Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: inconsistencies in the Bible (digest of postings) Message-ID: Date: 17 Dec 89 07:05:43 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Services Lines: 58 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Our longsuffering moderator writes: > >[Inerrancy is normally based on the original autographs, interpreted >as intended by the author. The original autographs are specified >because it is not claimed that tranmission of the text is without >error, That's funny; most inerrantists I know seem to think that God spoke in early seventeenth century English... :-) though usually inerrantists believe that the errors have been >quite few, and they often adopt fairly conservative positions in >matters of textual criticism. By interpreted as intended by the >authors I mean that one has to take metaphors into account. If for a >definition you require an effective procedure (in the computer science >sense) for deciding when there is a metaphor, you're obviously right >that one is not likely to be forthcoming. But I'm not convinced that >this is a serious problem. Few issues issues turn on a question of >what is and is not metaphor. This is generally pretty clear to >everybody. "This is my body" is probably one of the few (maybe >only?). I have to disagree here. I think that it makes a huge difference whether it is really, literally, easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, for example. But most of the examples are much more subtle than that. *All* languages are necessarily highly figurative; how many of us are qualified to decide on exactly how much literalness to ascribe to a (possibly garbled) translation of a (problematic) passage written in an extinct dialect of a language we don't speak? Right. So which expert opinion do we trust? This is a *minor* problem...? Although there are rough edges here and there, I don't think >there's any serious problem knowing what implications inerrancy has >for Biblical interpretation. It doesn't solve all problems, as there >are serious disagreements among those who accept it. But it certainly >rules out quite a large number of possible interpretations, and >narrows the range of disagreement quite significantly. --clh] I'm not sure that your discription characterizes the inerrantists that I've met and talked with. The position you describe is certainly more defensible ("Accuracy of original author's intent"), but almost useless for practical matters of interpretation. How do I know what Luke was thinking? For most matters of ordinary language, I would be reasonably confident of my interpretive abilities, but we're talking about eternity here. I can't use any of the normal contextual and cultural reference points for ascribing meaning, because the topic is something that had never been heard of before! I'm reminded of certain philosophical problems in the theory of statistics: either we can make reasonable requirements on the method (that don't violate our knowledge of mathematics and our objectivity), or we can get a method that can actually be used. Not both. -- David M. Tate | DISCLAIMER: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu | "Hey, that's *my* dis!" _____________________________________________________________________________ Statistics is the science of inferring the obvious and the false.