Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: kwilson@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Kent Wilson) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Basic policies for soc.religion.christian Message-ID: Date: 28 Feb 91 10:12:44 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 101 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article you write: |>I do not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, |>but I am at the conservative end of those who do not. Would you explain why you adopted such a view? What specifically is in error? I fail to see why my God, who raised Jesus from the dead, could not see to it that His words to us are not in error. Thanks, Kent =============================================================================== [God could certainly arrange for his word to be delivered and preserved without error. The question is not whether he could but whether he did. I see no evidence for it. While I regard the Bible as a reasonably accurate document, it is not necessary for its purpose that it be supernaturally accurate. I have several problems with the theory that it is: 1) It can tend to distract our attention from Christ. The Word of God is Christ, not a book. The book is a witness to him. 2) All I ask of witnesses is that they give me enough information to decide the truth of the case I'm interested in. If they claim to be competent witnesses, I have some idea of how to assess them. I can try to evaluate their motivations. I can try to crosscheck them with each other, and with whatever objective evidence I can find, etc. We make lots of important decisions in our lives based on information that is good but not inerrant. But if they claim to be inerrant, I have no idea how to evaluate that claim. Now we have to start collecting evidence about the Bible, and we make the Bible itself a matter of faith. What's wrong with simply saying that we have reports by fellow Christians who were near enough to the events to have reasonably good sources of information? Isn't that enough to base on decisions on? 3) It doesn't seem consistent with the way God works. He isn't big on unambiguous revelations. I agree that if I were God, I would probably give the church a direct pipeline to me. But I'd also be inclined to throw lightning bolts at everybody who refuses to accept me. God works much more indirectly. His idea of how to deal with rebellion is to come to earth and submit himself to the forces of repression. His idea of how to run a church is to let it make its own mistakes. Inerrancy seems to come from the same mindset that found a crucified Messiah inconceivable. 4) The Bible shows signs of human reporting. I don't want to overplay the concept of "contradictions" in the Bible. Many of them have reasonable explanations, and the history of Biblical criticism and archaeology suggests to me that explanations of others may well show up. However if you look at the first three Gospels side by side, it's pretty clear that we don't have a word for word account of what Jesus said. I'm not claiming that his message was seriously distorted, but there are certainly differences in wording and emphasis, enough to show that we don't have what modern historians would consider to be direct quotes. Take a look at something like Gospel Parallels to see this. It's present in every story that appears in more than one gospel. There are differences both in what Jesus says and in details of the narrative. As far as narrative, one that comes to mind at the moment is how many entities of what type were present at the empty tomb (one or two? men or angels? or Jesus himself, as in John?) Or Jesus' birth in Mat and Lk, with different geneologies and different accounts of the birth and surrounding events. Or Gen 1 and 2, which show different types of creature created in a different order. Surely I don't have to list here all the problem passages? There are lists of these things all over the place. There are also books full of ways of reconciling them. About all I can say is that the proposed reconcilations always look to me like they are forcing us to interpret passages in non-obvious ways. E.g. Gen 2, which looks at first glance like a well-written narrative, is typically taken to be a set of explanatory comments on Gen 1, because if we take its apparent sequence seriously we get a contradiction. 5) The arguments for inerrancy all seem to be circular. The most quoted evidence is 2 Tim 3:16. The problem is that nowhere does this say that the Bible is inerrant. It simply says that it is useful. To get an argument for inerrancy out of this, you must come in with the assumption that tn order to be useful, the Bible must be inerrant. As I've argued above, I think that's wrong. Generally, responses to comments like the ones I've made are "but if the Bible isn't inerrant, how can we be sure about everything?" Note that this again is circular. Because we want to be sure, we argue that the Bible must provide us with certainty. Nothing I know about God suggests that he provides guarantees, except maybe on very basic issues such as salvation. Finally, I'd like to note that inerrancy is less relevant than you might think. Most issues of Biblical interpretation are not over supposed errors. The hot issues that depend upon how one deals with the Bible are things like ordination of women, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, etc. And none of these depends upon whether or not there is an error somewhere. The real issue is not the inerrancy of Scripture, but what I call the "immediate applicability" of Scripture. That is, those who favor ordination of women don't claim that Paul has made some sort of error of fact, or indeed any error at all. Rather, they claim that he was giving advice based on his situation in the the 1st Cent., and would be horrified to have that advice turned into a new Law, that applies literally in all circumstances. --clh]