I think it is easy to lose sight of the Spirit in this discussion. The Bible needs to be “read in the Spirit” if you want to be led to divine wisdom. Honestly, without the Holy Spirit I think the Bible will appear as any other work to a reader. The true inspiration of Scripture is found when the Holy Spirit communicates divine truths to us as we read the Bible and God pushes us, urges and moves us in certain directions. It is our sacred scripture because it mediates the sacred, gives us a record of the incarnation and the ethical teachings of God in the flesh.
Authoritative for what? Certainly not fixing a car, teaching me about relativity or C++ programming. We need to figure out the purpose of the Bible then we can talk about whether or not it is authoritative. If the goal of the Bible is to bring sinners to redemption, to change hearts and bring people to God through Jesus then authoritative doesn’t really apply. The Bible is reliable for God’s intended purpose. It serves as a witness to the Incarnation and helps mediate the sacred.
Many people quote this but leave out verse 15 which comes before it: “and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”
Also, ask your friend how can you say the Bible is any of these things if it actually commands genocide, ethnic cleansing, depicts God as the biggest mass murderer and serial killer to ever live, condones slavery, is littered with misogyny and even commands rape. Did God really kill a guy for picking up sticks on the sabbath? I can’t help but think my sins are way worse than that. But this is not all that is in scripture. I believe the good far outweighs the bad. In the end, it might be easier to just stick with the teachings of Jesus. How did he summarize the Old Testament?
Matthew 22:34-40: 34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
It can even be argued that Jesus was critiquing the Old Testament when he told people to love their enemies. But that can be saved for another time. The problem is we have a tendency to treat the Bible as an encyclopedia of theological knowledge and as a rule book. How is throwing rules at someone effective teaching? Throwing rules at someone teaches them to be righteous? Or does changing their heart do that? We can certainly learn from the Biblical stories and parables. Also, something can certainly be useful without being perfect.
The Bible is only inspired insofar as it serves God’s intended purposes in my eyes. It is authoritative when God speaks to you through it because, well, it’s God speaking. And while there are some serious moral problems here and there in the NT, most of the message seems to be consistent with Jesus. I mean I find a book like James to be wonderful.
If you really want an answer, simply tell your friend that anything that exemplifies Calvary–God’s great love for the world – anything that is consistent with Jesus emptying himself and dying on the cross for us is authoritative. Genocide, rape, misogyny, hatred, slavery is not consistent with the love God showed us on the Cross. The Cross is your rubric for scoring the authoritative nature of every single moral command in scripture.
Parts of it. What Christian today actually thinks the whole bible is authoritative? Ask your friend the last time he/she ate shellfish or pork, or shaved or wore a shirt made of two different types of fabric.
Absolutely. When read in the Spirit.
Jesus taught us how to be righteous by example. I see sacrifice and humility. How can you not be humbled by what He chose to do? How could you not learn righteousness from the example of the Cross?
Love is the way of God. The Cross is the answer here.
Jesus. That is what God is like. If not, Christianity is meaningless. A lot of your objections do become softened and even go away if you follow Spark’s genre argumentation as well.
As an example, you bring up Matthew but I also have long accepted that much of the Matthean infancy narrative was fictional. It’s not history and I doubt its author thought all or most of it was. The author was trying to present Jesus as a new and greater Moses. Whether or not the virgin birth is to be accepted by Christians is another matter, but the parallels between Jesus’ birth and the Exodus from Egypt are obvious. “Out of Egypt I have called my son” is absolute nonsense as a prophecy. Clearly the Birth of Jesus was being cast in terms of Israel’s release from captivity and bondage. Jesus is here to save Israel and he is much more than Moses. That is the point of the infancy narrative. The Matthean infancy narrative is not a problem or a contradiction. The only error is misunderstanding the genre and purpose of it. Forcing it to be a historical creates the error. It is a fire of your own devising.
Vinnie