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New Blog

My lifelong friend and housemate Jonny has announced that his Dad now has a blog. Jonny's Dad (I can't remember his real name) is a Methodist minister and is about to travel to the Bible belt to do some research into Creationism. Pop on over to his blog to see how the research is going.

Comments update

Just a quick technical note: from now on whenever you post a comment there's a small question you have to answer in a similar way to the word verification on Blogger. It's there simply to fool all the comment spammers whose programmes will be unable to recognise and respond to the question.

You just need to enter the letter 'sp' in the answer box, or you'll be diverted to an anti-spam website.

Inerrancy pt 2

I've got a few more thoughts to add on inerrancy following my previous post. Kenny Pearce has commented on my last post over at his blog and Chris Tilling has also added another post to the series that he has been doing on the subject.

The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy

Someone pointed me in the direction of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, and while I don't have time to post on all of it I just want to highlight a couple of places in which I strongly disagree with it, because I still don't think it adequately deals with the relationship between fallen humanity and divine inspiration. The preface to the statement says that:

"Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives."

I disagree here, but bear with me a minute. Here's the denial of article IV:

"We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration."

How on earth do we arrive at this conclusion? It affirms the corruption of human language and culture, yet these languages and cultures are deemed sufficient for recording and transmitting infallible divine revelation. Perhaps they do, but this fails to take into account the way in which fallen human culture relates to the text of scripture and how this in affects our interpretation of it. The author of Genesis, writing approximately 3,000 years ago, says that the world was made in six days. Now he forms this view in his corrupt and fallen human culture, even if under divine inspiration, but does that mean that if we hold to an inerrant view of scripture, we have to believe this account in exactly the same way?

There is little or no explanation as to how we should let the historical circumstances in which the scriptures were written affect our doctrine of inerrancy. This was partly the basis of my objection to inerrancy on the basis that it almost completely bypasses the human element of scripture. This particular version of inerrancy concedes nothing to historical particularity. The Bible was not written in a vacuum, and divine inspiration does not override the fallenness, limitations, cultural conditioning and historical setting of the biblical writers, which the Chicago Statement upholds:

We affirm that God in His Work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.

We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

(Article VIII)

This sits a little uneasily with me. Chicago affirms the fallenness and corruptness of human language and culture, and that the fallen human personalities of the authors were overridden, yet this particular doctrine of inerrancy almost requires that they were. It is difficult to embrace the fallenness and limitations of the authors and at the same time insist that they perfectly communicated infallible divine revelation. I don't have a problem with this of course, because I still argue that the biblical writings are not divine revelation in themselves, but that they are testimony to the supreme divine revelation of God that was given in Christ. As P. T. Forsyth once remarked "The Bible does not contain revelation anymore than a reflector telescope contains the glory of the heavens." The Bible is the way through which we come to know God in Christ, and the primary means through which God communicates to us, but this is because the Bible points to Him, not because he verbally inspired every word of the Bible.

The Chicago system also runs into trouble when contradictions in scripture are taken into account. What were Jesus' dying words on the cross, for example? How did Judas die? How many times did Jesus visit the Temple in Jerusalem? Did he heal Bartimaeus on the way to or from Jericho? And so on, and so on.

Manuscript errors also need to be taken into account. Even the oldest manuscripts we now have are copies, and copies of copies. Pick up your copy of Nestle-Aland and you'll soon see that there are variant textual readings of almost every single verse in the New Testament - which of these were verbally inspired by God and are thus inerrant? What about texts that are the result of a long process of editing? Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Chicago Statement argues only for inerrancy in the original manuscripts:

We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

(Article X)

The only problem here of course is that we do not have any original manuscripts, and despite the optimism of Article X, we have almost no way of knowing what the original inerrant manuscripts said.

Furthermore, it is one thing to have an authoritative canon that is inspired by the Spirit, but even this itself is relatively useless since this by no means guarantees an authoritative interpretation. An inerrant canon does not mean we can read it in an inerrant way, or that a theological proposal is authoritative because we can support it with an 'inerrant' proof-text.

The Bible is not God

A fairly non-controversial statement you might think, but there is potential for confusion on this issue within the Chicago paper. I maintain that this because the inerrancy position still fudges on the issue of how to connect together divine self-revelation and the divine inspiration of scripture. This quote from the exposition of the Chicago statement should set alarm bells ringing:

"By authenticating each other's authority, Christ and Scripture coalesce into a single fount of authority. The Biblically-interpreted Christ and the Christ-centered, Christ-proclaiming Bible are from this standpoint one. As from the fact of inspiration we infer that what Scripture says, God says, so from the revealed relation between Jesus Christ and Scripture we may equally declare that what Scripture says, Christ says."

"By authenticating each other's authority, Christ and Scripture coalesce into a single fount of authority" - no they do not. All authority belongs to Christ alone, and to argue for the position that Chicago does here is a serious theological mistake because it abolishes the distinction between Creator and creature. The Bible is not God, it remains a part of creation - however unique - and it contains no authority of its own by which it "authenticates Christ." If this were actually true, one has to wonder how exactly Jesus did anything authoritative in his own time, since none of the NT was written until well after his death and resurrection. God, and God alone, is the source of all authority, and any authority that exists anywhere else does so only because it derives its authority from God.

The Bible is not authoritative (note: authoritative, not inerrant) because it says that it is. It is not a case of "Well, God's Word says that God's Word is God's Word" because if nothing else, this argument is supremely circular, and like all circular journeys, will get you nowhere. The Bible does not authenticate itself by its own authority. Neither is the Bible authoritative because of the way it makes me feel when I read it, and neither is it authoritative because the Church says it is.

The Bible is authoritative because God gives his authority to it, and for no other reason. The Bible does not repay the favour to God by in turn authenticating his authority, as though the Bible were somehow part of the perichoretic life of the Trinity. Last year I heard a well-known evangelical minister remark that the evangelical trinity "consisted of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Bible." After reflecting on this part of Chicago, I'm inclined to agree.

The Bible and God are not co-equals, and neither do they form a "single fount of authority". The Bible actually reveals that all authority has been given to Christ, and the Bible is only authoritative because it relates to him and proclaims him. The supreme revelation of God then is not the Bible, but Christ, and the supreme and final authority is not the Bible, but Christ. It is Christ who makes the Bible authoritative because it testifies to him, and not vice-versa.

This post might appear a bit too negative, but it's not my final say on the matter. I intend that my next post on the matter will explain more fully why I consider the Bible to be authoritative and why, while I think the doctrine of inerrancy is flawed, the scriptures are still God-breathed and useful for all the purposes that God intends.

First impressions count

How not to impress your new pastoral theology lecturer:

New lecturer: Using the case study I have given you, I want you to decide on various ways you could minister to the different groups described in the handout. You (points to me) - what kind of activities would you put on for old people?

Pause 

Me: Pfff...I dunno...funerals? 

And thus began our awkward relationship. I don't really enjoy pastoral theology, I find it a bit too get-into-groups-and-discuss-what-you-thinky, and also a tad dull. The most irritating thing about practical theology is how all the theory goes straight out of the window as as soon as you start, as happened this afternoon:

"I know you've all been taught about election and human depravity throughout your course, but I want to make it clear that I do not believe in it. I believe in human free will and that it's the best approach to pastoral problems."

 Imagine my incredulity when not thirty seconds later we are discussing how to minister to a heroin addict who wants to become a Christian and then we conclude that he is captive to sin and only the power of Christ is able to set him free.

Nnnnnnnngh.

Excuse the relative lack of blogging at the moment, there's only four weeks until the end of term and I still need to write another two essays and revise for my finals so blogging will have to take a back seat.

Justification by Faith means Social Justice

"Protestant pessimism about sin is also defended as 'Christian realism'. But it is theologically untenable. On the contrary, the consequences of justifying faith is optimism - optimism about grace, since 'Where sin abounds, grace abounds much more' (Rom 5:20).

[...]

Is there any point today in looking round for general phenomena to 'convince the world of sin?' and persuade men and women that in God's sight they are sinful? Or is it better to be specific and practical, and to ask about the victims of sin, and its perpetrators?

If belief in the universality of deliverance through Christ is the presupposition for an awareness of sin, then functionally, the doctrine of sin belongs strictly within the therepeutical circle which embracs the knowledge of Christ, knowledge of our own misery, and the new life in faith. Outside this therapeutical circle, and in isolation from it, the doctrine of sin does nothing but harm. But this therapeutical circle of faith revolves around the justice and righteousness of God which justifies and sets things to rights, and which has become manifest in Christ. It is therefore realted to the practical and specific social conflicts of people who have never received justice, and people who are themselves unjust.

If there is a divine liberation from the universal power of sin through the energy of the creative Spirit which works for righteousness, this legitimates the liberations from economic injustice, political oppression, cultural alienation and personal discouragement. If there is eternal life which will drive out death from the whole of God's creation, then everything is justified which already ministers to life and resists death here and now.

The Protestant doctrine about the justification of sinners, and today's theology about the liberation of the oppressed, do not have to be antitheses. They can correct and enrich one another mutually. The full and complete Protestant justification is a liberation theology: it is about the liberation of people deprived of justice, and about the liberation of the unjust, so that they may all be freed for a just society. The one-sided limitation to the perpetrators, and the forgiveness of their active sins, has made Protestantism blind to the sufferings of the victims, and to God's saving "option for the poor". Protestantism has underrated the importance of 'structural sin' by looking too exclusively at individuals. But this is a one-sided approach."

Jürgen Moltmann - 'The Spirit of Life'