Re: NT inerrancy??

Hopefully, I will have a chance to post a longer
response to this in the future, but there are a couple
of things that need to be clarified.

The first big one is one that is endemic and the
Eastern Orthodox would call it an evangelical heresy
-- the idea that the Bible is the source of belief in
Jesus of Nazareth. It is not. Jesus of Nazareth is
the source of belief in Jesus as Christ and the Church
witnessed to Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ before
the penning of any of the NT documents. An Eastern
Orthodox would say they believe the Bible because the
Bible is a christian collection of documents, meaning
it was composed by the christian community. An
eastern Orthodox would *never* say (at least if they
know orthodox theology) that they believe in Jesus
*because* the Bible tells them so.

IMHO, they have a hugely valid point. However, there
are other issues that remain sort of simmering below
the surface.

--- wallyshoes <wallyshoes@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>
> George Murphy wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Well, this is the same issue that's been
> debated with respect to Genesis 1 & 2
> > &c. If those aren't accurate historical reports
> of things that happened a few thousand
> > years ago, are they "lies"? You are trying to
> make the biblical writers conform to
> > modern standards for historical & theological
> writing, but their purpose needs to be
> > assessed in terms of the standards of their own
> culture. There's a little German
> > jingle:
> > Wer den Dichter will
> verstehen,
> > Muss in Dichters Lande
> gehen.
> > "Whoever wants to understand the poet must go into
> the poet's country." & if you want
> > to understand a 1st century Christian, you must to
> some extent be willing to get into
> > the frame of mind of a 1st centuryt Christian

Absolutely. There are lots of texts that clearly mean
something in context that they would not mean if we
did not understand the context, e.g. the eye of the
needle, or references to Gehenna -- which we would not
understand the meaning at all unless we actually knew
of the place called Gehenna and often it gets simply
translated as hell which provides none of the context
of what Ghenna actually was.

> I chose the NT because it is a lot closer than
> Moses' time.

Yes, but it is still very different culturally and
linguistically to our times. One cannot read 1st
century literature and just assume that it means what
we as moderns think it means. N.T. Wright is an
excellent resources for discussions of the historical
context of the writing of the New Testament documents.
Take Daniel -- speaking of the Son of Man coming on a
cloud. If NT Wright and hundreds of other scholars
and thousands of Jewish rabbis are right, NO ONE in
the first century, christian or Jew would take it to
mean literally that a person was supported by a cloud,
riding down from heaven. No one. If that makes it
unreliable by Walt's definition, because it sure seems
to read like it describes a guy coming down on a cloud
from heaven, well, it's unreliable by that definition.
 Of course, the conception of how to read it is
ignorant in the extreme, demanding that Daniel be
written -- and translated -- in terms that make
perfect sense to me 2000 years later in a vastly
different cultural context, even though in our
cultural context, there are plenty of turns of phrase
which appear to be lies -- when I say my blood boils,
I do not mean that it is hot enough to change from a
liquid to a gas, when I see red, it does not mean that
my vision has shifted to only allow me to see a narrow
range of the visible spectrum, etc.

>
> But let's just step around the theology and talk
> about the "real world" of today. By your
> accounts, one cannot expect Matthew to be telling us
> factual events. Instead he is saying things
> that never happened for the sake of making a
> theological point. As such, a theologian like you
> can
> read and understand it. People like me cannot. ----

Who says that people like you (or me) cannot?

There are a couple of issues tied up in this that have
not been adequately addressed or even acknowledged:

1. What is the purpose of the particular document?
a. If you think the purpose of any document in the NT
is to report in an objective, detached, acontextual,
factual manner that a modern would PRETEND to report
(because there is no such thing as an objective,
factual report of anything), then they and everything
you have *ever* read is unreliable.
b. If one starts with the proposition that the NT
documents are witnesses to the experience of the
church (i.e., the people who were in faith communities
that were established by the evangelists and those who
had first hand experience of jesus) of Jesus of
Nazareth whom they came to recognize during His life
as the Christ. They are completely reliable for
relating *their* experiences.
c. The question then becomes, in part, how did they
relate those experiences and how are we to understand
what they were saying about it.

> so I have put the Gospel by matthew on the
> shelf as something I cannot trust. What about Luke.
> Do you think the same of him?
>
> I also raise the point about the difference of
> opinion by Matthew and Luke as to the home town of
> Joseph and mary. Do you think that Matthew is making
> a theological point? If so, what could it be?

2. Baby and Bathwater syndromes -- the NT texts
obviously contain different kinds of material, in the
sense that sometimes Jesus is directly quoted,
sometimes stories are told about Jesus in which he
doesn't really do anything -- like the childhood
narratives. What importance do each of these kinds of
material have for what the purpose of the text is
(which is to provide a witness to a particular
community's experience of Jesus of Nazareth and convey
what they think is important).

a. Is it important to Jesus' ministry, His life, His
death and His resurrection where the Holy Family went
when? If hypothetically one evangelist reported they
had orange juice for breakfast on October 15th and the
other reported they had apple juice on October 15th,
in direct contradiction of one another -- would we
care?

b. If everything agreed perfectly, wouldn't the
skeptic say -- "ah hah! put up job", like they claim
for Josephus' referral to Jesus as the so-called
Christ?

c. What makes something unreliable? As I suggested
in no. 1 if the fact that it is told from a particular
perspective, then EVERYTHING is unreliable and we
can't read it so we might as well put it up on the
shelf.

d. Perhaps it makes sense to ask what the books say
about Jesus and what is important about Jesus rather
than do the books accurately reflect the same
chronologies as one another. They clearly do not, but
I fail to see how that really has an impact about
whether they are reliable witnesses to THEIR
EXPERIENCE of Jesus of Nazareth.

3. Sorting out Understanding -- One also has to
realize that these various communities are sorting out
their understandings of Jesus of Nazareth. Theology
in the sense of first century christianity is not some
airy-fairy intellectual pursuit, it is an attempt to
understand the meaning of what they have experienced.
Theology is, in that sense, important for every person
and not solely the concern of some set of egg-head
academics. It is trying to understand what Jesus
means to you and me and there are different ways to
convey that. It is clear that different communities
had different emphases on their understandings, but,
consonant with the baby and bathwater comment a moment
ago, there is tremendous agreement about the nature
and character of each community's experience of Jesus
of Nazareth.

> > First, what is meant by "infallibility"?
> Is its primary meaning that the texts
> > in question describe historical events infallibly,
> or that they witness infallibly to
> > the person & work of Christ?
> > In saying that I am not trying to "save"
> the word infallibility: I can live
> > without it. But what does it mean? & if we're
> going to use it, recognizing the kinds
> > of historical questions you raise, what should it
> mean?
>
> I always choose the dictionary definition. My
> dictionary says:

Dictionary definitions do not give technical
definitions. The dictionary definitions of both
infallibility and inerrancy have little to do with the
technical definitions as the church has used them
which is why these arguments get started. If you go
by the current common usage of the terms (rather than
their ACTUAL technical definitions) the NT texts are
neither inerrant nor infallible. Of course, one is
being massively ignorant to try to apply those
definitions. So perhaps Howard is right for a
different reason, we should not use the terms because
the vast majority of the laity don't understand how
they *really* mean.

> "Incapable of error"
> "Not liable to mislead, deceive or misrepresent"
>
> With those definitions, and your notion of Matthew,
> that text is not infallible --- at least not
> to modern man..

 
> Walt
>

I guess that was not nearly as short as I thought it
would be.... sorry. ;)

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Received on Wed Dec 31 12:08:19 2003