I'm merely pointing out that you're wrong to say that, "Bible inerrancy is a principle that goes back to the earliest times." It doesn't. At most it goes back to the latter half of the 19th century.
And i'll say again that the Fundamentalist Movement which was a reaction to nineteenthy-century Modernism/Liberalism goes back only that far but bible inerrancy is one of the "fundamentals" of the faith that they sought to affirm that does go back to the beginning.
That is what the
Chicago Statement says, in Article XVI: "WE AFFIRM that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church's faith throughout its history. WE DENY that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism." [This latter statement is what is implied in equating it with the Fundamentalist Movement as you are doing.]
It is disputed however, and the signers of the Chicago Statement are Reformed Theologians who would know Luther's writings well. I tried to find out more about this but this computer is very slow and my eyes give out rapidly so I'm going to have to content myself with simply affirming the authoritative status of the Statement signers. I would suggest that perhaps Luther was mostly referring to the Apocrypha which were accepted by Roman Catholicism, and saying that they don't meet the tests. But that is just a guess and in any case I'm sticking with the Chicago Statement.
Faith writes:
Yes, the writers of the document do not provide the kind of support that you would desire,...
They don't provide support for their affirmations that anyone would desire, not just me. In particular they provide no support for Biblical inerrancy, they just declare it.
That is what a statement does, it declares.
The Infallibility, Inerrancy, Interpretation section describes a multiplicity of ways that the inerrant Bible is errant. It calls the Bible a "human production" written from the perspective of the author.
But inspired by God.
They provide no support that the authors were inspired by God, nor even describe what the effects of being "inspired by God" mean, nor even that there is any such thing as "inspired by God."
It does declare it, however. Under that title you refer to,
Infallibility, Inerrancy, Interpretation the first sentence is "Holy Scripture, as the inspired Word of God witnesses authoritatively to Jesus Christ, may properly be called infallible and inerrant."
Faith writes:
They are very very clear that it is all inspired by God without overriding the writer's personality and culture etc.
Repeating what you're ignoring, they called the Bible a "human production." There is no claim, let alone any support for this claim they didn't make, that their human errant qualities were removed while engaged in this "human production."
What the CSBI says in Article VIII is "WE AFFIRM that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom he had chosen and prepared. WE DENY that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities." That is, He guided their writing without overriding their own personalities.
When precision was not a goal it was "no error not to have achieved it." It also says:
quote:
Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.
In other words, the Bible is inerrant not by modern standards but by whatever they want to claim were the standards of nearly 2000 years ago.
Something like that, but I'd say "by standards they recognize in the scripture itself."
I'm not going to comment on your misreading of the errors of transmission except to reiterate that God does not promise that copies and translations will be error-free, only the original autographs, and that nevertheless the thousands of MSS of copies and translations we possess are shown by textual criticism to refer back to an inerrant original. Article X of the CSBI says "WE AFFIRM that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy." In the section
Transmission and Translation the inerrancy of the original is established by the discipline or science of "textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips that may have crept into the text in the course of its transmission. The verdict of this science, however, is that the hebrew and Greek text appear to be amazingly well preserved, so that we are amply justified in affirming, with the Westminster Confession, a singular providence of God in this matter and in declaring that the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free.
In other words the inspiration of the original authographs can be established by textual criticism applied to the copies.
You go on and on claiming you didn't misread anything but proving that you did and I'm not going to say more about that.
It is not synonymous with the particular theological movement called Fundamentalism.
I never said it was. I've merely repeated what history says, that Biblical inerrancy was simply one component of the fundamentalist movement. It came into being at the same time as the fundamentalist movement. That doesn't make it synonymous with fundamentalism. You are rebutting a silly claim, twice now, that you made up yourself.
Well but it did NOT "come into being" at that time, it was treated by the opponents of the modernist/liberal revisionism as long pre-existing that revisionism. That was the whole point of spelling out the "fundamentals," to state what had been accepted FROM THE BEGINNING as fundamental to the faith, anbd that includes Bible inerrancy. You did misread all this.
As for Science I'll just say again, God blessed the West with true science among many other blessings, because of the West's adherence to Biblical Christianity. It doesn't matter whether the scientist is an atheist or a believer, the science is a gift from God to the Christian west. We're losing all that now though because of the erosion of Christianity in the west over the last century or so.
Your claiming that I'm personally taking credit for knowledge of God's will just shows your abysmal ignorance of the true history of western civilization, which is all I'm referring to, not something special to me personally.
No, I'm afraid you are wrong. St. Augustine wanted things both ways. In Chapter 18 of
On Grace and Free Will he criticizes those who believe that "faith suffices to a man, even if he lead a bad life, and has no good works," then goes on to argue that both faith and works are necessary for salvation.
Yes, works that are the fruit of faith can be said to be "necessary' to salvation" because both must be evident. But because this is so often misconstrued Justification by Faith Alone is emphasized to show its absolute preeminence. Works FOLLOW Faith and are necessary to salvation in the sense that if they don't follow then we can conclude there was no faith.
ALSO affirming stuff that is now rejected in current theology. No, it isn't that I've read that much of Augustine, but I have listened to some presentations and discussions of his work that make this point.
You listened to discussions and presentations making this point, but supported by what? Did they, like you, just make the point and move on? Or did they provide support for their point? If the latter then what did they say?
They quoted Augustine on a variety of topics, showing that in one place he was very consistenly in tune with what the later Reformers affirmed, and in other places he appeared to say something else.
In other threads you've argued that your faith is based on evidence, but in this thread you're arguing that declaring what you believe is sufficient to rise over all objections.
I could not have become a believer without what I took to be solid evidence, though I'd say that it was just about all witness evidence. I believed what many believable honest people said. And then I had some supernatural experiences of my own, and God answered my prayers and that too is evidence.
The death penalty is certainly good, it is justice where applied correctly.
Let the record show that the person supposedly blessed with divine grace praises the death penalty, while the spiritual but religiously bereft person thinks the death penalty bad.
Yes let the record show it, do.
Stoning was the method of the times in which the Law was given, before there was any kind of seat of government, before there were courts and sitting judges.
Now you're blessing stoning without any due process?
Of course there was due process. The leaders would have heard the case, Moses in the beginning, along with other elders, there would have been witnesses, two being the minimum required by the Law, there were simply no formal institutions at the time as we have now, no jail cells, etc.
The method of murder, even murder supposedly justified by a legal process, is not important. What's important is that it is murder.
That is insane. The death penalty is justice, not murder.
And it is considered to have been an especially effective means of enacting the death penalty because it involved the entire community in the act in order to impress upon all of them the importance of the law and the dire consequences of disobeying it.
It is most enlightening to discover that the most religious are also the most in favor of killing people.
Rather, most intellectually astute in understanding the difference between crime and justice, and most in favor of justice and Law and protection of society against criminal influences.
You've never been able to support your "original observations.
I disagree, but I also no longer care whether you consider my arguments supported or not. in any case my geological (and biologicaltoo) observations ARE original, which is the ONLY point I was making.
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