I like how in this statement, there’s the contrast between how much history the Bible contains according to what “most inerrancy advocates think”…
…and the actual truth of how much history it actually has, which happens to correspond exactly to Vinnie’s perspective…
Well said - This I think a very good assessment of Augustine’s thought as I have read him; he was such an absolute genius and innovator in so many ways… but at the same time when you are the first one to develop novel formulations of philosophy or theology, you don’t have the luxury of working with established vocabulary and categories. Hence he didn’t always notice inconsistencies that seem obvious to later readers after the discussion became more established and polished, and where different factions or schools of thought had developed based on careful distinctions or nuances that he didn’t notice when he was writing.
Sola Scripture that you brought up is I think a perfect example - he was writing about authority of Scripture, simultaneously alongside as well as authority of the church, back at a time before sola Scripture vs papal/church infallibility had become such a sharp debate based on the very particular distinctions that we’re so familiar with post-Reformation.
And your thoughts correspond to your perspective. This is just a tautology.
I think the heart of the issue is that modern (informed) Christians make genre distinctions and try to get the literal meaning within the genre. I don’t think the patristic fathers did this in the same way. A historical genre could have a figurative or allegorical interpretation. As I quoted: “But here’s the rub: one of the primary ways that the Fathers harmonized problem passages was to deny the literal sense of the text . That is to say, the “ inerrant truth” of a passage was often found not in its literal sense, but in its moral or allegorical one.” This would seemingly be why comparing Augustin and modern Chicago-like formations of inerrancy don’t work perfectly.
literal: taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory.
He moved people to write and He guided canonization. So you’re saying either that what He did has no authority or that He did an untrustworthy job.
That’s what perfection is about: something that is 99.9999% right is still wrong.
Scripture teaches reality!
You’re taking your own human definition and forcing it onto scripture. When the prophet says “None is righteous, none does good” and Jesus says “Only God is good” I have no authority to say they are wrong – nor do you.
The YEC view is that Genesis 1 provides 100% correct scientific and historical information, including the enumerated days. In Augustine’s perspective it does not provide any such thing.
That is not what is commonly meant, though.
If you want to be understood, yes – otherwise you’re just using a word without meaning, as has been described already.
Correct – inerrancy as commonly used means the details are 100% scientifically and historically correct. Augustine would have considered such a view childish and of the flesh.
That’s not the common meaning, as the article linked somewhere in this thread explained.
Most of today’s inerrantists refuse to ask the question of genre, and when they deal with it their argument is that it must be what it looks like to them.
That is your belief and it guides everything you say. If it is not true then all your assertions fail.
IOW according to you
Scripture is perfect
Your understanding of it is perfect
No I am not saying that because the Holy Spirit does not work in the way that you claim.
I know the Holy Spirit.
No Scripture teaches theology
strike that and reverse it.
You are forcing Scripture onto reality. Not only that but you aarre forcing your view of scripture onto reality.
You have spent a life time studying and yet you still fail to understand the simplest of statements. Before you make your assertions read the context of the statement and what He was answering. Instead of making it into a global statement. The same applies to the words of the prophet. Prophecy is also contextual, not global.
Until or unless you understand what Scripture is and how it came to be we will not agree on what it means. or can mean.
In the mean time, go out and meet people. You will find that your assertions about them fail miserably.
That is what the scripture tells us. If you won’t accept what is plainly said, you’re just making up your own religion.
Now you’re doing Adam’s thing and stuffing people into tidy slots instead of paying attention.
I claim what the scriptures say. That you think the scriptures can lie brings things back to those two logical possibilities: that what He did has no authority or that He did an untrustworthy job.
You use that as an excuse to be able to pick and choose what you want to believe from scripture, thus inventing your own religion.
Of course, because despite your setting yourself above scripture, scripture teaches reality. Paul treats the prophet’s words as universal, which settles the matter except for those who are making up their own religion.
I have met and observed thousands of people. I have yet to find one who is not broken.
Last time I checked Biblical inerrancy or idolatry was not a criteria for Christianity, so if there is a new or different religion it is yours not mine.
I politely suggest that you change your tune.
Whether you like it or not Scripture is not inerrant. I can show you but am guessing that there will be a hermeneutic answer. I doubt that I will risk a swim with a mill stone because your faith is far too entrenched.
But as a passing thought (not that my thoughts matter to you) If you understood what Jesus meant by “Call no one teacher” you would realise that you have been ignoring Him for the past 60 or 70 years or so. But, as you seem to not understand what He meant by not calling anyone Good, I doubt you will see what I mean here either.
One of the most obvious errors in scripture is in the genealogies. Matthew says there were several sets of 14 generations, but Matthew’s genealogy skips three generations. So Matthew has an error. Or the Old Testament genealogy is wrong. Either way, there is an error,
Does this make the Bible unreliable? No! Does this make it clear the Bible has minor but certain errors? Yes!
And another error is which of David’s sons did Jesus descend from. One gospel says Nathan. Another says Solomon. Both cannot be true.
Does this make the Bible unreliable? No! Does this make it clear the Bible has minor but certain errors? Yes!
Especially since Jesus was speaking Aramaic and the writings are in Greek.
But a comparison of the synoptic gospels shows the words of Jesus are not likely word for word. The instructions for the missionary journey of the 12 are an excellent example. Matthew records “don’t acquire” a staff, Mark says take nothing but a staff, and Luke says don’t take a staff.
Since there are multiple canons accepted by different churches, this statement seems to imply that God lead the Roman Catholic Church differently on the canon than He led the later Protestant Church on the canon and differently than He led the Church of the East in the 2nd century (or so) on the canon and differently than He lead the Ethiopian Church on the canon.
I think that is a difficult position to sell, since it has God guiding four groups to different canons.
I personally prefer the more ancient canon of the Church of the East.
That is not the point here. The point here is that @St.Roymond claims that God directly influenced the writing, translating and subsequent make up of the bible making it both holy and inerrant and therefore unimpeachable or deniable. Meaning that when it (he) says that it is saying something we have to accept and/or obey it without question…
This assumes that he has the correct understanding, making his doctrine and faith the only one possible.
I dare to refute this and I am automatically a heretic.
Neat eh?
Yea but that seems ad hoc. It’s just as intrinsically likely God directed the formation of one of them and the rest just erred to various degrees. Or God isn’t a literalist and guided multiple canons because he wanted his Churches to progress in different ways? We can’t tell God he does not have the right to have a different church canonize an extra book.
I’d say, just as there are internal and external errors within scripture, there are errors in its copying and dissemination, and there are errors in its canonization. There are also errors in the translation of Jesus’s words to Greek, also the MT into the Septuagint which the NT uses, there were errors made my the Church in the criteria they employed to choose the books (e.g. 2 Peter was composed ca 150CE.), errors made by our textual scholars in choosing the correct critical text, errors made by our many translation committees as they translate their canon into the different versions of the Bible and many errors in our interpretation of said scripture.
At the end of the day God moves over people but does not seem to force their hand. He is also willing to meet and accommodate the Church where it stands. That is why we can have such polyvalent and multi-vocal Scripture. It’s God that is inerrant and infallible. Not canon, not the Nestle-Aland critical text, not the original autographs or our interpretations.
Our desire for a perfect source we can make fallible interpretations of is the real problem. Imperfect source and imperfect interpretation means even if I understand the original meaning of scripture perfectly, there is no guarantee it’s true. Most seem unable to swallow that pill.
Inerrancy is quite possibly the most misguided and laughable word that could ever be applied to scripture and my gripe with @St.Roymond and his statements on canonization is they are detached from historical reality. There are errors involved in every step of the way from when the discrete publications were being written all the way down to our interpretations of certain ones. This includes canonization unless you pick one Church.
It’s a tough sell in today’s world to argue that God wanted what became 2nd century forgeries (e.g. 2 Peter) in the canon. But he may not care about authorship. Maybe it’s only the content of the books and living appropriately that He desires for us. Screw all our doctrines.
But this is intellectually why I am drawn to Catholicism. It makes most of these problems go away. Though some remain and it introduces new ones.
Wouldn’t that make God the author of confusion? That is something Paul wrote that He is not.
I suppose such a thing is possible, but that view is a tough sell too, in my opinion.
And the fact that the Roman Catholic canon was not set until the late fourth century and the fact that the 66-book Protestant canon was not set until about the 16th century makes it an even tougher sell.
Except that most who see the text as perfect (or at least Divinely written) do not see their interprettions as fallible either.
It is this notion that the Bible can only function if perfect or infallible that is at the heart of everything. There is just no validation for such a stance. It cannot be proven. That in itself may be true for much of faith, but when people start laying down the law or declaring that to deny it is heretical it becomes a major issue.
The understanding of scripture is central to Christianity but it is folly to think that there will ever be consensus enough to proclaim a single unified understanding. To my mind this is actually a good thing. Because humans are not universal in their thinking or understanding so to expect them to conform to such would also seem to be folly.
Do Roman Catholics, by virtue of papal authority, escape the protestant angst over divergent views of theology and scripture? I don’t think so. History shows that even “ex cathedra” papal decrees get “clarified and reinterpreted” by subsequent church leaders and councils. The church claims they are not overturning ex cathedra pronouncements, only refining them. But obviously the statements needed “refining” because there was heated debate over what the pope’s words actually meant!
At the end of the day, I think its a fool’s errand to expect “certainty” from either the text on the page, or a (supposedly) infallible human’s verbal pronouncement about it. The bottleneck is our fallible human brains when extracting the meaning from any medium. Communication is just messy. For me all that matters is that the text is a reliable enough witness to point to Jesus – reliable enough to convey his character and teaching.
Inerrancy has nothing to do with it, authority does. The scriptures are what the Holy Spirit gave the church for “teaching, reproof”, etc. You don’t get to put you own preferences above them – if you do, then yours is not a biblical religion and thus cannot be Christianity, it is instead a form of gnosticism where your personal knowledge is elevated above the scriptures. Jesus demonstrates that this is an error every time He said, “It stands written”
And you’re back to making stuff up.
The very same thing that the Prophets meant: none is righteous, none does what is right.
The great compliment given in the New Testament was to those who didn’t believe Paul until they had checked the scriptures. That is the duty of every disciple, to verify things from the scriptures. Yet you instead rely on your own understanding/
Not to those at the time; genealogies were malleable according to purpose.
Something interesting about the variance is that second Temple rabbis held that the Messiah must come from the throne family of David as well as from the house of Nathan, so what we have in Matthew and Luke are two genealogies that would likely have already been known – in essence, one traces the Messiah back to the House of David and the other to the House of Nathan.
Actually they can, give one intriguing quirk in the Law: if one ancestor had no sons, inheritance went through the daughters, yet when genealogies were written the daughter’s name wasn’t given, her husband’s was, yet the children of such a marriage were not counted as the father’s own offspring, but that if the unnamed daughter so that the grandfather’s line could continue. Also sometimes the daughter was just skipped over and the lineage jumped from grandfather to grandson, ignoring a generation.
We view genealogies as essentially as charts of genetic descent; the ancient Hebrews viewed them as charts of house descent, so some of the things a Hebrew genealogy could do legitimately we would view as errors.
The non-helpful result of all that is that we don’t know whether either Matthew or Luke gives an actually completely biological lineage or whether there are elements of lineage-by-law included. I’ve read more than one source that regarded Matthew’s list as fully biological and Luke’s as involving legal lineage, but given that Matthew was a Hebrew and Luke was a Gentile it could well be the other way around.
[One might presume that given the prophecies at least one of those lineages is biological all the way from David down, but that doesn’t tell us which one.]
