Bob Thune 2004-03-25
From Summa Bergania
From : Bob Thune, Jr
Sent : Thursday, March 25, 2004 10:17 PM
To : David Bergan
Subject : Re: Getting deductive
Hey David,
Great to hear from you again. I think you pointed out some great things in your last email, but I'm going to take your advice (back in the beginning) and leave a few of those questions behind so we can focus on the main issues. Hope that's okay.
It seems that you like my "Argument 1" better than "Argument 2" so far. So I'm going to build on Argument 1 a little bit in hopes that it will end up making Argument 2 seem more plausible to you. Let's review:
ARGUMENT 1: 1) God exists, and is personal and sovereign and good, and delights in revealing himself to His creation. 2) God is capable of (and seems to show a history of) revealing himself through human/created means - prophets, poets, kings, donkeys. (Of course he uses a burning bush here and there also...) 3) When God speaks (if we can establish that He does so), His word must be reliable (based on premise #1) 4) God, in His sovereignty, is perfectly capable of inspiring and preserving a written text for us, assuming He wants to.
You have agreed that these are all valid premises.
ARGUMENT 2: 1) Many biblical books (granting exceptions like Ruth) claim God's authority, declaring "Thus says the Lord" and commanding obedience. 2) The Bible, based on 2 Tim 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21, claims that the Old Testament is God-breathed. 3) The New Testament books all are either written by or verified by an apostle. 4) The standard for the reliability of any text is the reliability of the source (which is why a letter from your mom is more reliable than a letter from a cult leader). (This argument is heading toward what the Bible claims for itself, and how we should evaluate that.)
You agree with premises 2 and 4 as stated, but take some issue with 1 and 3.
Back to Argument 1: We have established that God can reveal himself... through human means... reliably. At this point in the argument I would like to propose 2 conclusions.
Conclusion 1: If Scripture is God-breathed, then it is inerrant. Inerrancy is a deduction based on God's character. If we can find any text which is, beyond reasonable doubt, God-breathed, then that text must be inerrant because of the nature of God. A God who would lie to us or mislead us is not a wise, sovereign, and loving Deity, but rather a devil (you can see we are following Lewis' trilemma here).
Conclusion 2: Any claims to divine inspiration must be taken seriously because of conclusion 1. The fact that a truly God-inspired text (actually, in the Greek of 2 Tim, "God-expired" or "God-aspirated" is a better rendering) would be an error-free revelation from the Divine Creator prevents us from cavalierly dismissing the Bible's (or the Koran's) INTERNAL claims to divine inspiration. Because of the potential that a text could speak for God, we cannot stand at a skeptical distance and scoff at such claims; we must rather apply ourselves to discovering whether the text in question (Bible, Koran, or mindless cult-leader drivel) truly is God-expired. (The burden of proof is therefore on the skeptic to prove divine inspiration false; not on the believer to prove it true.)
Now, on to Argument 2:
Let's use premise 4 as a jumping-off point. You seem willing to grant that at least PARTS of the Bible are inspired by God (i.e. prophecy, the words of Jesus, etc). I want to suggest that premise 4 is a key linch-pin in two different lesser-to-greater arguments. The first argument concerns the Bible's own claims to inspiration, and you'll notice that I'm borrowing again from Lewis' argument for Christ's Deity. We have some letters in the New Testament written by guys like Paul and Peter and James and John. Those texts claim that the Bible is inspired. What kind of men were Paul and Peter and James and John? Were they liars? Were they crazy? We know from even secular historians (Tacitus, Josephus) that the early Christians were profoundly ethical, loving, and willing to die for their beliefs. All four of these men were ultimately killed for their allegiance to Jesus. I think we can conclude that the claims that Paul and Peter make for the Bible's own inspiration are more reliable than any David Kranz article - and even more reliable than a letter from your mom. Apart from semantic wranglings (like what "all" means), these are not misguided men who would claim something that wasn't true.
The second lesser-to-greater argument concerns the inspiration of the entire Bible. I want to suggest that IF parts of the Bible are inspired by God... and if we can trust (based on God's character - argument 1) that God desires us to possess accurate and true written revelation and is capable of preserving it for us... then it shouldn't take much to get us to the point where we can say, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the whole Bible is inspired by God. Because God is the most reliable source in the universe, any text He gives us will be the most reliable text in the universe.
I realize that last step is still a leap at this point, because we haven't filled in all the holes yet. But I want to see how you're reacting so far to my utterly scintillating display of deductive reasoning. :)
Bob
