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the Bible

Page history last edited by Andrew Alder 1 year, 11 months ago

Topic warning: This is a page of theology and a page of books they do not want you to read

 

See also The Bible which I may merge with this page when I find time

 


 

 

inerrancy

 

Some years ago I was considering applying for membership of a particular mission oranisation. It's probably good I did not apply.

 

Because to do so, I would have needed to prepare more than a dozen "doctrinal statements", one on each of a list of theological issues that the organisation supplies. And one of them (this may not be word perfect) was "The inerrancy of Scripture (this is normally understood to refer to the original manuscripts)". This was the only one of the topics qualified by a footnote.

 

Here's my attempt at such a statement:

 

"Inerrancy is a term often applied to scripture, and best avoided. We don't know what it means and we can be reasonably confident that nobody else can make sense of it either, so it avoids the issues."

 

On another occasion I was obliged to teach a primary school class a song called "the B-I-B-L-E" which contains the line "every single word of it is true". One of my wonderful year five mighty men of God took me quietly aside. "Mr. Alder, we studied meaning and truth in English, and words can't be true or false. Truth values are only assigned to propositions and sentences." And he's right, sort of.

 

And note, this is primary school. My year six know things about genres and semantics that I didn't even dream existed until post graduate linguistics. Be warned!

 

Back to year five and the B-I-B-L-E song. We had a wonderful conversation on what it means. It does have some truth to it! "Every word of it" is of course a colloquial way of saying "every proposition in it". But the whole school was learning it, not just my year five, to sing together at a special assembly later in the year. That's why I really had no choice but to teach it. I was hoping he wouldn't ask "is that really age appropriate for your year two class?" and he didn't. But other year five students have asked me exactly that on other occasions!

 

From the mouths of babes and sucklings...

 

The authority of scripture

 

In theory

As a Christian I am under three authorities... The Bible, the Church and the Holy Spirit.

 

And these three each support the other two. That for me is an article of faith. So if they don't seem to agree, then I have misunderstood at least one of them, and the other two can't outvote it. Instead I need to find out where my error is. Because it may well be that I have two wrong and the one that seems to disagree is the one I have right. It happens.

 

It's called multiple redundancy, and it's a very sound principle for designing reliable systems.

 

The trickiest for many is the Holy Spirit, but for me it has most often been the Church. One of the excellent Australian Prayer Network videos resolved this for me: The Church only has authority when it speaks with one voice.  (It was probably Brian Pickering speaking, but may not be word for word in any case.)

 

But the point here is, the issue is rarely the Bible. Normally I know what God is saying to me through the Bible, and in my experience so do others. When we say "I really don't know what God is saying", normally that means "I know very well what God is saying, but I don't want to do it".  Mea culpa. How about you?  

 

In practice

My experience is, the more I read and study and reflect on the Bible and try to follow what it says, the better I follow Jesus.

 

My experience is, the more others read and study and reflect on the Bible, the more likely they are to follow Jesus.

 

Does it really need any other claim to authority, or dare I say it, to inerrancy? 

 

See also the worst verse in the Bible... gotta laugh or cry...

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