Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site topaz.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!columbia!topaz!hedrick From: hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick) Newsgroups: net.religion.christian Subject: Re: About Literalism: in what sense is God the author of Scripture? Message-ID: <2330@topaz.ARPA> Date: Thu, 20-Jun-85 10:12:16 EDT Article-I.D.: topaz.2330 Posted: Thu Jun 20 10:12:16 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 23-Jun-85 00:20:23 EDT References: <15117@watmath.UUCP> <675@ihlpg.UUCP> Reply-To: hedrick@topaz.UUCP (Charles Hedrick) Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 78 In article <675@ihlpg.UUCP> jeand@ihlpg.UUCP (Diaz) writes: >My question here would be, if the author of the Bible is not reliable >in the fields of history or science, why should I think that he is >reliable in the fields of 'faith and practice'? The issue here is the sense in which God is responsible for the Bible. If God were the author directly (e.g. he wrote it on stone tablets and gave it to us physically), then your argument would make sense. But he didn't. Human beings actually did the writing. Christians believe that they were guided by the Holy Spirit. But that fact alone does not make God directly responsible for the contents. The two models prevalent among Christians are: - the authors were eyewitnesses, or at least had accounts from eyewitnesses, and did their best to report what the witnesses saw. In this they were competent, but no more infallible than any other human reporter. - similar to the above, but in addition God arranged that the process have no errors. It is generally not said how he did this. I would imagine that one idea would be that as part of his Providence, he simply made sure that the transmission process introduced no errors, but that it was otherwise a human process. The other idea would be that there was direct information transfer from him to the authors. The only one of these that I think can be dismissed out of hand is the idea of direct information transfer from God to the authors. This would make the Bible essentially an account of a revelation from God to the authors, and not a historical document. No normal criteria could be used to evaluate its accuracy, nor would it be very useful in dealing with non-Christians. A non-Christian is not going to be very interested in what God has revealed to someone. I assume however that most fundamentalists intend that the process was a historical one under God's providence, and not this. The statement I have quoted from your article implies this viewpoint. I have heard of only two arguments for the position that God guaranteed the process against error. One is that the Bible itself asserts this. Of course that in itself is not a final proof. If the Bible is wrong, then the fact that it claims to be infallible means nothing. But it would at least indicate what the authors thought they were doing, and if one found the Bible attractive for whatever other reasons, would support the literalist case. The other argument is essentially a speculative one, namely that God would not leave people without a reliable source of information about himself, and it is hard to believe that God would allow this to contain errors. I believe the Biblical argument is the more important one. However I don't think it says what the literalists claim it says. The most typical passage is 2 Tim 3:16: "All Scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching the truth ..." That does not say that God guarantees Scripture to be error-free. People who think it does generally say things like "but God isn't going to inspire a mistake." However we are now getting into areas of speculation. We are no longer dealing with the plain sense of Scripture, but with Scripture plus some sort of argument that what God inspires can't have errors. That claim is clearly false for cases other than Scripture. God has inspired lots of people since the Biblical authors, and none of them has been infallible. So we are back to a speculative argument that essentially involves claiming to know what God would or would not do. Interestingly enough, this argument is of almost the same form as the R.C. argument for papal infallibility. It also has Biblical authority: "You are the rock ...", and also revolves around a speculative argument that God would not allow errors in a certain thing. I think we should be very wary of assertions that God would not allow certain things to happen. The Jews felt very certain that God would not allow the Messiah to be killed. It seems that God is willing to subject himself to the processes of human history in ways that we would not guess beforehand. My position is that the Biblical authors were competent but not error-free, and not independent of the knowledge of their times. This position is very different than the more extreme critical one, which holds that the Bible can't be used as a source for historical knowledge at all.