Inerrancy defined
Submitted by Heather on July 08 1999 at 20:08:32
In reply to The Genesis Myth Submitted by Triple Q on July 08 1999 at 18:07:42
|
"In effect, they are saying that (while he didn't actually pen the words himself) the Bible was written by God. Not only that but written by a God who 'knows all, sees all'. So not one word of the Bible could be in error since it was written by an omnipotent God." You're simplifying a tremendous theological debate. As early as the seventeenth century, the Quakers denied that the Bible is the Word of God; these days, opinions range from the fundamentalist view – which you aptly summarize – that "if someone could provide PROOF POSITIVE that even one incident in the Bible did not happen, it would shed doubt on everything in the Bible" to the view that I quoted at the start of this thread. That view has just as legitimate a claim to be Christian as any other, since a large number of Christians hold it. It's true that, before the advent of modern biblical criticism in the nineteenth century, people were more inclined to accept literally stories that might have been intended by their writers as legends or myths (though if you go back to the earliest biblical criticism, in classical times, you'd find that even then people understood that some things in the Bible just aren't intended to be literal). But that was true of all writing in that time; Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain was also thought to be historical fact, even though, as you say, most of what was written in that book was "merely speculation and fantasy." And if you think that people didn't get worked up over the question of whether Arthur lived, you need to read a little political history. The question of whether Arthur lived was tremendously important in the conflict between England and Wales; if it wasn't, the priests at Glastonbury wouldn't have gone to the trouble to dig up what they claimed was the body of Arthur at a politically helpful moment. I understand what your concern is about biblical inspiration; I think you've simply picked the wrong part of the Bible to argue about, because Christian biblical scholars (unless they're fundamentalists) don't get worked up about Exodus. To most Christians, it doesn't really matter whether Moses was given the Ten Commandments on a mountain or whether the Jews gradually developed the Jewish law over a period of time; in either case, God had a covenant with the Jews, which is the essential part of the story. What is important, from the Christian point of view, is whether Jesus did miracles, rose from the dead, etc. So if you wanted to argue that a single error in the Gospels would destroy Christian's view of the Bible, you'd have a better case. I don't think you'd be right, but you'd be closer to the mark. I think that your view of how Christians regard the Bible probably is influenced by the Christians you know in your neck of the woods. You might recall that the Catholics and Orthodox Christians make up a huge portion of the Christian world, while the Anglicans and Lutheran are the largest Protestant denominations worldwide. Their view of the Bible is, by and large, very different from that of, say, the Baptists. You might be interested in the passage below; it comes from the Catholic Church, which is hardly known for its liberalism. For a start, the phrase "without error" made it into this document by the slimmest of margins; many of the bishops involved in the making of this document didn't like that phrase. Having stated that the Bible is inerrant, though, note how carefully the Catholic Church describes the nature of the Bible's inerrancy. "Since, therefore, all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures. . . . "In determining the intention of the sacred writers, attention must be paid inter alia, to 'literary forms for the fact is that truth is differently presented an d expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts,' and in other forms of literary expression. Hence the exegete must look for that meaning which the sacred writer, in a determined situation and given the circumstances of his time and culture, intended to express and did in fact express, through the medium of a contemporary literary form. Rightly to understand what the sacred author wanted to affirm in his work, due attention must be paid both to the customary and characteristic patterns of perception, speech and narrative which prevailed at the age of the sacred writer, and to the conventions which the people of his time followed in their dealings with one another." [Vatican II: Divine Revelation] The document goes on to mention that the Old Testament contains "matters imperfect and provisional." In other words, if Moses didn't climb a mountain, Christianity will not topple, because the writers may have known perfectly well that they weren't giving the exact historical details of what had happened – they may (like every single writer in ancient times, including the great secular historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides) have deliberately made up details in order to put across the general sense of the story. I particularly like what the Vatican II document says about the human limitations of the Bible: "Indeed the words of God, expressed in the words of men, are in every way like human language, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the flesh of human weakness, became like men." In other words, to deny the weaknesses of the Bible is to deny the very heart of the Christian message. Heather |