INERRANCY AND CHURCH HISTORY: IS INERRANCY A MODERN INVENTION?
by Jonathan Moorhead
[See the link at the bottom]
“Following Peyrere, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) questions the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and claimed that most of the Old Testament was post-Exilic (Leviathan [1651]). Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) then posits that the Bible is not a divine book, but a part of nature and subject to its laws (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [1670]).” [See chain of transmission in the following posting!]
"The empirical philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) gives a classic statement regarding the elevation of reason over the Scriptures, “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything. I do not mean, that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles; and if it cannot, that then we may reject it; but consult it we must, and by it examine if it be a revelation from God or no; and if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares for it, as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates.”[FN 63: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: William Baynes and Son, 1824), 640.]
" This would quickly affect Christianity as seen by the Christian apologist Joseph Butler (1692–1752) who wrote, “Let reason be kept to: and if any part of the Scripture account of the redemption of the world by Christ can be shown to be really contrary to it, let the Scripture, in the name of God, be given up.”[FN 64: In The Works of Bishop Butler (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 260.]
"Jean LeClerc (1657–1736) continued the work of Spinoza in rejecting the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch but claimed that a distinction should be made be-tween inspired portions of Scripture with uninspired. To characterize the Modern Period, it is appropriate to cite the words of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): “Enlightenment is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage . . . use the mind without the guidance of another. ‘Dare to know’ (sapere aude)! "
"Have the courage to use your own understanding; this is the motto of the Enlightenment.”[FN 66: “An Answer to the Question: What is the Enlightenment,” 58–64 in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 58.]
“Such is the background for the birth of liberalism. The father modern liberalism is known as Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834). He is perhaps the most influential theologian of the 19th century.”
https://www.tms.edu/m/TMS-Spring2016-Article-05.pdf
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Note Referencing the "Complex [Conflict] Thesis! On page 85 of pdf, we read this tantalizing reference:
“It is at this time that Isaac La Peyrere (1592–1676) claimed that the apostle Paul revealed to him that there was a pre-Adamic race that existed more than 50,000 years ago.”
[[ ^ This sounds like one of our longer running threads !!! @AntoineSuarez, thought you would enjoy this reference! ]]
[[In his “Prae-Adamitae”, published in Latin in 1655 and in English as “Men Before Adam” in 1656, La Peyrère argued that
Paul’s words in Chapter 5, verses 12-14 of his Epistle to the Romans should be interpreted such that:
“… if Adam sinned in a morally meaningful sense there must have been an Adamic law according to which he sinned. If law began with Adam, there must have been a lawless world before Adam, containing people”. [FN 4: Almond, Philip C. (1999). Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-66076-9, p. 53. ]
“Thus, according to La Peyrère there must have been two creations: first the creation of the Gentiles and then that of Adam, who was father of the Jews. The existence of pre-Adamites, La Peyrère argued, explained Cain’s life after Abel’s murder which, in the Genesis account, involved the taking of a wife and the building of a city.”]]
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"This had such an impact that Richard Popkin comments, “The whole enterprise of reconciling Scripture and the new science was blown apart by a mad genius, Isaac La Peyrere . . . [who] really set off the warfare between theology and science.”[FN 62: “Skepticism, Theology, and the Scientific Revolution in the Seventeenth Century,” Problems in the Philosophy of Science, ed. I. Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Amssterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1968), 3:18.]