It's not that God has protected the Bible from either (Satan or corrupt men), but that He has used their evils for His own purpose.
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Satan and errors in scripture
- Thread starter Nihilist Virus
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So how does the contradictory age of a king in Samuel/Chronicles glorify God or further his plans?
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Among the "data" available to you are the "facts" that Satan is powerful, clever, and malicious to the gospel, and also the fact that God allows the Bible to be corrupted. You have ignored these details when drafting your conclusion.
Essentially, reading the Bible is like walking through a minefield. Your reasoning is, "It doesn't look like there's a mine here, so it must be safe." You can't know what Satan did to the Bible, not even by intense scrutiny.
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It shows that God intends to choose, in spite of man's self-serving desires and aspirations, among other things.
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Commander Xenophon
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It also plainly describes his power as corcumscribed. In fact some branches of Judaism, on the basis of the Old Testament, reject much of the identification of Saran as such as an import from Zoroastrianism. Certsinly your understanding of him is more Zoroastrian than Christian.
He tempted Jesus according to His assumed humanity. The divine nature is immutable and incapable of temptation or indeed change.
Jesus owned those things in His deity, simply not in his humanity. As a man, Jesus was at that point powerless, starving, having fasted; as God, Jesus had absolute sovereignity over the entire world. I don't believe Satan was fully aware of the nature of the Incarnation; although on the other hand, the devil seems to have a major attraction to futile enterprises, so...
This is true. The way he does this, which you would note if you had read the passage in context, is by tempting us. But he has no power if we, aided through the grace of God, resist the temptatiom.
It's not, actually; it is simply incompatible with your interpretation, which I believe is contrary to scripture owing to eisegesis; I believe you are reading certain verses in the NT without the context of, for example, Job, and are also disregarding the doctrine of the Incarnation and of the hypostatic union we find in John 1:1-17, Isaiah, and elsewhere.
Actually no, you should put thenauthority of the Church over the Bible, and the Bible over my own. The Church assembled the Bible from disparate spiritual texts and determined how it was to be interpreted. A proper interpretation of the Bible flows from the dogmatic theology of the Church amd rhe lerygma of the Fathers. After all, as St. Hilary of Poitiers said, scripture is not in the reading, but the interpretation.
I would note by the way that all of your objections in this thread seem to target fundamentalism; you have not considered the views of the majority of Christians who are not fundamentalist; indeed, the two largest communions, the Catholics and Orthodox, reject Sola Scriptura altogether.
A local church, the Roman Catholic Church. The Orthodox believe the Romans are in schism and strictly speaking we would say they are not even part of the Church, apthough we are working on ecumenical reconciliation with them.
Again, of the Roman Church. None of this happened to the Orthodox Church.
With apologies to my Catholic friends, the Roman Catholic Church is not the Church. I don't believe it is even a part of the church proper, at least not in the way the Churches of Antioch, Constantinople, Greece, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria. Georgia, and so on, are a part of the church.
Here is a better example of the gates of Hell not prevailing against the Church: Militant atheists in the USSR, whose beliefs in communism amounted to a religion, tried to eradicate Christianity and failed utterly. Indeed, in Albania, Enver Hoxha made religion illegal for nearly 30 years. Yet the Orthodox Church of Albania survived, and is doing well both in Albania and the diaspora.
Let me give you another example. In 1915, the Young Turks tried to kill most of the Christians living in Asia Minor: Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks. The Armenians now have an indepedent country, the Assyrians suecived, and the Pontic Greeks surciced as well, and some still live in Turkey.
Heresy according to who? What gives you this idea? The Church defines heresy, by the way, not atheists.
Actually, its not, since most Orthodox parish priests are married, our unmarried hieromonks (monastic priests) almost always live in monasteries, and when they serve the liturgy in the church, they leave immediately afterwards. And the ancient canons prohibit young boys from entering monasteries unaccompanied.
The Church is the Body of Christ. Submission to the Church is Submission to Jesus.
The Church pre-existed Constantine, and many parts of the Church were never under his political influence or control. For example, the Church of the East was almost entirely outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, in Persia, Mesopotamia, India, China and Tibet. The Church of Armenia. the oldest state church, was also independent of Rome, as was rhe Church of Edessa. Later in the fourth century, the churches of Ethiopia and Georgia were founded, again, well outside of Roman Imperial influence.
In the Fifth Century, the Persian Church intentionally rejected the Third Ecumenical Council as a way of snubbing their nose at Roman authority and demonstrating their autonomy to the Sassanids. I wish they hadn't, because the result was the prolongation of a nasty heresy, Nestorianism, which they only partially resolved under Mar Babai the Great a century later.
That church still exists, by the way, and continues to reject the Third Ecumenical Council.
Forgive me, but that was your problem. You prioritized the reading over the interpretation. The only real way to understand the Bible is to either go to an Orthodox Church for a year, and attend all the services and listen to the homiles and explanations given, and see how the texts are actually related, or alternately buy a book that does the work for you, like Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky.
In my opinion, the Bible is not a sacrament; it is much less important than the sacraments it describes, like the Eucharist. Why read the Bible when you can encounter God in Church? And if you doubt me on this point, go to St. Anthony's Monastery in Florence. Arizona, see what they built in less than two decades, and then get up at misnight and go to the Matins and Liturgy. I am EO, but I do love the Coptic church; going to a Coptic divine liturgy is another good place to meet God; you enxounter Him in the extreme love that exists, which does not, however, defeat the dignity or beauty of the service.
My life would be not worth living without the sacred liturgy. I love the liturgy more than anything else, because there, in a cloud of incense, I encounter God, and partake of Him.
It does actually, in practically the entire Old Teatament. Read the appointed lessons for Holy Saturday in the Greek Orthodox lectionary (you can find them on http://bombaxo.com).
Imfallibility stems from that verse read in conjunction with 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and Galatians 1:8.
Note that only the Church as a whole, assembled in an ecumenical council, with all bishops present, is infallible. So when the entire church declared Jesus to be God at Nicea, that had infallible authority. On the other hand, when the Roman Church, on its own accord, inserted the filioque, it acted fallibly; or when St. Basil the Great. who I love. declared aroma do not exist (in fairness, he spoke of the Greek philosophical idea, which turned out to be right), he was fallible.
The scriptures are protected by Satanic meddling by the Church, which is in turn protected as a whole from his influence.
I do however see the infkuence of Satan in the Quran, the Talmud (which contains the warped logic the Rabbis use to refute the Messianic deity of our Lord), the Vedas, the Pali Canon and so on. Each of these books represent Satanic corruptipns of the truth.
We can also see Satanic corruption in unsanctioned editions of the Bible produced by non-Christian cults, for example, the New World Bible of the Jehovah's Witnesses, carefully edited so as to deny the deity of Christ.
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ChetSinger
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No, the data available to both of us are the thousands of manuscripts themselves, along with rest of the historical record that they reside in. That historical record includes the writings of the early church fathers, the writings of contemporaneous outsiders who observed the early church, and additional non-canonical early Christian writings. And given that data, as summarized for me by qualified scholars, my confidence is high that the message we have now is the one that was originally preached and then written down.
You may be aware that the Jehovah's Witnesses postulate something similar to your idea. They argue that someone (inspired by the devil, I suppose) went through the early New Testament writings and replaced "Jehovah" with "Lord" in numerous places, thus changing the theology. It's a conspiracy theory, basically. But they have the same problems you have: there is no supporting manuscript evidence and there is no ancient testimony that such changes were ever made. Also, wouldn't the churches have complained if some persons attempted to change Christian theology in such a way? In sum, there is no data to support their claim. So I don't buy into it. And I don't buy into your hypothesis for the same reasons.
You need to find some scholarly support for your idea before I'll spend more time on it.
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Commander Xenophon
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Indeed, the variance between conflicting texts is slight and does not in any way compromise the Gospel message.
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Happy to demonstrate...if you can objectively position yourself before and after time. Can you do that? I'll wait.
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Because heaven is beyond the parameters of the known universe, to go beyond the beginning and the end of time, would place you in heaven...which would then be self-evident.
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God, who is omnipotent, doesn't need to rely on the perfection of humans for a perfect Bible to convey.
As long as the Bible as a whole is a true human account of witnessing plus that as long as all His sheep are saved, the Bible serves it's designing purpose completely and perfectly.
You don't expect a perfect mirror can talk because you understand very well the design purpose of a perfect mirror doesn't include making it talk. While no human actually 100% understands the design purpose of the Bible, that's why all the unrealistic expectations of what the Bible should be.
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Because we have 6 billion human skulls. It doesn't matter as the message of salvation is rather simple to pick up.
Daniel 12:4 (NIV)
But you, Daniel, close up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge."
Basically, the division in terms of knowledge results in the different denominations. However the division in the message of salvation results in heresies.
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