Bob Thune 2004-03-18 3
From Summa Bergania
From : Bob Thune, Jr
Sent : Thursday, March 18, 2004 10:50 PM
To : David Bergan
Subject : Rabbit hole part 7
David,
Thanks for the long reply. I feel like I have a little more insight now into your thinking process. You claimed that your last section was outside the realm of our biblical inerrancy discussion, but I beg to differ. It is absolutely related.
I want you to notice that your very proof against the skeptic (following Lewis) relies on a foundation you claim you can't accept. You say that "it is not possible for Jesus to be a "good religious teacher" since the main theme of His message was that He was the Son of God." Later, you say that "Jesus fulfilled all the Messiah prophesies of the Old Testament." But on what are you basing these assertions? On Scripture. And if Scripture is not inspired by God, then it is not trustworthy, and therefore gives you no basis to state what the main theme of Jesus' message was. After all, it might not have been the main theme of His message; it might be what His error-prone disciples THOUGHT he meant.
Or, to put it another way: you seem to think it's reasonable to believe the parts of the Bible where Jesus claims he was the Son of God. But my philosophy professor at the University of Oklahoma claimed that Jesus in fact never claimed divinity; the only Gospel which explicitly says so is John, which could be a late-second-century Gnostic-influenced text. So if you were arguing with my philosophy professor, to what reasonable argument would you turn? You can't make the claims you are making without assuming the inerrancy of Scripture. My philosophy professor would simply use the same line of reasoning you have been using with me: Scripture is fairly trustworthy, but it's not inerrant, so there are a few places where you can't take it at face value. For David Bergan, those places might involve Noah and Pharoah; for Dr. Tom Boyd, those places involve the deity of Christ.
Even for you to claim that The Sermon on the Mount "is so profound and so deep and so gripping that it must be divine," you must assume that Matthew accurately recorded Jesus' words. This is nothing less than assuming the inerrancy of Scripture. For if the sovereign God did not faithfully preserve Jesus' message through Matthew's hand, what are we left with? We are left with mere conjecture that Matthew might have recorded what Jesus actually said. But maybe Matthew was an intelligent ethicist and wrote down what HE understood Jesus to be saying; so what we really have are Matthew's thoughts and not those of Jesus Christ.
Do you see what I'm saying? Your own proofs are built on the foundation of presupposing the reliability of Scripture. If Scripture is errant or incorrect, you have no basis to conclude the things you do about Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, or Old Testament Messianic prophecies.
I was reading this week in Gleason Archer's "Survey of Old Testament Introduction." Let me close by reproducing for you his thoughts on inerrancy, which mirror my own:
"In the last analysis, then, every man must settle for one of two alternatives: the inerrancy of Holy Scripture, or the inerrancy of his own personal judgment. If the Bible contains errors in the autographs, then it requires an infallible human judgment to distinguish validly between the false and true in Scripture... Since men disagree in their critical judgments, it requires absolute inerrancy on the part of each individual to render a valid judgment in each instance. Even the agnostic must assert for himself such infallibility of judgment, for he cannot logically assume an agnostic position unless he can affirm that he has surveyed all the evidence for the authority of Scripture and has come to a valid judgment that the evidence is insufficient to prove the divine authority of the Bible as the Word of God. These, then, are the only alternatives available to us as we confront the Scriptures: either they are inerrant, or else we are."
Humbly,
Bob
PS - As a point of common ground, I named my second son after C.S. Lewis! Since you are a Lewis fan, I pray that God uses you (and me as well) to impact the world for good in some semblance of the manner that Clive himself did.
