The Authority of Scriptures
In the Early and Historic Christian Church, there was no doubt as to the
importance of the Scriptures in determining orthodox Doctrine. They
considered the Old Testament, and later, the New Testament to be
Inspired and Infallible. They truly believed that the Scriptures were
inspired by God to the point that what they said, God said.
However, many modern Christians (especially in the mainline Protestant
Churches) tend to believe that the Scriptures are not perfect, and that
many of the writings can be brushed off as human bias, or human ignorance.
This begs the question, how do we know what is of God, and what is of Paul?
posted by Mathaytace_Christou at 1:06 PM
8 Comments:
The thing these people need to understand, is that there is no way to tell the difference between what is inspired and what is just of man. That's because the Bible is intended to be a take or leave proposition. You can't cut it up into little juicy particles that you like and dump the uncomfortable stuff. You have to but the whole chicken, bones and all or nothing.
6:28 AM
BTW, just to clarify...the whole Bible is inspired. :-)
6:28 AM
Sorry, spelling error on the first post. I mean 'buy' not 'but' :-)
6:29 AM
There are two common opinions that need to be addressed on the authority of scripture.
#1 you mention as position of a growing number of mainline protestant groups because of their acceptance of liberal scholarship and philosophy, that the bible is a human flawed document.
#2 is the position more common in the Catholic church and to some degree the orthodox, that the bible is spiritually true, but not literally true. In otherwords, the OT for example might be completely made up as far as historical fact goes, but it was made up in order to tell a spiritual truth.
Both views have problems. Obivously the first view is worse because it even denies the spiritual authority of the word. However, the literal truth of scripture is important to its credability as well. Over and over the apostles made the point that if their gospel story was not literally true, the whole deal was pointless. I do not deny at all that God uses allegorical methods to teach us. Trees can probably teach us allegorical truths.. but trees also exist.
Adam and Eve can teach us alot of symbolic and allegorical truths, but they also existed.
A great deal of christian doctrine depends (as much as many like to ignore this fact) on the literal truth of the scriptures.
2:58 PM
We do however have contradicting accounts of the Resurrection.
I think what is important however is not whether it was One woman, many women, or who it was that found Christ, but the fact that He was alive after He was Dead.
I do take the Scriptures Literally on matters of doctrine. But History and Doctrine are not always intertwined.
3:30 PM
Actually, the difference on secondary details makes the ressurection core more believable. If it was a fake, everything would probably match up to a tee, but real events are often seen differently by different people. I have read up on this controversy so I can elaborate more on request.
6:35 PM
Actually Jonathan, that is my point exactly.
12:54 PM
There are all sorts of supposed contradictions in the scriptures and I've been presented with most of them.
In almost every case it comes down to how you read the text, and what assumptions you make about what the author is saying.
The only contradiction that I've seen that isn't fairly easy to explain is in the Old Testament, between kings and chronicles. Both books appear to describe the same event which included a numbering of troops, in one it says something like 4000 cavalry and in the other like 40000 cavalry or something like that.
Most people assume one is just a simple copyist error (which of course some people argue is proof of fallibility). It is possible that it could be two different events, but it seems unlikely.
6:50 PM
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