Bible Infallibility?

[asiyreh]

I wonder if I jumped on the big liberal train, where the last stop would be? Would it be a Christian platform I wonder?

 

[hedrick]

I wonder if I jumped on the big liberal train, where the last stop would be? Would it be a Christian platform I wonder?

Everyone had a different idea of what "liberal" means. I'm a sola scriptura guy who is serious about following Jesus. I sometimes wonder if conservatives don't trust the Bible. Are you concerned that if we drop the conservative preconceptions and treat the Bible based on evidence, it will turn out not to be convincing? I suggest that you can have more confidence than that.

The same thing is true of theology. If you drop the idea that the Catholic tradition, or the Westminster Confession, or whatever, is perfect, and seriously reconsider things from a Scriptural basis, you may come to somewhat different solutions. But most liberal theology is strongly Trinitarian, and is committed to the Incarnation. Maybe not expressed in the traditional way, however. I'm thinking of the serious theology done in the liberal tradition, not the idiots that get press attention.

 

[chilehed]

Hi all,

This is something that I am wondering about at the moment. I've been looking at churches in my area but a lot of them say they that the Bible is "infallible."

Now I do believe that the Bible is true, but (please do not let me not offend anyone here!) I just don't believe in the creation of Adam and Eve, or stories such as Noah's Ark as historically relevant.

I was doing some research online and apparently infallibility can refer to the idea that the Bible is spiritually accurate and useful, not necessarily historically accurate....

I'm just confused...can anyone clarify this for me?

Thank you!

The answers you get on this will obviously reflect the teachings of various denominations. Being Catholic, my response will reflect the Catholic understanding.

If you refer to Chapter 2, Article 3, Paragraphs 106-107 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you find that

106 God inspired the human authors of the sacred books. “To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.

107 The inspired books teach the truth. “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.”​

The term used for this is inerrancy: the Bible is inerrant. Infallibility refers to something else, which I won't go into here unless you ask (I don't want to muddy the water).


Furthermore:

109 In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

110 In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current. “For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.”​

So, for example, was the universe created in 144 hours? The Catholic understanding is that God intended the creation narrative to be an explanation of the origins of our human condition, it was not his intent to be giving us a science text, so the answer is "not necessarily". It's perfectly within the scope of Catholic teaching to believe in either a young earth or an old earth, because it's utterly irrelevant to the issue of how our relationship with God can be repaired.

Were Adam and Eve historical figures? The sense of Catholic thought is that they were, and I believe that it's something that Catholics are bound to believe: that all human beings have a single pair of ancestors in common from whom we all descend. And in fact, it's been scientifically proven that we all descend from a single female. But Catholic teaching doesn't deal with the physical details of how they came to be, because again it's not something that's important to the mission of the church.

I could go on, but the point is that the scriptural narratives are at the service of God's intent, and that we need to be properly sensitive to its literal and spiritual senses.

 

[x141]

Jesus said the spirit of truth would be in you, and that he would lead you into all truth, though most affirm this, how churches conduct themselves reinforces the opposite.

 

[asiyreh]

Everyone had a different idea of what "liberal" means. I'm a sola scriptura guy who is serious about following Jesus. I sometimes wonder if conservatives don't trust the Bible. Are you concerned that if we drop the conservative preconceptions and treat the Bible based on evidence, it will turn out not to be convincing? I suggest that you can have more confidence than that.

The same thing is true of theology. If you drop the idea that the Catholic tradition, or the Westminster Confession, or whatever, is perfect, and seriously reconsider things from a Scriptural basis, you may come to somewhat different solutions. But most liberal theology is strongly Trinitarian, and is committed to the Incarnation. Maybe not expressed in the traditional way, however. I'm thinking of the serious theology done in the liberal tradition, not the idiots that get press attention.

Ahh, no I've seen the bible defended purely as a historical document and validated time and time again, by various archaeological discoveries and textual criticism to be in any concern regarding it's authenticity. Maybe then that's why I feel comfortable adopting a conservative even fundamentalist stance.

However you are right about one thing, when I think liberal - certain as you say "idiots" like crossan spring to mind. Perhaps I'm just a little suspicious of the whole thing really. The right foot of this particular church (that is to say the liberal church) definitely stands in non Christian territory.

I see the point that you come at it from; you don't like the attacks on the homosexual community and those on other faith groups. I think this is commendable, I'm a little uncomfortable with this myself. Jesus gave the gospel both to the sinner and the gentile. I think if the church was a little more Christ like we'd all be in a better situation.

 

[hedrick]

I see the point that you come at it from; you don't like the attacks on the homosexual community and those on other faith groups. I think this is commendable, I'm a little uncomfortable with this myself. Jesus gave the gospel both to the sinner and the gentile. I think if the church was a little more Christ like we'd all be in a better situation.

Actually, no. My position on homosexuality is a consequence, not a cause, of my theology. I was a Christian as a teenager, which (if you look at my age) was before homosexuality was a real issue. For some reason, the term "liberal" has come to be used for a mish-mash of general skepticism and what I call the "taint necessarily so" approach to the Bible. But there actually is a liberal theological tradition.

Liberal theology in its current form goes back to the late 19th Cent. It was really a response to critical scholarship as applied to Christian history and the Bible, and to Kant, with the resulting suspicion of highly abstract theology such as the neo-Platonic approach to the Trinity. The former is really a continuation of the Reformation. The Reformation, after all, was largely the result of new critical methods being applied to the Bible, and challenging traditional interpretations of the Scripture.

There are two wings of the liberal tradition, both of which go back to the beginning. I'd trace one to Schliermacher and the other to Ritschl. Schliermacher seems to me to have given up both on abstract doctrine and basing theology on detailed exegesis of Scripture. So he based on Christianity on a few general principles such as love. You can see a 20th Cent version of this in Bultmann. Ritschl, however, tried to base Christianity on the Bible as understood by current scholarship. This approach is also still alive and well in the 20th Cent, though Karl Barth did a hatchet job on Ritschl, and at least in part temporarily responsible for that position being in a bit of disarray. However the general approach of basing Christianity on our best understanding of what Jesus actually taught is still alive and well. Wright is on the conservative end of that. Crossan and Borg are on more radical end. (It's an oddity of the US that Wright is considered controversial. In the UK he's considered to be a conservative.)

I think that God wants us to be honest, and I think conservative Christianity treats evidence dishonestly. My real motivation is ethical.

It's another peculiarity of the US that conservatives accuse liberals of abandoning truth in order to be popular, when it's obvious that if you want to be popular, the best way is to give people "the olde time religion" and justify all their prejudices. I'm really not compromising truth in order to accommodate gays, or the modern world, or anything else. I'm really and truly committed to following Scripture, but Scripture as it is, and not as the tradition wants it to be.

 

[hedrick]

[double post]

 

[hedrick]

One of the biggest problems in the liberal churches is an ignorance of the history of the liberal Christian tradition. That leads people to think that liberalism is simply skepticism, and that over time it will lead away from Christ.

In fact history does not support either of these things. Liberal theology today is not more skeptical than it was in the 19th Cent. A century and a half of scholarship has brought a level of detail in understanding Jesus that wasn't present in the last 19th Cent. The original liberal writers operated mostly in general impressions of what Jesus taught. Compare this with the detailed understanding of the historical background and of Jesus' teachings in modern writers such as Wright and even Crossan. Similarly, the liberal tradition started with a serious skepticism about abstract doctrines such as the Trinity. Since that time, we have come to understand both the weaknesses and the strengths of the kind of doctrine. The current liberal tradition is at least as committed to key doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation as the folks in the 19th Cent were. However we've got a much better understanding than they did of where they come from and what the Scriptural issues are.

The main thing that has happened is that the liberal tradition has championed various movements in support of people who were considered inferior in the past. Thus we've had arguments over the role of blacks, women, divorcees, unmarried folks, and gays. This has led some to think that liberals have been getting progressively far from the tradition. But this does not represent a progressive drift of theology, so much as a consistent approach to new issues that have come up in the culture.

 

[Harry3142]

briocht-

Do I believe that the creation stories of Genesis, as well as the great flood and the tower of Babel, are literal historical reports? No, I do not. And they were never intended to be seen in that light. Instead, they conveyed a message that went much deeper than the reporting of events, a message which stories such as these helped the people comprehend more easily.

The creation stories of Genesis were a rebuttal and demythologization of the egyptian creation epic, which the Hebrews had learned to accept as fact during their time in Egypt. However, in that epic gods and goddesses created other gods and goddesses for almost the entire time of creation, with all the species of animals, including man (the real word for 'Adam' if it were translated rather than transliterated) created on the last day as almost an afterthought:

www.theologywebsite.com/etext/egypt/creation.shtml

Note that in their creation story everything was either a god or a goddess. the sun, moon and stars were deities, the earth was a deity, and even the atmosphere was a deity. Genesis stripped all of them of their divinity, so that the sun, moon and stars were nothing more than objects in the heavens giving the people light, the earth, atmosphere and heavens were simply three aspects of this planet, and the other species of animals they saw around them were simply other species of animals, and nothing more. The only being that could be credited with divinity was over and above all that he had created, as well as being invisible, so no painting depicting him could ever appear on a tomb wall, and no sculpture of him could ever be placed in a temple.

There are churches which insist that we must accept all the stories of Genesis as literally true. But it's been my experience when confronted by those who insist on that most strenuously that their real goal is to create a mindset within their hearers that they must obey the leadership of that church in order to attain salvation. IOW, it's a manipulatice device used to gain control over others' intellect, rather than its being a genuine belief in these myths. And once you see them as stories conveying a message that goes much deeper than the mere reporting of events you can appreciate the message that they are really conveying yourself.

 

[asiyreh]

Evidence gathered from the study of genomics has forced modern science to adopt the inconvenient out of Africa model while the multiregional model is fast losing popular support.

Multiregional suggested; I believe, three separate evolutions of humans from three different hominid groups.

Out of Africa, One common female and male ancestor.

So don't be counting the biblical narrative as dead and parable quite yet my friend.

And regarding the painting and sculptures it's my understanding that Anglicans allow these images into their churches. Although to be fair you do a clever legal dance around the "veneration" of these idols. Perhaps I'm mistaken or painting large brush strokes?

Henrick, I didn't realise you considered Wright to be a liberal. I would have thought he'd be quite conservative. We're talking Nt Wright, right?

 

[Harry3142]

Asiyreh-

The debate has not been about where homo sapiens originated; it's been with when. We know that they originated in Africa, but we also know that this origination occurred well over 100,000 years ago. What you identify as the first man and woman were in actuality a group of people who survived what many scientists consider to be an extinction level event which occurred circa 70,000 years ago, rather than they themselves being the first true humans. It is suspected that the supervolcano Mt. Toba, which erupted at that time and seriously decimated all life in Africa, was the cause of this die-off of humans, with a consequent re-emergence of them through this one group of people who managed to survive the devastation.

As for venerating paintings and sculptures, you have the anglican church confused with the Roman Catholic Church. Our churches are decorated in the same fashion as many other protestant churches.

Further information concerning Genesis and where their stories originated includes the serpent in the garden. In its original telling it was Ra, the sun god, who fought Sebau, the serpent-fiend, defeated him, and then deprived him of the use of his legs. But whereas Ra had needed to engage Sebau in battle, God needed only to make the decision to cripple the serpent, and it was done. You can read the credit given to Ra in the egyptian Book of the Dead, under the heading of A Hymn to Ra:

www.africa.upenn.edu/Books/Papyrus_Ani.html

 

[hedrick]

Henrick, I didn't realise you considered Wright to be a liberal. I would have thought he'd be quite conservative. We're talking Nt Wright, right?

I don't. But I've been participating in other threads where most participants see him that way.

 

[hedrick]

There are churches which insist that we must accept all the stories of Genesis as literally true. But it's been my experience when confronted by those who insist on that most strenuously that their real goal is to create a mindset within their hearers that they must obey the leadership of that church in order to attain salvation. IOW, it's a manipulatice device used to gain control over others' intellect, rather than its being a genuine belief in these myths. And once you see them as stories conveying a message that goes much deeper than the mere reporting of events you can appreciate the message that they are really conveying yourself.

That's unfair. Today's conservative approach to Scripture can be traced to two sources, both shortly after the Reformation.

* Catholics attacked the Protestant dependence upon Scripture, saying that without authoritative interpretation there was no way to know whose interpretation is right. Some Protestants responded by trying to come up with an approach to Scripture that was so literal that everyone could agree on it, and it wouldn't be affected by changes in scholarship.

* As critical scholarship was increasingly used on Scripture, it started casting doubt on ideas that many Protestants though were critical, e.g. original sin. They could come up with no easy way to deal with this other than to reject critical scholarship (or misrepresent it).

Of course the Reformation was itself the result of critical scholarship, and it had already abandoned a number of doctrines that Catholics thought were essential, but once a Protestant orthodoxy was established, it defended itself from further change just as the Catholic Church had defended itself against the Reformers.

The most common concerns I see among conservatives today are still those two.

 

[Harry3142]

That's unfair. Today's conservative approach to Scripture can be traced to two sources, both shortly after the Reformation.
* Catholics attacked the Protestant dependence upon Scripture, saying that without authoritative interpretation there was no way to know whose interpretation is right. Some Protestants responded by trying to come up with an approach to Scripture that was so literal that everyone could agree on it, and it wouldn't be affected by changes in scholarship.
* As critical scholarship was increasingly used on Scripture, it started casting doubt on ideas that many Protestants though were critical, e.g. original sin. They could come up with no easy way to deal with this other than to reject critical scholarship (or misrepresent it).
Of course the Reformation was itself the result of critical scholarship, and it had already abandoned a number of doctrines that Catholics thought were essential, but once a Protestant orthodoxy was established, it defended itself from further change just as the Catholic Church had defended itself against the Reformers
The most common concerns I see among conservatives today are still those two.

The churches I was referring to are located in different radical denominations/sects, and I learned about them from face-to-face confrontations with their leaders. So what I describe is from actual events which I myself was a witness to.

These churches insist that salvation is not achieved through accepting Christ, but instead is an ongoing process which can lead to salvation if the members adhere to everything taught to them by those leaders. This entails not only the standard Do's and Don't's (do not murder, do not steal, etc.), but also what their attitude is to be toward others, and even entire groups.The purpose is to establish a mindset in the members which leads those members to accept that they must obey every dictate of their leadership, or else perish.

I call this 'the hitlerian tactic', due to Adolph Hitler's using it to lead an entire nation to their destruction. It requires that the targets' intellects be 'steamrolled' over in order to influence them on their purely emotional level. One of the strongest instincts we have is the instinct for survival, so if a skilled manipulator can manage to 'derail' the intellect, he can create in his victims the attitude that if they don't listen to him, and then obey him absolutely, they will be lost.

 

[Iosias]

Infalliable = the Bible cannot contain errors.
Inerrancy = the Bible does not contain errors.

Both are wrong IMO

Try The Word of God? by Keith Ward and The Bible: The Basics by John Barton.

Hi all,

This is something that I am wondering about at the moment. I've been looking at churches in my area but a lot of them say they that the Bible is "infallible."

Now I do believe that the Bible is true, but (please do not let me not offend anyone here!) I just don't believe in the creation of Adam and Eve, or stories such as Noah's Ark as historically relevant.

I was doing some research online and apparently infallibility can refer to the idea that the Bible is spiritually accurate and useful, not necessarily historically accurate.

Is this what is meant when some churches say they believe in Bible infallibility?

Although I know some churches do believe exactly what is written word for word in the Bible...

I'm just confused...can anyone clarify this for me?

Thank you!