Thanks for sharing. I remember reading The Late Great Planet Earth my freshman or sophomore year in college, and thinking it was interesting but pretty thin on a lot of points. That was during the Jesus Movement around that time, so had a lot going on, even at the state school I attended. Another book I read about that time was B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity which actually had a more lasting effect on both me and society.
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The meme is accusing Bible believers of circular reasoning. If it was a single volume written by a single writer that would be a valid point, but since it is a compendium/collection there is no circular reasoning because just a couple of writers are making the assertion that “the scriptures” are true and are referring not to themselves but to the rest of the collection.
I recognized this problem years ago when I stopped in mid-song –
Jesus loves me, this I now, for the Bible tells me so.
And asked myself, “And what tells me that the Bible is correct?” So I changed it and have sung it this way every since-
Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Gospel tells me so.
(Of course there’s the issue that the Bible tells me a lot of other things besides “Jesus loves me”.)
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Goalposts that can be moved wherever you want them to. We can just call errors in the text “ancient literary conventions” and then claim they are not errors anymore. Or just call something x and say the Bible assumed it but did not intend to teach it. I am not an inerrancy advocate. I would prefer to say the Bible serves the purpose for which God intends it to and it is normative for Christian faith. Hermeneutics is a big and messy topic in today’s world.
The church didn’t canonize hypothetical autographs that may or may not have existed. It canonized the extant versions of the documents widely available in their specific form at the time. There were many alterations before the manuscript record took hold. The Church, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, canonized them all.
Canonization exposes sola scripture as baseless and irrational.
Vinnie
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I was 12 and lacked critical thinking skills. haha. As far as lasting effects on society, Hal Lindsey may have done more long-term damage to society than folks realize. From the OU professor who coined the term Christian Nationalism:
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In my view and experience (and I feel very strongly about this), there is no quicker way to drive people away from Christianity than to tell them they have to take the entire Bible at face-value (I.e. the kind of modern, scientific reading) as true to be a Christian/follower of Jesus. I believe the people driving people away from Christianity the most aren’t secularists, atheists, etc but Christians who gatekeep “true” Christianity behind the stringent ideas of biblical inerrancy which most Christians throughout history have not held.
This is the kind of thing that causes people to “deconstruct” their faith. If their entire faith is built on the Bible being completely inerrant (in scientific matters based on a surface-level reading), there’s a good chance their faith will come crashing down if they ask even the smallest question. These questions will start tearing a bigger and bigger “hole” in their belief system. Perhaps this is why some do not want others asking questions (and are surprised when their kids leave Christianity when they go to college and are fairly asked to question their assumptions about it). I do not mean to straw man this position, because I have heard inerrantists have more nuanced views about things. But I’ve also seen the latter in action and how it drives people away because it can artificially make people “choose” between being a follower of Jesus and being a follower of truth.
Once again, this is not meant to be an attack on inerrantists at all, but rather a criticism of the way some inerrantists (hopefully only a few) stake their entire Christianity on inerrancy and claim those who do not are somehow “not real Christians.” One can even argu such a position idolizes the Bible, replacing God and Jesus as the object of worship. Sadly, this seems to be the way many skeptics I see online view Christianity.
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According to some systematic theologians it is. I made a thread about this a while back.
I do think there is a valid point in there somewhere. God is the highest authority, We cannot appeal to some other authority to prove this as that would invalidate God as our highest authority. But at the same time, isn’t Grudem using reason when he says the Bible is self attesting and argues thusly? Are we not all slaves to reason by default? I’m not philosophically knowledgeable to get out of this pickle but it raises some interesting issues.
He would be shocked, probably not from doubting his authority from God, but since he expected the end of the world a lot sooner. God did something radical at that time through Jesus but Paul had no idea his situational letters would become scripture.
Scripture to most of the New Testament was a bunch of the OT (that canon was not fully set at the time yet). Even early Christians after the NT mostly thought of the OT as scripture. 2 Peter mentions Paul’s letter as scripture (I think that is the earliest reference) but that is most likely penned in his name ca. 125. Metzger in Canonization went through some early Christian attitudes towards scripture. There was scripture and then the “memoirs of the apostles.” The problem in antiquity is that people were skeptical of something new. If it hadn’t been around for a while then it was easy to dismiss. You don’t really just write scripture. Your writing has to disseminate and increase in popularity–it has to become scripture.
Vinnie
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This is an important part from Grudem, which I’m not sure if you entirely skipped:
It is one thing to affirm that the Bible claims to be the words of God. It is another thing to be convinced that those claims are true. Our ultimate conviction that the words of the Bible are God’s words comes only when the Holy Spirit speaks in and through the words of the Bible to our hearts and gives us an inner assurance that these are the words of our Creator speaking to us. Just after Paul has explained that his apostolic speech consists of words taught by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:13), he says, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14)
So does the Holy Spirit tell us the Bible is God’s verbal, plenary words, dictated inerrantly from heaven? Or does the Holy Spirit seem to tell different Christians different things? I don’t disagree fundamentally with him here. faith first, doctrine second based on my experience. But it does raise questions.
How is an appeal to the Holy Spirit not using reason? Any explanation of anything seems to assume it in my book. The bigger question is also what to do with other holy books and religions that also claim to be self-attesting? or Christians with very diverse views of the Bible justifying them with the same Holy Spirit?
Vinnie
Surely you can answer some of those questions yourself. You can probably even answer them better than I could.
Good point. I believe that people who are looking for logical reasoning would agree with you here. However, frequently we look for certainty. Roger Scruton observed that one function of faith is to provide certainty in the midst of fear–if that’s the reason we go to faith, then fundamentalism becomes attractive.
Thanks.
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I banned the KJV when I was doing bible studies for university students on the grounds that the language is so different than what we actually speak and read today that it falls under Paul’s injunction against a language people don’t understand.
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Oh, I could probably introduce you to a few, or who feel the KJV was an improvement over the originals.
I like your quote of yourself.
But the first part is a gross generalization that in no way describes most of the people I’ve spent my life with in church. Right or wrong, inerrancy and infallibility in relation to Scripture are views held by some of the most Christ-loving and following people I know.
It’s easy to allow ourselves to accept popular protrayals of evangelicalism as the complete picture. I’ve spent my life in it. It is not all corrupt beyond recognition. The stereotypes are not the whole story.
Vinnie, could you flesh this out, please? Thanks.
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The sola scriptura principle as held by the Wittenburg Reformers can be found in the church Fathers, who called scripture things such as “the referee” and “the measure”.
Yet the view the early church called inerrancy wasn’t about there being no errors in the text, it was about the message striking where God “aimed” it. They were much less concerned about scripture being “reliable” than they were about it being effective.
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It’s often puzzled me that those who hold to the radical version of sola scriptura fail to see that the radical version is not biblical.
Church Fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa and Cyril of Jerusalem would disagree; they held the same understanding as did the Wittenburg Reformers.
Canonization only touches sola scriptura if you hold to it as resulting from some authority bestowed on the church, a view that cannot be sustained in the face of the actual process of canonization.
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That was my observation in my university days; not only did it drive away outsiders but it accounted for the majority of students abandoning their faith.
But the last line is not accurate, or at least it didn’t used to be: Christians believed that the scriptures were God’s word not because they said they were but because they spoke of the Savior who had defeated death and came from those who knew Him.
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Ahh - and here I thought I was being quasi-original, saying that! But I’ve probably used very similar words to those many times before, so … fair enough!
Thanks for that reminder. In a related reminder of allowing that one should be careful of just generally flailing around swords against this or that … I found this 2nd-part interview of Daniel Hummel - interviewed by Phil Vischer, to be quite fascinating. He discusses the legacy of dispensational theology here in the U.S. And the conclusion of the interview really captures (or has helped shape?) how I now think about much of Christian pop culture today (of which I’m very much a product as well.)
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Now if you ask 20 different people what sola scripture means, they might all give you different answers. So I tread lightly. For better or worse, I understand it in relation to the Catholic Church. It (circularly) says the Bible is the only authority and it’s doing so explicitly to reject the authority of the church on certain issues. The Church puts magisterial teaching on an equal footing with scripture.
The Church itself canonized the Bible, hopefully under the influence of the Holy Spirit. But the Bible itself, our apparent ultimately authority on everything, doesn’t explicitly teach “sola scripture which, as it turns out, is just another tradition or interpretation of the Bible among many. Kind of odd how that works? Claiming to believe something as an ultimate standard that the individual books of the Bible don’t similarly claim to be/do. That claim or authority is hardly based-on the Bible and the very concept of “the Bible” presumes canonization because what “the Bible” actually is, is a collection of 72 discrete publications written possibly over a thousand years, lumped together by the Church.
Time and time again scripture shows itself to possess ancient cosmology and outdated worldviews (misogyny, slavery etc). It cannot be the sole authority on everything unless we espouse wooden literalism.
Prima scriptura is much better than sola scripture but since the Bible did not fall from heaven as a completed work, but was put together as individual publications from vastly different regions and times disseminated and became popular, one cannot remove tradition from the equation. Tradition/Church and the Bible are inseparably intertwined.
The NT and Jesus also seem to appeal to non-biblical source quite a few times.
That last part sounds to me like an appeal to extra-biblical tradition, something I’m not sure is consistent with “sola scripture.”
I’m pretty convinced that in the end, sola scripture saws off the branch it is sitting on. Not to mention if we used the Bible as our final authority on everything, a 6,000 year old earth, a global flood, a dome in the sky and so on would all still be believed in today. We have allowed science (and in many cases reason and common sense) to change how we understand the plain sense of scripture’s words. I mean, Luke traces Jesus’s genealogy back to Adam. In my experience, proponents of sola scripture aren’t the type to claim the Bible makes accommodated cosmological errors though they can and do fully admit Scripture can use the “language of appearance.” And I think a lot of Christians today just accept sola scripture as part of their tradition without thinking too much about what it means.
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Couldn’t agree more, although evangelicals today seem hell-bent on creating newer, faster ways to drive people away. Someone needs to invent a word for the opposite of evangelism.
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Whatever you might call it, a millstone comes to mind.
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