The Modern Inerrancy Debate

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Found this artical at the CRI site and found it interesting in light of the conversations about inerrancy lately found on the board.

The Modern Inerrancy Debate
Dennis Bratcher

I. Credibility and Inerrancy
If the purpose of theology and theological expressions, beyond affirming certain creeds, is to communicate what we understand about God to others (theos + logos = God-talk), then the terms we use ought to communicate clearly. That is as much a function of the development of language in a culture as it has to do with truth. In most contexts today, we would not normally tell people, for example, that they look gay, although I heard that exact expression used in an old "Brady Bunch" episode a couple of weeks ago. If the meaning of a theological term has shifted so that its use is no longer clear, then for the sake of communication we probably need to find terms that will communicate rather than risk being misunderstood, or not heard at all.

I think we are in such a position in our modern culture with the term "inerrant" or "inerrancy" applied to Scripture. Even though that term has been used in the past as a faith confession about the nature of Scripture on some level, usually affirming the Bible as a reliable guide for the Faith and practice of the church, it has come to mean something quite different. In many contexts it has become a shibboleth in promoting certain ideological agendas, and is being used by some as a means to divide and judge other Christians to the point that it creates more controversy and debate than it communicates anything positive about the Christian Faith or about Scripture.

In the larger social and cultural scene, the whole concept of the inerrancy of Scripture may actually be having the opposite effect than many intend. It is intended to affirm the authority and value of Scripture as the sole guide to the Christian Faith, as the source of inspired instruction for meeting the spiritual and ethical challenges of a modern world. Yet the direction in which the concept has evolved and the manner in which it is being presented today both tend toward an "all or nothing" or an "either/or" acceptance of a whole range of ideological and theological ideas linked to the concept, with a corresponding militant attitude toward those who do not accept it in toto. The result has been that in many cases beyond the narrow circles of those who promote the concept, it has weakened the credibility of Scripture and created tremendous controversy, friction, and pain within the Christian community.

I think we would be able to move further toward maintaining the credibility of the Bible to "skeptics" of our day, as well as providing a more positive witness to the transforming grace of God revealed in Christ, if we discard the whole concept of inerrancy, at least in the way it is advocated by many today. I think it simply creates more problems in our communication of the Gospel message than it solves. Wesleyans can affirm and defend the truth, authority, and reliability of Scripture far better on other grounds, and even other theological camps have better ways to affirm the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture

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II. Roots of the Modern Inerrancy Debate
Beyond the problem of communication, one of the main problems with the argument for inerrancy of Scripture, or even the companion argument for near total historical reliability of Scripture, is that it is based on a very modern and quite rationalistic premise. The modern debate arose between 1900 and the 1920s, and was developed into the 1970s, as a defense against historical skeptics who were launching some very scathing attacks against the authority of Scripture from the perspective of historical positivism and scientific naturalism. However, in the zeal to defend Scripture, many simply capitulated to the rationalistic mind set and tried to defend the Bible on that alien turf by ground rules set by the critics. The ensuing "battle for the Bible" is thus a battle largely fought in an area far removed from Scripture itself, and by the premises and logic of very rationalistic categories.

The scientific premise that forms the basis for modern historiography, and the basis for challenge by skeptics, is that only empirically verifiable events can be accepted as true. They contended that since many biblical events could not be verified by external documents or records or empirical data to have happened, then they never happened. Therefore, the accounts were not true and were therefore in error (I won’t address at this point the problem in equating the concepts of "true" and "without error," which are not necessarily synonymous).

The defenders, on quite different grounds than empirical evidence, assumed that the Bible was true as a starting point. No problem there, at least from the perspective of faith confession. But the defense took shape as a logical syllogism that worked backward toward the rationalists. Since the Bible is true as an assumption, and since only verifiable historical events can be true (thus accepting the premise of the rationalists), then the Bible must contain only actual and verifiable historical events and can contain no error. Thus inerrancy as a very rationalistic response to the rationalists was born.

A similar line of reasoning developed against those who assumed historical positivism as the only way of explaining human history Historical positivism is an outgrowth of the empirical model, which not only assumes that truth consists only of that which can be empirically verified, but also rejects any metaphysical aspect of reality and assumes a closed world in which historical event can be explained in terms of preceding historical events and the relation of events to their cause in those preceding events.

To counter this, in addition to the above assertions about the inerrancy of Scripture, the defenders also adopted a near total metaphysical explanation of history in which God was the prime cause of all human history. He was "in control" of all human events, and there needed to be no other explanation for human history than God. Scripture, then, was just the writing down of that history, both past and future, and so was inerrant because it simply recorded what God was causing to unfold. This could lead, for example, to the often quoted definition of prophecy from that perspective as "prewritten history."

Again, the logic behind this line of defense rests on the defenders of Scripture actually accepting the premises of the rationalists, and then trying to define Scripture in such a way that it could then answer them on their own grounds. But it seems that many never asked whether or not Scripture could even fit within those rationalistic categories; that is, whether Scripture was ever intended to be provable by the canons of scientific empiricism.

One other factor came into play in the development of the inerrancy debate. Most of the "defenders" in the early stages were from the Reformed tradition, especially fundamentalist Baptists (nothing at all here against Baptists; it is just a historical fact). That simply meant that the debate was cast nearly from the beginning in terms of narrowly focused theological concerns and agendas. Two closely related theological ideas from that tradition affected how the debate took shape: the emphasis on the total sovereignty of God, which works out into predestination in some circles; and the total depravity of humanity.

Wesleyans accept the basic theological idea of depravity as a way to affirm the need for God’s grace, and would, for example oppose Pelagianism, which holds that human beings are inherently good. However, the idea goes much further in the Calvinistic tradition. Rooted in Greek dualism, which sees all aspects of the physical world as inherently evil, it extends to all segments of human existence. In that view, humanity can never be anything other than dominated by evil since they live in a physical world and a physical body that is, by definition, evil and imperfect. They can be forgiven for their sinfulness (the theological term here is "imputed righteousness"), but will always exist in this world as imperfect, flawed, and sinful creatures. They cannot even choose God, some would say, so God in His sovereignty, must choose for them.

Because of the total inability of human beings, the emphasis on the total and absolute sovereignty of God thus comes to the foreground. The sovereignty of God is articulated in terms of the absolute metaphysical categories of Greek philosophy. God is understood as the absolute of everything, described in terms of "omni-" (all), infinity, perfection, and similar superlatives. Theology from this perspective is concerned with proper definitions and formulations of God that will preserve this emphasis.

God’s sovereignty in this absolute sense is seen to extend even to human decision and the flow of human history. That is, in its most severe form, nothing occurs in God’s creation without Him specifically willing that it should occur. Even in modified forms, human freedom is subsumed within God’s sovereignty, or even denied altogether.

As those ideas were worked out and applied to Scripture, they led to the view that Scripture must be written by God himself, and that their primary function was to reveal the absolute descriptors (propositions) about God and the world. God could never trust sinful, flawed, and imperfect humans to have much to do with Scripture since they would introduce errors and thus destroy its reliability. So, God Himself is the sole author of Scripture. From this conclusion came theories of inspiration (See below) that emphasized God’s near total control of the production and preservation of Scripture, with the attendant theories of inspiration that would support such a view (dictation and some forms of verbal inspiration).

And then another logical syllogism came into play. Since God wrote Scripture, and since God is perfect and without error, and since God knows exactly what happened, then the Bible must be absolutely accurate, inerrant, in everything it says, and even in a lot that it doesn’t say that we now know to be fact (the earth is round, matter consists of atoms, etc.). In other words, Scripture, since it was associated directly with God, must be of the same quality as God Himself: absolute, perfect, "omni," inerrant, etc.

So, this view of the inerrancy of Scripture was developed both from the pressures of culture, as well as from some very specific theological agendas. The Bible is then read through the lens of a doctrine developed totally outside Scripture itself, and often without taking seriously the evidence within Scripture. As a result, the Bible is often made to serve the doctrine of inerrancy, a move which runs counter to one of the primary tenants of the Reformation, that Scripture should be the primary authority for the faith and practice of the Christina community, not doctrines.

The fact is, the whole issue of inerrancy, as well as how some now define infallibility, is alien to the Wesleyan tradition for several theological and historical reasons. The modern concept of inerrancy, and it is a modern concept, arises out of Calvinistic based fundamentalism as it blended a basic position in predeterminism (predestination) with a narrow rationalism to defend Scripture (the "Battle for the Bible") against the excesses of scientific positivism and naturalism.

While the motive may have been entirely valid, since there certainly were some excesses from the side of naturalism and rationalistic modes of thought, I think there developed a serious overreaction in the opposite direction. The defenders of Scripture began asserting things about Scripture that neither the Bible itself nor some of the theological positions outside of a narrowly interpreted Calvinism can possibly sustain.

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III. Inerrant Autographs
These observations almost always lead to another area that impinges on the topic of inerrancy: the affirmation of the inerrancy of the original autographs of Scripture (autograph = the original manuscripts as they came from the hand of the original author).

Anyone who works Scripture in the original languages knows that there are errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax in the biblical text. It is also an easily demonstrable fact that there are hundreds of variants among the different manuscripts of the biblical text. We sometimes forget that the Bible was not written on a word processor in English, and it is difficult to keep in mind that there is no "master text" of the Bible. We only have it in hundreds, even thousands, of manuscripts that all contain differences of greater or lesser degree. Our modern translations are based on a compilation and analysis of all these manuscripts.

On a different level, a careful examination of parallel biblical accounts, where the same story or account occurs in more than one place, reveals that in many places the accounts are different. For example, in the Gospels there are many places where the accounts of Jesus’ activity and sayings are recorded in multiple versions that vary from each other (see The Synoptic Problem).

There are places where the events are ordered differently (the cleansing of the temple or the day and time of the crucifixion in the Synoptic Gospels and John), the same sayings are set in different contexts (the sermon on the mount and the sermon on the plain in Matthew and Luke), or the same event is accompanied by different sayings (the confession of Peter in Matthew and Mark). Even when all of these do correspond, there are often different Greek words attributed to Jesus, sometimes closely synonymous, sometimes giving a different nuance to the saying (e.g., Matt 5:3, 6 and Luke 6:20-21). There are other places in Scripture where this occurs as well, such as the parallels between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles or between 2 Kings and Isaiah.

On a still different level, if one approaches the biblical text without the presuppositions of inerrancy, there are also historical difficulties in which the biblical account does not correspond to what we know of the events. There are also discrepancies in the use of numbers, genealogies, Scriptural citations, etc. (see The Date of the Exodus).

To many students of Scripture these factors present no serious problems to accepting the Bible as the authoritative word of God, beyond needing to understand and interpret the message as it is presented with these factors. However to the inerrantist position these are potentially fatal observations. In an absolutist position, which many inerrantists take, none of these can be allowed to stand. While some of these such as the historical discrepancies can be explained by various means, the difficulties with the biblical text itself is a much more troublesome problem to inerrant views. While they are affirming the absolute inerrant nature of the biblical text, it is obvious that there are physical errors within the text.

The solution to this dilemma of wanting to maintain an inerrant text while faced with a text that is obviously not inerrant, is to affirm that the original writings were inerrant as they came from the hand of the original author, while the errant copies we have now were corrupted in the process of transmission, copying, and translation over the years. This position of "inerrant autographs" is a common way of maintaining inerrancy in the face of textual evidence to the contrary. In fact, some churches, for example the Wesleyan Church, incorporate such a statement into their doctrinal position on Scripture.

Now, this may be a valid move solely as a faith affirmation. But I contend that it does not really say much, and certainly does not give us any place to stand in the actual study and use of Scripture in the church beyond making affirmations about it. And it raises questions of credibility from those who do not so readily accept the faith affirmations.

There are several problems with the idea. As I have suggested, I think the main reason for affirming inerrant autographs is the simple fact that the text that we have now is obviously errant in some details. So to maintain the concept of inerrancy, it is simply moved back to a context where the validity of the assertion cannot be verified since we do not have any of the autographs. However, I find it extremely problematic to assert something about a part of the Christian faith that is as important as Scripture in a way that cannot be confirmed in the light of totally different evidence that can be confirmed. In other words, I think that smacks far too much of a rationalizing effort to bolster a fundamentally flawed idea than it does of good theology or good biblical study. Again, as a faith affirmation about the authority of Scripture, I understand what it tries to say. I just don’t think it says it very well.

There are other logical problems, as well, that drift into theological ones. If God supervised the writing of Scripture to the degree that people produced absolutely inerrant writings beyond their own capability to do so, why could God not have, or why didn’t he, just as easily superintend the transmission of that text so that it would remain inerrant as it was copied through the centuries. What is the purpose of having inerrant originals if that inerrancy is not to be maintained in some way? What purpose is served in allowing a perfect text to deteriorate?

And if we allow this, how then do we know we can trust the text we have today since it is admittedly errant, and since we do not have the "originals" with which to compare it? If our faith is in an inerrant text, and if that text has been allowed to deteriorate in one area to the point that it is no longer inerrant, how do we know that other areas have not likewise been corrupted?

In other words, if the criteria of inerrancy is to be the judge of truth, it solves nothing to push the inerrancy into the distant past since we only have the text today as it is. If that criteria is valid, then we do not have the truth.

Still another set of problems clusters around the very idea of "autographs." This assumes that there was at one time a single master copy of Scripture, or at least of individual books. But this in turn assumes a certain mode of inspiration and production of Scripture that is not totally supported by the evidence or most (not all) ways of understanding how Scripture came to be.

"Autographs" assumes Scripture (individual books) was written by a single person at a single time, the prophetic model of an inspired author. In other words, by definition and assumption, it eliminates most dynamic views of inspiration that allow a role for the community of faith over a period of time to produce Scripture as God worked in the community. This results in a circular argument. One can affirm inerrant autographs as inspired only by assuming a view of inspiration that produces inerrant autographs.

One step further in this relates to the idea of "sources" used for the Gospels. Even many conservative biblical scholars are now willing to acknowledge that the Gospels were likely written from earlier sources, either written or oral, that preserved the teachings of Jesus in the 35 or so years between his life and the writings of the first Gospels. If the Gospels writers used sources (and certainly not everyone would agree that they did), were the sources also inerrant? If not, how can an inerrant text be produced from non-inerrant sources? If so, on what basis do we affirm that the sources are inerrant since they were not Scripture? This would leave open the logical possibility of other documents being inerrant that are not Scripture, which would undermine one of the primary reasons of affirming inerrancy in the first place: the unique authority of Scripture.

Well, there are other points that could be made, but perhaps this is enough to illustrate that pushing inerrancy back to the original manuscripts actually creates even more problems for the position than it solves.

There is one other facet of this topic that often comes up in this discussion at this point. It again relates to the sovereignty of God and how we see that working out in relation to Scripture. It is often affirmed that just as God can reveal Himself in the world in quite extraordinary ways that transcend human ability to understand, for example the Incarnation, so God can create and preserve an inerrant text as a medium of revelation of the absolute truth about everything. Again, this is certainly valid on one level as faith affirmation about the nature of God, but it probably does not help us much in understanding Scripture.

The greatest problem here is the logic in assuming that simply because God can do something then that is, in fact what he does do. There is a great deal of difference between saying that God could do something, and affirming that He did or does, in fact, do it. To say that He could is no proof that He did. This is where the issues often get confused. For example, working from the sovereignty of God, one might ask if God could, because of human incapability of choosing the good, choose the good for a person. Theoretically, the answer is yes. Yet, Wesleyans affirm that God does not, in fact, do what He clearly could do.

So again, the problem here is in asserting something about the Bible based on doctrinal or creedal confessions about the nature of God or ultimate reality or some other assertion that has very little to do with Scripture itself.

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IV. Revelation and Inspiration: The Foundation in Scripture
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Part of the difficulty in all of the inerrancy debate is a problem, even apart from all the other doctrinal and ideological agendas and presuppositions at work, in understanding the nature of Scripture as we have it in terms of God’s self revelation in history, and in terms of what we mean by inspiration. These are complicated topics, but let me try to raise some of the issues in relation to the inerrancy debate. What follows is not intended to be definitive or exhaustive; only my own perspectives on one way to address the issue of the nature of Scripture and move beyond the inerrancy debates.

There are two issues at stake here: revelation and inspiration of Scripture. It is important that these are not confused, since some of the issues that become battlegrounds arise from interchanging the two.

The concept of revelation lies at the heart of the Christian Faith. We believe that God has uniquely revealed Himself to humanity in the arena of human history. Christians do not believe that we seek God and then find Him (as, for example, in Buddhism). We believe that God chose to reveal Himself to us. Both Judaism and Christianity are responses to God’s self-disclosure in history.

It is important here to note that the content of revelation is not information or data (propositions), but God Himself (or, in philosophical categories, knowledge about God, although I would prefer to leave God as the subject of revelation rather than its object, or to leave it in relational categories rather than ontological ones). That is, it is a self-revelation, or self-disclosure, not revelation about things or ideas. Much of the early church following Augustine, who was himself influenced by neo-Platonic idealistic philosophy that saw the world in terms of absolute ideas, understood all knowledge to be revealed by God (in contrast to Aristotle who held that some knowledge can be apprehended by the senses, as we do now in scientific research; interestingly enough, this was a view shared to some degree by the Israelites in the OT Wisdom traditions, e.g. Proverbs).

The idea that all knowledge about everything comes by revelation from God has made its way in various forms even into modern thinking, particularly through the Calvinistic tradition that uses the sovereignty of God as a primary theological category. This has relevance in our present discussion of Scripture, because some adopt this view in relation to the Bible and see Scripture itself as direct revelation by God covering all knowledge and data. Scripture is seen in this view in absolute categories, from which perspective the terms inerrant and infallible are most often used to describe Scripture.

However, I do not view Scripture in those terms. I do not understand the Bible itself to be direct revelation, and I do not consider it be revelation about everything. Scripture is the witness that the community of faith has borne to or about revelation. In other words, God is the content of the revelation, and Scripture tells us about and points toward that revelation, as, for example, the Gospels writers bear witness of the things they have seen and heard (Luke 1:1-4; cf. 7:22; Jn 21:24-25; cf. 3:32).

Scripture is revelatory only in the secondary or derivative sense that it is a witness and response to God’s revelation. The Bible contains not only reports about specific revelatory events such as the exodus or the incarnation (the technical term here is kergyma, "proclamation"), it also contains the communities’ response to those events, how the Communities of Faith worked out the implications of their encounters with God in doctrinal, social, ethical, and cultural ways (didache, "teaching").

For example, by analogy, the Gospels can be seen as the witness, the proclamation of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, while Paul’s writings can be seen as teaching the implications of that revelation, and guiding the community in proper response (e.g., "live your life in a manner worthy of the Gospel of Christ," Phil 2:27). The same analogy can be used in seeing the connection in the OT between the exodus (proclamation) and the giving of the torah at Sinai (instruction). I say "by analogy" here because they are both now Scripture for us, which makes it more difficult for us to divide the categories up so neatly.

To say this in a slightly different way, God is revealed to us today through interpreted events. God revealed Himself in history (events) and the Community of Faith interpreted those events to us in what we now have as Scripture. We have no direct access to the events themselves; we only have mediated access through the witness of the community (Scripture, and to a much less degree, tradition).

This does not eliminate any objective grounding to God’s revelation. In fact, contrary to mythical systems of religion such as popular Hinduism, it affirms the objective basis in history of God’s self-disclosure, which is why I use the term "event." But it also affirms that His self-disclosure is mediated to us through testimony, and that testimony itself is not "objective" in the same sense as was the event itself. This is because part of that testimony is also the interpreted "significance" or "meaning" of that event in relation to past events, present experience, and future implications. That is, it is theological (talking about God) in nature and, in the best modern (or actually post-modern!) sense, history ("history" here understood as connections or significance of events rather than data reporting).

This sense of testimony to significance in these three historical dimensions can be traced biblically, especially in the instructions in Deuteronomy and other places: "When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do these things mean?’ then you shall tell them: ‘Once we were slaves in Egypt . . . .’" Especially in the OT, because of the time span during which the biblical testimony was preserved and passed down, all three of these dimensions are often interwoven into a single biblical text as different communities over a 1,200 year period told and retold the "story" in light of new experiences, new revelations, new instructions, and different ways in which the various communities responded to God over the centuries.

The Scriptures as we now have them reflect this dynamic of the "story of God" as it was woven into the life of the community of Faith through the centuries. And when we read, or preach, or interpret that story we are adding yet other historical dimensions as we bring our own present and future into interaction with the text, and apprehend significance and meaning from the text in those dimensions.

This suggests that the "story of God" was told in ways that were influenced by the people who were telling the story, and that it will also be influenced by people who hear it. While we affirm that the testimony is true, the vehicle of the testimony was conditioned by the culture, language, knowledge (or lack of it), historical experience, personality, ethos, etc., of the people through the centuries who passed on the testimony, and who grappled with the implications of it in being the people of God (See Speaking the Language of Canaan). So, Scripture as we have it has a dual nature. It is the story of divine revelation (God’s word. . .) told in the vehicle of culturally conditioned literature (. . . in human words).

It also suggests that the story is likewise heard in the same culturally conditioned ways by us. That is, we bring our own culture, language, knowledge (or lack of it), historical experience, personality, ethos, etc., to the biblical text when we read it. And we grapple with its implications in living out being the people of God. If we are going to take this dual nature of Scripture seriously, we need ways of understanding Scripture and theories of inspiration of Scripture that will likewise take these two aspects seriously.

Now, this brings us to the question of exactly how the community bore witness to God, how it understood God to be at work in these events, and how we know that their testimony is true. And it also raises in a secondary way how we can come to terms with Scripture if it is to be our story as well. This brings us to the role of God in shaping Scripture. Here is where the concept of inspiration of Scripture provides some help. However, how we talk about inspiration of Scripture is greatly influenced by how we understand revelation as outlined above.

There are a variety of theories of inspiration (of Scripture), and I won’t take the time to deal with them all. The basic issue in talking about inspiration is the balance between the dual nature of Scripture, the balance between God’s role and humans’ role. Usually inspiration has to do with the work of God in the process. In Christian tradition, this is usually connected with the work of the Holy Spirit as the agent of truth in the world. Thus, inspiration can be conceived, in some way, as "in-Spirited" (cf 2 Tim 3:16-17, 2 Pet 1:20-21). But this does not in itself resolve the question of balance.

On the one pole are dictation and verbal theories that affirm nearly 100% God. Usually, these are heavily influenced both by an absolute sovereignty of God model that allows little human input into anything since humans are totally contaminated by sin and cannot be trusted (with roots in Augustinian influenced Calvinism), as well as by the philosophical model mentioned earlier that equates revelation with all truth. In these views, Scripture is equated with the mind of God, and He is seen as the primary author of Scripture. Here, the physical text itself is seen as the locus of inspiration and, indeed, revelation of absolute truth.

On the other pole are elevation theories that affirm nearly 100% human. Usually, these are heavily influenced either by rationalistic or naturalistic or deistic models that do not see God active in the world, or by atheistic or agnostic thinking that will not acknowledge anything other than humanity. In this view, Scripture is just a good book reflecting the same kind of elevated human insight that, for example, might be found in Shakespeare or Star Wars. Here, the writers are the source, and most often the only source, of the writing.

Between these poles are various blends of the two. Interestingly enough, theories toward either pole claim plenary ("full") inspiration depending on whether the physical text itself is seen as fully inspired or only the writers are inspired. In any case, the mediating position is usually termed dynamic inspiration, which tries to balance the role of God and humans. In many of these perspectives (with various nuances) it is not the text that is inspired but the writers themselves, or the message. However, what the writers understand is not solely a product of their own thinking but is enabled by the activity of God, which distances this from the elevation pole.

For me, any adequate theory of inspiration must take into consideration three crucial factors.

It must not only allow but take seriously the faith confession that God is active in the world, that He reveals Himself to humanity, and that there is a dimension to God that cannot be accessed by human reason or experience.

It must be able to deal honestly without rationalization with the phenomena of Scripture itself, the evidence and features contained within the text of the Bible as we have it now (which prevents appealing to any no longer extant versions of the biblical text).

It must be consistent with, or at the very least compatible with, the larger Wesleyan theological understanding, especially in the important perspective of prevenient grace ("going before" grace that God grants to humanity to enable their response to God, which impacts discussion of human moral freedom).

The best way of understanding inspiration that takes into consideration these factors is a dynamic theory of inspiration that tries evenly to balance human and divine involvement in Scripture. For me, the method or mode of inspiration is not nearly as crucial as the fact or process of inspiration. And I see the locus of inspiration neither in the physical text itself nor in single writers, but in the message of Scripture, what it tells us about God, about ourselves, and about how we relate to God. And it is not just in the message as a collection of facts, but in the message as a witness to the transforming and enabling power of God’s grace in the lives of people!

Now, without delving too deeply into various possible modes of inspiration within a dynamic understanding, let me explain how I think the process works in the production of Scripture. As mentioned above, it all begins with God revealing himself, either to the entire community in historical events such as the exodus or the incarnation, or to individuals in specific ways, such as Moses at the burning bush or Paul on the road to Damascus.

However, with any revelation of God there must be a response from the community or the person. That is, they must be able not only to understand the meaning and significance of the event, but must also be able to communicate to others, who have not directly experienced the revelatory act of God, its meaning and significance and to translate that revelation into practical everyday living. Here is where inspiration comes into play. Not only does God reveal Himself, he helps the people understand that revelation through inspiration.

Inspiration begins at the point of God enabling people to understand God’s revelatory actions. However, exactly how they respond to that revelation, how they talk about, tell it, theologize about it, pass it on in tradition, incorporate it into ethical and doctrinal systems, etc., is all influenced by the culture in which they live. They do not pass on eternal, absolute truths. They tell the story of God, which God has revealed to them and helped them understand, but they tell it in their own way. They translate God’s revelation into the language, metaphors, symbols, liturgy, and literature through which they can bear witness to God’s truth, and in which other people can hear and understand the testimony.

However, Scripture does not yet arise at this point. And inspiration is not the one time action of God that is only related to the original revelatory event, or to a posited "original" author. Inspiration is the ongoing work of God (Christians would say the Holy Spirit) whereby He continues to help people understand the message, the testimony. So inspiration is not static but dynamic. It is at work as the witnesses tell the story, as well as enabling people who hear the story to understand and respond. In this sense, as mentioned above, there is some connection between the idea of inspiration and the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace.

The work of God in enabling people to understand through the testimony extends to the entire community of Faith. God is at work in the community as a whole as He helps them to understand, not only the testimony, but also how to respond to that testimony. So as the community does its own lawmaking, or development of ethical standards, as well as constructing theology and doctrine, it is God at work in the entire community throughout the centuries helping them understand the things of God.

This does not at all override the freedom of people or the community, which explains how some people or some communities can so badly distort or pervert the testimony and develop ideas or doctrines that stray from the original revelation. And it also explains the warnings in both Testaments concerning the need for faithful transmission of the story and sound doctrine. But we affirm that God has so enabled the process that even with all the vagaries of history through which the communities of Faith have passed, with all the difficulties of transmission of the story, even with all the errors and discrepancies in Scripture that we now have, we still have a reliable and trustworthy witness to the truth of God.

So, inspiration, the work of God in enabling people to understand the message, is an ongoing, dynamic process. It was at work, for example, in Moses seeing the burning bush and understanding that this was God, telling Zipporah when he got home that night, telling the Israelites what God had revealed to him, and later telling Pharaoh. But it extends far beyond that. God was still at work helping people understand as this story was told centuries later to Israelites gathered around a family Passover table in David’s kingdom, as children heard the story about God’s deliverance and recalled God’s great acts of the past.

Inspiration was at work as scribes perhaps centuries after that incorporated that faith confession into a compilation of writings telling the marvelous story of God’s deliverance and creation of a people. To that story were added priestly, liturgical instructions for proper observance of Passover, and the importance of proper response to the God who heard the cries of oppressed slaves. Still later, God was still helping the community understand as they further incorporated an analysis of their own failure as God’s people. Exilic and post exilic prophets and scribes told the story again, but in the context of the catastrophic failure that climaxed in the exile. And yet the story took on new significance a century after that as exiles returned home, and they interpreted the return from exile as a second exodus as they learned new depths of God’s grace and forgiveness.

As they collected all these stories together, God was still at work helping them understand their history. They used certain writings within the community of Faith because God has helped them understand that this way of seeing their history was a faithful interpretation of how He had worked with them over the centuries.

We could track this process even further into the development of the canon, but I won’t take the time here. But even today, as we sit in a nearly 21st century AD living room and read the story again, there is once again the work of God the Holy Spirit helping us understand the message, to hear again the testimony to the revelation of God. And when a preacher or a bible scholar studies the passage, or proclaims it on Sunday morning, inspiration is still at work helping her understand God, and helping the people who hear it respond!

That is why I think that any reading or study of Scripture should begin with the prayer, "Lord, help me understand." It is an acknowledgment of that dynamic quality of inspiration, and a confession that finally, after we have done all we can do to understand the human dimension of Scripture, it is God who brings the testimony alive, and makes it a living and active word!

And yet, the form, the vehicle of that message is dependent upon the people themselves. So, there are cultural oddities. There are personal idiosyncrasies. There are errors of fact, of science, of grammar, of spelling, of data. There are different perspectives from different people from different cultures on different continents over a span of 1,800 years. There are inconsistencies in historical data, in the use of symbols, in views about future events. Sometimes prophets were wrong in how they translated their understanding about God into their interpretation of historical events. Sometimes they even had to change their prophecies (See Ezekiel and the Oracles Against Tyre).

Sometimes leaders had to go far beyond the old law codes, and sometimes had to invent new responses to ethical challenges. Sometimes new understandings challenged old orthodoxies. Sometimes in one historical situation one view was valid, and in another historical situation the opposite perspective was valid. Sometimes they emphasized one aspect and sometimes another, and sometimes those are not directly reconcilable. After all, the story is in human words.

But it is God’s story! Or perhaps better, it is a story of God! For me, affirming a dynamic view of inspiration allows the truth about Himself that God has revealed to us to be faithfully and accurately preserved by the community of Faith. This takes seriously the faith confession that God is active in the world, that He reveals Himself to humanity, and that there is a dimension to God that cannot be accessed by human reason or experience. In this sense, the Bible is God’s word.

However, a dynamic model that sees inspiration of Scripture as a process operating within the community of faith rather than a one time revelation of absolute truth also allows us to examine all the evidence within Scripture honestly without need for apology or rationalization. So, I can conclude that Moses did not write the Pentateuch as we now have it, or that Ezekiel was dead wrong in his prediction about the destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar, or that Isaiah probably did not have Jesus in mind in Isaiah 7 or 9, without in any way whatsoever taking anything away from the message of Scripture, from its witness to God’s revelation of Himself, and the resulting call for us to respond to that revelation.

A dynamic view of inspiration is also very close to the Wesleyan perspective of the balance between God’s grace and human freedom. Contrary to some other traditions in the Christian faith, Wesleyans affirm that God’s grace actually transforms people, and makes them capable of freely responding to Him. Wesleyans simply do not accept the idea that human beings are so perverted and corrupted by sin that they can never be righteous or understand the things of God. We really do believe that God can work with people, and even can, by the power of His grace, enable them to be righteous rather than simply being counted as being righteous.

If we really do believe that, then surely we should believe that God can entrust them with the testimony to His grace as he continually works with them individually and communally. If he could entrust the Savior of the world to a young Jewish girl from Galilee, surely He can trust the testimony to that event to His disciples, and to the resulting community of Faith that He has called into being.

So, just as our lives reflect the working together of God’s grace and our response, I think Scripture as the testimony of God’s people also demonstrates that same working together. In some sense there is an incarnational dimension to Scripture. That is, it is truth about God incarnated into the words of human beings. And just as we were called to recognize and respond to the Incarnated Word of God in Jesus, I think we are called to recognize and respond to the incarnated word of God in Scripture. It is only then, in the recognition and response, that Scripture becomes the living and active word of God.

There are other implications of this whole perspective, such as investigations into the historical process of development of the canon and the implications that would have for understanding the nature of Scripture and its authority; the contributions that various methods of biblical study and close analysis of the biblical text itself would contribute to this issues, as well as the implications for how various biblical study methodologies might be used to better apprehend the theology of the biblical text; the implications of how such a view of dynamic inspiration would impact the practice of the church in areas such as church polity, the ordination of women, certain ethical debates, the use of the Bible in spiritual growth, and a variety of other issues.

All this simply says it might be more profitable for the church to leave the debates about inerrancy aside and concentrate more on hearing the living and active word of God speak in the community of Faith.

[RJ (141.154.144.33)]

V. Faith Statements, Before and Beyond Inerrancy
While I would passionately defend the authority and reliability of Scripture, most Wesleyans have never held that the biblical text is absolutely inerrant or infallible; only that the message of Scripture is reliable and trustworthy. This position has a long heritage in the church and predates the whole inerrancy debate by many centuries. In this position Nazarenes, United Methodists, Free Methodists, Evangelical United Brethren, and others along with Anglicans and Episcopalians stand much closer together in opposition to the Baptist position and the inerrancy debates.

However confusion arises in some circles because of the anachronous use of the term "inerrant." For example, the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene uses the word inerrantly in talking about Scripture.

"We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by which we understand the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith." (Article IV of the Articles of Faith, 1993-97 edition).

But there are two extremely important qualifications to the concept there.

In the first place, the word inerrant occurs as an adverb modifying the concept of revelation: "inerrantly revealing." That implies that the intention in the Manual is that what is revealed in Scripture is inerrant, not all of its contents. The Christian Faith has always affirmed that the primary revelation of Scripture is God Himself, and His offer of salvation and relationship to humanity.

Second, the content of what is inerrantly revealed is qualified as "the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation." This confirms the observation above. The technical term for this is soteriology, relating to salvation. The Manual only affirms soteriological inerrancy, which is very close to the position of Wesley.

The Free Methodist Church makes this perspective even more clear. The Book of Discipline states that the Bible is:

". . .the trust worthy record of God’s revelation, completely truthful in all it affirms. It has been faithfully preserved, and proves itself true in human experience." (Book of Discipline, Free Methodist Church, 1989, paragraph A-108)

Both of these positions are derivative through John Wesley from the Articles of Faith of the Anglican Church. The traditional Anglican/Episcopal Article on Scripture, "Article VI, Of the sufficiency of the Holy Scripture for Salvation," reflects this (see The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion - Anglican):

"Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation."

The 1808 Methodist Article on Scripture from the Book of Discipline, "Article V, Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation," likewise reflects the borrowing that John Wesley did from his mother church, and emphasizes the soteriological dimension of the authority of Scripture (see The Twenty-Five Articles of Religion -Methodist):

"The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation."

The Evangelical United Brethren Church takes a similar position in their Article on Scripture, "Article IV.-The Holy Bible":

"We believe the Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments, reveals the Word of God so far as it is necessary for our salvation. It is to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and practice. Whatever is not revealed in or established by the Holy Scriptures is not to be made an article of faith nor is it to be taught as essential to salvation."

This demonstrates that the "Battle for the Bible" and the almost obsessive preoccupation with the inerrancy of Scripture is not nor has been an important concern to churches in the Wesleyan tradition. As heirs of the Reformation, Scripture played a central role in those traditions. But the affirmations were content to focus on the message of Scripture that bears witness to the saving and transforming work of God in the world. That remains today in those traditions the primary emphasis in relation to the authority and reliability of Scripture.

Anything beyond this is personal opinion. It is certainly an option for people to believe things about anything that is more strict or narrow than the doctrinal positions of a particular church. But those beliefs should remain secondary and should never be affirmed as essential to the Christian faith, and certainly should not be a source of contention to the point of disunity. Unfortunately, some of our beliefs about Scripture have often done that, especially in the whole inerrancy debate.

Now this still leaves a lot of questions. But I would contend that inerrancy, as used in the modern context, is not a battle that Wesleyans have to fight, or should be fighting, because we can approach the issues from a totally different direction. We do not have to argue for the total historical or factual or even textual reliability of every word of Scripture, and yet can still affirm that all of Scripture is true and is God’s reliable communication (word) to us. Perhaps the best course of action is to return to the Faith confessions of our tradition, and in so doing move beyond the inerrancy debates.

For further reading: Dennis Bratcher and Dean Nelson, "How to Use and Not Abuse, the Bible," in I Believe: Now Tell Me Why, Beacon Hill, 1994, 30-41.

-Dennis Bratcher, Copyright © 2004, Dennis Bratcher - All Rights Reserved

[Bob Brinton (151.203.161.112)]

I find this rather difficult reading, partly because I hate lumping thinkers together into categories. If others have questions about what I do or don't believe about the text of the Bible, I welcome them. I believe in miracles and that the Word is historically accurate. I don't think people just made stuff up. I just question the idea that every single line has come to us accurately and that it's impossible that some wrong things got included by those making the decisions. Not God. People in positions of ecclesiastical authority. They certainly make mistakes today. And I'm not saying there definitely are errors. I'm saying there may or may not be. I'm saying we can't prove it is exactly 100% accurate in every detail. We can believe it, but that isn't proof. And thinking there could be errors does not make you a heathen and an infidel. I'm not certain either way about the predestination issue. I'm not arguing with that.

[Roberta (141.154.144.33)]

" I'm saying we can't prove it is exactly 100% accurate in every detail. We can believe it, but that isn't proof. And thinking there could be errors does not make you a heathen and an infidel."

I agree with you here 100%, Bob.

[Roberta (141.154.144.33)]

I would also like to add,Bob, that one can love the Word, find it a comfort, instructive, beautiful and find that the Holy Spirit enlightens you to passage after passage without the dogmatic belief in it's inerrancy. I find that the miracle of it all. People have argued, used and misused the Bible and God for centuries, yet they still today are real and alive and beautiful.

[Bob Brinton (151.203.161.112)]

Thank you Roberta. For those of you who can't read through all of this, try reading the third part.

[Roberta (141.154.144.33)]

I agree it is long, but I found it worth the read well, cuz I like to study, probably way too much. *s*

Bob's suggestion about reading the third part is a good one.

[RJ (141.154.144.33)]

"All this simply says it might be more profitable for the church to leave the debates about inerrancy aside and concentrate more on hearing the living and active word of God speak in the community of Faith."

Amen

[Anonymous (141.154.144.33)]

.

[Anonymous (68.82.183.197)]

do something Satan doesn't want you to do tonight....PRAY

[Anonymous (24.172.44.98)]

.

[Bob Brinton (70.17.128.228)]

For K.

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

Notice who never responded on this thread?

[rjfernalld (rjfernalld)]

Funny...I thought he'd love this discussion.

[rjfernalld (rjfernalld)]

Too bad that people don't like to read the longer posts....I found this article especially interesting on the subject.

[karen (karen)]

I found this essay on a favorite Web log. The writer often addresses my particular struggles with Christian faith and with a sensibility that resonates deeply. Boddah, you asked what boundaries I feel the need to push. Well, here are some of them.


Negative Embrace
Posted by Matthew Sturges: http://www.matthewsturges.com/correction/2004/03/index.php

Earlier this week I was teaching a class, the Lenten class that I've been struggling to keep up with all month long. This week I wanted to do something a little different, even if a bit odd, just to get and keep everyone's attention. Lent isn't the church's most fun-filled season; it's a time of introspection and atonement and, as such, teaching an enjoyable class about it is a bit of a challenge.

A concept that has always intrigued me, and which seems deeply useful for believers in a postmodern, pluralistic world is Keats's notion of negative capability. In a letter written in 1817, Keats attempted to explain the genius of Shakespeare by expressing a quality that the bard had in abundance; he described that quality as, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." In other words, Keats praised the ability to be comfortable in not-knowing, to be able to proceed in the creative act of living without certainty or conclusions.

I spent a moment describing Keats's epiphany, then told that class that we were going to engage in an exercise in negative capability ourselves. I had them write down one significant stumbling block to their faith, some aspect of Christianity or the Christian life about which they had pause, and share it with the class.

The responses were fascinating. One woman talked about her upbringing in a fundamentalist church, how she was led to believe that unless she did exactly as she was told she was going to Hell, how other church members pried incessantly into her personal life in order to ensure her purity. She was filled with resentment over this behavior--said behavior being the reason for her current membership in the rather more liberal United Methodist Chruch--and was still unable to reconcile it in her heart.

Another woman who, I discovered later, is considering going to seminary, described her anxiety over God's will for her, and how frightened she was that she wasn't measuring up, or doing the right thing. She also mentioned that she is engaged to a man who's a practicing Buddhist, and wondered aloud what her responsibilities as a Christian were vis-a-vis this relationship. (I gave her my cell number and told her to call me later--this is the kind of conversation God created me to have with someone.)

One man, in his sixties, expressed the kind of existential stumbling block that I had always assumed belonged in the purview of younger people. He talked about his desire to learn more about Scripture, but how this desire was countered by a fear of what he would find there; specifically, he found the Bible to be difficult and contradictory, and what he knew of modern biblical scholarship made him uncomfortable and filled him with doubt.

I wanted to say something caustic like, "****, you don't know the half of it, buddy," but I refrained.

I had them fold up their stumbling blocks and place them in an envelope marked "Stumbling Blocks" on one side, and "Negative Capability Enclosure" on the other (yes, I'm a dork). I explained to them that once they put their stumbling blocks in the envelope, they would remain there for 30 days, during which time, they would be protected by a high-energy field of negative capability. They were to go about their business for the next month as though these issues were already resolved, without resorting to reason or logic about how it was done, or what the outcome was. I alleged that such certainty within uncertainty might create space in their heads to move past such difficulties altogether. Who knows?

We'll see how it works out.

It occurred to me it might be helpful for us to examine the Bible and the Christian life in this way. Here's the problem: we in the West have inherited two clashing worldviews that create all kinds of anxiety in the modern mind. One the one side is the pre-modern religious worldview that contains Judaism and Christianity, whose views of history and progress are intimately entwined with the will of a complex and mysterious God, and on the other side is the modernist worldview that presupposes a cosmos run in strict Newtonian fashion in which effects always follow causes and there is a reasonable explanation for everything you can perceive; an explanation that does not involve the meddling of a supernatural deity.

Reading the Bible, especially the Gospels, presents all manner of difficulty for the modern reader for this very reason. We want to believe in the divinity and holy purpose of Christ, we want to acknowledge the miraculous healings and resurrection, we want to take on faith that Jesus was the conduit through which God exercised God's particular will within the sphere of human events. But at the same time we also want to believe that we live in a rational universe that starkly contradicts such irruptions into the framework of time and space. Modern historical theologians have performed all sorts of logical contortions in order to resolve this duality, falling into one of two basic jumbled camps: either a) all this stuff happened just like it says and there's no point questioning it so we just have to take it at face value, or b) some of this stuff didn't really happen the way it is described and it was punched up by early Christians to add weight to the story. For instance, regarding Paul's flash of light and heavenly voice during his conversion on the road to Damascus, theologian Paul Tillich dismissively says, "That's just the way they told stories back then."

The fact that we really don't know what happened during Jesus's lifetime, if Jesus said and did anything even remotely like what is preserved in the New Testament or even, really, if there was such a person at all, modern Jesus scholars have done all sorts of crazy things to get at the "historical Jesus," whoever he may be, and see what we can know about him. I can summarize a number of books' response to the question by saying, "Not a whole hell of a lot."

Most scholars agree that yes, there probably was some guy named Jesus who preached and taught and healed sometime around the third decade of the first century C.E. Who this person actually was, and what he really believed about himself are matters upon which there is very little concensus. He was, perhaps a simple, unassuming hasid whose teachings were blown way out of proportion by a guilt-ridden genius named Paul (A N. Wilson), or he was indeed the son of God who functioned as social prophet and deliberately manipulated Jewish ideas like, "Son of Man" and "messiah" in order to radically subvert Jewish idealogy (N.T. Wright), or he was a brilliant teacher whose mythos sprang up organically among his post-easter following (Marcus Borg), or, as many believe, he was more or less what the Gospels say he was.

I do not know which of these approaches, if any, is the correct one. I know that the New Testament, taken at face value, is nearly incomprehensible. As A.N. Wilson writes, I think quite correctly, that "anyone so ignorant, or so innocent, as to open the New Testament in the hope of finding a neutral historical source will be knocked back by a hurricane. Open it, and you will find a Pandora's box of personal challenges and ethical commands. By the end, the last thing you are worrying about is whether it is true, because you yourself have become a character in the story."

Here's the thing about the Bible: it is not a history book, as much as we would like it to be one sometimes. The Gospel writers knew nothing of modern historiography, had no access to modern information sources, and had no Englightenment criteria of reason or Newtonian naturalism to fall back on. They lived in a world that was subsumed by the supernatural. That's just how it was back then.

Beginning with historiography (which is simply a fancy way of saying "how historians approach doing history"), we must understand that there was no such thing in the first century. There were few research tools to be had. And most importantly, each of the Gospels projects a distinctly Jewish concept of history, which is that all of history is a record of the interplay between God and humankind. For instance, to a modern observer, Pharaoh's truculence in the face of the Hebrews' demands for release even in the face of destructive plagues, we would chalk up to pride or bullheadedness, or some other psychological factor. Not so for the Torah writers. In their minds, the Pharaoh's hard-heartedness was caused by the direct will of God, as was everything else. In their view, all of history becomes a teaching story. This worldview is eagerly adopted by the Gospel writers. So it is that the goal of the Gospel writer is not to present an unbiased history containing just the facts, leaving out the inherent morality of the events. Such an idea would have been not just absurd, but inconceivable to a first-century Jew writing about a man he believed to be the Messiah.

Historically speaking, the Gospels are a real mess. Luke dates Jesus's birth as occurring during the reign of Herod, when Quirinus was governor of Syria. This all sounds neatly historical until we point out that Herod's reign was not contemporary with Quirinius's government of Syria. Also, the census that Luke refers to is not mentioned at all in Roman history and of the one census that we do have record of (taking place about 4 C.E., several years after Jesus's birth) there is no provision that men are to return to their ancestral homeland.

Now. We know all of these things because we have compiled and examined ancient narratives which are readily available in book and on microfiche, etc. A first-century Christian writing a history of a persecuted heretical Jewish sect could not simply stroll into the library and look this stuff up. He had to rely on what he was told, and we all know how reliable hearsay is. The sources for the Gospel writers were people who had either actually witnessed these events or people who knew people who witnessed them. It is, of course, speculated that the authors of Matthew and Luke had the Gospel of Mark to rely on, but that merely pushes back the problem. Because Jesus was not considerate enough (or perhaps too wise) to write in any medium more permanent than dust, we have none of his original work. We have only the recollections of some Jewish fishermen and tax collectors and others who did not exactly comprise the intellectual elite of the Roman empire or Judaism at the time.

In light of all this, we see that the Gospels are not really biased or ahistorical in any way that we understand these terms. They were, and are, precisely what their authors intended them to be, as best they knew how to create them. Because their belief was so fervent, so real, and so urgent, they were willing to take some chances on the factual authenticity of what they wrote. John rearranges the history of the Gospel narrative not because he thinks that's the way it really happened, but because that's how he's chosen to tell his story. To John, the facts do not determine the truth; they are determined by the truth. Another way to look at this is to say simply that he is not a biographer of Jesus; he is an evangelist for the Christian faith. And the concepts of historicity and narrative factualness that we use as standards today simply hadn't been invented yet. Or to put it a better way, historicity and narrative factuality would have been conceived entirely differently by the Gospel writer than by you or me. I cannot stress enough how different these two worldviews are.

In order to receive the Gospels, therefore, as they were intended to be received, we must check some intellectual baggage at the door. We must do this, or else we are reading an entirely different book than the one that was written. This is where Keats's negative capability comes into play. In order to appreciate the Gospels, we must jettison long-held assumptions about what the world is and how it works. We must approach the Bible not as historians searching for clues, but as believers experiencing the Good News of Jesus Christ. Into the "Negative Capability Zone" go our thoughts such as "If Jesus had actually ascended literally he would have ended up in orbit, not in Heaven," and "It's highly unlikely that Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem," and so on. The factual nature of this stuff isn't at issue. It's just not the point.

So let's examine one of the more troubling passages in the New Testament from a historical standpoint. This is one that people love to point out as a curiosity to me. In Matthew, we have Jesus going off in the garden to pray. He asks for the cup to be taken from him while the disciples snore in the distance. When he returns, Jesus is immediately arrested and taken away by the soldiers. So the problem is this: how on earth does anyone know what it is that Jesus was saying while he prayed in the garden? If we accept the Gospel narrative, there was no moment during which he might have mentioned it to anyone. I suppose he might have recounted this memory whilst on the cross, but that seems to me a rather inventive answer.

So what's going on here? Did Jesus really say those things or did Matthew just make them up? The answer is that you're asking the wrong question. This is an evangelical narrative, not a history. There is nothing to attack, nothing to defend. What Jesus actually said or did not say is unknowable. It never occurred to anyone to write down an unbiased history of the life of Jesus, as we know such things. The evangelist equates evangelical narrative with biography. They are, to him, one and the same thing where Jesus is concerned. And so John is justified in referring to his Gospel as a true account of events, witnessed by one who saw them. To John, the religious sentiment and the dictates of faith are every bit as valid a perception as what is seen with the eyes and heard with the ears, if not moreso.

And this is really the crux of the matter. We modern Christians want to have the world both ways: we want a life that is dominated by our faith, but we also want to live in a modern, scientific universe where the dictates of faith don't really apply. This is just too much to ask of ourselves. Once you deconstruct a Bach melody and express it in mathematical terms, you have strayed far, far from the experiential beauty that is its entire reason for existing in the first place. There's nothing wrong with your mathematical expressions per se, they just aren't the point. So it is with miracles and biblical minutiae; we can hold them up to the light and compare them and cross-reference them all day long, but in doing so we have already stepped out of the circle of light that they describe. There's nothing wrong with doing this, but it's not the intended experience. It was never meant to respond to such probing and so the results thereof are unsatisfying.

I think sometimes that intellectual and liberal Christians are looking for an excuse to read the Gospels as fiction. I say, go for it. The way that we approach our fiction is much closer to what I believe the Gospel writers intended than the way we approach our history. Don't think of them as historical narratives at all. Think of them as poems written to describe something utterly beyond the power of the artist to describe. Think of them as love poems. Think of them as historical novels expressing a social and religious conviction that extends so far beyond the mundane facts of experience as to render them nearly meaningless.

But whatever else we do as modern Christians, I think the worst thing that we can do is push the Gospels to the back of our minds and pretend that they're not there. We cannot give ourselves to Christ if we're holding back some part of ourselves in shame of the illogic and inconsistency of the message regarding Christ. We need to celebrate the Bible for what it is: not wish that it were something else, or simply pretend that it is what it is not. Both reactions do it and ourselves a disservice.

[karen (karen)]

I had decided to stop posting on FactNet because it was suggested that the message was being “diluted” by those who do not uphold the Bible as God’s authoritative and inerrant Word. This provoked much soulsearching and prayer. I never want to be at cross purposes with God. But I have come to see a broader purpose for this forum. I believe that helping people to leave is very much God’s concern, but it is only one facet of His plan. For me, leaving the ministry was merely a first step in my faith walk. And what I discovered on the outside was an even greater challenge to my faith than what I encountered inside. Not everyone will find their answers in conservative Christianity. I know this is a scandalous thought for many. But it is for those, like me, who need to reevaluate the foundations of their faith before moving on that I post.

I have been reading a book called Beyond Liberalism & Fundamentalism by Nancey Murphy. The author retraces the philosophical evolution of the modern Christian perspective toward the Scriptures. I was greatly amazed and encouraged to see that it mirrors my own faith journey. I have come to the same benchmarks and forks in the road. So interesting. Anyway, with God I have been analyzing how my faith is constructed. Though frightening at times, it is also wonderful to expose my foundation to be challenged in this way. What remains standing at this point may not be a huge edifice, but it is strong and sound.

For instance, while fundamentalists claim that their faith is supported by something objective (the Bible) as opposed to those who trust in spiritual experience, the fact is that both liberal and fundamentalist faith is undergirded by EXPERIENCE. What is the argument for believing in the testimony of the biblical authors? We are told it is because God affirmed these individuals and their witness through manifestations of the Holy Spirit (i.e., MIRACLES). The signpost, if you will, to the Bible is spiritual experience.

Whether one was a witness to the miracles attested to in the Bible or a believer centuries later because of the affirmation of the Holy Spirit, the faith of all Christians is ultimately constructed on experience.

Now here’s what’s interesting—the very way we discuss faith as an edifice is tied in with our “modern” philosophical approach to evaluating truth. I am curious how the author’s discussion of these issues unfolds. More later.

[overseas (overseas)]

And here is the voice of an evangelical Christian. Just curious if you realize that you transform truth into a question of sophisticated, academic research which cannot be accessible to honest people, but with lower IQs. Took me long to understand that being Bible wise according to God's Holy Spirit is not identical with intelectual capacity. It has more to do with our moral choices. Anyone of you remembers about the apostles (uneducated people) that made the highly educated Jew priests wonder in the Acts ? I am wondering what kind of Christ are you pursuing if the Gospels are debatable and their text is fiction and poetry ?
You people kid yourself. I became a believer at the age of 22 after I was a devout of martial arts. And I can tell you, instead of sticking to half of the Bible + some philosophical gadgets, I would rather go back to martial arts for 1000 times. If you take away 1% of the Bible, you get nothing but nonsense, cause only the integral Bible makes sense. This is not an argument for innerancy, but shows the logical consequence of your demonstration.
You could benefit of some lectures from Francis Schaeffer, great Christian and philosopher. F. Schaeffer dealt with your type of persons that speak about 'negative capabilities' and uncertainty, asking them to live and make daily decisions consistent with that approach. You cannot and you do not live like that. You live daily like you are certain of several things, otherwise you go crazy. You make daily a lot of decisions to trust somebody/ something based on some sort of evidence. But when it comes to Bible you cannot be consistent with your daily behaviour. Using the same type of reasoning you enjoy to put Bible down, I personally can make you doubt who you are, where you live and if you really own a computer...
For everybody, I do acknowledge the difficulties of the Bible issue and I look for answers. Meanwhile, accepting the Bible solves more of my questions about truth than rejecting the Bible.

[yogi (yogi)]

I recommend Ravi Zacharis!

Yogi

[overseas (overseas)]

"The solution to this dilemma of wanting to maintain an inerrant text while faced with a text that is obviously not inerrant..." So you guys already decided that Bible is not inerrant. Anybody of you used his future-forecasting capabilities for checking the Book of Revelation ?

"That is why I think that any reading or study of Scripture should begin with the prayer, "Lord, help me understand." It is good to see inconsistent thinking desguised in intelectual language; anybody has an idea why the author thinks of Lord and not of a Female Goddess? Maybe the ancient guys passed on the story of God by altering it with their macho convictions. 'Help me understand" - hey dude, who says that understanding is possible and that we don't live in an absurde universe ?

One Proverb from my inerrant Bible says: 'Do not answer to fools according to their foolishness not to make yourself like them, but do answer to fools according to their foolishness for not letting them think they are wise'.

[nwmomike (nwmomike)]

Yogi,
I TOTALLY agree. Ravi is a great thinking and apologist. He gets WAY over my head and I have to listen to his messages several times and ponder it even longer. For those who wish go to:
http://www.rzim.org

I also have a resource that might help people.
http://www.conservativeonline.org/journals/01_02_journal/1997v1n2_id05.htm

It's natural for people coming out of cults and spiritual abuse to swing the pendulum the other way and tend to stay away from any dogmatistm or truth claims. We need to pray that God will help them find a balance. Any further force of any claims seems to push them away. At the same time we need to be firm in our stance too without compromise.

As much as it took for them to get released from and abusive situation it's going to take time to heal. We need to stand along side them and try to help them back to a balanced approach.

M or Michael

[karen (karen)]

You are right, I base my everyday life on certainties. But how did I come to that place of certainty? It was because day in and day out, my experience showed me I could depend on them. Each morning when I come down to my home office, my computer is still there. I press the power button and my monitor springs to life. If this were not the case, I would doubt my original presuppositions.

I used to be a Christian who believed every word of the Bible. But as I applied it in my life, I began to see that it didn’t always work the way I was led to expect--didn't yield the fruit of the Holy Spirit. For instance, there are many Christians considering themselves fundamentalists who “tweak” the Bible without realizing it. One such person I know admitted to me that his attitude toward his wife needed massive revision when faced with real-life experience as a husband. He practically ignores the Scriptures that say wives must submit to their husbands and chooses instead to focus on the verses that speak about Christ’s love for the Church as a model for him. Some fundamentalist Christians believe that long hair on men is an abomination to God and others see that admonition as subordinate to other biblical considerations. Some Christians take the Bible’s assertions about slavery being acceptable to God at face value and others perform scriptural gymnastics so they can remain true to their intuitive convictions about God without losing faith in the inerrancy of the Bible.

After 10 years as a fundamentalist, I became aware of my suppression of all experiential data that contradicted my beliefs. I made a decision to walk in intellectual integrity from that point on. Having intellectual integrity does not mean that I exalt myself above God. It means that I am honest with myself and God about experiential data that contradicts what I thought was true. I am not trying to discover truth apart from Him; I have just widened my field of vision to include sources of data beyond the Bible.

Haven’t you ever cooked with a recipe? If so, have you discovered after a first go around that perhaps you should have reduced the amount of salt and increased the cooking time? It would be incredibly foolish to continue making the recipe as written if the results were less than desirable.

I also think about the way my son constructed his world view. As a young child, he took everything my husband and I told him as gospel truth. He needed a coherent way of looking at the world as a starting point. But from there he began to test what we told him against his experience. Of course, this is a complex process and some things that seem true at first can’t stand the test of time and other things that may initially seem unworkable prove true in the long run. I believe it’s the same process with us, God’s children. We start with a system and by walking with Him in the day to day, God is able to show us what is solid and unchanging and what is not.

As far as your assertions that my approach is overly intellectual, I must respectfully disagree. I am capable of exercising both my mind and my heart just as I can walk and think at the same time. Why create a false separation between different facets of a person? Surely you see varying levels of intellectual engagement between fundamentalist Christians. You’re not saying that Jim’s intellectual doctrinal approach, for instance, is invalid because there are some Christians who can’t follow it or consider it irrelevant, are you? There are discussions that are over my head, and I just pass them by because they don’t offer me anything I need at the time. However, if I can formulate a question, God is faithful to meet me in that place.

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

It might be mentioned that the Apostle Paul was very much an intellectual compared to the other apostles. And he wrote more of the New Testament than any of them. There's nothing wrong with using what God equips you with. At the same time, remember that if someone can outreason you, it does not in itself make them right. Follow the light you have. If God gives you light with doubts in it, that's okay. Live with the doubts as long as He lets you keep them. He can take them away if that suits Him. Is faith without doubt really faith? No.

[nwmomike (nwmomike)]

BTW, CRI is not Christian Research Institute - Hank Hanegraaf. It's Christian Resource Institute which have nothing to do with each other. Also which I'm sure Hank would disagree with on many points.

Just providing it for clarification in case someone might think Hank had something to do with this.
M or Michael

[kathleen (kathleen)]

Dear Friend,

There are many people in this world that find themselves discouraged and are not sure how to get back in stride with who they once were. We must remember that there is a spiritual war constantly going on and the devil tries his best to bring discouragement to people's lives that will keep them from reaching the heights of victory, which God has prepared for them.
We are to be mindful of the enemy's tactics and be quick to cast down his thoughts and renew our mind with the Word of God. I truly believe that
discouragement's main ingredient is fear. We are tempted to think on our past failures and future uncertainties and that is where fear comes in to
bring discouragement and disheartenment. We must keep in mind that the devil is a liar and the father of lies and we are to guard our hearts not
allowing his deceit to enter our lives. (Ephesians 6:12) (John 8:44)

When the enemy brings these temptations of fear and uncertainty, we are to remember 2 Timothy 1:7 which declares, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” We must stand in our authority as believers in Jesus and know that God has given us His Word and His Name to defeat the enemy and come forth victorious. Be encouraged and know that you are well able to overcome, overtake, and rise up above the enemy's evil devices. (Luke 9:1-2) (Mark 16:17-18)

I hope you are encouraged by today's message to resist the enemy and stand in your authority as a Child of God knowing that you have been given
authority over all principalities and powers of the enemy.

PERSUASIVE SPEECH

In the street of life, walking in the darkness of the shadows, Satan was hunting with his dogs, the imps of human weakness. A man came down the
street and Satan said to one imp, “Go get him for me!” Lightly, the imp hopped onto the man's shoulder. “You are discouraged,” he whispered.

“No,” said the man, “I am not discouraged.” “You ARE discouraged!” This time the man replied, “I do not think I am.” The imp repeated, “I tell you, you are discouraged.”
The man dropped his head and murmured, “Well, I suppose I am.”
“I've got him, he's discouraged,” the imp reported back to Satan.

Another man passed. Again Satan said, “Get him!”

The demon of discouragement repeated his tactics. The first time he said, “You are discouraged,” the man replied emphatically, “No!” The second time the man replied, “I tell you I am NOT discouraged!” The third time he said,
“You lie! I am NOT discouraged!”

The imp returned to Satan, crestfallen, “I couldn't get him,” he reported.
“Three times I told him he was discouraged. The third time, he called me a liar, and that discouraged ME!”

Don't forget Satan is the liar of all liars...And only the Word of God can defeat him...

Author Unknown

We must be ever mindful of the enemy's tactics and be quick to cast down his evil thoughts in the name of the Lord and speak the authoritative words
of victory that God has given us through His Word. The Bible declares in
2 Corinthians 10:5 “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that
exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity
every thought to the obedience of Christ.” The Lord Jesus has given every
believer His word that whatever we bind on earth is bound in heaven and
whatever we loose on earth is loosed in heaven. We must keep this in mind
and know that by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ we can overcome the
enemy's devices and stand victorious in who God has called us to be.
(Matthew 16:19) (John 14:12-14) (1 Peter 2:9-10) (Romans 6:20-23)

Be encouraged and know that you have the ability to defeat discouragement, depression and any other device of the enemy that is meant to pull you down. Stand in your authority as a Child of God and in the name of Jesus take back what the enemy has stolen.

Read and meditate on these scriptures:

Matthew 16:19 Jesus declares “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound
in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty
through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”

Ephesians 6:10-14 “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and
blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore...”

All of these scriptures can be found in the King James Version Bible

[nwmomike (nwmomike)]

Kathleen,
Thanks for that encouragement. It's a good lesson. I especially enjoy 2 Cor. 10:5

Jesus quoted from most of the books of the old testament as authoratative, binding, and as the words of God. He was setting an example and a precendence for us too.

Thanks again

M or Michael

[karen (karen)]

I have to say that I see tremendous similarities between Carl Stevens’ control tactics and those employed by the Apostles, particularly Paul. If Paul couldn’t bring people to his way of thinking through persuasion, he said they would come under God’s judgment or be deceived by Satan. This is exactly what Carl does. Is what Carl does wrong because of principle or because he is not really an Apostle?

GGWO’s “us vs. them” paradigm is borrowed from the Scriptures as is the “persecution” scenario. It’s just that Carl applies these principles more narrowly (i.e., the ministry is the purest expression of Christianity).

While in the ministry, we were held captive because it was a closed system that perpetuated itself. Whenever we had a discordant thought, we were directed to believe and submit to the pulpit. Don’t question. As Christians, if we have a thought that contradicts the Bible, we are supposed to believe and submit. Don’t question. Same drill, just different authority.

[nwmomike (nwmomike)]

Paul's authority and scripture were attested to by prophecy, signs and wonders. Christ gave them direct authority as representing Him. Carl's and our only authority is scripture given by the apostles and prophets. I have thoughts all the time that contradict the Bible. I have faith that what God has already proven to be His word in things I do understand can be proven to be true in things I don't. Do I understand everything I did at the beginning. NO I don't think anyone can expect to know scripture to such completeness in this life. But it in no ways make scripture the part that's wrong, nor the faith. I respect the fact that you have a problem with any authority at this point. It is to be expected. I simply want you to ponder the implications either way carefully.

M or Michael

[jim_faucett (jim_faucett)]

2 Cor. 6:5 (ESV)
beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger;


2 Cor. 11:23-24 (ESV)
Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—I am talking like a madman—with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. [24] Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one.


BIG difference btw Carl Stevens's pseudo-persecution that was often the result of his own errors and Paul's sufferings promised to him by his Lord:

Acts 9:16 (ESV)
For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name."

[nonotone (nonotone)]

Karen,

You write:

I have to say that I see tremendous similarities between Carl Stevens control tactics and those employed by the Apostles, particularly Paul.

This comparison is "on the surface" not altogether unfounded. However, the bottom line, for any conservative Biblicist is that Paul's writings are authoritative and canonical, because he IS an apostle. Carl H. Stevens does NOT have apostolic authority of any kind so therefore his writings and preaching do not carry this authority.

As I'm sure you are aware, to properly understand the Apostolic writings, one must have a consummate understanding of Koine Greek, along with the historical and cultural context they were written in. Beyond this, an incredibly deep understanding of Old Testament Hebrew and the ancient cultures of the Bible Lands is also required because the O.T. IS the foundation for all of the Apostolic writings. ... and I don't mean the kind of watered down, redacted "Isagogics" you get at MBC&S. I'm talking Westminster Seminary level kind of material and learning.

I'm reticent to do this, but Karen, let me make a recommendation and please take this in the kindness of Jesus Christ. You are clearly a very intelligent person and this gift is from Him. Why not empower yourself, by putting your intelligence to work in gaining a thorough grasp on the original linguistic, cultural, literary, and historical sources that underpin all of these arguments. If you will do this, you won't have to be manipulated by your own reactions to what CHS, other "fundies in kind", or anyone else has done to "shame" you or advance "arguments" against your convictions. Also, you'll be able to exercise what could be called "first order" critical thinking skills - that is the ability to draw you own conclusions from the most original sources (... the "I'm standing on the shoulders of giants" principle).

It may take me awhile to get back to you, but if you will email me at nonotone@mac.com, I'll reply with a very personal example of how the beginnings of such a "journey" into ancient literature in my own life is helping me to overcome the biggest wound that I've ever experienced.

Love and Peace in the Lord Jesus Christ,


Brian Bowman
John 3:21

[overseas (overseas)]

You people have to understand I am where I say... overseas. So I am not familiar with your specific GGWO problem. But maybe this way I may bring something good to the discussion, from a 'cold mind' perspective.

Karen, I have daily the same problem that you encounter about experience vs. Bible. And the problem is real. Except one possible explanation is that experience does not contradict the Bible, but our current understanding or acceptance of the Bible. In my case, experiential dissapointments led me back to the Bible for correcting my understanding, not questioning the reliability of the Bible (uh, I did not mean it to sound like rejecting reality... It is not about rejecting reality, but about the meaning you attach to your experience and the expectations you have in life).

I do value reason and intelectual ability; I attended John Stott seminaries on using your christian mind and kept lectures to students on that; I oppose Hindu cults and their 'leave your shoes and mind out of the ashram'. But I discovered in the Bible that access to truth is an ethical question not intelectual. Intelect is there to help understand what truth means not if truth is true. See John 7:17 'if anyone wants to do God's will...'. Sorry but I don't have access to Bible where I write, to give you more quotes.

So the question is: is reality contradicting Scripture or just opposing your deepest personal expectations and wishes ? My strong belief is that many many many christians do not accept the Bible for its whole unique message and that is why they are dissapointed. Pls do not feel offended, I am included. People expect christian life to be solution to their problems. And they do have legitimate problems. But Bible teaches that christian life is to serve God and His glory. Human well being is secondary. A lot of us (you and me) agree to this simple, basic truth. Where we do not probably agree is that, while in the sanctification process, christians are still capable of big time hypocrisy and egocentrism. Except we lose complete faith in our good will (not in our minds and reason), we will easily misinterpret a lack in our personal theology as a hole in the Bible inerrancy. Accepting who God is and his unique character is tough and hurts. We use to live the christian life with an impression of a God who is an improved kind of father/ friend/ boss/ sheperd etc. But He is not the improved/ best version of an earthly concept. He is not human or anti-human, He is non-human (transcendent ?). Understanding Him and accepting His light is extremely morally painful for us. We may be tempted to question the Book than our ability to perceive His Spirit.

Just have a look at the book of Dr. Larry Crabb 'Finding God'. I read it when my opinion was already formed.

For all, I am also engaged in studying how scriptures reached us, the process of translation and all possible evidence.

[karen (karen)]

Michael,
Your point that Jesus affirmed the Scriptures is something I have considered many times. I find His statements the most compelling argument for inerrancy. However, I also find it interesting that His words and actions often countered the written Word that Israel had at the time. When the Pharisees brought the adulterous woman to Him, they had the Law that compelled them to stone her. I think it’s important to view this situation as people of the time would have, not in light of what we know about the new covenant. I can imagine they were thinking that Jesus couldn’t possibly be led by God, because of course He would never go against His Word. And there’s the scriptural passage where Jesus tells the Jews that Moses’ divorce statutes were merely a concession that God allowed in light of their hardened hearts. I know that we have later Scriptures that put Moses’ writings in a different context. However, how would the Jews have dealt with Jesus’ undermining of the Law? Whenever I listen to contemporary discussions on these issues, the speakers/writers always focus on the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. And I acknowledge the essential points Jesus was trying to make. But the fact is that Jesus did violate what was written in God’s Word to bring listeners closer to the heart and mind of the Father.

Now project this scenario to our modern times. If someone were to suggest, for instance, that some of the things that Paul asserted were also concessions that God made because of the hardness of people’s hearts, Christians would blow a gasket—just as the Jews did when faced with Jesus.

I also wonder how Christians can be so sure that the canon is closed. Is it because of the verse in Revelations that warns against adding to the book? If so, I think there are other ways to view that passage.

Anyway, many Jews were and are also persuaded that the canon was closed. And because of their certainty, they missed the new thing God was doing. (BTW-I am not looking for new revelation; I’m only suggesting that no one can be certain that God won’t intervene again in some unanticipated way.)


Jim,
I acknowledge that there are major differences between the persecution that Paul suffered vs. Carl’s persecution complex. And I do know that Carl is not an Apostle. In fact, I NEVER thought he was, in spite of murmurings among “body members” to the contrary. I guess I find some of Paul's attitudes troubling, even in light of his calling.

Overseas,
I really appreciated your last post. I hadn’t realized that you were not ever affiliated with GGWO. So what brings you to this site? Just curious.

You bring up two important points that I’d like to address: 1) that sometimes our expectations toward God are disappointed; and 2) “If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself” (John 7:17).

First, there have been times in the past when my expectations were disappointed. But I dealt with those. This is not the source of my reticence about the Bible. The experiential issues I am referring to have to do with God’s nature and how following some of the Bible’s commands produces bad fruit. It is possible, as you and Brian say, that my understanding of particular Scriptures is flawed. But then I will have to say that much of Christendom is also similarly misled.

With respect to John 7:17—I have problems with this being used to diagnose me. It is always easy and convenient to avoid dealing with honest objections by discrediting the person who raises them. You are not the first to do so. God knows my heart. He knows how I struggled nearly to the point of making myself sick to not only believe every word of the Bible, but to follow it scrupulously in my day to day life. I am not a disinterested contender; these issues emanate from the core of my being. As is true about many of my brothers and sisters who have a common history with the ministry, we left everything to follow after God. We were willing to go wherever He led. Commitment is not the issue here, please believe me.


Okay, Brian,
I am willing to study “original linguistic, cultural, literary, and historical sources.” But unfortunately, nothing in Bible college prepared me to do so. Any suggestions how I can start? What are the essential resources?

But apart from any misunderstandings I might have about the Bible, there is the issue of “posture” before it. I will write more about this at another time.

Thanks everyone, for your thoughtful responses. I want you to know that I deeply consider everything you say.

-Karen

[jim_faucett (jim_faucett)]

"I also find it interesting that His words and actions often countered the written Word that Israel had at the time."

Or was it that, as our overseas friend intimates, that Christ's words and actions countered their understanding of the written word that Israel had at the time? They expected him to take over the throne on earth as Messiah, that was their misunderstanding of the written word, Christ has never countered the actual intent of the written word but fulfilled it. For example, it may be considered that the vision Peter had of the unclean animals coming down in the sheet countered the "touch not, taste not" of the ceremonial law. The key word here is 'clean'. The types and patterns of cleanliness and spotlessness of victim and priest are fulfilled by Christ, not contradicted by him. Christ and the disciples plucking corn on the sabbath or not going through ceremonial washings show that the Pharisees clearly misunderstood that the Sabbath is for man, and that even the Old Testament teaches this, not preventing works of mercy or necessity in even the strictest sense.

As for the question of knowing if or not Jesus prayed a certain way in Gethsemane because there were no human ears there to hear his words--the same could be said of the prayer of Christ in John 17--the same could be said of the words in the first chapter of Genesis--was there a human witness to the words "Let there be light?" God does not need a human witness, because this is part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit which you seem to say is your guide. If he can guide you now, why do you deny Him the right and purpose He declared of Himself to lead the apostles into "all truth" as they recorded the gospels?

[karen (karen)]

Jim,

I was with you every step of your response until you said: "God does not need a human witness, because this is part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit WHICH YOU SEEM TO SAY IS YOUR GUIDE." Have I not shown a willingness to hear? However, there is always something hateful that comes out of you toward me. I will not receive that which comes to me outside of His nature. You and people like you are the cause of my issues with Christianity.

[jim_faucett (jim_faucett)]

Don't take it the wrong way Karen, I did not mean it in a hateful way--I meant that you are claiming to be led of the Spirit--so were the apostles and prophets--and they wrote the Scriptures. I am asking that you consider their leading of the Spirit in recording the history of God's work. I am sorry if my comment sounded like I was attacking you.

[jim_faucett (jim_faucett)]

I think, Karen that sometimes this particular medium does not allow for the full plea I was making--You are desiring the Spirit of God to lead you, Yes?

These ones who wrote the gospels, history, epistles and the Revelation desired the same leading into all truth that Christ promised them. We need to ask--was the Holy Spirit as faithful to them in communicating Holy Scripture as we expect Him to be in guiding us in our daily lives?

(Message edited by Jim Faucett on December 16, 2004)

[karen (karen)]

Okay, Jim, I do understand what you're saying. And I appreciate your gentleness http://www.factnet.org/discus/clipart/happy.gif

What's difficult for me is the rigid boundaries that inerrancy claims create for the modern believer. If God were to show me, for instance, that the Church's activism against gay people was not His will, most Christians would quote I Cor. 6:9,10. However, I don't see Christians voting only for politicians who support prohibition, for instance, though drunkards are also mentioned in that passage. I don't want to get into a debate about homosexuality, BTW; I'm only using this as an example of the kinds of issues that adherence to the "letter" provoke for me.

Inerrancy creates a great gulf between the biblical writers and all who come afterwards in terms of liberty to hear from God. I am assuming that Paul did not know his writings would be included in the biblical canon. He was a man who began with the OT Scriptures and allowed the Spirit to teach him new things--he developed ideas that were merely hinted at in the OT writings. Some will say that Paul and the other biblical writers did not contradict the Scriptures--but that is only something we can say in hindsight--for surely they ushered in a radical change of focus that many of the time perceived as contradictory.

I guess what I'm saying is that even if I come to affirm inerrancy, I will always hold "truth" lightly and with humility, because how can I ever be sure that my perspective is not skewed by my limited humanity?

I'm not sure if any of this will make sense to you, but that's the best I can do for now.

-Karen

[jim_faucett (jim_faucett)]

The "Church" or some of them may have thought the world was flat, but Scripture does not teach this. Usually, the misunderstanding is ours because of sinfulness--not that the Word is faulty.

[nwmomike (nwmomike)]

I can see both sides of the debate on the canon being closed. Jude says "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" and elsewhere that we have everything necesary for life and godliness. The other side though even if there was new canon added it would never contradict what was already said. It may claify the understandings as Jesus and the apostles did but never contradict.

M or Michael

[nwmomike (nwmomike)]

Karen,
I really appreciate the conversation as of late. It seems more toned down and while honest is less demanding I think. Not sure that is the right word but at least it sounds like everyone is getting involved to find a correct balance. That is what makes the Christian life wonderful. We meet together with our presuppositions and preconceived notions and find others that challenge them and also bring us back to balance. Otherwise it makes little since to have a church body. He did it for a reason. It's not always easy but it's also how we grow.

I enjoy reading the posts now.

Thanks everyone. I've been sick this week so been tough to concentrate much.

M or Michael

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

We're getting somewhere here. Please keep going, Karen.

Jim; Although I don't share doubts in some of the issues Karen raises; we are strongly bonded and her searching earnestness and desire to please God are beautifully evident to me. Her doubts don't bother me. I see her belief in the midst of them. I love her insistence on being honest.

For me the issue that compels me is the freedom to walk in what the Spirit gives and to speak out what I 'see' in Him. I'm not trying to overturn or subvert the Scriptures. I have this problem: To me, words are on the surface. They can articulate underlying spiritual realities, but often the technical meanings that can be assigned to them can lead us to places that conflict with those realities. I consider that the realities themselves are revealed by the Spirit; and that only through Him can the words convey what he intends to come out. I consider this to be true with already written words, such as the Bible, as well as other words we are speaking or hearing now. I consider the Spirit to be the One who gives discernment both of what is true and what is pertinent. I consider myself blind without Him; even if I have the Bible and knew it thoroughly. My relationship with the Spirit is one of trust and inner waiting on Him. I don't always see things right away. I don't have answers for every issue in appropriate boxes. I do find great riches and support and conviction in the Bible. The Spirit resonates them within me, and sometimes through others to me. Sometimes I feel as if those who stress inerrancy are telling me to choose the Bible rather than the Spirit. And I'm not entirely convinced that the Bible is 'the whole Word of God'. I don't think so. My own search is for truth and what God wants. It's mostly in terms of my own walk and interaction with others; and what I believe He wants me to express. I don't want those who doubt this or that to stop seeking God because of their doubts. Jesus offered to let Thomas stretch forth his hand and touch His wounds. That's my attitude toward those who doubt further than I do. I'm not asking them to accept everything at once. Just to keep seeking, to allow what light they can receive to find a place with them. When the Lord is 'done with them', they still may believe much differently than me. That's His business. This isn't compromise. It's taking light in the stages we can.

In addition to this, I know that I am 'mature' in some things and infantile in others. This is true in practical things; and I expect it's true in spiritual things also (laying aside the accurate notion that we are all infantile). Boddah professes to be an atheist, and yet many of her words display great maturity and accuracy. I learn from her. Her unbelief does not take away the value I find in her. Now; if you can receive it; I seek to promote value where I find it - to augment, 'edify', encourage, interact with and add what I can find in agreement with it. I love what I find and consider it from God, even if she doesn't consider it that. She's my friend. I'm not afraid of 'the darkness' in her; and some things I might tend to think of as darkness may not be. And being somewhat melancholic and an intercessor who seeks to open myself to others' hurts for prayer; I'm not so sure that us all being happy or 'balanced' is really what God wants. I find value in some distressing and hurtful places, like maybe the cross?

[karen (karen)]

I am sure that many on FactNet get exasperated with my seemingly endless questions and doubts. I do understand that. But I am so afraid of being brainwashed, that I can only take this step by step. That is why I keep one foot on the ground--to make sure I am in touch with reality, and not boarding a spaceship of human construction. I have seen too many "communities" of people caught up in a common delusion. They share intricate systems of thought with internal consistency, but little or no grounding in truth. I know some will say that is why we stand on the Bible. But I must be absolutely certain that the Bible is endorsed by God in the way that conservative Christians believe.

There was a time when I readily accepted what I was taught; I used to be a much more trusting person. But I am seeing how deeply I was violated because of that trust. I can't take the word of people anymore. Each and every principle or premise must be validated by His Spirit before I will stand on it.

After eight years in the ministry and two in the subsequent fundamentalist church, I was so beaten down that I had the worst depression of my life. I went to see a Christian therapist who told me two things that created huge reverberations in my way of looking at things. She said: 1) I had an addiction to religion; and 2) I had no self. But of course, a Christian should be utterly devoted to the truth and continually taking one's "self" to the Cross. But God showed me I had a distorted view of both. I was so willing to accommodate myself to others' expectations of me, including His, that I had lost my personal dignity. I had a slavish relationship to Him. Over the years, God has restored my dignity by honoring my boundaries. I have been surprised at His delight in me when I wrestle with Him--when I push back. Yes, He is sovereign; yes, He is all-powerful; yes, He can crush me like a bug. But for some unfathomable reason, He permits this insignificant creature in His kingdom to come boldly to the throne of grace.


-Karen

[aurora (aurora)]

I love the way you write, Karen, and I appreciate your searching heart.
I know all that you continue to bring up here is important for us to ponder and I'm sure there are many reading here who need to work through similar persistant questions.
You are such a blesssing, my friend!

[chris (chris)]

Karen…

Last night I was reading about spiritual reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and ran across a few pages I thought might interest you.

“There is, Schwenckfeld holds, a double revelation of God. The primary Word of God is eternal, spiritual, inward. ‘The Word, when spiritual messengers preach or teach, is of two kinds with a decided difference in their manner of working. One is of God, even is God, and lives and works in the heart of the messenger. This is the inner Word, and is in reality nothing else than the continued manifestation of Christ. He is inwardly revealed, and heard with the inward ears of the heart.’ It is, in fact, God Himself operating as Life and Spirit and Light upon the spiritual substance of the human soul, first as the Life-Seed which forms the new creation in man, and afterwards as the permanent nourishing and tutoring Spirit who leads the obedient soul on into all the Truth, and perfects it into the likeness and stature of Christ. ‘There is a living, inner Scripture, written in the believer’s heart by the finger of God. This inner Scripture has an active creative power of holiness, and makes holy, living, righteous and saved all those in whose hearts it is written.’

The divine word in the secondary sense is the outward word-the word of Scripture. ‘The other word which serves the inner Word with voice, sound, and expression is the external word, and is heard by the external man with his ears of sense, and is written and read in letters. He who has read and heard only that, and not the inner Word, has not heard the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of Grace, nor has he received or understood it.’ It is at best only the witness or testimony which assists the soul to find the real life-giving Word. Cut apart from the inner spiritual Word, the word of the letter is ‘dead,’ as the body would be if sundered from the spirit. ‘It paints truth powerfully for the eye, but it cannot bring it into the heart. The Scriptures cannot bring to the soul that of which they speak. This must be sought directly from God Himself.’

In his (Schwenckfeld) practical use of Scripture and in his estimate of its importance he is hardly behind Luther himself. ‘There is,’ he says, ‘no writing on earth like the Holy Scriptures.’ His Christianity is penetrated and illuminated at every point by the profound spiritual experiences of the saints of the Bible, and still more by the vivid portraits of Christ in the Gospels, by the words from His lips recorded there, and by the experiences of the apostles and the development of the primitive Church. He never doubts or questions the inspiration of the Scriptures; quite the contrary, he holds that Scripture is ‘given by God’ and is an inexhaustible well of inspired truth from which the soul can endlessly draw.

The actual content of Christian faith is supplied by the historical revelation; but Schwenckfeld always insists that written words, however inspired, are still external to the soul, and merely record historical events which have happened to others in other ages. ‘If man,’ he writes, ‘is to understand spiritual things and is to know and judge rightly, he must bring the divine Light to the Scriptures, the Spirit to the letter, the Truth to the picture, and the Master to His created work…in a word, to understand the Scriptures a man must become a new man, a man of God; he must be in Christ who gave forth the Scriptures.’ That which is to change the inner nature of a man must be something personally experienced and not external to him; must be in its own nature as spiritual as the soul itself is and not material, as written words are.

‘The pen cannot completely bring the heart to the paper, nor can the mouth entirely express the well of living water within itself.’ The Bible leads to Christ and bears witness of Him as no other book does, but it is not Christ. And even the Bible remains a closed book until Christ opens it. The Scriptures tell, as no other writings do, of the Word of God and its life-operations in the world, but they are still not the Word of God. The spiritual realities of life cannot be settled by laboriously piling up texts of Scripture, by subtle theological dialectic, or by learned exegesis of sacred words. If these spiritual realities are to become real and effective to us, it must be through the direct relation of the human spirit with the divine Spirit-the inward spiritual Word of God. ‘He who will see the truth must have God for eyes.”

Jack and I think of you often. Have a great day!

Chris

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

Chris; Would you and Jack consider coming back to the Berkshires?

[chris (chris)]

Bob,

Jack wants to know if that's an invitation?
And...what's the temperature up there right now? Actually, yes, we would love to visit again up there...it's been a long time. I went to High School in Lee I have many memories between school and TBS. We would really enjoy seeing you and Mary again.

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

I live in a shoebox. I can't give you a place to stay. The Herrings might. What I really was thinking of though, was if you'd move up here. I love your focus. If you started a church up here, I'd be interested. The weather varies, sometimes really cold and sometimes not. A while back, someone suggested gathering in Lenox in the Spring. I believe there's a lot of potential spiritual 'material' here to work with.

If you email me at bob.brinton@verizon.net, I'll pass your address on to LuAnn. If she's open to that and you'd like to visit, it could happen. A coffeehouse has just been opened in Lee involving Rick Newton, who's been carrying a cross in various places in the world since 1975. It officially opened last night, and Lu and her daughter were among several that sang. Robin (Clark) O'Herin and Dave Schmidt also sang. Robin has done a couple of CDs. Still singing the blues for Jesus.

[chris (chris)]

Bob,

Just kidding about the invitation. I have family there and/or friends that we could stay with. We'll e-mail you later... have to run.

[overseas (overseas)]

Thank you all for sharing your personal process of searching God and meaning of truth. I think this "brainstaorming" should accompany a Christian all life long.
Karen, I reached this site because of my need to be prepared against cults and my apologetic inclination.
Some thoughts on the topic, please bear with me:
- We are talking about interpreting the Bible and finding truth. As long as this regards personal guidance, I think Bible does not offer detailed personal guidance. But offers the general framework, being more specific on the negative limits of our actions. For the positive aspect of our actions, we are called to make decisions from several alternatives. God does not give us 'holy ears' for perceiving His detailed indications, but creates in us holy minds and holy characters that have to be exercised in making holy decisions. I do not kick the Holy Spirit out by this. I do not question that God has a detailed plan for our lives, but how should we follow His plan. I found that when I chose between several alternatives, I finally reached what God has prepared for me.
- We may be in doubt when seeing several christians acting differently based on same Bible principle. As long they agree on the general meaning of that principle, I think they are free to choose their behaviour from a certain range. I really believe it is my call to be frank/ direct with people about truth, even arguing aggressively (but decent of course), confronting people. I leave aside my efforts to find out if this is just a natural inclination of mine or God call. I have other friends that emphasise patience and gentleness in spreading the Gospel (but not directly supporting sinful behaviour). But I believe that God wants to use us all in his plans and neither one is wrong. By this, I do not endorse ecumenical stuff or contradictory interpretations of Bible. My formula is: God does not only have a personal relationship with us, but also a personalised one.
- Reconciliation of the written Word with the spiritual presence of God. For me, the Holy Spirit empowers me to fulfill what is stated by the Scripture. If I know my Bible well, it is easier to recognise the presence of the Holy Spirit, because I already know the general direction He wants me to move. So when I feel a desire/ pleasure/ pressure to do something specific in that general direction, I just do it, praise Lord for his spiritual presence I detected and don't bother about details. I know I cannot rely only on my ability to recognise God presence (i.e. without testing the signs of His presence against Scripture) because of my imperfection in this life.
- Where I do not probably agree with some is focusing on introspection. My guess is we function best when we focus outside of us, toward worshipping God and serving others as Christ did. Then we find ourselves changed in the process, without tight self control.
- Karen, would you please give me a specific example of your troubles: experience vs. written Word. Not for debating or condemning, but just that I humbly understand the problems you and I may face.

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

Here's the other important thread. It's a good one.

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

bump

[wanttoyota (wanttoyota)]

PART 1
Those who feel need to ponder these issues might profit from Kevin Vanhoozer's "The Drama of Doctrine, A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology", 2005. His is a way to look at the revelation of God in the Bible as "communicative action".

I myself have struggled to form a credible concept of Bible as the word of God, because I see the literalistic, inerrant "verbal, plenary inspiration" type of Bible view inadequate. It leads to too many impasses, too many rationalisations and too many contradictions to be useful. Not to speak of many destructive doctrines of which one of the worst is biblicism ("everything that needs to be spoken of can and must be spoken using only the words found in the Bible, f.ex. Jay Adams' system of counseling). This view of the Bible is a form of rationalism, which makes the text the locus of authority. Then there has been different subjectivist views makin religious experience the locus of authority. Lindbeck spoke 1984 of these to respectively as 'cognitivist-propositionalist' and 'experiential- expressive' and proposed his 'cultural-linguistic' approach as a solution. Vanhoozer takes this as his starting point but points out that in cultural-linguistic concept the locus of authority is in the believing community (church) and thus relative. It does not satisfy the believing heart's desire for absoluteness in the object of faith, nor the biblical references to the absolutely reliable Scriptures (f.ex. Jesus' word and attitude toward the Torah). Something is missing and I find Vanhoozer's 'dramatic' view of the Scriptures very appealing.

[wanttoyota (wanttoyota)]

PART 2
It doesn't mention this in the book but one can imagagine oneself living at the time of Jesus in Jerusalem and hearing the stories of Jesus' speeches and deeds from different people who have been there to see and hear him. After hearing a few people sharing their experiences one starts to get a general picture of Jesus. If one is familiar with the Scriptures one can start searching them and find places which tell of the Messiah or Servant of God making the lame walk, blind to see and deaf to hear. After Jesus' crucifixion one can find several places in which the text seems to foretell the actual events. Let's imagine that all this time the person is depending on second hand information (he might be sick and unable to move). He knows that the informants may not remember everything exactly right but it does not bother him because he sees clearly enough the general course of events and the nature of the person acting the principal role. Aided by the Holy Spirit's inluence our person can come to believe that Jesus is the Christ.

We who live 2000 years later are in principle in a similar situation. We cannot have absolute certainty on every detail of the gospel story but we have enough information to be able to believe, with the Spirit's help. I think it is against the nature of the Bible as witness to gospel events, to expect of it total exactnes.

[wanttoyota (wanttoyota)]

PART 3
So far we have not yet reached Vanhoozers' original points. He views God's self-revealing activity in the world as drama played out first in God's speaking the words creating the universe, living things and man. Then in speaking to Adam and Eve, Abraham, the profets and lastly in Christ. The history of all these people is a divine play where God is the initiator and man the responsible responder to God's initiations. God the Father is the playwright, Son the pricipal actor and Holy Spirit the interpretor of these events. Because the actors of the drama of redemption are thinking, feeling and acting (willing) people ,God's communicative activity ("revelation" in more familiar language)includes factual, emotional, esthetic, physical etc aspects of life. One need not separate 'cognitive - propositional' and 'experiantial-expressive' and 'cultural-linguistic' aspects of it. In order to know God's will one has to live in all these aspects, to do the will of God. The royal law of love alone takes one far in getting to know God's will.

The text of the Bible as we now have it is part of God's communicative actions. It is therefore not like any other book but is ontologically on different plane. It is part of God's plan of redemtion, it is redemptive when applies to heart by the Holy Spirit. The text need not to be 100% exact in every historical detail (much of it is not even history but some other literary genre) just as tge original eyewittnesses needed not to remember everything perfectly. The inaccuracies do not hinder God's communicative actions through it.

P.S. This 2,5 kB limit is a kind of small.

[wanttoyota (wanttoyota)]

PART 4
Final addition.
What comes to locus of authority in Vanhoozer's system it is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit interpreted the gospel events when they happened. The Spirit concvinced the hearts. The same happens today. The Spirit convinces our hearts when we read the Bible, the Spirit lifts up words, themes, characters, historical events and gives them redemptive meaning. So the locus of authority is absolute and the heart can trust it.

[lana (lana)]

I am nearly 78 yrs. old and have sought the Truth nearly all of my life. Its been a precarist journey. I studied and read everything I could get my hands on. I've been through the B.S. experience. The scriptures are so writen, they apply to every stage of our growth to overcome the flesh. Nothing is wasted.Now that I am old, surrounded with almost unsurmontable problems, I have no choice but to trust Him and His word. I no longer "lean to my understanding".I know He is teaching me to "die to the flesh". Just as Paul said in Romans 7 and 8. Its all Faith. He died in my place on the cross so I won't have to die in my sins. It has become real to me. I guess you can call this "Faith rest".

[mercyreigns (mercyreigns)]

there is way too much here to read. Can someone just tell me if there are any other books that have the teachings of Jesus and the Gospel as the evangelical community preaches it?

I mean, as for me I first met and heard about Jesus in my Catholic cathechism *don't know how to spell it* as a kid. And I truly believed then....

any comments about this?

[godsweb (godsweb)]

I met GOD in "PERSON", in 1967.
See His Message here: www.godsbelievers.com (http://www.godsbelievers.com)
His Message: "This is The Truth"
RHW

+++ PASS IT ON +++

[david_munson (david_munson)]

<font color="000000"><font face="arial,helvetica"></font>
I swear to all you folks here I never met this guy,LOL.

</font>}

[mercyreigns (mercyreigns)]

ok I am very confused. what happened to the original posts? and where is my post? are there 2 threads on this subject? thanks

[david_munson (david_munson)]

<font color="000000"><font face="arial,helvetica"></font>
Mercy,
it may have been archived but I really don't know.
A lot has had to be reposted or replaced.

Maybe the moderator could help you with that.
Hope so.
Dave

</font>}

[iris (iris)]

From Jerusalem Post

Falwell: Jews can get to heaven
By ILAN CHAIM

An evangelical pastor and an Orthodox rabbi, both from Texas, have apparently persuaded leading Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell that Jews can get to heaven without being converted to Christianity.

Televangelist John Hagee and Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, whose Cornerstone Church and Rodfei Sholom congregations are based in San Antonio, told The Jerusalem Post that Falwell had adopted Hagee's innovative belief in what Christians refer to as "dual covenant" theology.

- - - - - - -

The whole story is here:
http://www.jpost.com/

[sidethorn (sidethorn)]

Didn't Jesus say He is the way and the truth and nobody comes to the Father but by Him (Jesus)???
Hmmmmmm.

[arguendo (arguendo)]

"An evangelical pastor and an Orthodox rabbi, both from Texas, have apparently persuaded leading Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell that Jews can get to heaven without being converted to Christianity."

Great. I hope someone remembered to send God the memo.

[david_munson (david_munson)]

<font color="000000"><font face="arial,helvetica"></font>
If that where true then why did Jesus come to His own first?
John 1:11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

Add to this that the first shall be last and the last shal be first and you have jews turning to Christ after the gentiles do.
</font>}

[wanttoyota (wanttoyota)]

It seems that people here are not interested in the "modern inerrancy debate". Does anybody know a site where these things are discussed?

[david_munson (david_munson)]

<font color="000000"><font face="arial,helvetica"></font>
arguendo,
the article about Falwell is a fraud.
It's not true.
I don'y know why they said that or what thier agenda was but it's a baseless lie.

</font>}

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

Wanttoyota (I used to have one), check the Paul's Take on Inerrancy thread. I have no problem believing that God preserves His words. But I have no problem thinking that maybe some of the words that have been preserved were not His.

Also, I don't think God stopped speaking fresh things 2000 years ago. I don't think the Bible teaches that. The verses in Revelation 22:18-19 read,"I [personally solemnly] warn everyone who listens to the statements of the prophecy [the predictions and the consolations and admonitions pertaining to them] in this book: If anyone shall add anything to them, God will add and lay upon him the plagues (the afflictions and the calamities) that are recorded and described in this book.

*** And if anyone cancels or takes away from the statements of the book of this prophecy [these predictions relating to Christ's kingdom and its speedy triumph, together with the consolations and admonitions or warnings pertaining to them], God will cancel and take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the city of holiness (purity and hallowedness), which are described and promised in this book."

I believe this passage refers to the book of Revelation and not the Bible as a whole. The canon of Scriptures was not fully settled on when this passage was written.

Cordell has an interesting take on what Jesus had to say in Matthew 4:4 'But he answering said, `It hath been written, Not upon bread alone doth man live, but upon every word coming forth from the mouth of God.'

His take is that what God spoke thousands of years ago is still coming forth, proceeding from God's mouth. My belief is that God has things to say to us currently and individually. That the Holy Spirit does really lead us in day to day details; and not only through the previously written words of God. Did He not say new things through Paul? Has His mouth been effectively closed?

[bob_brinton (bob_brinton)]

Want, You also might try doing a word search on inerrancy or inerrant. Likely the subject has come up on other threads.

Did the Holy Spirit inspire Solomon to write that all is vanity? When Adam and Eve fell, did God remove His image from them? Does not the creation bear the artistic style of the Creator despite the Fall? Is anything God has made vain? How does the Spirit of Truth residing in you respond to Solomon's words?

There are explanations for this floating around somewhere hereabouts, but they sound very contrived to me. Of course, I may be wrong. Those who insist on every single word being infallible will never admit that they might be wrong. It often seems to me that their faith is more in the text than in the Person of God. Again, just 'my take' on it.

[whatsup]

SO Bob Brinton....God preserves His Word, yet He somehow allowed words that were not His to get mixed up with His true Word, and now here we are trying to figure out which is which....how careless and inconsiderate of Him.....if only He had thought of that problem before the Bible was put together and spared us this dilemma..oh well..."Has His mouth been effectively closed?" you ask....if only yours was, you silly little man

[whatsup]

SO Bob Brinton....God preserves His Word, yet He somehow allowed words that were not His to get mixed up with His true Word, and now here we are trying to figure out which is which....how careless and inconsiderate of Him.....if only He had thought of that problem before the Bible was put together and spared us this dilemma..oh well..."Has His mouth been effectively closed?" you ask....if only yours was, you silly little man

[orangetwopay]

either way, you'd better eat of the word daily, my friends!

http://liquidwaves.blogspot.com/2006/03/eat-of-word-daily.html

[bob_brinton]

God could have prevented every single false prophet between Genesis and now if He'd wanted to. Has He? 'How careless and inconsiderate of Him', as you put it.