real questioning of dearly helped beliefs, and real struggling with uncertainty. But in reality the diversity of belief only reinforces its truth to me.
Valid in some parts but in others that is just you making the Bible say what you want. That is not letting scripture serve as conscience and corrector. It’s us being the conscience and corrector of scripture and it’s completely arbitrary and dependent upon the norms, culture and value we bring to the text. It’s even more complicated and like a spiral because that text has influenced all those things.
So was murdering Jews to Nazi’s.
So was the holocausts and genocides throughout history. So was subjugating women.
So was chattel slavery in the US. It was valid in the 1800s too because God taught it and people could do what they wished with their property.
What’s a valid status is determined by whatever people believe at the time. I’m not buying this.
I say no thank you to the whatever it is you are selling on this front to placate. I’ll stick with being anxious over a lack of certainty.
How can you say the message is inerrant when our message is different than our ancestors in parts and will be different from our offspring in parts? The message is subjective and ever changing.
Unless you somehow think your take on the Bible is the correct one for all time?
The modern exegetes - for instance, N. T. Wright - have done quite a good job to rethink the misogynic passages, to show that they must not necessarily mean what the previous generations thought they meant.
As for me, I prefer a somewhat easier way. I suppose that nothing may be a universally applicable rule of Christian faith and life unless established by Jesus Christ. And if a particular apostolic teaching seems to contradict the words of Jesus or his way of action, the former should be understood, without discarding it, as a response to some specific need or situation.
For example, the relative denigration of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 may be explained by the apostle’s belief that the end was near - therefore, he might have considered the full-time missionary activity the most fruitful (but by no means the only licit) way of life for every Christian. But these apostolic words must always give way to Mark 10:6-9, just like the passages that seem to prohibit the ordination of women must give way to Luke 10:39-42.
As for the words about slavery - well, the apostle lived in the world where the absence of slavery was literally unimaginable. Even affirming the equal human dignity of the slaves and the free, he still had to assume that some people (and some Christians) would inevitably remain enslaved.
Or let’s have a closer look at one more discrepancy. The apostolic prohibition to communicate (even to share meals) with the professed Christians who shun the Christian moral standards (1 Corinthians 5: 9-11) is in apparent contradiction to what Jesus did repeatedly. Jesus has freely communicated and shared meals with sinners (Mark 2:15-17; Matthew 11:19; Luke 5:29-32; Luke 15:1-2) – that is, with the lapsed members of the people of God, with the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24).
The admonition that the apostle has given to the Christian community in Corinth may be explained by the context. The Corinthian church consisted of gentile Christians who were not sufficiently versed in the Jewish moral tradition, whereas the Christian moral tradition had been just forming. At least some members of the Corinthian church were not sure about the Christian sexual morality, hence the apostolic response was requested (1 Corinthians 7:1). In the meanwhile, the community was plagued by internal rifts (1 Corinthians 1:10-12). A community that lacks both a clear understanding of the rule of faith and internal unity while being surrounded by a distinctly un-Christian milieu would easily dissolve unless a strict observance of the basic standards were encouraged.
So, the first Epistle to Corinthians demonstrates how the apostle Paul protected the doctrinal integrity when it was really threatened. Of course, this apostolic contribution must be remembered and appreciated; but it can’t be the final verdict.
Jesus has repeatedly stated that different people may need different time span to get in line with the will of God, and that God is patient enough to give them the time they need (Luke 13:6-9, Matthew 20:1-10, 21:28-31). The church that doesn’t cast out the people who are still not in line with the biblical commandments would just follow this divine pattern. The members of such a church would mind their own sins and abstain from judging the other people, which is a highly recommended Christian behavior (Matthew 7: 1-5).
In short, the Church must be open and welcoming to the people while firmly protecting her doctrinal integrity. Balancing these two principles is a complicated pastoral task to be accomplished by every generation of the church leaders. An as the latter are not infallible themselves (Acts 20:28-30), it is inevitable that the churches committed, commit, and will commit numerous errors in disciplinary issues. So the church history has to be quite messy - just as it is in fact.
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Why bother following Christianity when science says the bible is full of falsehoods?
Heres one…Acts 28
Luke writes…
On the Isle of Malta, Paul is miraculously saved from the venom of a viper.
Science has proven there are no, nor have there ever been, poisonous vipers on the isle of Malta…its clearly a lie according to science!
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I never said that it was inerrant.
As for the rest, there is a moral high grond that I refuse to take.
I think that you are being just a little obtuse and exaggerating.
No one is claiming that slavery was correct, but it would appear that Paul did nt consider it something to contest. That is not my call. All I can do is look at what is written in the light of Christianity. The principle of accepting your lot is still valid, with the caveat of civil rights and dignity notwithstanding.
We can throw out the baby with the bathwater, or we can sieve out the wheat from the chaff. The Bible is what it is.
Richard