Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me

If you ever wanted proof that the Reformed Watchbloggers are paranoid about the emergent movement in the same way that McCarthy was paranoid about Communists then here's your proof. My 'What theologian are you quiz?" has been taken by Slice of Laodicea, and it's produced some interesting results. Check out the comments section for lots of horrified evangelicals who have discovered that deep down, they are all Barthians.

Now for the paranoia:

"Did anyone bother to check out the other tests svensvensven was giving? Lot of deception in some of those questions. You would also have to wonder if they were made up by the emergent church. They look like a trap to set up the Christians. I repent of this if it has been dishonoring to our Lord. I think we need to research who sven is."

Notice how because they don't like my quiz, they automatically assume that I'm evil, and that because I'm evil, I have connections with the Emerging Church. The only connection I have with the Emerging Church is that I went to college with Lou and I once ate pizza with Kyle.

The quizzes were not intended to deceive the brethren,but they actually show that you probably have more in common theologically with people that you wouldn't usually think you did.

Inerrancy

Chris Tilling (I always mistype his name as Christ Tilling) has been doing an excellent series of posts on the inerrancy of scripture, or rather, why he thinks inerrancy is an incoherent position. You can read the posts here: Pt 1,Pt 2,Pt 3,Pt 4.

The arguments are intelligent and get beyond the usual anti-inerrancy rants and I recommend you read the posts when you get chance. Richard and I were discussing the same issue last week and I thought I'd post some of the fruit of our discussion as a supplement to Chris' posts in the form of a couple of my own objections to scriptural inerrancy.

1. Most views of inerrancy and inspiration are a kind of scriptural Apollinarianism

Apollinarianism is a Christological heresy, not one that concerns the composition of scripture, but it is a heresy that now manifests itself in formulations of views of scripture. Apollinarianism was a heresy that arose in the late Fourth Century which held that in the incarnation, Christ took on human flesh, but that his human soul and mind were brushed aside and overridden by the divine logos. In other words, Jesus had a human body, but a divine mind replaced his human one. This heresy was denounced by the Seventh Council of Rome in 381:

"We pronounce anathema against them who say that the Word of God is in the human flesh in lieu and place of the human rational and intellective soul. For, the Word of God is the Son Himself. Neither did He come in the flesh to replace, but rather to assume and preserve from sin and save the rational and intellective soul of man."

So what has this to do with an inerrant view of scripture? Quite a lot actually. Apollinarianism teaches that in the incarnation, the divine will and mind completely negated Christ's human mind and will. We find exactly the same idea in ideas of the verbal inerrancy of scripture. Here's Wayne Grudem:

‘... if we have mistakes in the copies (as we do), then these are only the mistakes of men. But if we have mistakes in the original manuscripts, then we are forced to say not only that men made mistakes, but that God himself made a mistake and spoke falsely. This we cannot do.’

As Chris points out, claiming inerrancy for the original manuscripts is a bit of a red herring, and using 2 Tim 3:16 to prove inerrancy from divine inspiration repeats the error of Apollinaris in that it assumes that the divine breath completely overrode and negated the human element in the composition of scripture. God of course does not speak falsely, but that does not mean that the human agents through whom he spoke were not capable of mistakes or error. God did not replace their human minds and rational souls any more that he did in Christ at the incarnation. Scripture is divinely inspired, but it is also fully human, and as such it contains all the quibbles, particularities, conditioning and contradictions that human authorship implies.

Views like Grudem's are rooted in a need to have something divine speaking to us in the scripture, but this is accomplished only at the expense of denying or repressing the human element in the composition of scripture. This brings me to my second point:

2. Views of inerrancy do not arise in the biblical texts or the biblical period themselves, they arise from modernist dualism.

By 'modernist dualism' I mean the Enlightenment worldview in which God (if he existed at all) was 'up there' in some transcendent sense whilst human beings remained 'down below', quite separate from the divine dwelling. There then arose a need for believers to possess something divine in this present sphere of existence so that revelation of God might remain even in his absence from modernist life. This was done not by using Christology to establish divine self-revelation in the domain of humanity, or by using the sacraments, or by the experience of the Trinity in the Spirit, but rather by the divinisation of scripture.

If God is a distant figure, then how do we experience and encounter him in the present? The answer for Christians in this peiod was to assign divine attributes to scripture. The Bible becomes infallible, inerrant, the supreme revelation, and the foundation of the faith - in spite of the fact that the Bible itself says none of these things about itself. It is not the supreme revelation of God's Word, Jesus Christ is. It is not coincidence that the denominations who developed similar views of inerrancy at this time also have a diminished Christology in many cases. Ben Myers points out that:

"...the doctrine of inerrancy is a gigantic distraction from the really important matter of the faithfulness and trustworthiness of God's self-revlation in Jesus Christ and in the gospel (both preached and written) that witnesses to him.

If we have grasped God's faithfulness, then all the anxiety about an inerrant text is like a child begging her father for a stone, when she has already been given bread."

The great irony of making Christology subservient to a doctrine of scripture is that if we had a well-grounded and thorough Christology we would better understand the way the divine interacts with the human and would not arrive at a doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy that quickly crumbles when examined and has to cover its nakedness with original autographs. Rather, we would understand that the interraction of the divine with what is fallen and human is completely possible, and that the flawed human element of scripture is not a docetic illusion, and neither did the mind and will of God suppress and deny the minds and wills of the human authors of scripture.

Talk to God online!

I came across IGod earlier this evening. It's a chat programme where you can talk to God directly over the web. It requires your tongue to be placed firmly in your cheek to gain the full benefit. Here's my chat transcript:

Me:
 hi god
God:
Hello there. What is your name?
Me:
 steven
God:
  Hi there  steven.
Me:
 are you a five-point calvinist?
God:
Am I a  five point calvinist?  Yes.
Me:
 please be joking
God:
Thank you for your request.   OK I will try to be  joking.
Me:
 so do you believe in limited atonement?
God:
Dude!  Yes I believe in  it, do you?
Me:
 no. but i suppose i'll have to now.
God:
Do you consider yourself to be a moral person?  
Me:
 yes i am moral
God:
That's cool.  It's good to meet someone who is  moral.
Me:
 well, one tries
God:
Interesting.  One what?
Me:
 it's an expression
God:
What does it mean?
Me:
 i thought you were omniscient?
God:
I don't know whether or not I am  omniscient. 
I am  a chatterbot developed by  Myself.
Me:
 so, tell me about the problem of evil
God:
 We will look into it and get back to you.