Notice that it’s not even a question of what texts are in error when the conversation makes the turn that it did just there.
My view has long been that reasonable people can disagree about the inerrancy or authority of the Bible. The liberal view of Scripture is not unreasonable. I can sympathize with it in many ways. However, for believers in Jesus, it does get interesting on where those lines are drawn. Was Abraham or Moses a historical figure? Did the Exodus happen?
I do enjoy reading contemporary evangelical commentaries that wrestle with these issues… and at this point of where the world is literally turning inside out, I do look to the Bible as a kind of Noah’s Ark
The Bible doesn’t say the Bible is inspired, because the Bible is a collection of documents that did not exist when 1 Timothy was written. “Scripture” in that context just meant sacred writings and I’m pretty sure Paul or the author of 2 Timothy did not have in mind that the letters the apostles were writing were Scripture.
I believe the Scriptures were inspired in their composition, compilation, and redaction over time, and that the process of canonization was inspired, but it has more to do with my doctrine of the Holy Spirit than it has to do with the authority and interpretation of one verse in 2 Timothy.
He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Lilked your comments.
2 Tim. 3: 16-17 says that all scripture is inspired. Even 2 Tim. 3: 16-17 is inspired. I agree that when 2 Timothy was written there was yet to be a Bible. But since the Bible contains scripture the Bible must be inspired.
2 Timothy became scripture because the same Holy Spirit that inspired Paul inspired those who put the New Testament Canon together. That is what I believe.
That is a good way to explain it. In that regard are you thinking about “historical” events like the Flood and the Tower of Babel that do not completely align with evidence from archaeology and geology?
It could apply to a wide number of OT writings. Even books like Chronicles were written pretty far removed from the historical events, as I understand it. Ezra is thought to have written that post exile.
You just stopped talking about evolution. Evolution deals with life from life – and the mechanisms for that are well-known and are indeed sufficiently elegant that atheists and agnostics have looked at them and concluded there must be a Designer, and some of those have come to Christ.
Without scholarship there’s no way to know what the scriptures say. The YEC position almost invariably relies on reading an English translation and assuming that the kind of literature it sounds like in modern translation from a modern worldview is what that portion of scripture really is.
See, you’ve got that relationship backwards: people don’t decide they want the scriptures to not be historically accurate and invent a literary genre, they read thousands of ancient texts and sort them into groups which share literary structure and then analyze the structure and thus list the characteristics of a particular genre. And if a portion of scripture from the time and area where a certain genre was common fits those characteristics, then that section of scripture plainly belongs to that genre.
And it turns out, for example, that the opening Creation account in Genesis fits two genres at once, and neither on requires – or even contemplates – historical accuracy.
So the assertion that "
is a statement contrary to reality.
Morality wasn’t involved with God declaring things “good”, which is what I was addressing. To take a modern definition of a word and impose it on ancient literature, as one of my professors put it, constitutes rape of that literature – or at the very least assault.
No, what you write gives evidence that you haven’t done your homework – there’s no assumption involved.
The scripture does not say that. The only thing that can be concluded from scripture concerns human suffering and death.
Except that for them to continue to exist God must sustain the existence of those in torment. That makes it not just consequences but torture.
That goes beyond what the text says.
This is just a cop-out. When rocks show every evidence of being many hundreds of thousands of years old, there are only two options: either they are really that old, or God lied. Faking evidence is lying, and creating formations that look hundreds of thousands of years old but aren’t qualifies as faking evidence.
It’s worth noting that in readings from the early Fathers when a term that can be translated as “inerrant” is used it isn’t talking about getting facts rights, it’s talking about the message hitting the target the Holy Spirit aimed it at.
And writers who used literary genres they were familiar with and under the understanding of the worldview they held.
If it was read aloud during worship, it was considered scripture, and the evidence suggests that the letters of Paul were used that way along with the Gospels as they were published. Just how much of what we call the texts of the New Testament would have been known and included is a huge question, but whatever was read in worship qualified as scripture.
I love that account because archaeologists know of an unfinished ziggurat (that would have been the largest ever) to which pretty much ll the elements of the story apply; it’s the relationships between those elements that are different.
Thanks. Had not thought about that but much of the Boible appears to have been written sometime after the events. This in no way diminishes their. recollection and accuracy. My comments were focused on Genesis. I am addressing this in detailin a new book, Reflections on Genesis.
That is an interesting topic to explore. In that culture, oral tradition was no doubt highly valued and was more closely held than today, but still it would have changed in the retelling over the 20 generations that passed over a 500 year period. Even language and the meaning of words changed dramatically over that time. However, it is not the events that were inspired or that hold the message God has for us, it is the text written that carries the authority lent by God’s inspiration, and God used the human author’s knowledge and understanding of those events to convey the message.
Admittedly, that is a tough concept to wrap your head around if you grew up in a culture of literal/historical interpretation and inerrancy, as I did and in which I largely live in my church today. But, I think it is true. It is sort of like evolution. It may be hard to really grasp with all its implications at first, but when you realize it is true, opens a new understanding not only of the world we live in but has implications as to how we understand our relationship with God.
A grad course on canonization of the New Testament. The canonization process began with churches trading copies of Paul’s letters and developed into a matter of exchanging lists of what they read in church, a process that worked its way “upward” until entire patriarchates were announcing what they read in church.
And that’s “a tough concept to wrap your head around” almost regardless of how one grew up because our culture is so thoroughly imbued with the worldview of scientific materialism.
That could be said of some of the literary genres in the Old Testament, where details can be taken literally for the purpose of understanding the message of a piece of literature but not literally on their own. So a preacher can expound the opening Creation account in Genesis and sound like he takes the passage literally when he doesn’t take it that way at all, he takes it as the ancient literature it is.
Indeed it would be. I did an investigation for my new book. Following is what I say in the book and below it are the references. You might want to check them out.
*The temptation is to assume oral traditions are not durable. To the contrary studies of fairy tales such as the brothers Grimm and the Beauty and the Beast are fairy tales or folk tales that we know today may have originated 6 KYA.
*Wilhelm Grimm along with his brother Jacob of the 209 Grimms Fairy Tales argued that the tales were remnants of an ancient Indo-European cultural tradition that stretched from Scandinavia to South Asia 5 KYA.
19. Shultz D (2016) Some Fairy Tales May be 6000 years old. Study Traces the History of Some of Our Favorite Folk Stories. Science 22 April 2016.
Graca da Silva (2016) S, Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales. Royal Society Open Science, Royal Society Publishing 01 January 2016.
A problematic claim…you.cannot extrapolate millions of years in evolutionary terms from “let the earth bring forth”…when that biblical statement is clearly within the context of “evening and the morning were day…”
That is a twisting of scripture to support secular evolutionary belief.
You are making stuff up here as usual and i notice that almost every single time you do this, you pluck texts out of their context and completely ignore supporting biblical cross referencing. Im finding it difficult to read your responses because of this habit of yours makes me cringe at the lack of theological standards. This hayshed straw plucking is setting a low standard even for this forum.
You apparently have this notion that everyone has to come to God via the scriptures. That isn’t the case; there are many paths including biology.
And I didn’t “make up” anything; I have posted multiple times about the atheist and agnostic students who due to studying evolution concluded there must be a Designer.
Oh, you think my fellow students were trying to “support evolutionary belief”? That’s insulting to them – they concluded there must be a Designer due to studying “evolutionary belief”, and only then set about discovering Who that Designer might be.
Some did the same thing due to astronomy studies and others because of physics studies.
I didn’t “pluck” anything. And your notion that everything has to be justified by “biblical cross referencing” isn’t even biblical.
You can’t have theological standards until you know what you’re reading. YEC refuses to actually study the scriptures because the whole basis is forcing ancient literature to fit a modern worldview.
Right, but the context in which the canon was being decided a hundred years or so into church history was not the context in the churches when the author of 2 Timothy wrote “All Scripture is God-breathed.” I think we can confidently assert the author of that letter did not consider that letter Scripture at that time.