Bob Thune 2004-03-19 2
From Summa Bergania
From : Bob Thune, Jr
Sent : Friday, March 19, 2004 10:32 PM
To : David Bergan
Subject : The Argus Leader is definitely not inerrant
David,
I am not saying you have to doubt everything you read in error-prone texts. But come on... your examples are hardly appropriate. Error-prone maps and error-prone phonebooks and error-prone journalists (like David Kranz) aren't asking me to stake my eternal destiny on their message. Reliability is not enough when it comes to truth about God. Is the God revealed in the Bible absolutely true, or is he only "generally reliable?"
The issue I'm raising is not that error-prone texts are never trustworthy. Rather, the point of my whole last email is that UNLESS you believe in inspiration, you have no basis to claim that the Bible accurately reflects Jesus' teachings. It cannot be an accurate depository of the teachings of the 2nd person of the Trinity unless the Triune God made sure it was so.
Your troubles with inspiration/inerrancy are driven by the fact that there are some things in the Bible that you don't like or that don't make sense to you. Your own reason is the sole authority. But there are others (Dr. Tom Boyd) who reason that the passages you really like are in fact not trustworthy. You are both appealing to reason, and are fully convinced that your positions are reasonable. And so your position is no different from his. You have no greater authority to appeal to; you cannot claim that you are RIGHT and he is wrong when it comes to Jesus' divinity. For to say "Jesus is divine" requires you to rely on an error-prone text, which he will simply use against you by claiming that it errs at every place where Jesus is held up as divine. You cannot claim absolute truth; the best you can do is to say that "I believe Jesus is divine, and I am convinced that His message is true for me." You can't say it's true for ALL people unless the Gospels are inerrant.
The point I'm driving at is what Archer (no dummy, by the way - a Harvard PhD) concludes: "These, then, are the only alternatives available to us as we confront the Scriptures: either they are inerrant, or else we are." I claim that Scripture is inerrant; you claim that your logic is. These are both starting points, not ending points. It seems that you are treating our discussion as though you can reason your way to accepting the inerrancy of Scripture. But you can't! You must start there in order to get there. As long as you are starting from the primacy of your own human logic, you will never conclude that there is something which supercedes your logic and which your logic must answer to. We are talking about foundational epistemology here.
Before I depart, I confess that I'm not trying to avoid your questions; I just don't quite understand them. Are you giving me the fact that 2 Timothy claims that Ruth is inspired? Because last time I checked you weren't sold on that idea. Likewise, haven't you already answered your second question by saying that it's subjective, not objective? For your whole problem with inerrancy is that a God who puts a rainbow in the sky and hardens Pharoah's heart isn't the kind of God you really want to worship. So for you, the God revealed in the Bible is not subjectively satisfying.
(I would probably answer this question by saying that it's both; ultimately, each person must decide for himself whether the God revealed in this document is acceptable to him; but that doesn't change the objective fact that God Himself absolutely exists and that He Himself IS the universal standard for truth and reality.)
I don't mean to be sharp or presumptuous... I just sense that there is more resistance in your soul than you realize toward biblical inerrancy. You are obviously an intelligent thinker, a gifted writer, and a talented logician, and I am very much enjoying the dialogue. But at some point you have to put down the sword of logic and wrestle with the more deeply held fundamental presuppositions that drive your logic in the first place. That's what I'm pushing for. Let me know where you want to go from here...
Bob
