Characteristics of the Bible: “inerrancy” or “theological reliability”?

To begin with, science can’t decisively prove that there have never been poisonous vipers on the isle of Malta. Science can only say that their remains were not found yet. But this is not relevant in the end. Paul could be attacked by a venomous viper or by any other dangerous animal. It could happen on the isle of Malta or anywhere else. These details are not material to the message that the writer of the Acts conveys.

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So you are happy following a philosophy with loads of fundamental lies… scientifically exposed lies?

7 day creation
Adam naming the animals
Eve eating forbidden fruit
A serpent that had wings and flies and talks
The global flood
God confusing language at tower of babel
Sodom and gomorah
Pauls miracles

Wouldnt you agree that the above small sampling scientifically casts a shadow on the rest of the bible? On the balance of probabilities, its complete nonsense

I would say that you only answer the comments you can contest.

You neatly ignored me.

Science does not dictate Biblical truth. That does not invalidate either science or the Bible. They are not in competition.

Richard

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Im not ignoring you at all…you are straw plucking your response!

Again, science proves creation, adam naming animals, flying snakes, babel, the global flood, paul being bitten by a highly venomous serpent on Malta, genealogies…ON THE BALANCE OF PROBABILITIES it proves all those things wrong!

Do you honestly expect that they will ever find evidence of venomous snakes on malta?

Exactly and there is no reason to presume otherwise or jump through hoops to remove the misogyny, rape, slavery and murder found inside. Call it what it is and move past it.

I agree. It’s possibly Paul erroneously thought the world was ending very soon and gave his followers some rules because of this false view.

It is also possibly Paul was so zealous for the gospel, like Jesus’s never married and assumed and taught this is the proper way.

I would simply say the message on marriage in the Bible is inconsistent and we have to disregard parts.

My priority goes to Jesus. Remember, Paul is especially careful to distinguish his commands from the Lord’s.

They fit in really well at the time and were probably tautological to most of the church the last 1900 years. Rethinking them is code for changing them to fit modern values. I prefer calling a spade a spade.

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We are not talking about chemistry or phtsics here but observations lent to measurements by archeologists . geologist and paleontology. If the observation does not agree with the observation or understanding, in most cases, of events there is a difference in what was written about the event and the on site observation or evidence. Latter day scientific evidence can explain the past. The initail writings I agree were never meant to be scientific but it does not matter. Evidence is evidence and a retro application brings in the question was the original writing in error. Looking back yes but can it be counted in error if at the time they did not know any better. To them it was real.

I agree Science does not dictate Biblical Truth. Scientific evidence can help explain Biblical events like creation, the origin of man the flood and the Tower of Babel.

You are the one who said: “ Regardless of what we think of slavery, it was a valid status when Paul lived.“

All those situations I pointed out were just as valid.

Paul at least dares to tell Christian slave-owners to treat their property/slaves fairly. Baby steps.

You call them lies. Lies are intentional scts to deceive. The writrers of Genesis wrote what they thought they knew or understood. You cannot prove any of them are lies but you can address them in light of evidence unavailable to the writers at the time. Sometimes the evidence does not agree, e.g., the flood being world wide and the Biblical time line, the dispersion of people and the language confuion at Babel.

I think if you review the history of inerrancy it applies to the writing without any consideration of inspiration. Some of the definitions put forth by Luther, Acquinas and the Chicago theology group seem to focus on errors as a product of the writers and not in any way related to inspiration.

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You are fighting a battle that does not need to be won.

It does not matter what science thinks

It does not matter how creation was made.

We do not need the Biblical explanations to be scientifically correct.

It is not an “all or nothing” argument about the content of the Bible.

Paul did not claim that scripture is inerrant, nor did he say it was the only reference

he said it is useful. IOW if you can’t find it anywhere else, try Scripture
It is part of a pastoral letter, not a specific teaching.

Who cares!!

what matters is what the people of the time thought!

Stop knit-picking. Stop trying to disprove science. It does not matter!

Richard

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Sorry the Bible does not claim innerrancy. It caims inspiration. The church recognizes inspiration and has introduced inerrancy to describe the Bible over the years and claims it as well.

Certainly, I will not agree that anything of what you’ve mentioned here would cast a shadow on the rest of the Bible!

First of all, 7 day creation is not a lie - but thinking of these days of creation as our usual 24-hour periods of time is just plain wrong and doesn’t follow from the text itself. Moreover, there is the biblical text (Hebrews 4:3-11) that clearly understands the seventh day not as a specific timespan but as the eternal divine bliss, which the believers are called to enter.

Secondly, the first human beings, whatever their names were, have named all the animals they encountered, and have committed a grave sin of self-centeredness - and we, their descendants, have continued in their wretched ways ever since, unless being saved by the merciful presence of Jesus Christ.

Thirdly, the peoples of Mesopotamia - the ancestors of the first biblical writers - have undoubtedly survived the huge flood that has covered the entire land they knew.

To make the long story short, for the Bible to be the authoritative divine message (or a symphony of the authoritative divine messages), nothing must be factually true but the following statements that undergird and hold together all biblical narratives:

  1. The world has been created and preserved by the absolutely free and intentional force that we call God.
  2. God is the Father who creates and preserves everything through his Word, who is also called the Son.
  3. Jesus from Nazareth, described by the four canonical Gospels, embodies and represents this Word of God.
    3.1. To be the embodiment of the Word of God was not his own claim or pretense, but his fate - he was just born this way, from the Spirit of God (the Spirit of the Father and the Son).
    3.2. This Jesus has preached the forthcoming Kingdom of God, communicated and shared meals with sinners and outcasts, healed the sick, refused to become a political leader or to use force. He was arrested and murdered by the political establishment of the time, Roman and Jewish. Then he returned from the abode of the dead in a transformed but real body and was encountered by his disciples.
    3.3. All these words and deeds of Jesus, in their entirety, reveal the character of God - divine creative humility, divine uncompromising stand on good and bad, divne mercy and patience; whereas his resurrection points at the future consummation of creation, when God will resuscitate the dead, heal the wounds, close the gaps, and cover all who will not have rejected him with eternal glory.

Surely, I’m not trying to say that inspiration entails inerrancy if the latter is understood as a complete absence of any errors whatsoever. On the contrary, that’s the idea I reject.

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I agree that 2 Timothy does not say inerrant. It doesn’t say inspired either (there is a Greek word for that right?). God-breathed…. I think it says scripture is “lif-giving” and I’m guessing the author (who was not Paul) was referring to the Septuagint. The Bible as a whole is not univocal and can’t speak (it consists of discrete works written over the course of a thousand years) as a whole unless the Church first accepts it as inspired. Without that, there is no canonical dimension. It is the church who says the Bible is inspired because it is the church that canonized the Bible. A singular book from within that canon says scripture is “life-giving.” That only refers to our Bible after canonization, not before. People fond of sola scripture would be wise to remember that.

For what it is worth, 2 Peter (probably not by the apostle Peter but written early 2d century) puts them on par with scripture.

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Even if Paul knew this he would not have meant his own efforts. Unless I am reading him wrong.

The whole point is that the inerrancy doctrine is another example of taking a verse out of context and magnifying it into a specific doctrine.

Richard

This is true only if you are reading the accounts as though they were effectively modern literature, both in the same genre.

Genesis 1 has three different messages, all three theological: temple theology, royal theology, and polemic. These can be considered “high” forms because the narrative lacks any personal interaction; it is “God on high” at work by Himself (though the divine council is in the background, they play no active part) – He is King over all, elohim/deity over all (even over other elohim/deities), Maker of all, unique and remote.

In contrast the Garden story in chapter 2 is just that: it is story, on a folk level, depicting God as an almost folksy figure Who rather than being remote and giving royal-priestly commands/decrees literally gets down in the dirt to make a family, planting rather than ordering “Bring forth!”
I’ll note that chapter 2 verses 10b through 14 have been judged to be later addition, a conclusion I agree with. Those verses interrupt the flow of the story; skip straight from “water the garden” to “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden” and the progression is narratively smooth.

So the message in the first Creation account is that God is remote, majestic, and above all else, having built His own kingdom and set up His own temple, and invented humans to be subjects and to be the “statues” in the temple that represent Him. The message in the second is that God is right down in the middle of things like a gardener, a friendly patriarch figure personally involved in making things including a caretaker for His garden.

The import of the scene with getting this caretaker a helper/companion hinges on one word, וַיִּצֶר֩ (wa-yi-tsair), which can be rendered “and He formed” or “and He had formed”. If the former, then YHWH-Elohim comes across as a sort of bumbling figure meaning well but somewhat fumbling His project, inventing animals to try as suitable; if the latter, the animals were already made and the story is more about how “the man” responds to all these other living creatures, and his judgment about them, rather than God seeking to make a companion for the man. I know which I would prefer, but I have to concede that on the linguistic level it can go either way; to me the argument for “had (already) formed” over “(now) formed” is thematic, not linguistic.

Which is pretty much what the YECists do. The messages are about the nature of YHWH-Elohim and taken together present a two-fold picture, God as high and remote versus God as personally involved. I’ve read material arguing that the juxtaposition of the two makes for a view that was radically different than the usual view of deity in the ancient near east, but while I agree it is different I find the difference more subtle since in the usual ANE material humans were made to be workers for the gods and here in Genesis we have “the man” made to be a garden caretaker and “the woman” is additional labor for that task.

A correction? Not likely at all given how completely independent they are. But the second one is probably older, the sort of tale that could have been passed down orally for centuries. The first account on the other hand strikes me as something that temple priests would have written, which makes perfect sense since the structure is lifted straight from an Egyptian temple source. I can imagine someone who knew that the Garden story had been passed down in folk fashion for generations taking the “let there be” account and sticking it in front bother because it came from Moses and because it was more dignified, but the reality is that to have put the latter after the Garden story would have messed up the flow into the second part of the Garden story – besides which “In the beginning” is a more majestic way to start off.

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That’s the justification. Historically, though, inerrancy flows from the viewpoint of scientific materialism with its idea that for something to be true it has to be 100% scientifically and historically accurate.

When taken in the late philosophical meaning, that term overstates the case from the scriptures. Yahweh is said to know the hearts of all, but for other things it is more accurate to say that He can know all things. It’s a subtle difference but an important one.

And, critically, what is an “error”? The answer to that question if asked of a 1500 B.C. scribe would be a very different thing than if asked of a 21st-century individual.

Given that the term “word” in ancient Hebrew referred not to individual vocables but to a complete statement – consider that in the entire Old Testament set of writings it is never “Ten Commandments” but is “Ten Words” – then attributing the message to anything less than full statements (meaning more than just simple sentences, since some of those Ten Words have multiple sentences) fails to match the concept of “truth” in the scriptures.

Interesting way to put it, and I have to agree.

I think you just switched topics mid-stream from “inerrant” to “inspiration”. The latter term does not lend itself at all well to the first.

Nor likely would any of the other writers of scripture. OTOH if told that “Your letter to the Romans is going to be called scripture”, Paul likely would not have been surprised or shocked – if he’d been a Sadducee, he would have protested, but as a Pharisee he would have more probably just shrugged and gone back to what he was doing.