Why Not Inerrancy?
December 2, 2006 Posted by Roger Overton
I’m currently working on a paper (for school) on inerrancy.
One of the things I find interesting about the topic is that both sides (those
for and against it) have generally been acting like the debate’s been over for
the past two decades. I haven’t been able to find a complete volume dedicated
completely to the subject written in the past 20 years, only scattered
references here and there.
As I’ve been reading the dated material (Jack Rogers, Clark
Pinnock), I’ve been having a difficult time putting myself in the
non-inerrantists’s shoes. So I’d like to ask for some help, particularly if you
don’t agree with the doctrine of inerrancy.
1) What
publications/scholars have persuaded you toward your position?
2) What
arguments do find compelling against inerrancy?
3) What
do you see as the difference between infallibility and inerrancy?
At this time, the first question is really the most pressing
since it’s better for me to quote published scholars than comments on a blog.
However, I’m personally interested in responses to the latter two as well so I
can better understand the position. I’m not looking for a debate right now. If
you leave responses (please do), my replies will be in gratitude and perhaps
clarifying questions.
Related posts:
- A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy, Part 6
- A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy, Part 2
- A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy, Part 1
- A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy, Part 5
- A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy, Part 3
- A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy, Part 4
Posted in Main Page, Roger's Posts, Theology
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December 2nd, 2006 at 5:48 pm
This probably won't qualify as a “scholarly” article, but it is an article for ministers and laymen written by a scholar. I think it gives a basic sense of one point on the “infallibility matters more than inerrancy” spectrum, though likely without as much clarity or definition as you'd like. If nothing else, it might give you a lead on someone (Olson) to contact for further insights/info.
December 2nd, 2006 at 6:06 pm
this sounds like I'm trying to be a smart alec but i'm not - you should ask tony jones.
December 2nd, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Writing from theological book headquarters in Pasadena, California (the Archives Bookshop), Baker just released the updated second edition of Pinnock's The Scripture Principle, and the only other recent book I know that addresses this issue is Scripture Alone by Sproul, which has a running commentary on the Chicago Way, er, Statement. I believe that's all that has been written lately.
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:06 am
Santa Biblia by Justo Gonzales–It gives a helfpul (though sometimes disagreeable) perspective of the scriptures from a Hispanic perspective, and you'll find in the opening chapters/introduction a commentary on the topic
John Goldengay at Fuller Seminary (probably most things out of Fuller) has a helpful article on commenting on the topic.
Introduction to the NRSV Bible. I don't think it will use the word inerrancy, but in its approach to bible translation leaves room for not assuming the doctrine of inerrancy.
Check out: http://www.quodlibet.net/perry-inerrancy.shtml
To answer your other questions. The idea of inerrancy sounds confusing, especially when the definition is not quite easy to put our hands around. The authority of scripture for me does not come because the scriptures are without error, but because they are the Scriptures–inspired and authoritative.
I know you disagree with this, but it wasn't an issue that got this much attention until about the 19th century. The church (both catholic and protestant) was fine to operate without having to hold on to a form of inerrancy.
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:51 am
The second edition of Pinnock's book (which I happened to pick up at ETS) seems to be only minor revisions and a new appendix, so that wouldn't constitute a new work. I've overlooked Sproul's book because I thought the title, Scripture Alone, referred to Sola Scriptura. Apparently P&R's marketing strategy failed since I skipped it due to its title. From what I can gather online, however, this is a collection of older material by Sproul, so it doesn't constitute a new work either.
December 3rd, 2006 at 11:05 am
Thanks,
I can't find the article by Goldingay you speak of, do you have a link?
I'm confused by your statement: “he authority of scripture for me does not come because the scriptures are without error, but because they are the Scriptures–inspired and authoritative.” You believe the scriptures are authoritative because they are inspired and authoritative? Isn't that circular?
I don't know anyone who believes that scriptural authority comes about because of inerrancy. The inerrantist position is that authority and inerrancy come about because the Bible is inspired by God. If we find the Bible is not inerrant, then its authority is underminded and cannot be from God.
December 3rd, 2006 at 2:50 pm
I'm not sure why my argument is circular. The Bible is inspired and has authority without it having to be inerrant. The scriptures are inspired and authoritative because that's what they are (in of themselves). If the Bible is not inerrant, that does not take away from its inspiration and authority, which is where we disagree because what I'm understanding from you is that the only reason that the Bible has authority and is inspired because it is inerrant.
To use a not so good illustration that might get a little bit of what I'm getting at: My father has authority in my life not because he is morally superior to me or is right 100% of the time and is free from making any mistakes. He has authority because he is my father. He does not have to earn my trust or my allegiance. He has authority in my life, period. The Bible does not have to fit within a certain doctrinal framework for it to have authority in my life. Because the Bible is what it is, it has authority in my life.
December 3rd, 2006 at 4:39 pm
“what I'm understanding from you is that the only reason that the Bible has authority and is inspired because it is inerrant.” I've never heard or read an inerrantist state that, including myself. Where did you get that idea?
Most people (in my experience) say the Bible is authoritative because it comes from God. But what you've said is that it's authoritative because it's authoritative. How is that not circular? I'm just trying to be clear about your position. We both agree that the Bible's authority does not come from it being inerrant. We appear to disagree on where the Bible's authority comes from, perhaps because I don't understand where you think it comes from.
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Well fine then, Roger, don't buy from Archives!
Yeah, the Sproul book is more about Sola Scriptura and how inerrancy factors into SS, though you are correct that it is not new material. I think scholars inclined to write on this issue have been focusing on other things: Grudem on egalitarianism and Pinnock on Open Theism, to name two.
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:20 pm
I know Roger doesn't want to turn this into a debate, but I wanted to comment on this:
“the only reason that the Bible has authority and is inspired because it is inerrant”
Actually, it's the opposite. The reason the Bible is inerrant is because it is inspired by God. Inerrancy is a corollary of the doctrine of inspiration derived from the nature of who God is, not some axiom postulated to support inspiration.
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:14 pm
You wrote: If we find the Bible is not inerrant, then its authority is underminded and cannot be from God.
So you're saying that the Bible's authority is tied to its inerrancy. I think that regardless of whether the Bible is inerrant, it still has authority. It's 'inerrancy' doesn't reflect on the nature of the Scriptures or the nature of God.
I agree that its authority comes from God. I don't deny that. It's just not tied to any litmus test like inerrancy.
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:17 pm
Is it possible to take on the view then that the Bible is not inerrant (by the way, throughout all of this “debate” there is still no working definition of inerrancy) and still “inspired” by God (probably need a definition for inspired as well)?
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:16 pm
EE, I expect you will have to go on to inspiration to get to your point. You have a different view of inspiration than Roger does - one that does not have the corollary of inerrancy that Tim mentioned.
You believe, it seems, that the Scripture were inspired by God and therefore authority. Yet, you do not believe the scriptures have to be inerrant to be inspired by God.
Roger, I haven't spent enough thoughtful time to give you a helpful answer. The chief reason I don't hold an inerrant view of scripture is because the bible appears to be in factual disagreement with itself. Attempts to explain away these apparent errors seem more reaching or contrived than convincing. Yet, I still trust that scripture is inspired and authoritative.
I haven't studied a debate about this because my position seems plainly true and a good fit with the evidence. I regret, therefore, that I don't have scholarly references to offer you regarding my position. Best of luck with your paper.
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Is it possible? Absolutely! Is it coherent? I'm not entirely convinced that it is, for inerrancy seems to follow from (1) God's complete truthfulness, and (2) God's full inspiration of the Bible: the Bible, fully inspired by God, is completely true in everything it affirms. The alternative to this is that God has given us an inspired but errant Bible. To be sure, our understanding of inspiration will have an effect on how we construe inerrancy, but it still logically follows from the doctrine of inspiration that Scripture is true in all it affirms.
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Roger, do you have For Faith and Clarity: Philosophical Contributions to Christian Theology? It has a chapter, “Beyond Inerrancy,” which may be of use to you in writing your paper.
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:42 pm
Thanks Bill! Your explanation and articulation of what I'm trying to say is helpful and right-on.
December 3rd, 2006 at 11:18 pm
What follows from my doctrine of inspiration is that scripture is a trustworthy guide in matters of faith and practice, unfailing in what it intends to teach. It has errors that do not limit its ability to teach nor its authority regarding that which it intends to teach.
Its difficult to say any of that without getting back to the inspiration. I believe that God inspired writers, communities and redactors to bring to us the scriptures through their own language, identities and cultures. We see in places the limits of particular perspectives and traditions and even multiple irreconcilable yet complimentary perspectives and traditions.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:20 am
Bill, I get the impression that my short statement left you with the sense that the inerrantist position is further from your view than it really is. The inerrantist fully takes into account the context (including the cultural, traditional, and linguisitic limitations) of the human authors of Scripture. I absolutely agree that the word of God is “unfailing in what it intends to teach.” Where I think we differ is what God's intent was: I would include matters of science and history as understood by the people at the time as part of what God intends to teach, in addition to faith and practice, and in that teaching God's word is true in all that it affirms.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:49 am
I do, thanks.
December 4th, 2006 at 1:48 am
I like your additions, Tim. I agree to all of those things too. To those outside of an inerrant position, those additions are not obvious. I think we may disagree on what God's intent was, but we might agree most of the time on most passages. As to the errors, we may be closer on those than it might seem as well. Our differences may be more semantic usage than in content.
December 4th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
I wrote one of my worst papers in seminary on inspiration and Scripture, but it wasn't the fault of my sources, merely my ability, or lack thereof, to make a coherent argument. It's an embarrassing paper that I won't let many people see.
I used Grenz's discussion of Scripture in his magnum opus, Theology for the Community of God in which he wants to keep the inerrant term, but redefines it so mdeuch that it comes closer to the infallible position. (It was reminiscent of the Chicago Statement.)
I used some of Donald Bloesch's Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration & Interpretation. I don't remember if it got into the inerrancy debate, but I imagine that it did considering its subject matter. It was written in 1995, so it's fairly recent, theologically speaking.
Hope those resources are helpful. I imagine Bloesch would be the most fruitful, but I don't think he takes a conservatively inerrant view. He could be a valuable interlocutor, however, since I think he comes from the Reformed stream of Christianity.
In answer to your questions, I think what we're seeing in this discussion and others like it, that there are different definitions of the term inerrant. So, it's probably not enough to ask if others believe the Bible is inerrant or not, but we'll have to define what inerrant is first. (The same is true of the other terms used, e.g., inspired, authoritative, infallible, etc.)
I think that inerrancy as I have historically understood it is the view that the Bible is 100% accurate on 100% of what it teaches, except for some grammatical errors. This is usually framed within a historicity and scientific debate. Most of the folks I've interacted with who use the term inerrancy defend the seven day creation and view inerrancy as a stance against the claims of classical liberalism and the scientific community which they see as attacking the Bible. This is also the version of inerrancy that Fuller famously moved away from when it adopted the infallible position in the 1960's on “Black Saturday.”
More recently, I've seen nuanced positions emerge like Grenz, or the Chicago Statement, both of which seem to inch closer to the infallible position. I'm still not convinced that I need to take an inerrant position, or that it is the correct option — and I don't like the term because it carries a ton of baggage that brings to mind fire-breathing dinosaurs in Job, but that's another story.
Whoops, I guess I really didn't answer your questions. Eh.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Roger,
Sorry for not posting sooner, I check your blo about once a week.
With that being said, I attended DTS, so had to sign a statement that confirmed I held to inerrancy when I entered. But, thanks to some great proffessors who taught me to critically think, I left Dallas as a non-inerrantist. I hope to explain why in what follows. But first, here are a couple o books I think would be helpful. Goldingay's “Models for the Interpretation of Scripture”. In it, he doesn't get into the debate, per se, but he does provide some great thouhts to consider. I would also highly recommend, David Meade's “Pseudonymity and Canon.” I used this book when I was doing a paper on the authorship of 2 Peter. I argued against Petrine authorship and suggested that maybe our definition of inerrancy should include pseudonymous writings (see also Bauckham's discussion of authorship in the Word series commentary for 2 Peter). I would also recommend N. T. Wright's Griffith Thomas Lectures from 1989, printed in Vox Evangelica 1991, 21, 7-32, also available online at http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm. I think this helps to explain why the argument between inerrancy and infallibility is wrongly placed.
I came to deny inerrancy (as the Chicago statement defines it) for the following reasons: First, the term inerrancy has “died the death of a thousand qualifications”. That is, the same term is used by people like Norm Geisler and Dan Wallace, but there definitions are not even close to the same. Dan has wrritten a defense of his view at bible.org (http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=4200). That is a pretty wide spectrum and one I think justifies coming up with a new way to describe what we think about the Bible. Second, I was sitting in a class on OT Historical Narrative and as we translated through the Samson narrative I thought, am I really suppose to believe Samson went out and caught 300 foxes by the tail, tied the tails together and sent the foxes through the fields of the Philistines. Is the impact of the story lessened if I do not hold to it being historical (it is written as actual history in the Hebrew sense). The same could be said of Jonah. Look at all the people who are missing the point of this prophet by attempting to prove a person can live in a fish for 3 days! I have been challenged about the resurrection and the impact “my view” would have on this, but the resurrection is different there are a lot more witnesses writing, this is what we saw! Third, there ARE some errors in the Bible I could not get around. One of them is the accounts of Jesus healing the demoniac (or two) and casting the demons into pigs. It is found in Matthew 8 and Mark 5. Matthew says it happened in Gadara. Mark says it was in the region of the Gerasenes. These regions are about 20 miles apart. No big deal to us, but in first century Palestine, that is a big difference. I understand the point about “the original autographs” but the attempts to qualify the difference in conservative commentaries is laughable. Does it make that big of a difference to say Matthew or Mark got their geography wrong? I think not.
Your third question dealt with the difference between inerrancy and infallibility. I think the main difference is that inerrancy holds to a tight view of verbal plenary inspiration (all words of the whole text). Infallibility on the other hand, would argue (like Bill) it is authoritative for faith and practice and does not try to deal with science, etc. My take on the authority issue is this: the Bible is authoritative because of its dual authorship. It is God's story told through human authors. God's voice is saying “this is the way walk in it,” while the human authors are pointing to the same thing only saying, “we tried it our way, it doesn't work” and “this is God's way, we tried it it does work” and finally “Jesus came and exemplified this way, so we really should allow it to work” Does that make sense?
Sorry for the long post, it is not an easy question to answer with a short answer!
Good luck on your paper!
KA
December 6th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I had this question in my mind last night before going to sleep: how do the different ways of viewing the Bible (i.e., inerrancy, infallibility, etc.) account for the canonization process? When I listen to the debates — particularly between the inerrant and infallible positions — it seems that people act as if the Bible as it now stands is a unified, permanent codex. I know people do understand that the Bible went through a long canonization process with much debate, but I don't ever hear about the relationship between those debates and our current debate regarding how we should view Scripture. The easy answer is that those choosing the biblical books sought those books that were infallible or inerrant, but that seems too simplistic and anachronistic for me. Any other thoughts?
December 6th, 2006 at 11:11 am
“Third, there ARE some errors in the Bible I could not get around. One of them is the accounts of Jesus healing the demoniac (or two) and casting the demons into pigs. It is found in Matthew 8 and Mark 5. Matthew says it happened in Gadara. Mark says it was in the region of the Gerasenes. These regions are about 20 miles apart. No big deal to us, but in first century Palestine, that is a big difference.”
I think this indicates that different definitions of “inerrancy” are at work here. The discrepancy is clear at face value, but it's only an error if you define “inerrancy” as complete and total precision in the minutest of details. When people ask me where I'm from, the answer varies: I'm from L.A. sometimes and I'm from Diamond Bar other times. Does this mean I am lying? Or does it mean that Diamond Bar is a small town that most people haven't heard of, and I say L.A. because people know where it is? Couldn't this kind of thinking be at play in the discrepancies between Mark's location (the small town) and Matthew's location (the region)? What about the textual variants in Mark's account? I'm not trying to debate whether Matthew and Mark (and Luke for that matter) got the location wrong. I think, rather, that examples of this sort show that there is a major discrepancy in our various understandings of what inerrancy is and what it entails. When these examples are given, I get the impression that inerrancy is viewed as the guarantee of a perfect final product in the Bibles we have. But that is precisely what it is not! Inerrancy adds the “in the original autographs” clause not to explain away these discrepancies, but to make the important point that if the original authors never intended to communicate precision down to the most common geographical denominator, we can't hold these kinds of “errors” against them. There are numerous factors which could account for the “errors” that we find. Inerrancy, at least as I understand it, is more of a methodological principle which guides how we approach Scripture (by faith) than a conclusion derived from fallible human study of it.
December 6th, 2006 at 11:32 am
You are explaining away the errors here. The prior comment was asserting that this was referring to two different places, and you are saying that one was a town and one was a region. This may be an adequate explanation for this apparent error if you are right and the prior commenter was wrong.
I don't believe he is defining inerrantism as saying that both have to be perfectly congruent. I believe he is asserting what he believes to be a genuine error in the text, and that inerrant position would disagree that this or any other such example is an error.
I expect there are answers to every passage that appears to be in error to us. It is difficult for me to imagine that taken in whole these would convince me that there are no errors in scripture.
That skepticism aside, would you be willing to share the inerrantist's answer to the conflicting accounts of who was present and what was said at the tomb?
December 6th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Hi Tim,
Bill said it well. The difference between LA and Diamond Bar is a great analogy, but it doesn't work in this case. Taking the size of Israel in mind, the problem with the Matthean and Markan accounts of where the demoniac was healed would be more like you travelling oversees and telling someone you were from LA, when you were really from Chicago. Gadara and Genessaret are both distinct regions.
One of the lame attempts to which I referred in my moriginal post was that Jesus did this twice. In respect to Bill's question, maybe Jesus was raised more than once, so we do not need to wonder about who was there…Sorry, I am a redeemed sart alec at heart.
December 6th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Again, this raises the question of what is inerrancy. It seems to me that the inerrantists (is that really a word?) have a different definition of what inerrancy is from non-inerrantists.
December 6th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Sorry for the second post. I intended to reply to Tyler, but forgot.
Tyler,
The issue of defining inerrancy was only an issue in 20th century Amrican evangelicalism. The church councils did not set out to select books that were infallible or inerrant, they were looking for issues like authorship and coherence with accepted doctrine. They were pre-modern, so for them they believed what they believed because of their identification as people of the Book! (I don't mean to oversimplify the epistemology of pre-modernism, just that they didn't ask the same questions).
Inerrancy became a “fundamental” as a response to German liberalims in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was here that conservatives needed to “defend” the authority of the Bible by saying it could pass the rationale tests of certainty through scientific methods. There is an article on quodlibet that explains the issue pretty well in this regard (http://www.quodlibet.net/perry-inerrancy.shtml). The point is, the reason Roger is having trouble finding current articles/books on the topic is it has become a non-issue (so to speak).
Hope that makes sense. My wife tells me I tend to ramble!
December 6th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Thanks KA. I was aware that the ideas of inerrancy and infallibility with regard to Scripture are from the last couple centuries, which is why I said the anachronistic comment. My question is more for us debating how we view Scripture. How do we jive our inerrant, infallible, authoritative, etc. views with the canonization process? What does that long and hardly uniform enterprise have to tell us about how we should view Scripture? And how has canonization fit into the inerrancy debate historically?
December 6th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
Roger, you asked “What arguments do find compelling against inerrancy?”
The concept of 'inerrancy' of Scripture led to the crucifixion of Jesus.
The New Testament writers claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was the man chosen from among the people and appointed by God to rule the world. They claimed that he represented the true values of God and that his opponents had judged him by their own false standards. They also claimed that he had fulfilled the 'scriptures' predicting his death.
Yet the opponents of Jesus searched these same 'scriptures' but could not relate the writings to the man. On the surface, this seems understandable - there were particular and exact statements by the prophets that when the 'anointed' of God appeared, the fortunes of Israel, then at their lowest ebb, would be restored.
But therein lay the basic fallacy! The opponents were relying first on words and events to lead them to their 'messiah'. Jesus' supporters relied first upon fundamental values, then adduced words in their support. For them, he was the 'spiritual' fulfilment of the Israelite hope.
The Jerusalem priests thought that the Old Testament was 'inerrant.' By concentrating on words, personality and events and ignoring basic values, they demonstrated their flawed thinking.
Unfortunately, the doctrines built up around the personality of Jesus of Nazareth reflect the same attitudes and display the same flawed thinking as the priests of Jerusalem.
December 6th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
My point exactly.
December 7th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Tim does the definition that the inerrantists use of inerrancy account for the discrepant accounts of the people at the tomb?
December 19th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
You're saying that the concept of inerrancy led to Christ's crucifixion? Are you sure it wasn't God's plan for redeeming a fallen world? Or human sin in general? MUST it be some failing of your philosophical opponents?
And frankly, your justifications for this deadly chain of logic are weak at best. Even if you proved philosophical commonalities between Pharasees and evangelicals it wouldn't show that those commonalities are the bad ones — and as I said above, even if you managed to show both you wouldn't be justified in labelling evangelicals as Christ-killers.
December 20th, 2006 at 6:20 am
“…you wouldn't be justified in labelling evangelicals as Christ-killers.”
You have grossly misrepresented me and set up a 'straw man' in order to draw attention away from the substance of my argument against 'inerrancy'.
December 20th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
I was harsh; I'm not the first to be harsh when dealing with an offensive statement which appeared to be a falsehood. I may have misunderstood you (I hope I did!), but I have not deliberately misrepresented you (and due to the closeness of the context, you can't claim that any misrepresentation would harm you; it would simply make me look foolish). You yourself chose to make your FIRST paragraph the single sentence “The concept of 'inerrancy' of Scripture led to the crucifixion of Jesus.”
The only explicit argument you present is the paragraph:
If this is supposed to explain a fallacy (which it claims to), it fails. There is no logical fallacy in “relying first on words and events”. It might be bad understanding of revelation — or it might not. It might not even be the concept of revelation used by the Pharasees and Saducees (you give no evidence, and I don't recall at the moment whether the similarities between the sects extended to their hermeneutics/concept of revelation). Other people claim that the Jewish leaders' resistance to Jesus arose from other causes, such as their desire to hold on to power, or their emphasis on the triumphant messianic prophecies but not on the humiliating ones.
In any case, there's no support in your post for your up-front claim that “the concept of 'inerrancy' of Scripture led to the crucifixion of Jesus.” You'll have to do more than calling a different hermeneutics a “fallacy”; in order to support what appears to be the main claim of your post, you'll have to show that both the people who agitated for Jesus' crucifixion and modern inerrantists share the same philosophy on that point; and that this philosophy (and not some other unshared one) led to the call for crucifixion. I think you'd also have to indicate that it's morally wrong to hold that philosophy as well, since it's possible that some of the things that led to Christ's crucifixion and which are shared by both groups are actually innocent (for example, inhaling before a shout). Simply showing that the philosophy causes one to come to the wrong conclusions occasionally isn't enough (every philosophy does THAT).
In conclusion, if you want to present an argument, do so. What you actually presented appears to me to be simple ad hominem.
December 20th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
The priestly establishment in Jerusalem had their own ideas of the divine will and saw themselves as its expression. The followers of Jesus took a contrary view and saw him as embodying and projecting the divine will.
The Jerusalem of Pilate and Herod Antipas became a stage where two opposing points of view based on two opposing sets of values was played out. (This collision of values is dramatised in John's gospel)
It is a truly 'divine' paradox that the Christian churches ostensibly preach Jesus of Nazareth while, at the same time, through their doctrine, they misrepresent the man who lived and died for 'truth' as is evident by his words to Pilate.
The priestly establishment of Jerusalem asserted that Jesus could not be the representative Israelite, the 'chosen of the Lord,' because he did not meet with their approval or measure up to their interpretation of Old Testament 'messianic' criteria. They laboured under the delusion that the choice was a matter for them!
The churches of 'Christendom' are labouring under the same delusion. They, in turn, assert that the 'chosen of the Lord' must meet with their approval and measure up to their interpretation of the New Testament as proclaimed through their doctrines.
If Jesus of Nazareth were to appear today, he would be unrecognisable in terms of the 'trinity' and the 'miraculous incarnation' - doctrines supposedly based on the New Testament.
Our predicament would mirror that of the disciples who had to choose between the teachings, authority and weight of tradition represented by the priestly establishment, and the weight of moral authority represented by the values and principles espoused by Jesus.
They chose Jesus and what he represented over the priestly establishment and what it represented. They recognised that there is only one criterion for messiahship - the man destined to rule the world in righteousness must be a man who possesses certain qualities of character. All the rest of the criteria first imposed by the Jerusalem establishment and now by Christian church doctrine add up to nothing.
Perhaps all of us may one day be faced with a choice similar to that of the disciples.
December 21st, 2006 at 12:10 am
Thank you for the careful explanation. I think I see the story you're trying to tell, and I even agree with some of your points — for example, that Jesus was righteous because of His character, and without His character it would be impossible to be the Messiah. It's certain that many of His disciples were drawn to him because of his character; others because “he taught as one having authority”.
The conclusion might serve as a useful warning to bring humility in those whom knowledge has puffed up, but honestly, the tone and wording of the message must be changed if it's to serve as anything but a groundless, truthless insult. Please reconsider.
The specifics of your argument I just don't follow. Nobody would expect to recognize the Second Person in the Trinity as such; if we know Christ, we know him as a single person. But if you don't (1) know Christ as a Person, and (2) know God the Father as a Person, and (3) know them as distinct Persons and yet one God, you don't actually know either one. If you don't know God, you haven't known Christ either, because Christ's ministry is to glorify His father.
I'm not saying that the trinity must be affirmed in order to be saved, or in order to know Christ. I'm saying that according to the revelation God has given us, the trinity is how we will experience God. To slightly alter your quote, *when* (not if) Jesus of Nazareth does appear at the appointed time, He will be recognizable as Himself, and He will glorify the Father.
We have a certain amount of “agree to disagree” here. I think I can read your justified rebuke of a pride of knowledge and a willingness to sit in judgement of God's works, and agree. I can't agree to lay aside the revelation God has given us.
-Billy