Summations Only

Yes only the OT was referred to, but scripture is scripture. The NT canon was determined on the basis of which of the scriptures were inspired by God. Meaning inerrant.A big mistake many make is not taking the cultural context of the laws into account. We are to read the laws according to their spirit and God's assessment of the seriousness of sin, but some things don't make sense to us because we don't live in anything remotely like that ancient culture. A lot of the OT laws were designed to deal with situations that commonly arose in that tribal context. They are the most just solution for the situation given the cultural framework. The laws about slaves aimed to mitigate the common cruelty slaves were subject to. You can't eliminate slavery in such a culture, so God gave laws that make life easier for the slaves. I'm sure the marriage decision is similar if we knew more about the historical context of marriage customs. The decision to send her back to her jerk of a husband is no doubt better than releasing her into a society where single women don't stand a chance, or sending her back to her parents which would be like an admission of guilt. We're aiming for the best of an all-around bad situation here. It's assumed that the test for virginity is to be trusted if it proves that the woman did commit adultery, and the message is that adultery is punishable by death. The last part is all I was answering before, God's judgments as to what sins deserve death. Jesus saves all us adulterers who believe in Him, but doesn't tell us adultery is not worthy of death. (I'm using "adultery" in the catchall sense that covers every kind of sexual sin.)I had no intention of taking the 2 Timothy passage out of context, the point was only to give you a definition of "inspiration" and that's what I did. I also don't see that the rest of the passage changes its meaning though you seem to make a big deal out of it for some reason.When I said you take Jesus out of context I meant out of the context of the entire Bible of which He is author and subject, and is proved to be Jehovah Himself.I hope that covers it all.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Just how impotent is this god you believe in?

I know some chapters of Club Christian try to market that nonsense but it is simply silly and totally misrepresents what the Bible actually says.To say Jesus was the author and subject of all the material in the stories included in any of the canons is patently false. It is just plain lying. Yet they are filled with factual errors and contradictions so the facts show that once again your position is false.

They certainly don't make sense, and at least we agree on that. You talk about it being an ancient culture and taking it out of context. You accuse me of taking things out of context but you never say how you come to that conclusion. There are numerous laws like that in the OT that are completely contradicted and remedied by the teaching of Jesus. Go back to my original quote from the NT with the woman caught in adultery. Jesus has her freed by saying that the one without sin should cast the first stone. It is clear that these laws were being followed up to the time of Jesus.As for it being an ancient culture I'd suggest that it still exists today in parts of the world. It really isn't much different than we can see for those living under the Taliban and others of their ilk. Is that a result of the god you worship. Is that a group that carried on under god and remained untouched by Jesus.Maybe they are the ones following the true nature of god. How would we know if we understand the Bible as you do? You understand god as having a dual nature. Maybe they have it right and we have it wrong or maybe we're both right but living in different circumstances so god has one set of laws for them and one for us. How would you know?

I and others explained to you how He could. Frankly Faith that is because your position is indefensible.

And yet when I point that out, you claim that it is every bit as relevant to our society today and we need to understand it through a plain, simple reading. Really?? God could have said "Thou shalt not own slaves, neither male nor female owneth thou them. Instead, you must pay those that work for you a fair and equitable wage so that no human being, who were made in my image, would suffer the indecency of being held as the property of another." How about punish the husband who lied, who falsely accused a fellow Israelite of sin? How about society treating women who have been abandoned by their ungrateful husband with respect and compassion? Is that too much to ask for God's holy people?Honestly, the lengths you will go to justify your nonsense is unbelievable.HBD

Sorry if I failed to recognize that you were saying the same thing, but it may have been somewhat different. I don't dismiss the teaching as totally irrelevant for us just because it was given in a cultural context that is radically different from ours.You can't impose the legal thinking of today's cultures on them as you are trying to do. God has more wisdom than that. If you that far outstrip their customs and expectations they simply couldn't obey the law at all, the economy was too much built around slavery as way of paying off debt, and the marriage customs too ingrained and the society's view of the roles of men and women too inflexible to stretch them as far as you want to. They wouldn't see the justice in it, it would make God a laughing stock among them. Why would you expect Him to try to turn such a primitive tribe into modern America?abe: It would already have been a stretch to force the man to take back the wife he wanted to get rid of if the normal response to such a situation was that the society left her to fend for herself or threw her back on her parents because he didn't want her. At least she would be taken care of. Women were subjected to horrible abuse in such patriarchal societies. Remember that Jesus said divorce was allowed among the Israelites because of the hardness of their hearts, but here's a case where the woman's honor is exonerated and he's not allowed to divorce her. Perhaps we should think of that as an improvement. I do. /abeNevertheless we can always find principles in the law to apply to ourselves and as I said, what God regards as sin worthy of death is one of the the things we need to learn.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I attend a Church of the Nazarene, in the Wesleyan, holiness tradition, and our statement of faith regarding this issue is

quote:

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We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by which we understand the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith.

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The key is "all things necessary to our salvation," so it doesn't matter if the stories are 100% accurate, but the point is that the truth or the message they communicate is what is complete and reliable. In other words, the Bible does not mislead us in how we relate to God and how he relates to us.HBD

Never has inspired meant inerrant, nor has it meant dictated.If the Mother Teresa inspires me to write a story of giving and selflessness, does that mean that Mother Teresa authored that story instead of me? Does it mean that my story is an inerrant and literal history? No.How you can twist inspiration into dictation is beyond me.

Just how inerrant the Bible is depends on the point the proponent is making at that time It ebbs and flows with the needs of the person making the claim.Sometimes its really really inerrant, and other times its just a little bit inerrant.Fun game though, no?

But many are doing that in other parts of the world. Taking your position to its logical conclusion would lead us to believe that societies such as those under Taliban rule are being led by god. Their society mirrors the society that we see depicted in the early books of the OT. It just appears evil to us because we don't have your god's insight into what is needed to ultimately bring societies such as that into a more perfect state.

Fair enough although I'm not sure that is how others would understand the term "plenary inspiration".The thing about Faith's argument is that she has to defend Biblical inerrancy at all costs. It is why I call her faith biblianity as opposed to Christianity. Her faith depends on an inerrant Bible. It is like the bottom card in a house of cards - pull it out and the whole thing comes down as would everything her life is based on.

Exactly.The retort is usually that if you can't accept all of it as true, then you have to throw all of it out. Otherwise you're just picking and choosing.But that's bullshit.Just like I can write: "The sky is green and 2+2=4". The error in one part does not make the other part false as well.Placing a truth next to a falsehood does not make them both false.So, with the Bible, we can see truth in there even though we can also see errors in there. Its not all or nothing.You decided what is true and what is false just like you do for everything else: You compare it to the world around you and see what works and what doesn't.

I had a feeling someone was going to make that ridiculous equation between an ancient tribal culture and today's tribal cultures. But in those days they were surrounded by equally primitive cultures all sharing similar customs and outlook. Absorbing an entirely new alien standard just wouldn't happen, they would resist it. While today's exist in a world with highly civilized cultures to which they could learn to adapt. Islam has unfortunately written itself into a corner but that's another story.Enough of this nonsense.

So I went looking for preaching on inspiration and inerrancy. Here's the first sermon I decided to listen to: John MacArthur on Inspiration, pt. 1I know it's a lot to ask but it's all here for anyone who wants to take the time. You can pretty much get it in the first few minutes but you'll get more if you listen to all 23 minutes. He does correct my comparison between my own feeling of being taught by God in answer to prayer and the way the Biblical authors were inspired. But otherwise he's emphasizing that scripture is indeed entirely inspired by God.And here's a page of sermons on the subject of Inspiration that I haven't yet heard.And then I looked up Inerrancy and from that page chose this sermon which I'm listening to now. The very first words out of his mouth were that inspiration implies inerrancy, which is what I've said here.So far these are all the Orthodox point of view. Sermon Audio represents Orthodox preaching, predominantly from the Reformed tradition, and this ought to show that I'm representing that point of view in my arguments here.ABE: As I have gone on listening to the sermon I'd started, I've found him (4:00) talking about the idea of "partial inerrancy" which is what HBD says his church believes. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.