Painting Fakes

A few years ago I wrote a series of posts on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy , and for a while after that I kept coming back to the subject.  I stopped eventually, partly because I ran out of things to say, and partly because it was like shooting fish in a barrel.  The idea of an inerrant Bible just doesn't make any sense once you've read it and realised what kind of book (or collection of books) it actually is. However, at the risk of going over old ground and boring everyone, I've just read a fantastic book by Peter Enns called The Bible Tells Me So...Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It.   Don't bother reading my laboured posts on the subject, just read this book instead. Enns is an Old Testament scholar.  He currently holds a chair in Biblical Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania.  His book jacket also tells us that he has taught at Harvard, Princeton and Fuller.  Interestingly it doesn't mention Westminster The...

Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God is a sustained critique of the concept of Biblical inerrancy, particularly as outlined in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  Stark is a young Bible scholar whose origins lie in the Stone-Campbell movement , a 19th century church reform movement which led, among other things, to the creation of the Churches of Christ.  Those who have had anything to do with members of this branch of the church will know them as conservative Evangelicals with a strong congregational ethos and (at least theoretically) a focus on ecumenism.  Stark was brought up on the idea of inerrancy, so in a sense this book is his "coming out". He cites many of the problems with inerrancy that will be familiar to readers of this blog.  He finds it impossible to read the Bible without seeing its mutiple points of view, its variants on the same story, its factual discrepancies.  The early chapters of this book focus on these questions, and th...

Happy New Year everyone.  I trust 2012 is a better year than 2011 or, if 2011 was the best year of your life so far, that at least the comedown is unspectacular. In between eating, sleeping and watching cricket I've been reading The Bible Unearthed, an earlier book by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, authors of David and Solomon .   This book operates on a broader canvas, providing an overview of the latest (at least up to their time of writing in 2001) archaeological evidence about the times in which the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, are set. Finkelstein and Silbermann are serious and distinguished historians and archaeologists, not eccentric amateurs like Tony Bushby or Stephan Huller .  They carefully cite and sift their sources, build their arguments from evidence and are careful to avoid overclaiming.  Nonetheless it is important to remember that archaeological evidence is intrinsically partial.  In a country which has been continu...

Courtesy of my friend Kay I've been reading a book by Gregory Jenks called The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives.   Jenks is Academic Dean of St Francis Theological College, the Anglican seminary here in Brisbane.  He is also strongly connected with the "progressive" Christian movement in the USA as a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar  and a friend of the radical former Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong , to whom he refers as a kind of mentor. Despite his association with Spong, Jenks is very much his own person.  Spong's comparable book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, is combative and quixotic, leaping unpredictably between mainstream scholarship like the source theory of the Gospels, and fringe ideas like the notion of the Apostle Paul as a repressed gay man.  By contrast, Jenks is calm and sober, providing a concise lay person's summary of what he sees as the current state of Biblical ...

As a teenager I was fascinated by the story of King David.   It was a part of the Bible I read over and over again.   Looking back on it, I think it’s because David is the most complete and the most human character in the Bible, even including Jesus.   D espite his flaws and his repeated failures he keeps trying to do right and enjoys tremendous success.   Plus, there’s lots of action, plenty of blood and guts and a fair amount of sex. At one point I even wrote an ancient history assignment about King David’s role in Israelite history.   However, I lost marks because of my naïve acceptance of the Biblical accounts as accurate history, my failure to evaluate them as sources. To be fair to my teenage self, back in the 1970s most historians had a fairly generous view of the historicity of Samuel and 1 Kings.   Not that I knew anything about it at age 16, but most critics regarded elements of these stories as reaching back to two narratives w...

2 Timothy 3:16-17 is one of those snippets of scripture you get taught to memorise when you're a young evangelical.  I haven't read it for a while but it formed part of our readings on Sunday morning and it struck me that I had learnt it without thinking clearly about what it means.  Now's my chance to make up for that lack.  Here's the passage. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work . We were taught that this verse was a key indication that we should believe the Bible in its entirety.  It was often combined with a passing reference in ...

Don Rogers over at Reflections recently posted this quote. "Those who claim they “believe the whole Bible” and “take it literally” are being dishonest. Their pastor may have preached recently on the story of the fall of Jericho, but it was applied to God “making the strongholds of sin in your life come crumbling down”, not to a battle plan to take a city. To be fair, not all Biblical authors view God in the same way. And so there is no single “Biblical view of God”. But certainly God as depicted in some parts of the Bible is not the concept of the deity served by Christians today. The question a Christian needs to ask is whether they have the courage to admit that their view of God is not the same as that of many depicitions in the Bible. Do you have the courage to take the Bible’s actual words completely seriously, even when the result is that you are forced to acknowledge that you do not accept their literal truthfulness?" ~from Dr. James McGrath’s "Exploring ...

During this series on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy , some people have suggested to me (with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety) that I should maybe explain what I think, not just what I don't.  Of course, I've been doing that all along to some degree, but as a closer for the series I'd like to spell it out as clearly as I can. Of course all along I've been using the Chigago Statements as a foil against which to work out what I think.  It's still developing.  Nor do I claim anything close to inerrancy for myself - I expect lots of people to disagree in various ways and I expect a lot of them will turn out to be right.  I'm no Bible scholar, and none of what I say here is original.  Still, here goes... 1. The Bible is the primary source for Christian belief Everything important that we believe as Christians is ultimately sourced back to Bible.  It's where we learn about God and about Christ, it's where we learn how to pray and how to...

A couple of times in this series on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy I've mentioned poetry in the Bible and I'd like to deal with this question a little more fully. Article VI of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics says WE AFFIRM   that the Bible expresses God's truth in propositional statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute. The problem with this affirmation is that it is simply and clearly wrong for large parts of the Bible.  Even the framers of the Statement on Inerrancy recognised this, saying in Article XVIII WE AFFIRM  that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices.... They knew this to be the case, but they obviously didn't know what to do with it, or they couldn't have put their article about "propositional truth" in the follow-up statement. So what's propositional truth?  Mr Google defi...

My relative and fellow blogger Luke has also been blogging on inerrancy, coming from quite a different standpoint to me.  Most recently he pointed to Jesus' parable of the mustard seed , in which some of the botanical details are not quite correct.  This is a clear case where literal truth is beside the point - indeed, Jesus' "errors" of fact appear to be quite deliberate and are used to heighten his message. I've been thinking about another Bible story this past week, in relation to the Chicago Statement's insistence on the  absence of contradication in the Bible.  This is one of my favourite Old Testament stories - the story of David's desire to build the temple.  The first part of this story is found in pretty much identical form in 2 Samuel 7, and in 1 Chronicles 17.  Quoting from the Chronicles version, here is what happens. After David was settled in his palace, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while...

I have to confess that I have a soft spot for Ken Ham, a local boy who made it to the big stage.  He grew up in the same Brisbane suburb as me.  I had a slight friendship with his younger brother in my early teens, and Ken himself taught biology at the high school I attended.  In the year I graduated, he quit teaching to start the Creation Science Foundation here in Queensland, and a few years later joined forces with his friend and mentor Henry Morris to spread the idea of young earth creationism in the USA.  He is still doing it to this day. In my early 20s I went to a Creation Science event at which Ken shared the platform with an American biologist.  At the time I was very receptive to creationism and was impressed by the American's presentation on the mathematical improbability of evolution.  I remember being less impressed with Ken's presentation, but in hindsight it was probably more to the point.  The Book of Genesis, he said, is a...

Some further thoughts on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  Four years after the original Chicago Statement, the same group of conservative theologians had a follow-up summit and issued a second statement, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics .  This statement aimed to clarify some of the content of the original, and to explain a little more carefully how the participants meant the bible to be interpreted. Once again, the core of the statement is a series of affirmations and denials and each would be worthy of some comment.  I'd just like to highlight a couple.  Firstly from Article VI WE AFFIRM that the Bible expresses God's truth in propositional statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute. We further affirm that a statement is true if it represents matters as they actually are, but is an error if it misrepresents the facts. WE DENY that, while Scripture is able to make us wise unto salvation, ...

I was talking with someone on the Internet about Biblical inerrancy, and said as I often do that I didn't really understand properly what the term meant.  He referred me to a document called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  This document was produced in 1978 at a conference sponsored by a group called the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.  Its 300 signatories included a number of evangelical luminaries of the time including JI Packer, Francis Schaeffer and RC Sproule.  The same group produced two more statements in succeeding years and the second, The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics , is a kind of follow up and explanation of the first. The core of the statement is a set of 19 articles, each of which is framed as an affirmation of what the authors believe, followed by a denial of the position they are refuting.  It's a pithy, elegant statement written by some highly intelligent men, and it certainly helped me to...