The Inerrancy of Scripture Part 2

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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May 7, 2016

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Jory Micah and El Shaddai; Spencer Toy and CrossExamined; Sola Scriptura Continued (Part 3)

00:46: All right, there we go.
00:58: They tried to get me to wear the Britney Spears microphone again, but I successfully resisted the temptation to that worldly thing.
01:05: But it makes it a little bit difficult because if you're holding this and trying to do mouse things on a track pad, it's a little bit of a challenge.
01:16: Good to see all of you here this morning. I can't really see you because the light's coming from that direction, so you all can stick your tongues out at me, do things like that.
01:25: I really wouldn't notice it, except for the people over on the side. I would be able to see you. It's good to have all of you here on a
01:32: Saturday morning. I know there's a lot of things you could be doing. It's a beautiful day. You could be out running and hiking and biking.
01:39: If I were at home, that's what I'd be doing. Probably wouldn't be at a conference, that's for sure.
01:45: But it is good to be with you this morning. If you were not here last evening,
01:50: I apologize because last evening was sort of the introduction to where we are this morning.
01:57: We have a lot of topics to cover. If you've looked at the subject list, there's a lot of things to cover today.
02:05: So we can't get into everything as in -depth as maybe I would like, but hopefully this will be a beginning.
02:12: I do have a small book called Scripture Alone that does have chapters on a lot of these issues.
02:17: For example, we won't have time today to even talk about the issue of the canon of Scripture.
02:23: Why do we have the books in the Bible that we have? Why don't we have the Gospel of Thomas? That's a whole other area of discussion.
02:32: There are excellent works out there. I would highly recommend taking a look at at least the brief presentation that I make on that subject in Scripture Alone.
02:42: I highly recommend the books of Dr. Michael Kruger to you on that particular subject.
02:48: He has a blog called Canon Fodder, C -A -N -O -N, not C -A -N -N -O -N.
02:54: There is a difference between the two. But those are just some of the areas that we won't be able to really touch upon because of the time limits upon us.
03:05: What I wanted to do very quickly at the beginning, as I mentioned last evening, was to sort of just run through the major affirmations of the
03:12: Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, and then I want to try to sneak in, if we have the time, looking at a couple of texts that are frequently raised in regards to alleged contradiction in the
03:25: Bible, just to give you somewhat of an illustration of how we would deal with these issues, how we would respond to these things, and some of the important things that we need to do in rightly handling the text of Scripture itself.
03:39: So I'm just going to try to run through these very quickly. Unfortunately, my system is projecting two different screens, so I'm going to have to look at them with you and turn away from you in the process.
03:48: I don't mean to do that. But very quickly, Article 1 of the Chicago Statement says, we affirm that the
03:54: Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God. We deny the Scriptures receive their authority from the
04:00: Church, Tradition, or any other human source. And that is a rather important affirmation, one that I've defended many times.
04:08: It really is a statement of sola scriptura, that the Scriptures have an authority that is different than any other kind of authority, because they are
04:15: God -breathed. The Church is not God -breathed. The Church is important. But the Church is the
04:20: Bride of Christ, and the Bride of Christ wants to hear the voice of Christ. Once a
04:26: Church puts itself in the position of having rulership over the Scriptures, and once a
04:31: Church says, only we can interpret the Scriptures, as Rome has done, there is no longer an ability to have an external source that can bring
04:38: Reformation to the Church. And so it's very important that we affirm sola scriptura, the fact that the
04:44: Scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith. We can have lesser rules of faith, confessions of faith, and things like that, but they are always underneath Scripture.
04:55: They are always lesser than Scripture in authority. They can never be equal to or superior to. In light of what we said last night, of what the
05:02: Scripture is, since it's God speaking, then there cannot be a higher authority than God's own speech.
05:09: And so as important as Church, tradition, or anything else might be, those things cannot be superior to the
05:16: Scriptures themselves. Article two, we affirm the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, that the authority of the
05:23: Church is subordinate to that of Scripture. We deny that Church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the
05:30: Bible, a further statement of Scriptural sufficiency, and a further statement of sola scriptura.
05:36: Let me just mention very briefly that, and we will talk about this a little bit more later on when we talk about the concept of prophets and revelation outside of Scripture, there are many people who would be identified as non -Catholics, and hence, if you only have
05:53: Catholics and Protestants, they would be allegedly called Protestants. But if your Church does not seek to specifically practice sola scriptura, if your
06:04: Church does not specifically seek to emphasize the sufficiency of Scripture as the final rule of authority and a closed canon, if your
06:14: Church basically has an appendix at the end, after the book of Revelation, where you have all sorts of people saying, thus saith the
06:23: Lord, thus saith the Lord, thus saith the Lord, so that technically the Bible keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, then you're not standing with the
06:30: Reformers. You're in a different group, and that particular group is difficult to define, and I'm certainly not going to be attempting to defend that kind of perspective.
06:41: I believe that God has given us His Word, and He gave it to us at a particular time for a particular purpose, and that He is not giving further books of Scripture after that.
06:53: God has a purpose for giving the Church what is sufficient for the
06:58: Church to exist and to function as the Church. And unless you come up with the idea that, well, there needs to be a re -founding of the
07:05: Church, or something along those lines, all this runs into a problem, and that is that God's final revelation is
07:11: Jesus Christ. And so unless you're going to say that there are certain things about Jesus Christ that He didn't tell
07:16: His Apostles and that He waits 2 ,000 years to tell His Church about, there's no reason for further Scripture, further
07:21: Revelation, anything like that at all. That's certainly been the Christian position for a very, very, very long time.
07:27: Church creeds and councils and things like that can have great authority. They can be very important. I do not downplay them, but they always must be subordinate to the
07:36: Scriptures and to the Word of God along those lines. We affirm that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God.
07:45: We deny the Bible is merely a witness to revelation or only becomes revelation in encounter or depends on the responses of men for its validity.
07:52: Let me just ask very quickly, sort of help to wake you up this morning in case Starbucks was closed on your way in.
07:58: That's a tragedy for some of you, I realize, but, oh, you don't have Starbucks. Mug and bean, sorry. It's Starbucks everywhere else in the world, but evidently they won't pay the proper bribes to get in here.
08:09: So, what? You all know that was true.
08:17: You know it. Anyway, how many of you recognize the background of this article and what it's specifically responding to?
08:27: I'd just be wondering if you feel confident you know exactly what it's being referred to, or how about a specific name of a theologian?
08:36: Yes, Karl Barth, that's exactly right. This is a statement, and I sort of resonate with this because I did my first master's degree at Fuller Seminary back in the 80s, and I sort of feel like Karl Barth was my homeboy that whole time because he was just so big at that time.
08:57: I got sick and tired of the constant citation of Karl Barth. But basically, this is an affirmation of the fact that the scripture is, in and of itself, divine revelation.
09:11: It doesn't become divine revelation when I encounter it. Barth had an odd, well,
09:18: Barth was trying to respond to the wild liberalism of Schleiermacher and others of his day. But still, it was not a thoroughly grounded or historical perspective that Barth took at this particular point.
09:31: And that's what Article 3 is all about, in case you looked this up and read it. Article 4, we affirm that God, who made mankind in His image, has used language as a means of revelation.
09:41: We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation.
09:47: We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration.
09:53: So this is just a basic affirmation over against some who would say, well, you can't call this divine revelation because God's thoughts are so much higher than ours and our language is corrupted, our language is limited.
10:06: Some languages are better than other languages as to their ability to communicate nuances of meaning.
10:13: There are some languages that have significantly deeper grammatical and syntactical capacity, vocabulary, so on and so forth, than other languages.
10:22: And so there have been those who have come up with the idea that, well, you can't really affirm this as God speaking because this would be too limiting for God, something along those lines.
10:31: This is an affirmation that God made humanity and that God is, you know, we're not saying that human language can exhaust divine meaning, but that it's sufficient for the communication of divine meaning.
10:45: And as we saw last evening, Jesus held men accountable for what the Word of God said. And so obviously on that level, it is sufficient for God's purposes and that's what's being said here.
10:56: Article 5, we affirm that God's revelation in the Holy Scriptures was progressive. We deny that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever corrects or contradicts it.
11:05: We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writing. So this touches on a number of things.
11:12: When we talk about progressive, the point is that you do not have in the book of Genesis the full revelation of everything that God is going to do, that the incarnation, for example, took place in time and history, that Old Testament revelation looked forward to New Testament fulfillment, that there are things that clearly are revealed with much more fullness in the later portions of Scripture than they are in previous portions of Scripture.
11:38: But that is not to say that the previous portions of Scripture were wrong and had to be corrected later on.
11:45: In other words, we don't have, as many Muslims have in their theology, the doctrine of abrogation, where you can have something that was revealed earlier, but then if something is revealed afterward, you can have
11:54: X and then not X. And you have to figure out what's abrogated what and so on and so forth.
12:01: That is not the understanding. And certainly if you think that when we look at the Old Testament law, for example, we're talking about abrogation rather than fulfillment, then you've missed the point there.
12:11: And we further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of New Testament writings.
12:17: It is a clear assertion that the canon is closed, that God had a purpose in the finality of the revelation in Jesus Christ, and that there is no need for further revelation after that.
12:29: Now, obviously, many people today would disagree with that. The Mormons disagree with that.
12:34: Of course, I don't consider Mormonism to be a Christian religion. In fact, I've said many times before that Islam is considerably closer to Christianity than Mormonism ever could be.
12:45: And I say that as a person who knows Mormonism very, very, very well. But Mormonism is an extremely polytheistic religion.
12:52: They believe in an unlimited number of gods. And when you have a religion that makes Lucifer the spirit brother of Jesus, you miss the boat bad, badly, very badly, foundationally, a long time ago.
13:03: So they're way out in left field someplace with their particular theology.
13:09: But obviously, they have further revelations in the Book of Mormon, Doctrine, Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price.
13:15: But there are many people who would say that this is too limiting today, that we need new revelation to deal with new technologies, nuclear war, gene splicing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
13:26: And rather than the idea that God's word gives us the foundations, the guidelines, the principles that we then apply to the situations that we face in the world that God has placed us in today to ask us to minister and to be a testimony to him.
13:41: Article 6, we affirm the whole of Scripture and all its parts down to the very words of the original were given by divine inspiration.
13:47: We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts or of some parts, but not the whole.
13:54: And certainly, there have been many people who have attempted to basically say, well, you know, we don't have any problem seeing, say,
14:01: Psalm 19 or Psalm 119 as being inspired, but I don't know, there's parts of Joshua that are really questionable, and there are other sections maybe in Ezekiel someplace are just a little bit too weird for me.
14:17: And all those genealogies, nah, the imprecatory Psalms definitely go out, that type of thing, as if you can pick and choose which parts you want to accept.
14:27: The idea is that God has a purpose not only in the inspiration of Scripture, but then in the giving of Scripture to the church, and that the idea that we can then go, well, okay, yeah, maybe in the past this was relevant, but it's really not relevant for us any longer today, or things like that, this pick -and -choose methodology is inappropriate.
14:50: And if there's even more there in regards to the concept of maybe what's inspired is the general gist of a passage rather than the words, things like that also fall into this particular section.
15:04: We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit through human writers gave us His word. The origin of Scripture is divine.
15:11: The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us. We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.
15:19: We touched on this just a little bit last evening. Remember, I talked a little bit about Peter's discussion of men spoke from God as they were carried along by the
15:27: Holy Spirit. There are some translations because of a textual variant there that say holy men spoke from God, but I have a real problem with that because as I mentioned last evening, it's not the character of the men, it's not their insights into God that makes those words special, it is the actual work of the
15:45: Spirit of God that accomplishes that. The locus of inspiration is in the actual writing of the
15:52: Scripture itself, not in the understandings or musings of any of the prophets or apostles themselves.
15:58: And that's the affirmation that is being made here. We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom
16:07: He had chosen and prepared. We deny that God in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose overrode their personality.
16:14: So like I said briefly last evening, it is very easy for someone reading the original writings, whether in Hebrew or Greek, to see the difference between different authors.
16:25: Paul's style, vocabulary, cadence even of writing is quite different than John's or quite different than Luke's, etc.,
16:33: etc., even in the Old Testament. You can detect the differences between various of the writers of the
16:39: Psalms and certainly the prophets have a different way of expressing themselves.
16:44: God is big enough to use men. I mean, He creates us, He makes us, and He is big enough to make the apostle
16:53: Paul, the person that he was, so that he does not have to turn Paul into an mp3 recorder or a dictation machine or what the dragon dictate.
17:03: That's the program that I've used on my computer, which is pretty cool. It's sort of Star Trek -ish, hello, computer, that type of thing.
17:12: And some of you know what I'm referring to there. And some of those things, uh -oh, everybody's going, he's a
17:17: Trekkie. Oh, no, man. Some of you just tuned me out. I can't trust anyone who's a
17:22: Trekkie. Well, okay. Anyway, don't get me into that. But we don't have to have a dragon dictate type theory of how the authors of the scriptures worked.
17:36: God is big enough to use each individual person as He has created them to give us exactly what
17:43: He wants us to have in His words. We affirm that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the biblical authors were moved to speak and write.
17:54: We deny the finitude or fallenness of these writers by necessity or otherwise introduced distortion or falsehood into God's word.
18:01: And so, positively, we're not saying that because Paul is being carried along by the
18:08: Holy Spirit in writing the book of Romans that Paul then becomes omniscient, that he has knowledge of all things.
18:15: The point is that as you're being carried along by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit's not going to lead you into error.
18:22: We certainly have to affirm that the Holy Spirit of God can give revelation that is beyond the natural knowledge of the individual receiving it or you could never have anything divine given to man.
18:34: If you limit what can be given to what the man himself knows, then you could never have anything supernatural revealed in God's word.
18:43: And so, for example, we can look at the words of the prophecy in Isaiah 9, verse 6, and we can recognize the depth that is there and we can see that it was deeper than even
18:55: Isaiah might have been able to understand in his particular context at that particular time.
19:01: But that doesn't mean that God cannot reveal those things. And so, we're even told in Scripture that the men of old longed to look into these things, that angels longed to look into these things that now have been revealed in the coming of Jesus Christ.
19:18: But at the same time, what they wrote made sense to them. What they wrote had meaning at that time, even if the fullness of that meaning would not necessarily be understood until a later date.
19:30: And so, you look at almost any messianic prophecy and almost any messianic prophecy had a fulfillment at that time.
19:37: But that wasn't the only fulfillment that it was meant to have. And so, if you limit it solely to what human beings would know, we could have no divine revelation whatsoever.
19:48: And so, the other affirmation here, really, this is an affirmation of inerrancy.
19:54: That is, that guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the biblical authors were moved to speak and write.
20:01: So, if they addressed something and made factual assertions about something, then the
20:06: Holy Spirit of God is not going to lead them into error on those matters. It does not follow then that if the apostle
20:12: Paul decided to write a treatise on particle physics, that he would have gotten it right.
20:20: He didn't know what particle physics were. And he didn't need to know those things to be used in the way that the
20:27: Holy Spirit used him to give us those sections of scripture that he was responsible for.
20:34: And then, of course, you have those who would say that, well, the finitude, the fallenness of writers obviously introduces a distortion or falsehood into God's word.
20:44: This whole subject of inerrancy is irrelevant because you have fallen creatures being utilized.
20:50: Well, they were fallen creatures. And no one is asserting that Paul or James or Luke were infallible beings and were sinless beings.
21:05: The issue is, can God accomplish his purpose in a world where sin exists?
21:11: And of course, we recognize that he can and he does. And since it is his purpose to give us his word, the sinfulness of man is not going to keep him from being able to accomplish that.
21:22: And certainly, given Jesus' view, his citation of the Old Testament and his assertion that it was
21:28: God speaking, it was not Jesus' view that the sinfulness of those prophets somehow automatically resulted in a distortion of the word of God.
21:38: We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy.
21:47: We further affirm that copies and translations of scripture are the word of God to the extent they faithfully represent the original.
21:53: Ironically, those are almost the words of the King James translators, if you've ever read the actual introduction to the King James version.
21:59: The King James translators said even the meanest translation that is faithful to the originals can be called the word of God.
22:06: It's interesting, a lot of folks won't really listen to what the King James translators said about the necessity of revision, the use of the
22:14: Greek septuagint, all sorts of things like that. But anyway, it's very similar to that, and this is a direct assertion that when we talk about both inspiration, what's the locus of inspiration?
22:24: The original. We're not talking about the inspiring of the
22:30: Latin Vulgate, for example. This would be directly against theology that developed and then undeveloped within Roman Catholicism.
22:40: There was a period of time when Rome exalted the Latin Vulgate to the position of the final authority, even over the original
22:47: Greek language. And one pope even put out an infallible Vulgate, which had to be very quickly withdrawn because there were so many errors in it, which is always somewhat embarrassing.
22:57: But this would speak directly to that, in that inspiration and hence inerrancy refers to the autographic text.
23:07: And if there is, well, let me just give you an example. There is a codex I mentioned to you briefly last evening.
23:14: It's called Codex D, Beze Cantabrigiensis, which is a 5th century manuscript that really is sort of the living
23:25: Bible of the early church. I don't know why this author did what he did, but there are some odd additions to it.
23:33: It is, by the way, the first manuscript that contains the story of the woman taken in adultery.
23:40: And it also has such weird things as when Peter is released from prison and he's going back to the
23:46: Christians, remember, and stands outside and I think is his angel and all the rest of that stuff. That he sends, as I recall, it's either 29 or 39 steps to the street.
23:57: It inserts this weird number in there, and no other manuscript had ever done it.
24:03: So let's say that, let's use that example. Is that an argument against inerrancy?
24:10: No, because we're not talking about the autographic text. There's no possibility that it is the original text.
24:15: It's clearly a scribe, literally 400 years later, making some type of a commentary that he thought was relevant.
24:25: Thankfully, if we only had that one manuscript, we wouldn't know it was a commentary, but we have all sorts of other manuscripts so we can detect these things.
24:32: But it is not an argument related to inerrancy, and a lot of people get confused at this point.
24:38: When you talk about textual variations, you talk about the longer ending of Mark, things like that. They think, well, this has something to do with inerrancy.
24:46: That has to do with the issue of preservation and the method that God uses of preservation. It is not an issue in regards to inerrancy because inerrancy has to do with the nature of inspiration and the result of that in the writing of the scriptures themselves.
25:00: And so a lot of people get those categories confused, and this is attempting to deal with that particular issue.
25:07: We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.
25:17: There are many people who do argue that unless you have the originals themselves, that you can't even begin to discuss the issue of inerrancy.
25:27: And I absolutely affirm and have challenged many people to debate this very issue.
25:34: I absolutely affirm that we have, in the New Testament manuscripts, every single word ever written by the apostles that was considered canonical by the church.
25:45: Now, Paul wrote other things we don't have, but Paul's grocery list is not an inspired document.
25:51: And there is no reason for the spirit of God to maintain Paul's grocery list. We don't need to know whether he liked
25:58: Cheetos or Fritos. It's just not relevant to us, okay? And so the issue of preservation is the matter.
26:08: And I affirm that if God extended the effort to inspire the scriptures, he's then going to extend the effort to preserve those scriptures because he has a purpose for those scriptures in the church.
26:23: They are to give guidance to the church. Romans chapter 15, those things were written for our guidance, for our encouragement, for our instruction.
26:31: God has a purpose in giving us the scriptures. And so just as he supernaturally gives them to us, he's then going to guide the church in the recognition of what those books are, that is the passive recognition of the canon, as well as in the preservation of those books, even over against the tremendous efforts to destroy the scriptures that especially took place during the first couple of hundred years under Roman persecution, where it was even illegal to produce or to own the
27:01: Christian scriptures at many times. And thousands of manuscripts were destroyed by the
27:06: Romans, especially between about 250 and the end of persecution in AD 313. Thousands of manuscripts were destroyed.
27:13: Yet despite all of that, God has preserved his word. And so we deny that any essential element of the
27:20: Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. I don't know about you, but something tells me as I look around the world, if we had the autographs, we would undoubtedly be worshiping the autographs.
27:31: They would be in some shrine in some place, and there would be people going in there and claiming miracles and trying to get healed by this, that, or the other thing.
27:46: That would be a problem. But I affirm that if it was written, we still possess it.
27:52: Now, I don't have time to go into this. I probably should have looked at the topics and said,
27:57: I need to stick this in some place. But like I said last evening, I have an entire presentation on this subject on the reliability of the
28:04: New Testament manuscripts. But one of the things that I bring out in that is that basically one of the things that we are facing when you look at the manuscripts of the
28:14: New Testament that we possess today is that it's like we have a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle.
28:20: Now, which would be better, to have 10 ,100 pieces or to have 9 ,900 pieces?
28:29: It's obviously better to have all the 10 ,000 pieces you need and then have to determine what the extra 100 are than to actually be missing any portion of that final product that you want to have.
28:44: And so what we have in the manuscripts is later manuscripts tend to expand, for example, almost always titles are expanded.
28:53: So when you compare the earliest manuscripts to the later manuscripts, Jesus, he becomes
28:58: Jesus, Jesus becomes Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus becomes Lord Jesus Christ. You have an expansion of titles, and so they tend to be a little bit longer.
29:06: And so the point is, if we only had 9 ,900 pieces out of 10 ,000, then we'd have a problem.
29:13: Because we would not be able to construct the original, we would not know what that missing portion necessarily said or how it might impact interpretation, etc.,
29:22: etc. That's not the situation that we face. The situation we face is determining those later accretions, not the deletions.
29:31: The manuscripts are so widely distributed, and we have so many of them, that it is the opposite situation.
29:39: We have the 10 ,100 rather than the 10 ,000, which is very important. We further deny this absence renders the assertion biblical inerrancy invalid or relevant.
29:48: Many people make that assertion, but it is a category error that they are making. We affirm that scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses.
30:00: Remember last evening, someone asked what's the difference between inerrancy and infallibility. Here you see that being illustrated. This is talking about the teaching of scripture.
30:07: It will not err in its teaching. Inerrancy is in regards to its factuality and its accuracy.
30:13: We deny that it is possible for the Bible to be at the same time infallible and errant in its assertions. Infallibility and inerrancy may be distinguished, but not separated.
30:21: Quite true. And here's where you have a lot of people today that just simply don't accept this. I know many conservative people in Baptist churches who have opted, and this is really what's become common even amongst conservative
30:35: Roman Catholics, is the Bible is infallible in its teaching, but it's not inerrant in its statements.
30:44: Now, how you try to put that together, how you try to make that work, generally for Rome, they make that work by throwing in tradition and the magisterium of the church as the missing authority to sort of prop up the
30:57: Bible when the Bible is found to be allegedly errant in what it's saying about something. And so you end up having to have external authorities being brought in.
31:07: And of course, once you start bringing in external authorities, then it's what's the flavor of the day? What external authority are you gonna use today?
31:14: And you certainly don't have any basis for unity amongst believers in regards to that.
31:22: So infallibility and inerrancy may just be distinguished, but not separated from one another.
31:27: A lot of people do not accept that today, that's for certain. We affirm the scripture in its entirety as inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.
31:36: We deny that biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive assertions in the fields of history and science.
31:43: We further deny that scientific hypotheses about Earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of scripture on creation and the flood.
31:50: Now obviously, here again, this is the very essence of the type of assertion that is found to be so reprehensible within the academy today.
31:59: Because the academy, the Christian realm of scholarship, has capitulated on this issue.
32:09: And in essence, says that the authority of scripture is limited to spiritual, religious, and redemptive themes.
32:17: And that hence, everything else that it addresses, whether it be historical issues, whether it be scientific issues.
32:24: And of course, the Bible is not meant to be an exhaustive history of mankind on Earth, it is not meant to be a science textbook.
32:33: I do have problems with those who try to make the Bible something other than what it is.
32:39: It's not its intention to be some type of extensive work of scientific inquiry on this issue or that issue.
32:48: You could not use the Bible, for example, as a field guide to the identification of South African reptiles.
32:56: It was never intended to function in that fashion. And if you try to push it to do that type of thing, you are abusing the text.
33:04: And you are not respecting the authors and their original intention in giving us what they gave to us.
33:10: And yet, there are some people who do try to do those very things. But obviously, for many, many people today, there are certain scientific hypotheses within the secular world, naturalistic materialism, that runs directly counter to the idea that God is the creator of all things.
33:27: And this is the real area of conflict, is what is going to be your final authority?
33:33: What are you going to accept as your final authority? The ever -changing theories of men or the revelation from God himself, that really becomes the issue.
33:42: We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term, with reference to the complete truthfulness of scripture.
33:49: We deny that it is proper to evaluate scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.
33:55: We further deny that inerrancy is negated by biblical phenomenon, such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.
34:13: Now, wow, that's a long, long section. And what in the world is being said there?
34:19: Well, we could actually park on almost any one of those phrases and expand upon them for quite some time.
34:26: We just simply don't have time to do so. What is being affirmed is, when we talk about alien to its usage or purpose, for example, one of the objections that I encountered early on in my ministry as a young person was the inclusion of a rabbit in amongst the ruminants in the
34:51: Old Testament, amongst one who chews the cud. Well, technically, a rabbit doesn't have the specific internal mechanism to chew the cud like other certain mammals do.
35:05: And so someone would say, well, see, the Bible was in error in saying that the rabbit chews the cud.
35:10: Well, there is a sense in which the rabbit does chew the cud in the sense of rabbits will re -eat their own excrement.
35:18: And so they're, in essence, doing that. But I think that misses the point. The usefulness of this observation about rabbits had to be useful to the people of that day, and the people of that day were not doing anatomy and physiology lessons on rabbits.
35:38: They weren't cutting them open and identifying various internal organs and classifying them and doing things like that.
35:45: That's a much more modern situation. It's not they weren't cutting open rabbits, but it was primarily to eat them.
35:51: And even if you did do a wonderful study of internal rabbit anatomy, you'd have to be able to necessarily preserve your observations for future generations much anyways.
36:02: The point is that if you look at a rabbit, the rabbit sits there and it goes, right? It looks like it's chewing the cud.
36:09: I don't know what it's doing, but it looks like it's chewing the cud, and it was an observational thing. It made it useful to be able to identify certain kinds of animals from other kinds of animals, and so it's taking a modern standard based upon concepts that did not exist at the time, reading them back upon a functional description that creates an alleged error or problem in the text or scripture.
36:36: And very, very often, and I know there are entire websites dedicated to this kind of stuff, Biblical Errancy by Dennis McKenzie and other websites like that.
36:45: This is what they're doing. They're not dealing with the text as it was originally written. They're not dealing with it in the context in which it was originally written.
36:52: Instead, they are attempting to apply a different standard to it and creating errors based upon the removal of it from its own context.
37:02: And so, for example, there's a description of one of the lavers in the temple.
37:10: And it says it's three times farther in circumference.
37:17: So in other words, it's very close to pi. The value of pi, we all know the value of pi, right?
37:25: 3 .141592654, and that's even rounded off. We all know how, for example, to drive an alien out of a computer, is to ask it to compute the final number, the value of pi, right?
37:37: The only people chuckling are people who know the original Star Trek series, okay? Because that's how they got, they drove an alien out of the
37:45: Enterprise computer by instructing it to compute the value of pi to the final value, and it's a never -ending number.
37:51: So you can't do it, but it worked, it drove the alien out of the computer. Hey, come on, it was the late 1960s, give him a break, you know?
38:01: Have you seen Bill Shatner recently? He's not looking so good, so things have changed. Anyway, so I've actually had atheists say, well, see, see?
38:12: It's 3 .141592654, not 3, as if the purpose in giving the dimensions of this laver, this round laver in the temple, was to give you the exact value of pi or something along those lines, since that's what it's referring to.
38:30: It talks about rounded numbers, the use of hyperbole, as high as the heavens or as many as the sand on the sea.
38:37: And people say, see, there's a limited number of particles of sand in the sea, and so that's not really infinity, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
38:44: These are obviously intended to create alleged contradictions.
38:50: We're gonna be looking at some examples of that in here in a few moments, hopefully, if I ever get this done. Article 14, we affirm the unity and internal consistency of scripture.
38:58: We deny that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved vitiate the truth claims of the
39:03: Bible. Now, as I mentioned last evening, there are certain, especially historical things, that I cannot necessarily answer questions about in regards to what the
39:31: Bible says, because we don't have enough information about what happened in history to be able to fully answer the question.
39:40: A lot of people like to think that we can apply modern day standards of MP3 recorders and video recording and everything else to what happened in history.
39:50: But the reality is, the Old Testament books are some of the most ancient books possessed by man.
39:57: And so there are all sorts of things that happened in the past. It has been very common for unbelievers.
40:03: For example, a long time, it was common for unbelievers to mock the Bible because it mentioned the
40:08: Hittites. And we had never found any evidence of the existence of the Hittites. Well, now we've found lots of evidence of the existence of the
40:16: Hittites. But what if the evidence of the existence of particular people will never be found?
40:23: What if the primary archaeological evidence was in an area that was severely damaged during a war, or in modern day, their home area was flooded by a lake that has been created by a dam in modern times.
40:40: And so we're just never gonna find the archaeological evidence. Does that somehow make a meaningful argument based on lack of information?
40:50: That's not meaningful argumentation. If you have real data, then you can make argumentation of contradiction and things like that.
40:57: But simply not having information from literally thousands and thousands of years ago, if you use that type of standard, we would not be able to make any meaningful assertion about anything in antiquity at all, but we have to be very humble when we start making assertions about things that far back, because we only have a certain amount of information available to us.
41:20: We affirm that Dr. Menarenci has grounded the teaching of the Bible about inspiration. We deny that Jesus' teaching about scripture may be dismissed by appeals to accommodation or to any natural limitation of this humanity.
41:29: In other words, it's pretty obvious what Jesus' view of scripture was. But many people want to get around Jesus' view of scripture by saying, well, he was a man of his age, and the incarnation means that he had limited knowledge, and so he was just a man of his age, and he accepted the theories of the
41:50: Jews of the day. And yeah, the Jews believed that the Bible was inerrant and things like that, but we don't have to believe that today because of the limitations, so on and so forth.
42:00: Sadly, I attended a debate very shortly after returning from South Africa last year.
42:07: I think it was the next day with a professor from Fuller Seminary who was promoting the concept of what we're going to be talking about later on, the
42:17: LGBTQ RSTUV movement. I just figured we might as well throw a few more in there because it keeps getting longer all the time anyways, so just throw the acronym in and let us go from there.
42:29: But the person promoting the acceptance of homosexuality and so on and so forth, in essence, closed his presentation by saying that we no longer think like first century
42:43: Jews, and so we must be free to be led by the spirit of God to not only think and believe differently than the
42:50: Apostle Paul, but to think and believe differently than Jesus did. And so you have a man claiming to be a
42:57: Christian saying Jesus was wrong about these things because, as he said to me as I approached him during one of the breaks, well,
43:04: Jesus was just a man. He really doesn't believe, I think, in the deity of Christ.
43:11: And so there you have who's teaching at Fuller Seminary these days. Real quickly, we affirm the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to church's faith throughout its history.
43:21: We deny inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.
43:28: You will hear a lot of people saying that this is a modern doctrine, that it was unknown in church history.
43:34: That just demonstrates that people don't know what in the world they're talking about in reading church history. Because any meaningful examination of the history of the church and the conflicts of the history of the church will demonstrate that the foundational element upon which the scriptures are being approached was there being the very word of God and inerrant and infallible in their teaching.
43:58: There just really isn't any question about that at all. Almost done here. We affirm that the Holy Spirit bears witness to the scriptures, assuring believers the truthfulness of God's written word.
44:07: We deny this witness the Holy Spirit operates in isolation from or against scripture. Now, what does this mean?
44:14: Obviously, the temptation for someone like myself is to, because I deal with other scriptures, is to fall into the trap of de -supernaturalizing the
44:29: Christian scriptures. Because when a Mormon, for example, says, well, I just have a testimony of the
44:34: Holy Ghost, the Book of Mormon is true. Well, if I'm saying that there is a spiritual aspect to the testimony of the truthfulness of the written scriptures, the
44:46: Christian scriptures, then are we just saying the same thing? Aren't I doing exactly what the
44:53: Mormon missionary does when he quotes Moroni 10, 4, and 5, and says all you need to do is pray about the
44:59: Book of Mormon. And if you'll pray about the Book of Mormon, then you'll receive a testimony, you'll receive a burning in your bosom. And when you receive that burning in your bosom, then that's the
45:07: Holy Spirit telling you the Book of Mormon is true. Is that what I'm saying? No, that's not what I'm saying. But I do recognize that in Luke chapter 24, one of the most important things that Luke communicates to us about the ministry of the
45:20: Lord Jesus to his disciples after his resurrection is what? That he revealed to them how he had been prophesied by all of the scriptures, and it specifically says he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.
45:36: And fundamentally, I recognize that an atheist can know what the
45:42: Bible says, but an atheist who is spiritually dead cannot have the spiritual desire to be obedient to Christ, submit to the word of God, and find in the presets of the
45:55: Bible joy and life and happiness and that which causes the saints of God to remain faithful to the word of God all the way through their long lives.
46:06: There is a spiritual element that we're discussing here. And I fully recognize when
46:12: I'm discussing, when I'm talking with someone who does not have that spiritual element and has no desire to have that spiritual element.
46:19: And I cannot convince someone against their will to believe something no matter how true it may be.
46:27: I recognize that. I affirm that. That's what this is saying as well.
46:32: We affirm the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatical historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret
46:39: Scripture. We deny the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching or rejecting its claims to authorship.
46:50: Now, that's a huge one that I wouldn't even have time in the next 15 minutes, and I'm going to run out of time here anyways, to even begin to look at.
46:58: There's a lot of stuff there that's extremely relevant in especially liberal seminaries today or seminaries that are going liberal that I can't expand upon, but I do in my book,
47:10: Scripture Alone. And then the last article I read last night, we affirm that a confession of the full authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the
47:20: Christian faith. We further affirm that such confession should lead to increasing conformity to the image of Christ. We deny that such confession is necessary for salvation.
47:28: However, we further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences both to the individual and to the church.
47:36: And so many things that I would like to be able to say to that. I will say this very briefly.
47:43: I just cannot see how anyone, for example, would actually be convinced that God has revealed himself as triune
47:53: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit if you do not believe in inerrancy. It requires the highest view of Scripture to believe in the deity of Christ.
48:03: You have to see the testimony of Scripture, its harmony. Once you abandon the idea that there is a harmonious revelation in Scripture, there is no reason for you to remain a
48:12: Trinitarian. And that is why in many liberal denominations, you can't even get a job in some of their leading seminaries if you affirm the deity of Christ because they automatically consider you to be some kind of a fundamentalist wacko if you'd continue to believe something like that, even though their creeds continue to state those very things.
48:32: If you do not have a high view of Scripture, you will not have a high Christology, a high theology, a high soteriology, doctrine of salvation.
48:40: You simply won't. It is not a possibility. So, as you can see,
48:45: I think some very wise thinking went into the formulation of that particular document.
48:56: Now, if I can get my cursor back onto the screen here very, very quickly, I would like to discuss with you very quickly a couple of items here.
49:07: I only have 15 minutes. I just chose a couple issues in regards to how we handle the text in light of the doctrine of inerrancy that hopefully will just sort of give you an idea of why some of these things are important and how we can make some application.
49:26: One of the issues that we deal with is the issues of the synoptic gospels, especially.
49:32: We have Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They're called the synoptic gospels because they follow each other fairly closely.
49:38: Obviously, many scholars think that Mark was the first and that Matthew and Luke were using Mark. And Luke specifically says he used written sources.
49:45: That wouldn't be an issue whether he did or didn't. But my problem with most of the modern theories that specifically assert a documentary or literary dependence is they ignore the preaching, the apostolic preaching of the gospel in the church at that particular point in time.
50:02: And I think that trying to get into Matthew's mind and figuring out why he doesn't say the same thing as Mark is a fool's errand.
50:11: I think reading my wife's mind is impossible. Reading Matthew's mind from 2 ,000 years later is almost as impossible as a husband reading his wife's mind.
50:22: So I don't think that those things actually answer questions. I think that they end up raising more questions than they actually end up answering as popular as they are.
50:32: But one of the questions that comes up is when you have differences in the recording of, say, the
50:39: Sermon on the Mount, for example. And obviously, Jesus said the things he said in the Sermon on the Mount in many different places.
50:45: So he didn't just say them one time in his ministry. And Matthew's version of the
50:52: Sermon on the Mount is much longer than Luke's, much longer than Luke's. And so Luke is abbreviating and he's being very short in what he is including.
51:01: Well, that raises the issue, well, is this the Ipsissima Vox?
51:07: Is this the voice? Or is this the Ipsissima Verba, the words?
51:15: And people go back and forth and back and forth on this issue. And I personally think that those two categories miss the point.
51:24: They miss the point because the locus of inspiration is the written word itself.
51:30: I keep coming back to that, but there's a reason for it. God has a purpose for giving us the
51:35: Gospels in the form he gave them to us. And even in, I just finished 11 years in Sunday school teaching through the
51:44: Synoptic Gospels, using the parallel of the Gospels, dealing with all the differences between Matthew, Mark, Luke, the whole nine yards, the very things that Bart Ehrman says
51:54: Bible believers like me never did, I did for 11 years. And I think it misses the real glory of what
52:04: God has given to us in the Gospels. And so I think there is a third category, which would be
52:10: Ipsissima Intendibant. And what does that mean? It is what the words that God intended to give to us in the form that he intended to give them to us.
52:22: So in other words, there are some alleged contradictions where if you didn't have three Gospels, you wouldn't know exactly what
52:29: Jesus intended to communicate to us. But it's in the comparison of the differences between them that we get the full story of what was really going on at that particular point.
52:38: And so it would be easier if we only had one Gospel as far as ease of defending something or something along those lines.
52:48: But you got to realize what is easier is not necessarily better. You know, there's lots of diet pills you can buy out there that according to TV is going to make you have a six -pack, abs, and everything else.
53:01: All you got to do is just take these pills. But most of us realize that's the easy way, but that generally actually isn't the best way.
53:10: And some of those things are just downright dangerous. Most of us know it's smaller portions and more exercise.
53:17: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is... I could show you a picture of me at 254 pounds as a weightlifter, and I'm not 254 pounds anymore.
53:26: And about 65 ,000 miles on a bike will do that for you. So it's what you eat and how much you exercise.
53:35: That's not the easiest way, but it is the better and healthier way, I assure you. So keeping that in mind,
53:43: I think, will help. And here's just an example, very, very quickly. One, and what's fascinating to me is not only was this raised in the first debate
53:53: I did with Shabir Ali at Biola University in 2006, but in the just -released book by Bart Ehrman on remembering
54:02: Jesus, where he attacks even the ability of the apostles to have remembered what Jesus said and did and so on and so forth.
54:09: This is one of the alleged contradictions and inaccuracies of the New Testament that Ehrman presents.
54:16: And one of the things that just drives me insane about Bart Ehrman is Bart Ehrman is a scholar, but he is a scholar of textual criticism.
54:27: His doctoral dissertation was on the development of an early form of the Alexandrian text type in the writings of an early church father by the name of Didymus the
54:35: Blind. That's a very narrow field of study. It doesn't have a lot to do with the synoptic gospels and all sorts of things like that, but he's gone into all these other areas to express his unbelief.
54:50: And yet, he doesn't show any knowledge of the best answers that have been offered by believing scholars on these particular subjects.
54:58: And it's frustrating because he's viewed as this great expert in everything Christian.
55:04: Why? Because he's an apostate. Isn't it amazing that former somethings are always considered to be the greatest experts on something?
55:12: And look, we do the same thing. You know, someone converts from Islam and we turn them into an expert on everything
55:21: Muslim, and the Muslims do the same thing. Any Christian who becomes a Muslim all of a sudden becomes an expert. I see that all the time too.
55:28: So, he even raises this very issue, even though we've addressed this issue over and over again, and shows no knowledge of what believers have said in regards to the study of one particular story in Matthew and Mark, and that is the raising of Jairus' daughter.
55:45: Remember the story? Jairus comes to Jesus and he says, and here's one of the issues, he says, my daughter has died or my daughter is about to die.
55:56: And Jesus begins to go, and you remember the story, as they're going along, the woman with the issue of blood comes up behind him and touches him, and he stops and says, who touched me?
56:06: And the disciples said, everybody's touching you. And she says, I was the one, and your faith has saved you, and she's healed from that day.
56:14: And while they're stopped, men come from Jairus' home and they tell Jairus, your daughter has died in one of the stories, that's only in Mark, that's not in Matthew.
56:25: In Matthew, that's where he'd said she's already died, but Matthew doesn't include the story, the element about the men coming and informing
56:35: Jesus and Jairus. And Jesus says, just believe, and so they go, and then Jesus raises her from the dead, and so on and so forth.
56:43: Well, it says two different things. It's contradictory, right? Well, just a few things, just notice, if we're being honest with the text, in something that's called telescoping.
56:55: Telescoping. Now, I could illustrate this if we had the time to do this. I could illustrate this by asking everyone in this side of the building today, after this session, to write a one -paragraph summary of what you just heard, and then asking everybody in this side of the building to give me two pages on what you just heard.
57:24: If we compare what you folks write in comparison to what you folks write, we would have to say that all of you were a bunch of liars in comparison to all the truthful folks over on this side of the room.
57:43: Why? Because they have much more room, they're going to be able to provide much more information, they're going to be able to be more chronological even in their laying out of how things happen.
57:56: You're going to have to squish things together and leave a bunch of stuff out. Well, what's obvious is
58:03: Mark intends to give a full discussion of what happened with Jairus, and Matthew does not.
58:10: And so, when we talk about telescoping, remember the telescopes? Even we had some as kids where you could sort of push them, you could pull them out and push them in.
58:16: Well, that's what Matthew is doing, is he is telescoping, he is pushing in and he is abbreviating the incident in comparison to Mark, who's giving us much more.
58:26: So, for example, Matthew uses 139 words over eight verses to narrate this event.
58:34: Mark uses 379 words over 22 verses to narrate this event.
58:40: So, obviously, Mark is dedicating much more. Now, Mark's a much shorter gospel, so this is an important story to Mark, if he's investing this kind of emphasis.
58:50: Matthew's version is 37 % the length of Mark's. Mark's version is 2 .7 times longer than Matthew's.
59:00: Most people don't ever even look at that. Those who raise these issues don't even consider these things.
59:08: In Matthew chapter 9, we read, while he was saying things to them, a synagogue official came and bowed down before him and said, my daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her and she will live.
59:19: But in Mark, one of the synagogue officials named Jairus, so notice the extra information, even gives the name, came up and seeing him, fell at his feet and implored him earnestly, saying, my little daughter is at the point of death.
59:31: Please come and lay your hands on her so that she will get well and live. And again, the critic, like a
59:38: Shabir Ali, will just, so they're contradictory, ignoring the fact of this next screen.
59:45: There's a reason why there's a big blank spot up there, and that is this entire portion of Mark's narrative.
59:51: While he was still speaking, they came from the house, synagogue officials saying, your daughter has died, why trouble the teacher anymore? But Jesus, overhearing what was being spoken, said to the synagogue official, do not be afraid any longer, only believe.
01:00:01: Matthew does not have anything about men coming and telling Jesus and Jairus that the girl has died.
01:00:09: The point is, in both instances, when they come to the home, they know that she has died, and Jesus has said, believe.
01:00:20: Now, Matthew, again, if you all were writing down the story in one paragraph, then you're not gonna have room to give all of the chronological indicators.
01:00:35: But you all, with two pages, have enough room to put it into the order in which it happened.
01:00:41: You might have the room to include names, you might even describe what somebody was wearing, and somebody was wearing this color or that color.
01:00:50: You've got the room to do it, you don't. Matthew has chosen to give this story briefly,
01:00:55: Mark has chosen to give this story in full. And so the differences are based upon the recognition that you have to allow authors to arrange their material in a certain way without accusing them of being liars.
01:01:10: Now, if we see that in our own situation, if we see how that happens every single day.
01:01:16: If we see how, for example, I have what's called an
01:01:22: RSS aggregator. It takes various sources and puts them all together in one place for me for my news online.
01:01:29: Well, when I look at those things, I'll have a summary. And then if I want to have more,
01:01:35: I'll click on it and get the longer version. Now, do I sit there and go, hey,
01:01:41: I've got a bunch of liars writing my summaries because the longer version has a lot more detail and they telescope stuff in my summary.
01:01:48: Is that what I do? No, except that's what critics do to the Bible. And I wonder why, especially when many of them are allegedly former
01:01:55: Christians. Might have some bias involved? I don't know, it seems like a possibility. Just one other real quickly cuz we're running out of time.
01:02:05: This one was funny, but it gives you an illustration of the kind of mentality that's out there.
01:02:12: I mentioned a website to you earlier, Biblical Errancy by Dennis McKinsey.
01:02:19: And Dennis McKinsey has been at this forever. He used to publish a newsletter, a three -page photocopied newsletter back in the 1980s that I subscribed to, filled on both sides of the page with alleged contradictions in the
01:02:33: Bible. And I had him on my program back in the day. This is before the Internet and all sorts of stuff like that.
01:02:40: I was having to dodge dinosaurs and stuff like that. And this is right around the time when
01:02:46: I first got my first computer, for example. Two 360K floppy disks, five and three quarter, remember those babies?
01:02:52: You could zing them across the room, they were great. Anyway, and this was one of the contradictions that Dennis McKinsey came up with, based on the
01:02:59: King James Version. The King James says, Matthew 19 .18, thou shalt not murder. In Romans 13 .9,
01:03:06: thou shalt not kill. And both of them are allegedly giving us the content of one of the commandments from the
01:03:13: Ten Commandments. And murdering and killing are not the same thing, he said. And so here's a contradiction in the
01:03:20: Bible. And at first, you just chuckle, at least I do, because it's based upon English translation rather than upon the original language.
01:03:31: Secondly, I knew that the portions of the King James Bible were translated by different committees.
01:03:37: There was a Gospels committee, there was a Paul committee, you had different committees that met at different locations.
01:03:44: And there really wasn't a major effort to try to harmonize their work.
01:03:49: And so they would render some words differently, depending on which committee you were a part of. Even some of the
01:03:55: Greek texts they used, one of the five editions of Erasmus, Stephanus, or Beza, would differ from committee to committee.
01:04:02: But here is the original language behind both of these. And as you can see, in the original language, they're identical.
01:04:11: Both say, you shall not murder. And so the alleged contradiction is totally based upon an
01:04:21: English translation. In fact, a translation in which the language itself did not exist when
01:04:27: Paul wrote the words that he wrote. That language would not develop for over 1 ,000 years.
01:04:33: So how can you accuse the Bible of contradiction based upon your misunderstanding of an inconsistently translated phrase in a translation that would come nearly 1 ,600 years after the uttering of the words by Jesus or the writing of the words by Paul in Romans?
01:04:53: Again, this kind of alleged contradiction, very, very common, but it's grossly invalid.
01:05:00: A mere examination of the text will reveal these things. Now, y 'all have seen the
01:05:07: Peanuts cartoon, Charles Schultz, Charlie Brown, and all the rest of that stuff.
01:05:16: There is something I call the Lucy -Linus effect. And if you remember Lucy and Linus, sometimes
01:05:22: Lucy would scream at Linus. And Linus' eyes would get big and his hair would go straight back from his head, like there's so much air coming out of her mouth that it's just blowing his hair backwards, that type of thing.
01:05:33: That's what some of you look like right now, is the Lucy -Linus effect, okay? I've been throwing so much stuff at you, and because we have so limited time and so many topics to be talking about, that it's coming at you fast and furious.
01:05:45: I understand that. My hope is that I sort of start an interest so that you can then start looking into these things on your own.
01:05:55: You can see what some of the fundamental issues really are and where some of the fundamental errors are that critics engage in very regularly in their criticism of the
01:06:07: Bible. So my understanding is we're gonna take a five -minute leg stretch. And during that time, if you've
01:06:15: SMSed any questions in, we will go through them and then have a
01:06:21: Q &A period, I think. Actually, we're gonna go straight into the Q &A. Maybe just take 20 seconds to.
01:06:28: We've only got, I think, about ten minutes for Q &A to get back on schedule. I apologize for that.
01:06:35: I can't imagine how I could have gone any faster, though. So I guess I was supposed to get done at 11, and with the song and everything else, ain't no way
01:06:45: I'm getting done in that amount of time. Mm -mm, so Brother Rudolph, you have some questions.
01:06:52: First question, can one affirm inerrancy and deny the historicity of Genesis 1 to 11?
01:06:59: Can someone affirm what? Inerrancy in the Bible in Genesis 1 through 11?
01:07:06: Can one affirm inerrancy and deny the historicity of Genesis 1 to 11? Okay, well, there's lots of folks that think they can.
01:07:16: There's lots of folks who try to. I think what the question is getting to is the fact that there is obviously a huge controversy in the church today in regards to the relationship of biblical teaching to the theory of naturalistic, materialistic, neo -Darwinian, micromutational evolutionary theory.
01:07:35: You have to keep adding all sorts of epithets to it to figure out which one you're talking about.
01:07:41: And so there are a lot of folks who want to change a biblical theory of origins.
01:07:50: And in essence, most of them would not say that Genesis 1 through 11 is in error.
01:07:58: They would say that Genesis 1 through 11 is a different kind of literature that has been misunderstood.
01:08:04: Here's the problem, misunderstood by whom? Well, misunderstood by early church fathers, misunderstood by people like that, down through the ages.
01:08:12: Okay, but was it misunderstood by the apostles? Was it misunderstood by Jesus?
01:08:19: Because Jesus quoted directly from Genesis 1 and 2 in Matthew chapter 19. We're gonna be looking at that later when we talk about the
01:08:26: LGBT stuff. And the question really is, and this has really become relevant,
01:08:34: I think, especially over the past number of years. What about the teaching of the
01:08:39: New Testament that death came through the rebellion of Adam? From any naturalistic perspective, from any evolutionary perspective, death is a natural part of the creation, always has been, always will be, was from the beginning.
01:08:56: There is no period of time when it has not been the normative thing. It must be the normative thing for the evolutionary theory to even function.
01:09:04: And so there are many who have basically said, well, and what you need to do with Paul, and Paul's understanding that death came through Adam and rebellion and so on and so forth, is to say that Paul was a man of his day.
01:09:17: And he was simply functioning with a cosmology or a view of the world that existed in his day, and we don't have to affirm that.
01:09:25: The problem is he makes a plain, clear, and inarguable theological point based upon that.
01:09:31: And that's where the problem really comes in. Now, I was a double major in college,
01:09:37: Bible and biology. I've fought this battle for a long, long time. I personally think that the advancement in the field of molecular biology and cellular biology has yielded some of the greatest evidences of an intelligent designer that have ever existed amongst mankind.
01:09:58: And so, but fundamentally, you do have to get down to making a decision as to what's gonna be your ultimate authority.
01:10:07: And for many people, wanting to fit in with a particular perspective in the culture, it's not so much directly denying inerrancy as it is denying the plain teaching of scripture and redefining what type of literature
01:10:26: Genesis 1 is. What type of teaching Romans 5 is, to try to get around some of the real problems.
01:10:34: So I do see a contradiction there, but it's not a simplistic contradiction. Okay, next question.
01:10:41: Don't the doctrine of inerrancy base its epistemological certainty on that which is simply unattainable?
01:10:47: It assumes that in divine revelation given in scripture, we have a kind of immediate access to the pure truth of God shining through.
01:10:54: Yet though, in scripture, we can see the original writings of scripture holds to a already or not yet tension in the
01:11:00: Bible itself. No, bring it back up,
01:11:07: I wanted to see it, because I'm not that blind.
01:11:18: First part. Well, it assumes that in divine revelation given in scripture, we have a kind of immediate access to the pure truth of God shining through.
01:11:31: But this is a neglect as Gabriel points out in the doctrine of revelation, the already and not yet tension the
01:11:38: Bible itself teaches. To hold the original writings of scripture in all parts and on all their subject matter.
01:11:43: So, this is a long citation that I'd like to be able to see in context.
01:11:52: But, and I don't think you read all of that. For sure, break it down. If it's too long.
01:11:58: Yeah, I don't, well, I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. But I do not believe that the already and not yet.
01:12:04: The already and not yet reality of the Bible is very true.
01:12:10: We have been adopted, we await the adoption.
01:12:17: We have already been seated in the heavenly places in Christ, we will be seated in the heavenly places in Christ. There is the reality of the already, but the non -fulfillment.
01:12:26: I don't think, I think is a major, major error of category and thought to confuse that with the reality of the assumption of every biblical writer.
01:12:41: That God's word is true, it has been spoken, we are accountable to it.
01:12:46: It is not to be questioned, it is not to be edited, it is not to be amended. I see a major difference between the now and the not yet, theologically speaking, in regards to what
01:12:58: God's doing in this world. And the fact that, as the writer of the Hebrews said,
01:13:04: God in times past spoke unto the fathers by the prophets, but now in these last days he has spoken by his son.
01:13:10: That would mean that there is yet to be more speaking in the future that will eclipse even the revelation of the sun.
01:13:17: And that's certainly fully contradictory to the Christian concept of who
01:13:23: Jesus Christ is and the finality of the revelation in him. So I see a real issue there. Yes, a question that relates both to the
01:13:29: King James translation. How do you deal with the late manuscripts in the King James translation?
01:13:35: And why does the ASV leave out the King James versions, or verses, sorry?
01:13:41: Well, in four minutes. Here's just, I can only give you some basic background here and refer you to books on the subject.
01:13:51: But if you have the King James or the New King James translation, okay?
01:13:57: What you have, in the Old Testament, that's translation was called the 1525
01:14:03: Blomberg text. There are very few differences in the
01:14:08: Hebrew Old Testament that is used in modern translations, what's called the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
01:14:14: They are, for all intents and purposes, the exact same text. There may be eight differences, grand total, that are pretty much irrelevant.
01:14:22: Most of the issues and differences, especially in regards to verses and things like that, have to do with the
01:14:28: New Testament text. And the King James translators used seven printed texts of the
01:14:35: New Testament as the basis of their translation of the New Testament. There is a Dutch humanist scholar, a
01:14:41: Roman Catholic priest, by the name of Desiderius Erasmus, who provided five editions during his life, between the first one and then his death in 1535, five editions of that.
01:14:53: The third was the most influential. Then you have an edition put out by Stephanus, Robert Estienne, who became
01:15:00: Calvin's printer in Geneva, in 1555. And then you have
01:15:07: Theodore Beza, who was Calvin's successor in Geneva in 1598, put out a printed edition.
01:15:13: And so the King James translators used printed editions of the
01:15:18: Greek New Testament as the primary basis for their translation of the New Testament. If you see anybody running around with this blue case bound
01:15:27: Trinitarian Bible Society thing called the Textus Receptus, that's actually based on the King James.
01:15:32: It's actually a Greek text based upon an English translation of five Greek texts. That has been created by Scrivener, going back and looking at the decisions the various committees made, because there's differences between those five editions that they used.
01:15:48: And he went back and looked at those five editions, looked at which one the translation committee chose, and created a
01:15:54: Greek text based upon an English translation, okay? And so the
01:16:00: King James and the New King James are based upon what's broadly called the Textus Receptus. Whereas modern translations,
01:16:06: ESV, NASB, Holman Christian Study Bible, whatever else it might be, are based upon what's called the
01:16:12: United Bible Society text or the Nestle -Allen text. Currently, the UBS -5 and the Nestle -Allen 28th are the current editions of those.
01:16:21: And there are differences, obviously, between them. Now let me just, I will just make one assertion about that.
01:16:27: I can't go into why there are differences and all the rest of that stuff in a minute and a half. But let me just say this, if you take the two most diverse representations of the
01:16:44: Greek manuscript tradition. So in other words, if you take what's called on the one side, and the most
01:16:51: Alexandrian text that we have. And on the other side, what's called the most Byzantine text that we have.
01:16:57: And if you apply the same methods of interpretation to both of them that I've just discussed.
01:17:05: Proper hermeneutics, looking at context, looking at language, allowing the entirety of the
01:17:10: New Testament to speak, etc., etc. You will not come up with a different faith in the examination of those most dissimilar manuscripts.
01:17:21: You might have a different list, it might differ just slightly, as to what verses you would use to support particular doctrines.
01:17:29: But no doctrine of the Christian faith is dependent upon a single verse of scripture, it's based upon the entire witness of scripture.
01:17:39: And so, if you will use the same method of interpretation, then you will come to the same conclusions.
01:17:47: If you use different methods of interpretation, well, once you start doing that, you can come up with anything. Just ask
01:17:52: Joseph Smith, for example. That's a good way of coming up with anything. So there's much more to be said on that, but like I said,
01:17:59: I'm not, I know a lot of the questions are about that, but the specific presentation I give on that was not a part of our planning.
01:18:08: And it is available online if you want to take a look at that in regards to those particular issues.