8 Things Jesus Believed About Scripture (Part 1)

BEVERLY POWELL

4/3/2017 03:53:05 pm

Khethomthandayo

4/3/2017 05:28:30 pm

barry

4/24/2017 05:17:25 pm

Christians themselves have authored books denying that Jesus was God. See "A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels", by: J.R. Daniel Kirk. James White refused, several times, to answer a Greg Stafford's question whether theos in clause c of John 1:1 was definite or indefinite. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-L3IoUq-fk
and cue up to 2:05:25 ff.

It would not matter if Jesus was God, that doesn't place his views beyond criticism. God once repented of his prior creation of man. Genesis 6:6-7, and the non-literal "anthropomorphism" interpretation cannot be sustained from the grammar or context or genre, that interpretation is set forth solely in the interest of helping that passage avoid contradicting other statements about God in the bible.

If Jesus was not God, then what he thought about biblical matters is far more subject to review and criticism than most conservatives think.

For Trinitarians, Jesus spoke in ways that makes impossible the Trinitarian requirement that the will of Jesus and the Father are perfectly aligned.

In Matthew 26:39, Jesus asks the Father to remove the cup of suffering. Was he asking for something he knew to be impossible? If so, why? Had he lost his senses? Or did he seriously believe the Father's will could be changed by request?

In the same verse, Jesus says "not my will, but yours be done", but again, if Jesus' will was in harmony with the Father's at all times, there would be no logical reason to submit his own will to the will of the Father. You don't say "not my will, but yours be done" to anybody unless you have manifested some evidence that you had desired something that was contrary to their will.

Christians will say Jesus was speaking here "as a man", not as God. But "nature" is the most fundamental component that makes something what it is. So if Jesus had two "natures", then BOTH of them must by logical necessity be present in anything he said. He could no more suppress his divine nature than you can suppress your human nature. In that case, his request to avoid his cup of suffering also originated from his divine side and not merely his human side.

…in which case, it is the divine nature of Jesus too, not just his human nature, that manifested this sign of disagreement with the Father's will…and at that point the perfection of the Trinity is irreparably disrupted.

For these reasons, Jesus' authority can be objectively disputed sufficiently that Christians cannot rationally expect atheists to think Jesus' viewpoint on some matter is beyond criticism.

And the bible is not inerrant anyway. The Roman Catholic church would hardly have persecuted Galileo if they felt his suggestion that they interpret scientific statements in the bible as being phenomenological language, were the least bit consistent with the intent of the biblical authors.

Sure is funny that the entire Christian church for it's first 1500 years or so never felt biblical statements about an immovable earth and a moving sun were anything other than literal, until Galileo came along. Seems to me that the only reason Christians of today interpret those parts of the bible as language of appearance (i.e., movement of the sun in Joshua 10), is not for any objective reason such as grammar, immediate context, larger context or genre, but solely because "language of appearance" is the only way to harmonize the bible with science and thus uphold biblical inerrancy.

Indeed, Catholic apologist Robert Sugenis boldly claims Galileo was wrong, despite his church admitting in recent times that Galileo was right. Sugenis advocates geocentrism at galileowaswrong.com, and holds that the bible verses about the immobile earth and moving sun are literal. He would hardly take such a position if something in the grammar of context of those bible passages made it "clear" that they are only using language of appearance.

Alisa Childers

4/24/2017 09:46:48 pm

Hi Barry, this is one of those posts that is mostly written for Christians. I certainly wouldn't expect an atheist to value what Jesus thought about Scripture—you are right about that!

Regarding Galileo, he was first opposed by secular philosophers, not the church—his theory challenged the reigning philosophy of the day—Aristotelianism. This all happened during the Reformation, and the church definitely tried to silence him (not denying that), but the church's interpretation of those verses largely had to do with the influence of Aristotle on culture. Galileo was a Bible believing Christian.

I believe that the Bible and science will never contradict each other. Christians have nuanced views about using science to help interpret the Bible, and yes, there are implications for inerrancy—but your characterization is oversimplified, I believe.

Daniel Hawkins

8/2/2017 03:14:30 pm

While I can largely agree with the first three points, I would submit that the last point is inherently flawed. The problem is not whether the bible is "historically reliable" or not, but rather why modern evangelicals and non-Christians alike insist on making "historical reliability" the determining factor of the value of scripture. This requirement is judging scripture by the post-enlightenment thinking that truth is solely that which is empirically verifiable (i.e. in the case of historical events something actually had to happen for it to contain truth). However, this mindset was not a concern for both the readers and writers of scripture as it is now in a post-enlightenment empirical worldview.

Yes, as a first century Jew, Jesus (the creeds affirm that Jesus was not only fully God, but also fully man, something that is often overlooked in many evangelical circles) probably would have held the common Jewish perspective that a flood occurred, or that Daniel was indeed a prophet (which is also probably true; however, what scholars are fairly certain about is that the book of Daniel as it exists now came into existence much later than the person of Daniel was said to exist. The issue is not, "oh the prophecies are too accurate, therefore they must not be real," but rather that the prophecies are only accurate up to a certain point. They accurately describe the emergence of empires up until the Selucid empire, and then the prophesies start to go awry. This, among other things, has led scholars to the conclusion that the prophecies contained in the latter chapters of Daniel were written during the Selucid rule as "ex eventu prophesies" or "prophesies after the fact" in order to provide legitimacy for what the author was trying to say, which, though it seems strange and even fraudulent in the modern era, was a common practice among ancient writers. An example of this is found in the "Book of Enoch" and ancient book purported to be written by Enoch, but actually written much later. [Despite this the book of Enoch was very influential in Jewish and Christian circles, with traces of it in much of the NT including the Pauline letters and even a quote from it in Jude 1:14-15].)

All that is to say that as an ancient Jew, Jesus was not concerned in the same way as we are with historical reliability. Sure, he likely considered the events described as history, but the value of the text is not in its historical reliability, but for precisely for the reason that you point out earlier: it is the word of God. More specifically it is God's word in human words.

To me this is the mystery and the beauty of inspiration. That God can use flawed humans and their language to communicate his truth in a way that we can understand. He gets down on our level so to speak.

This is one of the reasons I love the Genesis narratives (Gen 1-3). When they are read in light of their ancient Near Eastern (ANE) contexts and other creation stories that would have been circulating at the time Genesis was composed. When read against this backdrop, the intention of the author of these creation stories (and I would submit the intention of God working through this author) in Genesis becomes clear. He (or she) is making statements about who God is and his relationship to humanity. For example, when Genesis 2 is read against an ANE background we see that it is using temple imagery. Ancient temples contained gardens that were used to grow food to "feed" the gods. This was the reason for humanity's existence: to sustain the gods. However, in Genesis 2 we see that the garden (and the accompanying presence of the deity) was not made to provide food for the gods, but for God to provide for the humans. This is but a glimpse of the rich message the author is trying to convey about who God is by working in his own ancient cultural context. His main goal was not to describe, as a scientific text book how the universe came to being, but to describe who God is in relation to his creation a message that is often drowned out in the battle to prove the "historical reliability" of the bible. These stories contain immense truth, but not in the way we are conditioned to think in a post-enlightenment worldview. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, "To be sure Genesis 1-3 is legend. But it is true legend." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 3: Creation and Fall) By this he was making a statement that the truth of texts like Genesis 1-3 often transcend the mere question of historical reliability.

I am aware that was quite long winded, and forgive me if it does not make as much sense as I would like. Please do not mistake me, I love the Bible and the God it points to, but fundamentalist evangelicalism (among other things) chokes the life out of scripture by imposing restrictions on the text such as innerancy and historical reliability.