Thoughts on the authority of Scripture

From Summa Bergania

by David Bergan

probably written between 2001 and 2003

A. God is love.

B. God is a poached egg.

What criteria do we use to reject the latter and affirm the former?

The Bible?

But what if the Bible affirmed B and not A?

That question is irrelevant because the Bible does not do that.

So if the Bible affirmed B then we wouldn't appeal to the Bible as a criterion for distinguishing God's characteristics

True

What we find, then, is that the Bible really isn't a criterion at all because the Bible gets its authority from its coherence with our beliefs. If it wasn't coherent with our prior beliefs, that is if it were filled with nonsense, then we wouldn't respect it as an authority

Perhaps there is some truth to that, but I think the Bible's authority rests upon its being divinely inspired.

In parts the Bible claims to be divinely inspired and we really can't go much further than that. Through logic, reason, and empirical evidence we have no way to prove that it is divinely inspired. We can still believe that parts or even the whole thing is divinely inspired, but we do so solely on faith. Con artists and lunatics also claim to have divine inspiration, but we don't automatically believe every word out of their mouths. When a patient from the asylum says that God told him that a hippopotamus is pregnant with Jesus for the second coming

note ended

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Other thoughts (written sometime between 2003-2004?)

• One reason I discourage believing in the inerrancy of Scripture is because that belief flattens the value of the Bible. If it is all equally inerrant, then a verse from Nehemiah (7:67) about the number of slaves the Hebrews brought with them returning from captivity is just as valuable as the 23rd Psalm, Matthew 6, or John 3:16. Under that belief you cannot assume that Jesus's words of Truth trump the words of Ruth... that the Son of God's revelations about the purpose of our life and our destiny in the afterlife are no more informed than Job's guess that wicked and righteous men have the same future in the shadowy realm of Shoel (21:13).

• Even if, for the sake of argument, we agree that the original New Testament texts are fully inspired, infallible, and inerrant... what guarantee do we have that the subsequent copies weren't altered? Scholars are quite sure that John 8 (one of my favorite parts of the Bible) and the end of Mark were added in later because they are missing the earliest manuscripts. John 8 fits seemlessly with the character of Jesus... yet who knows where that story came from? How can we be sure that any other section wasn't inserted at some point just as that one was?