Verne,
I have intended more than once to withdraw from this dialogue. Thanks to your recent posts, however, I have been getting more than a few letters of support. It is clear to me and to those who have written me that seem to be getting frustrated and are bouncing around without dealing with the issues directly. For example, your original post of April 20th that you edited a few hours later so it would not come across so huffy and cutting at the end. To cite a few more examples, your quoting at length of Dr. Gleason L. Archer, calling into question my ability to share the gospel, you challenging me with other questions so that you will not have to answer Contradiction Three, and you attempting to make me look silly by pretending to think or speak for me on more than one occasion is showing that you have lost focus and forgotten that this is just a dialogue among brothers and sisters.
I am thankful for this dialogue, as I have said before because it has caused me to re-examine my beliefs and I have found yet again that the notion of inerrancy comes out wanting. In fact, I have found more passages in the Bible than I had in the past that demonstrates that men were inspired by God to communicate the gospel—the message of truth in the Bible, not give a perfectly reliable account of science. You said to me that you would disprove the first three contradictions I brought up. In your mind, you have dealt with the one and two but I knew you would stumble over Contradiction Three as I have and so many others have.
You wrote,
The Bible is a work of literature. Why do errantists petulantly hold the Bible to a standard that is different from that generally applied to such works?. Employment of figures of speech is common technique in works of literature of every kind! - Allegory, Metaphor, Hyperbole.
Is anyone reading these passages contextually prepared to argue that the writer intended to present a cosmological construct or dissertation? That is not, in my view, a reasonable stance.
Please consider the passage given to us in Isaiah 24:20:
The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again.
Isaiah 24: 20
I would like to submit that this verse more closely approaches cosmological commentary.
Sorry, Verne, you are taking one passage and attempting to hint that we should understand this to mean that the cosmology related in the Bible is either figurative or poetic but not literal. The ancients in Genesis 1 and throughout the Bible were relating their view of cosmology that they believed was true and what we know today is quite false. As your Dr. Gleason L. Archer wrote, “Bear in mind that inerrancy involves acceptance of and belief in whaterver the Biblical author meant by the words he used. If he meant what he said in a literal way, it is wrong to take it figuratively; but if he meant what he said in a figurative way, it is wrong to take it literally.” Genesis 1 is interpreted literally by many Christians and Genesis 1—and the rest of the Bible—relates an ancient cosmology we know today to be false. Therefore, as Dr. Gleason L. Archer says, “inerrancy involves acceptance of and belief in whaterver the Biblical author meant by the words he used.” The multitude of passages in the Bible that deal with cosmology are often literal because the ancients had a very different, INCORRECT view of the cosmos. I have written at length about this in other places. Sufficed to say, the phenomenological argument and the argument that tries to mask all the references to cosmology as figurative or poetic simply does not work. You, as your Doctor said, have to deal with Genesis 1 and the many other passages about cosmology literally. (Yes, there are some poetic passages, but the “windows of heaven,” “the firmament,” etc. were seen as literal things.)
I have a simple question of Will and any other supposed evangelical errantist reading this thread. Do you accept the Bible’s reportage of the above-mentioned events as true and reliable?
If yes, I will proceed to what I believe is an entirely credible Genesis cosmology and the matter of errant facts.
If you do not accept the Bible’s reporting of the above events as true and reliable, then my point is proven, my task is done, and I shall happily take six weeks off…
Verne
Verne, are you hoping I will say NO so you will not have to deal with Contradiction Three? I accept the Bible at face value unless it is clear I should accept it otherwise. Yes, I believe God can do miracles and has done what the Bible has related. In fact, I accept the Bible as a very accurate history book that opens the doors to the past. So continue if you wish, but know that it will force you to see the many errant references to cosmology in the Bible.
Your challenge:
I invite you to produce any writings of any pre-Eighteenth Century well-known, non-heretic Christian to the contrary...even men like Socinus and Sevetus appealed to Scripture's authority to try and justify heresies....
Verne
I was quite surprised by your post that attempted (like a few other Christian apologist have) to make Luther an inerrantist. He most certainly was not. He thought Job was a fable and that Jonah in the whale was not true. He rejected James, Hebrews, Revelation, Jude as being apostolic and inspired. Sadly, I presently do not have access to my many books I read years ago. Here are some links though:
http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ325.HTMhttp://matt1618.freeyellow.com/preface.htmlhttp://members.aol.com/johnprh/deuterocanonical2.htmlI have already given links to the early Church Fathers. None of the early creeds mention Scripture as inerrant. I have already, in past and present readings, seen to my satisfaction that the Princeton Scholars were the first to advocate that the Scriptures were inerrant in matters of science. It is up to you and others who are interested to see for yourself. I never intended to PROVE anything, just plant seeds in the hope that people will study and expand their minds.
Verne, you wrote,
Contrary to your assertions, inerrancy has been the historic position of the Church; they simply called it something else-infallibility. The term inerrancy was coined so there would be absolutely no doubt regarding the sharp contradisctinction between orthodox Christian teaching of the church, and the position being propagated by Will and viewed as heterodox (remember Wellhausen?); Will has it exactly backwards!
Really? I have already shown you Luther did not accept the inerrancy of the Bible as we know it, NOW you back up what you said here. BUT ONLY AFTER YOU DEAL WITH THE THIRD CONTRACTION I BROUGHT UP because we will never arrive at a common understanding of whether the Bible is inerrant or not from simply studying what the Church Fathers or Luther wrote because people interpret their writings very differently. I have read many different books that argue that Luther and Augustine either believed or did not believe the Bible was without error. The books or websites that argued they were inerrantist SELECTIVELY quoted their works and ignored other texts that I have read that show they saw human error in the Bible. SO, we should not waste time studying what others wrote about the Bible but study the Bible to see if it is indeed inerrant. So... Onwards to Contradiction Three...
