Tommy: You ask a very broad question when you’re asking about the Law, but I’ll take a stab at making it simple.

Preaching of the Law can fall under any or all of three major categories: Curb, Mirror, or Guide.

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Can someone explain some things in this essay at issuesetc.

What does he mean by preaching the Law? I’m not new to TULIP but I’m kind of new to Reformed thought in general. And I come from a legalistic background, so that phrase doesn’t sit well with me (not to mention I’ve listened to the theology of glory for about 8 years now). Other than that I agree with what he’s saying, so I was thinking that I just need it clarified.

Brian ‘Head’ Welch Leaves Korn, Citing Moral Objections To Band’s Music.

I hope he gets a chance to get a foundation before we start trotting him out as the newest poster boy for the Holy Spirit.

So this poor chap just can’t stop eating. So the authorities in his British County locked him up!

I was in a small town. I went to a big church, well, at one point it was big. It now had about 20 people. Fifty-five years ago this church was planted, it grew to 120 people, with zero debt it remains a mostly empty building.

The pastor retired, but was forced back from retirement to take over the pulpit and suffer with the church.

The service was very southern baptist with the commentary directed at my hosts. I was uneasy. Everyone sat with the people they knew, spread out like we were expecting three bus loads of people.

The church has zero debt and with it’s little income it can stay open, barely.
Should the church close it’s doors? I was asked this by my hosts. I didn’t know what to say. Abandon? Greener grass? Loyalty?

Inerrancy: I had a response but never posted it. I agreed with someone and didn’t agree with another but that’s okay.

I was at Best Buy yesterday getting ripped off on printer ink, and I saw Osteen’s book for sale. It was in the section titled “Trends” along with the weight loss and self-help books. Ha.

Dr. Gene Scott is gone. Where are the cigars? Light one up for a man who never paused to doubt his brilliance, or God’s grace. Anyone who had Merle Haggard playing in the Sunday worship service, and wasn’t afraid to use any word that needed to be used in a sermon is worth a toast. Gene Scott was one of a kind, whether it was refusing to preach till hundreds of thousands of dollars came in, or showing videos of himself with actresses, models and horses, or collecting the world’s greatest private Bible collection, this was a guy Jesus would have loved to hang out with. When I first heard him he was lecturing on the Great Pyramid, sitting in a big chair, wearing a captain’s cap and sunglasses, puffing smoke and cussing like a sailor. Nuts? Just enough to keep it fun. A former ORU professor with a real doctorate from Stanford who actually preached more grace than most Osteen Wannabes. I’ll miss him.

Hunter S. Thompson has died, killing himself this morning. He might be a little bit out there for most of the crowd here, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my favorite books, and Thompson was a brilliant writer. Let’s all have a toast to him—although beer will be fine, we don’t really need any of the dozens of substances mentioned in his literature in this bar.

Craig Blomberg- world class NT scholar from Denver- endorses the TNIV and says that in 3 out of 4 non-gender related text changes, the TNIV is more literal than the NIV.

Make that two. D.A. Carson endorses it. That’s significant to me. They also are sending me a free copy, and I got a cool screensaver. I can’t be persuaded, but I can be bribed.

Van Til the BHT’s Magic Tail Chasing Dog is recovering nicely from the Inerrancy Debate, and he thanks everyone for the food and cards. He’ll be back in circulation (no pun intended) soon. BTW- he is refusing to endorse the TNIV after it changed Philippians 3:2 to “Watch out for those ferrets, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.”

Wouldn’t it be great if I could post an N.T. Wright link, and we could discuss the SUBJECT of the link and not various objections to Wright?

So here’s a try: An excellent short introduction to the Book of Romans by N.T.W. A keeper if you are a teacher.

Tim Enloe hates his generation of Evangelicals.

A wonderfully good presentation of the uniqueness of Christian origins. The Impossible Faith: How not to start an ancient religion.

A fascinating article on what Video Game culture is turning us into. Excellent and much needed questions and answers.

Evangelicals are eager to use Constantine as an “evangelistic” tool. Of course, a “bible study” has been prepared for this purpose.

>Rejection of inerrancy is a departure from historic Christianity’s view of Scripture.

OK. That brush is broad enough to sweep this conversation off the blog. I’ve had enough of myself and everyone else. Eric’s post was excellent, I’ve said all I have to say, and the place is starting to feel like it did a month ago. So…it’s time.

Inerrancy is a BHT Dead Horse.

Don’t make me have to close off comment threads please. Thanks to all who participated.

I attempted to say something like this yesterday at IM, but Eric’s post makes it clearer.

What is the practical difference- for salvation and the Christian life- between these two statements:

1) “God produced an inerrant Bible.”

2) “The scriptures say exactly what God wanted them to say.”

I absolutely affirm #2, as do all the confessions I know of.

Remember this one from Capon:

“People object to the idea that the Bible is the Word of God just because it is full of oddities, contradictions, and dunderheadedness. Admittedly, there have been theologians who tried to maintain that God literally wrote it all himself – or dictated it to infallible secretaries – and that all the riddles of Scripture were put in just to keep our faith on its toes. Well, if you like that theory, you’re welcome to it; I happen to think it’s rather unflattering to God. What seems more reasonable to me is to assume that God did indeed decide to come up with a bookful of words that would be his Word, but that when he cast about for some word-producing agents, he found that all he had arranged for in his infinite wisdom were human authors. Accordingly, he did whatever he did to inspire the several writers of Scripture and settled for what he got – or, better said, perhaps, he got what he wanted, plus a lot of other sometimes vivid writing that he took as part of the bargain: inflated census figures, rhapsodic reporting of sleazy royal carryings-on, and a fair amount of just plain wrong geography.

Jeff Lee: I heard a bit on NPR about covenant marriage, and I wasn’t impressed. While the concept of taking marriage more seriously sounds like a good one, the practice of the Arkansas law seems to be to make exiting a marriage more difficult, and as Matthew points out, that’s the wrong end of things on which to focus.

I’d rather marriage was more difficult to enter, as that might have more of an effect on how often marriage is exited. Divorce waiting periods and so on seem like a waste of time to me. Mandated pre-marital counseling might be worthwhile, but then most churches I know about require pre-marital counseling anyway, if one wants to be married in a church.

Eric Rodgers: As several people have noted in comments, your statements about God’ inspiration of Scripture seem right-on to me, and not at all in conflict with the traditional Calvinist view of God’s sovereignty. I have no doubt whatsoever that God caused to be written—and preserved all this time—exactly what He wanted written and preserved. I simply dispute that one currently-popular view of God’s Word is the correct one.

Consider it along Lutheran lines: Luther himself said at one point¹ that there is a difference between God’s revealed will in Scripture and His hidden will. As an example, he said that God doesn’t will the death of a sinner (in His Word) while clearly God does will the death of a sinner (in His mysterious “hidden” will).

In other words, the dispute between those who believe in single predestination and those who believe in double predestination seems to hang largely on the first group being willing to go no further than Scripture does, while the second group clings to what they see as the logical conclusion that must follow and don’t understand why the first group won’t take that extra step.

I’m perfectly willing to go as far as Scripture does about the authority of Scripture, but not so excited about going any further, especially having seen the pain and hurt caused by people doing just that.

I believe that we have exactly the Bible God has ordained for us to have, but I don’t see any evidence that it should be considered as authoritative on issues on which it does not claim authority.

¹ Though the translation of Bondage Of The Will I read worded things differently, an online edition translates the paragraph I was remembering this way:

But the Diatribe is deceived by its own ignorance, in not making a distinction between GOD PREACHED and GOD HIDDEN: that is, between the word of God and God Himself. God does many things which He does not make known unto us in His word: He also wills many things which He does not in His word make known unto us that He wills. Thus, He does not ‘will the death of a sinner,’ that is, in His word; but He wills it by that will inscrutable. But in the present case, we are to consider His word only, and to leave that will inscrutable; seeing that, it is by His word, and not by that will inscrutable, that we are to be guided; for who can direct himself according to a will inscrutable and incomprehensible? It is enough to know only, that there is in God a certain will inscrutable: but what, why, and how far that will wills, it is not lawful to inquire, to wish to know, to be concerned about, or to reach unto – it is only to be feared and adored!

I’ve kept my hands clean in the inerrancy discussion for long enough, and after this post, I intend to avoid it the way I have been for the last week or so.

I find it very interesting that most of you will accept a Calvinist view of God’s agency concerning human events like sin and natural disasters like tsunamis, but then you almost seem to make a point to avoid it when it comes to the writing of scripture, as though the precise wording of scripture were out of God’s control.

Let me elaborate using a few examples I can think of right off the top of my head…

When you look at Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest over Jerusalem, most of you will say that he was the one who conquered the city, and yet God did it too. Furthermore, God is responsible for Jerusalem’s fall, not just in a distant way but intimately. When Nebuchadnezzar struck, the hand of God struck as well. However, Nebuchadnezzar was held responsible and even punished for his part in the destruction of Jerusalem.

Judas betrayed Jesus, and Pilate condemned him. No doubt these acts were sinful, but John 13:21-30 would seem to indicate that Jesus chose his betrayer. Acts 4:23-31 says that Herod and Pilate were predestined to do these things. God is 100% “responsible” for what happened to His Son. And yet, these men, who were agents of God, are all 100% held responsible for their own sins in this matter.

You say that men wrote down God’s word as God “inspired” them to do. Why do you not take into account God’s intimate agency in the writing of scriptures? Is it not that hard to believe that God could “breathe” his words (2 Timothy 3:16-17) as He intended them to be written? Does that preclude man’s responsibility or agency in the writing of scriptures? Not remotely!

This is pretty much just a half-formed thought, but I think it’s one that deserves attention. I normally agree with what most of you write, but on this issue, I have to take exception. Thank you for the great discussion. Maybe before long, I’ll weigh in more heavily on the creation debate, but not right now.

Pax!

I almost responded to Jeff in the comments but quickly realized that I had more to say than just a quick comment. I live in the county with the highest divorce rate in Arkansas. I see people every week in the pews whose marriages are screwed up. I would use stonger language to communicate how bad these marriages are, but you get the picture. Most of them do not last. We see people in and out of our offices all the time with marriage problems. My Sr. Pastor preached about marriage a while back and said that by the time folks come to us, it’s too late. Folks wait until it’s too late to come in and they only come to see us so that they can tell people that they at least made an effort. It’s too little too late.

As I’m sure most of you know, marriage is hard. I read Michael’s essay Running Wounded every so often just to remind myself that not only is marriage hard, but that I’m probably the reason it is so hard. I make my marriage harder than it should be. About 15 months after we married, Heather and I went to see a therapist. I know people were talking about us, wondering if we were about to get divorced. We weren’t, but I think we were probably heading down that road. We went to therapy, talked some things out and as a result our marriage was stronger than it ever was. We got in before it was too late but many couples don’t.

I am not in favor of the government making decisions about marriage, but at the same time I know that it sees the benefit of people staying together, the lower crime rates for children with two parents and all that. It benefits society and the government to help maintain happy and productive married people. The covenant marriage act says that two married people can take on an additional state requirement in their marriage. One is that if a couple wants to get a divorce they must go through marriage counseling. The other is that there is a shorter list of reasons that a couple may use for getting a divorce. “Irreconcilable differences” isn’t going to hold up for the covenant marriage. I like the idea of covenant marriage for these reasons. I think it forces people to take responsibility for their own faults and how they contribute to the problem within the marriage. Even if they do wind up getting divorced, one of the two may find healing through the counseling process for a particular problem in his or her life.

Is anybody here familiar with covenant marriage? I came across it last week and wondered if it is really necessary. I also thought it was interesting that it would be on the State of Arkansas’ website.

I know this is a backlash of no-fault divorce laws but in my way of thinking this is similar to the inerrancy discussion. The Bible must be “protected” by inerrancy. Now marriages must be protected by a covenant marriage. Doesn’t this lead to a trivialization of “regular” marriages (viewed as marriage-lite)? Is this the next big wave for evangelicals ala Promise Keepers, True Love Waits, etc.?

I realize divorce rates argue otherwise, but isn’t marriage a covenant anyway?

Noel confesses to an addiction.

Steve Beard summarizes the faith portraits in Because of Winn Dixie.

Mattthew: Your crusade is starting to get through. The ESV on-line site has a new set of options to delete all the verse numbers, section headings, etc.

Galatians 5:2-11 2 Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. 3 I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. 4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. 5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. ...11 But if I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed.

I was really struck yesterday with how relevant this passage is to the danger posed by adding anything to the simplicity of the Gospel (which is, after all, the message the Bible is bringing us.) Yes, Paul is discussing how faith in Jesus replaces Jewish ritual as the characteristic mark of God’s people, but he is also warning that any concession to matters extraneous to the person/work of Jesus renders the Gospel null.

This isn’t the way most evangelicals look at it. They see emphasizing issues like inerrancy or election or obedience to be necessary ingredients in the Gospel itself. I’d counsel caution on that one. Vital connections and essential connections are two different things.

Paul even says that we are faced with the possibility of “falling” from grace, and may be making the cross of no real effect by emphasizing something outside of the cross as essential.

Matthew was probably the worst at mis-quoting the O.T., from what I’ve seen so far. That dude was just doing word-association at points, really strange. Definitely not in line with modern scholastic standards!

I read Ed’s comment/post/email/whatever, and I hurt. I see several of my friends there, and parts of myself. While clearly I don’t agree with him on some of the specifics of things (most, though!), I really feel that modern Christianity, especially, has let him down.

You’re right, iMonk, it is what we’ve added to Jesus Christ that drives people away. When it becomes not enough that we believe in Jesus Christ crucified, and that God raised Him from the dead, but that we must also believe in X, Y, and Z, who can possibly keep up? Handling objections to the person of Jesus Christ is easy—as God, He breaks the rules, which places Him conveniently outside the realm of falsifiability. But the rest? Argh! People make my kidneys hurt!

Anyway, it’s convenient for me to realize that my own set of Christian beliefs happen to not encounter a lot of the problems that Ed listed, but I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there on the other side of things who would be just as upset with my pet doctrines. I pray that I am always able to keep separate that which I know from that which I believe, and I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is more important.

Thanks to Ed for the note. You’re not alone!

Ed Babinski was kind enough to write a great comment, and I am going to post it here. NOT for argumentation, but constructive comments are welcome.

Thanks for replying, Ed. More »« Less

Here is the guy who ruined me. Actually, the single best book on Biblical Interpretation I ever read as a seminarian. Thank God I found it. If anyone wants to get past the literalism thing with Genesis, I recommend Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Genesis. Read the reviews.

Hyers on Biblical and Scientific Maps
Hyers: What Genesis is all about.
The Narrative Form of Genesis 1
Dinosaur Religion: In Interpreting and Misinterpreting Biblical Texts

Sample:

It may surely be said that the Genesis accounts of creation are not in conflict with scientific and historical knowledge. Yet this is not because they can be shown to be in conformity with this knowledge, but precisely because they have little to do with it. They belong to a different literary genre, type of knowledge, and kind of concern. To take an example from poetry, which is considerably closer to the character of the creation materials than scientific or historical prose: a poetic treatment of an autumn sunset is neither scientifically true nor untrue. It needs no harmonization with scientific theories, and requires no scientific confirmation. It is unrelated to that sort of truth; and it uses language in ways that are peculiar to itself.

For someone to endeavor to defend the integrity and worth of a particular poem by attempting to argue that its “assertions” were “scientifically true,” and that it was reducible to a “factual presentation of simple historical truths—in the original autograph copy-would be no defense at all. It would be a confusion of categories, like trying to defend a client being sued for divorce by introducing the evidence in a traffic court! Any defense of a poem based on such confusions, and any attack on other forms of literature which do not 11 agree” with the poem, no matter how well-meaning and heroic, would be the greatest possible disservice to the poem, the spirit of the words, the intentions of the poet, and poetry in general. In its anxiety to protect the poem from unappreciative critics, it would succeed in opening up the poem to even greater criticism and misunderstanding.

Similarly, a “literal” interpretation of the Genesis accounts is inappropriate, misleading and unworkable. It presupposes and insists upon a kind of literature and intention that is not there. In so doing it misses the symbolic richness and spiritual power of what is there. And it subjects the biblical materials, and the theology of creation, to a completely pointless and futile controversy. The first questions in interpreting any part of Scripture are always, what kind of literature is one dealing with, and what issues are being addressed? One cannot merely assume from the superficial look of the material, as it appears to modern eyes, that the material is of the same order as what we might call history or science. One must first provide strong evidence from within the passage itself, and from a careful study of the theological and cultural context of the passage, as to the specific literary form and religious concern involved. When one does this, the literalist assumptions turn out to be far afield, and to have been brought to the passage as a precondition for its acceptance.

Thanks to Matt Crash for a complimentary post. Much appreciated.

Those of you who know anything about OBI, will get the importance of the following sentence: The pastor resigned.

I never thought this would happen, and it puts all kinds of interesting challenges/opportunities at our door, maybe at my door. It’s a matter worthy of prayer. Decisions will be made.

More than anything, I want my little Presby church to be full. That’s a matter of prayer, too. It would make everything much easier.

On a lesser note, at least one staff member is upset at the talent show, specically one part. I may have to answer to the boss for some of what went on with two groups of African girls doing “interpretative movements” to music. “Dancing” is against the rules, but I allowed it in this talent show. If I get called on the carpet, I will need a mighty wave of good will to deal with it. (Oh…also, apparently a rapper grapped his crotch, too. More trouble.) I have some beliefs that I am not going to cave on, even if it costs me in some silly way.

It was good to have Josh S. in the Chat room tonight.

Read Dave’s second story in this post. I’m hurtin’.

Every time I read a Capon illustration on scripture, I just have to laugh with delight. Thank God for Robert Capon. That’s all I can say. When I read these sourpusses and intellectual bullies, I just thank God for Robert Capon.

Accepting the Bible as inspired is a bit like receiving an entire collection of one’s grandfather’s writings. Suppose, for example, that on opening such a treasure, I found it to contain everything my grandfather ever wrote: letters, poems, recipes, essays, short stories, diaries, family histories. And suppose further that I was fully convinced not only that they were authentically his but that he had sent them for the express purpose of providing me with everything he wanted me to know both about himself and about our relationship. Far from putting an end to my study of his words, those convictions would be the very thing that started me wrestling with them in earnest.

And not just to be able to spout his words or to confirm what I already thought. Indeed, I would be well advised to approach them with as open a mind as possible, always ready to sit loose to what I had decided about him and simply listen to him. It should be only after long study and repeated readings that I would dare to conclude what any particular passage meant, let alone what the entire thrust of his writing was. With such a wildly various collection, there would always be a temptation to let my own sense of what he was up to get in the way of what he himself really had in mind. I might, for example, decide that, while his brief aphorisms lay close to the heart of the man, his longer stories had little to teach me about him. That would be a mistake; all that this conclusion would actually show was that I had a liking for agreeable bits of information served up on small plates but balked at the labor of trying to take his meaning when he expressed himself by putting on a feast of strange fictions. Or I might decide that only his serious metaphysical writings, and not his strictures on the proper way to make gravy, truly revealed the man. In the case of this particular grandfather, that would be an even bigger mistake: if there was ever a place where he disclosed himself as the lover of creation he really was, it was in the kitchen. Without a willingness to wade through his recipes, a reader would miss a good half of his charm.- From somewhere in the parables book.

If you want to see someone who was driven right out of the faith- entirely out- by banking on YEC, visit Ed Babinski. DON’T go there if you don’t want to see this sort of thing. It fires me up. I like my unbelief straight. It’s very clarifying that God isn’t handing us a plate of warmed over human wisdom and tasty facts. He’s blowing up the foundations and invading the world. Once you have incarnation, everything else is called off. YEC kept Ed from grasping that. I’d love to meet him.

IF you read it, go to this post. Notice that once the foundation was dug in YEC, it couldn’t be rescued by the route I’ve gone. And what destroyed the guy? Thomas Paine! And a Jewish writer who said the NT Christians selected the OT passages on purpose. Well DUH! In another place, he says that since Jesus was wrong on the end of the world, he’s not the Son of God. Done in by Schweitzer! (Calvinism is in the mix here, as is a tendency to go from one thing to another, but this is the great failure of the church: YEC ANSWERS don’t always work for SMART PEOPLE. But if you say they do work, wait till they find out you didn’t do your homework.)

This is what happens, and it’s why you better either shelter/indoctrinate your children past the point of no return or deal with it. This will could your daughter’s biology teacher if you don’t keep her in Christian schools straight through. When she finally hears this story, prepare for intellectual earthquake.

If you missed this comment by manasclerk, you missed one of the real gems of this discussion. What a keeper.

This morning, a good brother said that some of the things on my web site made him feel like he was reading the Jesus Seminar. ....

[Ed: Post Removed. We’ve had a peaceful and positive blog lately, and I don’t want to start a fight. So Tom’s comment stands, but the post is gone.]

care to throw Ecclesiastes 9:5,6 in the inerrancy-o-matic and see what comes out?

Ecc 9:5 For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.
Ecc 9:6 Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun.

Tommy, thanks for the update. You said that they want to provide some “better options” in Sunday School. Does that mean “better options” than catechesis, or “better options” for those who want more than “how to” classes? Also, are they going to address the concerns of Annie’s Bible study?

I’m familiar with the exchanged life teaching from two sources. One was from a dear friend of mine from college days when we attended FBC Atlanta. Stanley taught a series on grace that dovetailed with other material that my friend was reading (Nee, I think; perhaps others as well). He was an enthusiastic proponent of this teaching and, for a time, I found it liberating from much that I had experienced in legalistic circles. The second source was a book called Alive for the First Time by David Needham.

In some ways, the debunking has already been done by others (Luther comes to mind). But you’re right that more needs to be said. Exchanged life teaching is very attractive for its emphasis on grace and freedom from the law. They get a lot of mileage out of Galatians and Romans 6-8. But it does veer off into antinomianism and “you don’t have to sin” declarations. How does it stack up against the historical teaching of the Church? Not very well. Here’s a quote from Needham’s book:

“No matter how heartfelt and beautiful some of our Christian traditions are, we dare not allow them to alter God’s New Covenant truth. Consider the centuries old “General Confession” from the Common Book of Prayer, spoken daily, perhaps by millions around the world: [He quotes the whole “we have erred and strayed from thy ways” prayer.] ...
‘Yes’, we all say, ‘but I do fail so often!’ But why? Has our God ordained that his resources for godliness will always be just beyond our reach? Did he give us a dream to treasure, knowing full well it was only a dream? Is this the teaching of the epistles?
No matter how discouraged we may be as to the sins in our own lives, once and for all you and I must reject the idea that sin is to be accepted as the unavoidable norm. ...” [pp 129-30]

To which I now thankfully respond, shudder.

I keep trying to explain myself. My views on the Bible must be worse than inerrancy, as I have to write them over and over, and the more they are read the worse they are understood.

P.S. The person who says the historical approach of every Biblical book is NECESSARILY the same OR the Bible is worthless, is either ignorant or blatantly pursuing an agenda regardless of the facts. To say that the author of Genesis 1, and the author of the “we” passages in Acts and the authors of the Gospels were taking the identical same literary approach to telling history is WHACKED OUT. Put away your books and go take a long walk.

Yes! Creation happened. Luke was in the water with Paul at the shipwreck. Jesus was tempted by Satan. But to say that all these REAL events must be communicated to us in identical literary forms is CRAZY.

My other posts on this subject on the BHT.

I met with a pastor Friday about my concerns with the church. I didn’t rant, affirmed that I had no personal problems with anyone, etc. The meeting went well.

The church sees the need to try to ensure that everyone holds to proper doctrine, but doesn’t want everyone to be forced into some sort of catechesis. The want to provide some better options in Sunday School classes and that sort of thing. I won’t bore you with all the details.

My questions were basically is there a place for my wife and I? Answer: yes. Are there others in the church and especially people on staff that have the same doctrinal concerns that we do? Answer: yes.

Then I brought up Annie’s bible study. It has gotten worse since I posted earlier on it. The study teaches a 2-step process in sanctification, a “second blessing” or entering into the “deeper life.” Very similar to the Pentecostal view of the baptism of the Holy Spirit occuring sometime after conversion. She even says that you emerge from this experience with “new internal equipment” and says a little Jesus lives inside you.

I was thankful that the pastor I met with was familiar with Exchanged-Life teachings and disagreed with it. In fact, another church in town had been trying to get our pastors to let them come and teach it at our church, and our church turned them down. So we have taken the issue to 2 pastors and I called the chairman of our elder board to let him know about the situation. With our other questions about the church basically answered, this is all we are waiting on.

I haven’t found much on the web debunking this Exchanged-Life stuff. In fact, if you do a google search my earlier post on the subject here at the BHT comes up first. So I am going to work on a paper to at least provide something. If anyone has any good links or material that you think would help, shoot me an email.

David Wayne: I want to print two comments from the IM post on inerrancy.

it is my understanding that a movement occurred in the ‘70’s to view scripture through a process called “higher criticism.” Using this liberal view of scripture, events such as the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ were considered to be something other than literal truth. The “inerrancy” doctrine is probably a response to that. I am not a scholar on theological history, so feel free to correct me if my facts are errant.

iMonk-
I’ll steer away from the old/new earth thing, but I’ve got a couple of nagging questions. Pardon me if you’ve addressed these elsewhere, but I haven’t read everything you’ve ever written.

Was Jesus fathered by a mortal human, or was Mary a virgin?

Did Jesus rise from the dead and ascend to Heaven, or do his bones lie (lay?) here on earth somewhere? Did we evolve from monkeys? Was there a flood that destroyed the entire human race, save for one family?

The last two questions there may be room for debate about, but it seems that with regards to the virgin birth and bodily resurrection, they must both be literally true or all of christianity becomes a big hoax.

David, I am hearing you loud and clear that affirming inerrancy can be done in a way that doesn’t cause me to remove my brain and become a member of the TBN audience, but these kinds of letters come in regularly. Let me summarize:

No inerrancy = higher criticism= Darwinian evolution= denial of the virgin birth and the resurrection.

Now let’s read this one from “Jim,” commenting on my question about Psalm 137. (I asked how it is inerrant to wish to kill babies in revenge.):

“Blessed is he who seizes and dashes your little ones against the stones. “

Some observations:

1. If you have a problem believing that this verse belongs in the bible, then you have a major problem with large portions of the Old and the New Testaments. Do we remove, or disregard, all portions of the Bible which deal with God judging entire nations, including the slaughter of children? Ultimately, which parts of the Bible are you going to keep? (I think I know which ones …)

2. If you have a problem with this verse, you ultimately have a problem with God Himself. Even if you remove every such passage from the Word of God, you are still going to pick up tomorrow’s newspaper and discover a world in which little one’s are slaughtered – by war, by tsunamis, by famine. Unless you are positing a weak or negligent God, you will then have a problem with Him.

3. If you have a problem with this verse, I suspect you have a real problem with certain orthodox concepts such as a literal hell, a concept plainly taught in scripture, but which is “unpleasant” to nearly all who would contemplate it.

Are you getting my drift here? This is all over my mail. I refuse ONE WORD not used in the WCF, and this is what I hear.

Inerrancy = salvation to these people. It will be a cold day in hell before I embrace the view of scripture this guy is selling. (These people are not Jolly bloggers :-)

Clay’s band plays at the OBI Talent Show. Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day.

I could never play bass and sing at the same time. Clay does it easily. They tied for third. It was a great show and everyone had a great time.

Update: Apparently the band is called “Vote for Pedro.” I really liked “Earwax Volcano,” but it was a no go. Clay has always had a special place for “Cat in the Crosshairs.”

I hope everyone read Michael’s timely post featuring extensive quotations from the _______ Catechism. (blanked for those of you who haven’t yet taken the exam.) It got me thinking…

1. Wisdom. They have a lot. We could stand to be more teachable.
2. One source of their wisdom is experience. As the question of origins/creation is to us, so the question of astronomy was to them in the 15th-17th centuries. They put a lot of weight on Joshua 10 and Psalm 93:1 to hold the line against the heliocentric theory.
3. They haven’t repeated their hermeneutical errors (and the ethical/spiritual errors that derived from them) on the current question.
4. I shouldn’t be saying ‘they’. Luther and the rest of the early reformers were just as eager to denounce the Copernican theory. Calvin said, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” Even John Wesley in the 18th century ridiculed the heliocentric thesis. Am I leaving anyone out?
5. The pattern that the interchange between scientists and believers followed back then is spooky-similar to today’s question. The first rebuttal to any evolutionary theory follows Osiander’s move: instrumentalism. “It’s just a theory or hypothesis to save the appearances.” This line of argument ends up making the believer into the skeptic: we are not permitted to trust easy inferences from observations made with our senses (e.g., speed of light, stratification processes, etc.). This is perilously close to calling God a liar. Not even real skeptics would go there.
6. Crazy hermeneutics. Read Galileo’s letter to Grand Duchess Christina.
7. It might just be the case that just as we shouldn’t read too much into Joshua 10 and Psalm 93:1, so we shouldn’t read too much into Genesis 1-3. Let the texts be what they are. If they read realistically, fine.

If we tremble and fall prostrate as we hear the gospel, we marvel at God’s grace: “I never would have imagined that you would do such a thing for one such as me.” Should we be surprised that God will continue to surprise us as we delve into the wonder of His creation? “I always knew that you created the heavens and earth, my Lord, and even though there’s so much more to learn, I never would have guessed how You did it.”

Matthew Henry John Bartlett. An excellent blog.

If I have to believe this to be a good evangelical Christian.....I will GLADLY stand up and say No thanks. I’ll take New Age Wacko for $200, Alex. Anything but this. I prefer the resident alien theory in Scientology. (Here’s another helping.)

Stephen Myers site has lots of common sense science and Bible information. When I read it, I actually feel normal.

I don’t accept all of this material, but reading Scientific American’s “15 Answers to Creationists” should be required for anyone who only reads creationist versions of what scientists say.

Here is the Creationist response to the same article.

Guess Who has a fantastic take on the inspriation of scripture and the interpretation of Genesis?

Read all of this please. Read it and then be embarassed who says it.

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What it doesn’t mean.

Rejecting inerrancy does not mean rejecting the authority of the bible.

Rejecting inerrancy does not mean ignoring God’s providence in giving us the Bible we have today.

Rejecting inerrancy does not mean rejecting the truth of the main point and purpose of scripture.

Rejecting inerrancy does not mean we are blind to the beauty of its construction, its longevity, or its timeless message.

What rejecting inerrancy means.

Rejecting inerrancy means I don’t have to spend time reconciling inaccurate geneologies, chronologies, or census.

Rejecting inerrancy means I don’t have to become a scientific and technlological luddite to read it and believe it.

Rejecting inerrancy means I can read the bible in the way it was intended, rather than the way people think I should read it.

Rejecting inerrancy means I don’t have to memorize vast lumps of pseudoscience and try to explain dinosaurs on the ark.

Rejecting inerrancy means I don’t have to treat every verse as a defendable proposition.

Rejecting inerrancy means I don’t have to explain my own personal definition of inerrancy.

Tommy:

Paul was Jew who believed in Jewish things, like a young earth. He taught the things he knew. But he was only concerned with breaking down pagan religious ideals insofar as they conflicted with the central truths of God- i.e. a sovereign rather than a capricious, human-like God, and one God instead of many.

Paul’s preaching did not undo the distinction between Jew and Gentile. Jesus Christ made the declaration, and Paul carried the news to both parties.

“To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law.”

This Paul would be mighty surprised at your statement “I’m not sure how we can come to the world merely as Gentiles with such a heavily Jewish background to depend on for our doctrines”.

When I first wrote my essay on Why I Am Not A Young Earth Creationist, this brother wrote me, and introduced me to his web site. He’s doing a good work with his Bible and Science web site. This page contains his story of how he came over to “the dark side” of rejecting YEC. He also has a debate with Kent Hovind on here. I recommend it all the time. It has lots of science news and many helpful things for those of us who aren’t going to be YECs.

I intended not to respond, but I must. I will aim this obliquely towards Eric. He is a Lutheran seminarian and therefore he may actually preside at my heresy trial someday. Now is as good a time as any to make my case. (SENSE OF HUMOR ALERT!)

Eric, I am overjoyed that a smart, sincere, and caring intellectual person is studying for the ministry in my own denomination. And thank you for the sympathy regarding my wife. I appreciate it. But my audience is vast; the only common thread between them is that they are wrong about a young earth. If you read something that you feel does not apply to you, simply ignore it.

Falsehood does not operate in an insulated fashion, and zeal for something true does not damage people, whether they are child or adult. I speak of this stridently because my personal circumstances are bloody and raw. Even if some agree with me on the falsehood of a young earth, they will disagree with me about the magnitude of the resulting evangelical problem. So be it. We like to blame things on the fundamentalists, but we all have a fundament.

Here are some facts about the Gentiles to whom Paul took the gospel.

1) they believed in creation myths which varied wildly from the Jews’
2) they did not hold the Jewish scriptures in any regard, much less low regard
3) they required no scriptural genealogy lessons before accepting Christ
4) after conversion, they spread the church to every corner of the earth

Evangelicals today cling to our concept of the bible because we think ourselves to be Jews, not Gentiles. Rather than approach the God of the universe as impoverished Gentiles, we face him triumphantly with our bibles stuck on the tip of our pikes, raised into the air. Israel had their fathers, we have our bibles.

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Matthew 18:15-20 (TNIV) I’ve been sent this verse so often in the mail lately, this interested me.

If a brother or sister sins, go and point out the fault, just between the two of you alone. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they refuse to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

Gender specific singulars are an endangered species in this translation.

Here’s the ESV.

15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

AP Reporter: What are your notions of heaven and hell, eternal damnation vs. eternal bliss? Keanu Reeves: Well, I hope I get the bliss. And I know I’m going to have to work for it. But I’ve got to say, really, I have no kind of, can I say “secular religiosity”? ... I don’t have a denominational sight. I think, like in the stories that we tell, there is an aspect of the living life informing where we go. A transfiguration, there must be. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, and energy flows. It must be in a direction, with some kind of internal, emotive, spiritual direction. It must have some effect somewhere. ... I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

(Not inerrant)

We’ve had some discussions of the Patriarchy Movement in the BHT. Patriarchy.org takes on this movement with some good questions and information.

Mere Comments reviews Constantine.

I have some passages whose “inerrancy” I am concerned about, despite Bill’s surrender on the topic.

Psalm 137. Actually, Psalm 137:8. No difference between that and John 3:16?

The whole book of Job. You hear Job’s ranting complaints that God doesn’t know how to run his universe, mixed in with some good things about his mediator that he believes will one day vindicate him. Then you have the friends. Chapters of bad theology, mixed in with some things that are true about God, and a lot of moral generalities. God said they were really wrong. Elihu- the windbag. Some truth, and a lot of hot air.

How is every sentence in Job inerrant? How does inerrancy work in a book that is…well, frankly, full of error? (Let me guess….it will be inerrant teaching, which is just about what I believe if you limit it to Christ and the Gospel, and not including science, etc.)

I’m sure I’ll get a post telling me about inerrant verses that contain errors. Or something that is obvious to anyone who will just read their Bible and pray about it.

I’m more of the view that inspiration is a mystery that allows God’s word to come through a lot of human words and voices. The human voice- with all its errors- doesn’t erase the divine Word and Gospel. They come to us together.

An open note to inerrantists. You win. I’m convinced. The Bible is inerrant. VanTil has spoken.

Just to make sure I’m in the club, let me list everything that has to occur for the bible to be inerrant.

1. God inspired men to write down what He wanted to say.
2. The men wrote it down perfectly.
3. What they wrote down was preserved perfectly until it could be copied.
4. Over several centuries, whenever it was copied, it was copied perfectly. Scribes never added anything, deleted anything, or made any copying errors.
5. When it came time to canonize the books of the bible, the council that did so took the perfect copies and decided, perfectly, which ones to include and which ones to exclude. They didn’t miss any, and didn’t include any which shouldn’t be there.
6. When languages and cultures change, as they often annoyingly do, people were enlisted to translate the sciptures into different languages. These people did so perfectly. They had perfect understanding of dead languages of dead cultures. They knew the context of the books, the idioms of the culture, everything that would go into making a perfect translation.
7. When the perfect translations were finished, they were printed and bound, perfectly.

And so, millenia later, when that shiny new KJV, NKJV, NASB, or ESV drops into your hot little hands, you can be assured that what you are holding is without errors. In any way. At all.

Have I gotten it right? Have I missed anything?

Oh wait, I almost forgot: Those of us who believe in inerrancy must also have the ability to interpret what we read, perfectly.

I’ve had some interesting comments on my Osteentatious post. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or just shake my head. I’m getting the pearls ready…

This is the nonsense evangelicalism teaches.

If it doesn’t make me famous, I don’t want to do it. The New American mindset. Insightful. Also has no bearing on inerrancy.

>...Most of them are quite silly.- Tim Challies describing my reasons for not using the word “inerrancy” to describe my view of the Bible. He promises to return and finish me off in a few days :-) After “THE” Dane called my writing “drivel,” and recent commenters at IM have said I am to be “pitied” for not believing the Bible is what God said (which is a lie,) I really can’t wait to see what is coming next.

I need to say something. Read at your own risk. It isn’t very churchy. More »« Less

I will open this to comments, so that people may express themselves, but will respond to none.

Most of the godliest Christians I have known and loved dearly, like the elders I grew up around, believed in a young earth. Yet, I say that belief in a young earth is evil. Why? Because the incredible senses and mental powers which God gave us clearly indicate that the earth is old. To claim otherwise is to claim that you cannot trust the mind He bequeathed unto you.

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Understanding 133t5p33k for the older generation. Now you can understand what your kids (or your angry young Lutheran friends) are writing.

Remember, if you have to ask what “pwn3d” means, then you already are. ;)

I’ve had this story since Monday, but I didn’t want to post it while the trauma was fresh. We’re laughing about it now, so I think I can safely share this with the world. Stop whatever you are doing and read this tale. Here’s a picture of the human condition that will make you smile and cry at the same time. This may be one of the most bizarre events to every happen in our marriage. Preachers: Feel free to borrow this one. It is 100% true.

It’s the Thursday before Valentine’s Day. We always keep it modest, but we don’t overlook the day. I am in town, and I make my Valentine’s purchases: A funny card, a box of candy, and a Key Lime pie from IGA. Denise loves anything lime, and we’ve only had this delicious dessert a couple of times in our lives.

It’s been cold, so I put the pie in the trunk of the car. Saturday, I put it in the refrigerator, but safely down at the very bottom, on top of some boxed items that have been there for months. We don’t clean out the bottom of the fridge too often, so the pie was safe.

Valentine’s Day arrives. We exchange our cards and gifts, and I tell Denise there is one more surprise for later. The day turns out to be busy, and we are forced to eat at the school cafeteria because of time commitments that evening. The food was horrendous. I was very unhappy, but I knew the pie was at home, and we could salvage some of the day by enjoying it while we watched “CSI: Miami,” one of our favorite shows.

The time arrives. I say I have a surprise and I go to the fridge, and squat down to reach in and retrieve the pie from it’s hiding place. Denise has followed me over to the kitchen, and is standing over me. I keep feeling…and feeling. No pie. I feel some more. No pie. I look up at Denise. She has her mouth covered, and a look of absolute horror on her face. I’ll now let her tell the story from a letter she sent my mom this morning.)

Sunday afternoon I was digging around in the refrigerator and I found (in one of my classic hiding places, wrapped in a plastic bag—one of my classic tricks) a whole pie. I immediately knew what it was, and my heart sank. I recalled that at our last church potluck, Scott—-the lawyer who is an amazing cook—sent us home with a whole pie. I remembered putting it down there so it wouldn’t get eaten that night and we could save it for the next night. “Oh my goodness!” I thought. “I’ve let that wonderful pie sit there for almost two months. Now I’ve got to throw it away!” I nearly cried. I resolved to not tell Michael or Clay about it; it would be way too embarrassing…plus they’d be heartbroken that they never got to eat the pie! But I took it, still wrapped in the plastic bag, to the trash compound and tossed it into the truck, cursing my stupidity and my terrible memory and hating myself all the way.

Well, Monday morning Michael gave me a big box of Valentine’s candy and a cute card. We almost always eat supper at home, but that night I had a skit practice at 6:00 and Michael had a meeting after that, so we ate in the dining hall. It wasn’t a very good meal, and Michael was quite disappointed that we had to eat a yucky supper in the dining hall for Valentine’s Day. But while we were eating he said maybe the holiday wouldn’t be a total washout because he still had one more surprise for me at home.

When he finally got back from his meeting around 8:30, he went straight to the refrigerator with a smile on his face. He began digging. He looked up, worried. “What are you looking for?” I asked, and in the same instant I was struck with absolute horror. I knew. When he saw the look on my face, HE knew. I didn’t even have to say anything. “You threw it away? You threw away my pie?!” he cried. So I had to tell him the whole, awful tale. I wanted to crawl in a hole and never, ever come out. You can’t even imagine the feeling. I was depressed all evening, and still felt rotten the next day…though I did make a pie Tuesday morning so we’d at least have some kind of treat that night.

Denise was really upset. I spent the rest of the evening telling her everything was OK. It’s hard to cheer up a wife in this condition, but I tried. Honestly, I thought about what a parable it was of my life, but how I had hurt Denise intentionally so many times, and she was gracious to me. She didn’t smile again till the next day, but the dessert she made on Tuesday was great, and now we can laugh.

This is marriage. This is love. This is the human race. This is getting older!!! Enjoy the story. It’s going in the “Spencer Hall of Fame.”

This is completely off of any topic we’ve had going yet, but I just wanted to let y’all know that I just put up three posts on my Live Journal about C.S. Lewis’ writings based on an ongoing correspondence I’ve had with his stepson, Douglas Gresham. I decided to post our Q&A on my personal blog for everyone else’s benefit.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Enjoy!

Great post by Bill Wallo on a Christian view of art. Actually, about the best post I’ve read on how evangelicals think/don’t think/think wrongly about art. An must-read if you are artsy fartsy.

I have almost sent the “F-word” post to some guy called “The Dane” twice today, but I just can’t see myself going as low as a common rapper, so I’ve held back. But lo, the sin croucheth at the door and desires to have me. The jury is still out.

See, it was him taunting me as an English teacher that pushed my button. And that pushed my button because people keep talking to me about my view of scripture with sentences like this: “If you don’t believe in a literal view of Genesis 1-11, then you just think it’s an allegory.” Sound of breaking chair

Let’s visit the dictionary of literary terms: Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. Example: Fairie Queen, Spenser; Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan; Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Please note students, that allegory is not simply a metaphor. (“I taught Israel how to walk.”) No, it is an extended metaphor, usually a narrative, where multiple elements have meanings other than their most obvious meanings. In Pilgrim’s Progress, everything MEANS something else. That was in Bunyan’s mind from the beginning. The actions of the characters and the elements of the plot are determined by the goals and elements of the allegory. As one source says, “The characters in an allegory often have no individual personality, but are embodiments of moral qualities and other abstractions.”

Now scripture tells us that Adam is the head of the human race, but he’s not an allegorical character. The eating of the fruit may be a typical example of human sin, but it isn’t an allegory. The shame-filled nakedness of the couple is an aspect of human sinfulness, but it’s not an allegory. And so on.

A moderately good, but not great, example of a Biblical allegory is The parable of the soils in Mark 4. The various elements are somewhat controlled by their allegorical meanings, but it’s really more like four parables than a true allegory, because each scene is a real scene you could see every day.

Now listen class. I believe Adam and Eve, etc is a real narrative, a real story where the reader is meant to experience the story as exactly what it is. The author didn’t want me to think of something else. He wanted me to think about the characters and what they did. How it matches up with secular history, like 200,000 year old bones in Ethiopia, is of no interest to me. It’s an explanatory story, and as such it works just fine. The story shows/tells me who we are and how we got in this mess. There really is no level of allegory. There are implications..

So, those who say Genesis 1-11 is either modern journalism or allegory are, in my opinion, really badly wrong. Because they didn’t stay awake in English class.

Touchstone has excerpted a post that I believe refers to a study that was discussed on Mars Hill Audio. The Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Here’s an excerpt. Read it all. It’s excellent, and my views on inerrancy are nowhere to be found.

I suggest that the de facto religious faith of the majority of American teens is “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” God exists. God created the world. God set up some kind of moral structure. God wants me to be nice. He wants me to be pleasant, wants me to get along with people. That’s teen morality. The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good, and good people go to heaven. And nearly everyone’s good.

IOW, Joel Osteen should get that 100,000 member church and sell a lot more books. The culture has come to him.

Joel: I will read it all. Promise.

I was looking at a map of the lower 48 this morning (I love maps) and discovered that Kentucky borders on more states than any other state, seven. Colorado also borders on 7 states but its “border” with Arizona is a mere dot at the Four Corners.

There have been many good posts on the issue of inerrancy. I read Phillip’s and I hear myself talking. Weird. Right from the top he puts his finger on it: “it’s a cop-out.” Maybe a bit harsh, but I think you rightly discern that this is an ethical problem, a problem of how we deal with the Bible (and by extension, our conversations or debates over it). Debate over the meaning of ‘inerrancy’ is a never-ending task and leads to intellectual atrocities like Article 13 of the 1978 Chicago statement. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) begins with much of the traditional Protestant confessional language. Nothing seriously objectionable in my view until Article 9 at which point the wheels begin to come off. I don’t want to rehearse a list of bald assertions here, but I think it is worth asking whether the prediction in the affirmation of Article 19, a very admirable standard, has held up to the test of time and practice.

Is there a root to this problem? I think so. We get a hint from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics (1982) which explicitly adopts a naà¹?ve version of metaphysical idealism in its account of language, meaning, and truth. See especially articles 6-9, 12, 14-22, and the denials of 1, 11, and 13. I think the real issue behind this controversy is our presuppositions about communication. How do we communicate with one another? What are the limitations? What is the difference between oral and written communication? What about communication between God and man? What is communication about? Parental notification: this post has been baking for about a week now, motivated by the subjects of the Lord’s Supper and inerrancy. It is rated ‘P’ for postmodern. It is long. No, LOOOOONG. Angus, you have been warned. I have tried to give it some semblance of following a sequential train of thought, but this is postmodern philosophy we’re dealing with, so don’t get your hopes up. OK, here we go: Derrida to the rescue! More »« Less

Yikes…I live in a blue county!! (HT to Steve S)