Notes from Don, from aus.religion.christian

'Scripture cannot be broken'. I'm afraid I cannot see what you are on about. Even modern eyes can understand what it means, while Gill provides a deeper Jewish understanding that further strengthens what an English reader would understand. And this is in the context of Jesus' repeated teaching that Scripture was completely authoritative on everything it teaches, including the parts that sceptics scoff at today. I can't see that John 10:35 is being misused at all and Jesus made many other statements to reinforce the concept anyway.

Inerrancy is most definitely *not* a modern idea. The phrase 'biblical inerrancy' is relatively recent, but the concept is most certainly not. Look at Augustine's first letter to Jerome: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102028.htm "For it seems to me that most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books: that is to say, that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us, and committed to writing, did put down in these books anything false. It is one question whether it may be at any time the duty of a good man to deceive; but it is another question whether it can have been the duty of a writer of Holy Scripture to deceive: nay, it is not another question -- it is no question at all. For if you once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement as made in the way of duty, there will not be left a single sentence of those books which, if appearing to any one difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away, as a statement in which, intentionally, and under a sense of duty, the author declared what was not true."

That's a pretty clear statement about inerrancy, although if you searched for the term 'inerrancy' you would not find it, of course.

The dispute between Protestants and Catholics was never over inerrancy (implicitly accepted on all sides) but authority: the Bible plus church or the Bible alone (sola scriptura). In the early church, both the heretics and the orthodox appealed to Scripture as authoritative (the heretics misused it, but the point remains that there is a complete absence of any hint that the teachings of Scripture were wrong). The creeds concentrated on the things where there was divergence (deity of Christ, for example).

The only reason that evangelicals need to spell out 'inerrancy' today is the modern fashion for denying it.

Don

~~

Thanks for your friendly welcome. :-)

If regarding the Bible as authoritative means I am anti-science, then you have to dismiss many of the great founders of modern science as anti-science. Pascal wrote, "Except by Jesus Christ we know not what our life is, what our death is, what God is, what we are ourselves. Thus, without Scripture, which has only Jesus Christ for its object, we know nothing, and we only see obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature herself." --- Blaise Pascal (1623-62), The thoughts, letters and opuscules of Blaise Pascal, Translated from the French by O.W. Wright, Hurd & Houghton, NY, 1964, p. 335.

Oh, and you can write Newton off---he wrote much more on theology than he wrote on physics and calculus. And you can forget Kepler, who saw his research as "thinking God's thoughts after him". And Robert Boyle, and ... Indeed, even secular historians have noted that modern science arose because of the Christian (i.e., Bible-based) mindset of the intellectuals of the day. See, for example: http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v18/i2/origins.asp.

Dr Loren E. Eiseley, a leading science historian and evolutionist (1907-1977) concluded: '[by] The sheer act of faith that the universe possessed order and could be interpreted by rational minds... The philosophy of experimental science ...began its discoveries and made use of its method in the faith, not the knowledge, that it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a Creator who did not act upon whim or interfere with the forces He had set in operation. The experimental method succeeded beyond man's wildest dreams but the faith that brought it into existence owes something to the Christian conception of the nature of God. It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science, which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.' (Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Man who Discovered it. Doubleday, New York, 1969,p.62.)

I see nothing in the Bible that contradicts experimental science; only the story telling that goes in the guise of historical science.

Don