The Authority Of Scripture

Schuhart

Wibbs wrote:

from a Roman or Greek standpoint(and later Pagan Arab) the manner of death would have been uncomfortable.

Is it fair to say we just don’t have the kind of outlook any more that would have such discomfort, which makes it hard to get into that old mindset. It might feature a little in discussion, say, of Saddam's death sentence. But I don’t think anyone who opposes his execution would say ‘I’d be cool about it if they shot him.’

For the modern mind, the idea might be captured a little if we considered how people might react to a religion where the central figure died from an infection caught from a needle shared with a drug addict. That might certainly make some want to edit that detail out.

Wibbs

Schuhart wrote:

Is it fair to say we just don’t have the kind of outlook any more that would have such discomfort, which makes it hard to get into that old mindset. It might feature a little in discussion, say, of Saddam's death sentence. But I don’t think anyone who opposes his execution would say ‘I’d be cool about it if they shot him.’

For the modern mind, the idea might be captured a little if we considered how people might react to a religion where the central figure died from an infection caught from a needle shared with a drug addict. That might certainly make some want to edit that detail out.

Well put. The image of the cross is no longer the image of degradation it would have been back then. 2000 Yrs of Christianity and art have seen to that. Now it represents to many the ultimate image of sacrifice and triumph over evil. A concept that would have been quite alien to most of the original(and some later) observers.

ISAW

Asiaprod wrote:

ISAW, take this as a friendly warning. Tone it down, its becoming personal.

Since you brought this up here I will respond to it here. THe following words were addressed publicly to me

Your aggressive and frankly imbecile/ignorant/exhausting merry-go-round of provocation and manipulation of what I'm saying when I'm only responding to you is draining both me and I'm sure many other posters.

Yes THAT is personal. But I didnt complain about it! What did i do. I asked AGAIN about what questions were made which were not answered. I speciffically asked the person who made claims about what questions they made which were unanswered. If you think that is a personal attack on someone then you have a problem in discerning the difference between an attack on someons argument and an attack on the person themselves.

If you wish to point out any particular personal attacks which you think I may have made than please take it to PM.

I respect you may think i am attacking someone in particular but I am not and it is not my style. I am quite prepared to attack CLAIMS however and ask for evidence.

Several people have come here and posted the same questions over and over again with a specific motive in doing so. People have been banned because of that. I do not claim that Medina is one of those but you cant just post unsupported claims and then re ask the same questions if they have already been answered. Indeed the fact that people have been banned for doing just that bears this out!

And the onus of proof is not on other people but on the person asking the questions and making the claims! THEY have to show where the question was left unanswered.

So - If I personally attacked anyone please show in a PM where I have done so and I will immediately apologise for it. If not then the claim I have personally attacked anyone does not stand up. Telling someone that they claimed something is NOT a personal attack!

I respect your position and I appreciate your candor in saying you are giving a "friendly warning" . It however is also a public warning and if you are going to ban me for asking someone to back up their claims then that ban wont be lifted. I will not operate in a forum where a ban on me results from someone making claims and personal comments about me when all i did was ask them to back up their claims and do not IN ANY WAY make personal attacks on them.

So I am saying in a friendly way, but a fair and firm way, that if you can show me any personal attacks or charter breeches I may have made then PM them to me and expect a prompt apology on my part. If you cant do that then what point are you making?

Asiaprod

ISAW wrote:

Yes THAT is personal. But I didnt complain about it! What did i do. I asked AGAIN about what questions were made which were not answered. I speciffically asked the person who made claims about what questions they made which were unanswered. If you think that is a personal attack on someone then you have a problem in discerning the difference between an attack on someons argument and an attack on the person themselves.

As you said above, "Yes THAT is personal" Glad we can agree. Mine is a nice request to you to be careful "in general" of slipping into the realm of making it personal; this applies to everyone, not just you. Its one of the jobs that Mods get to perform.

ISAW

Asiaprod wrote:

As you said above, "Yes THAT is personal" Glad we can agree. Mine is a nice request to you to be careful "in general" of slipping into the realm of making it personal; this applies to everyone, not just you. Its one of the jobs that Mods get to perform.

Fine, thank you for telling me. Please do not consider this self righteous bit if anyone can point to me personally attacking someone else then I wholehartedlt and unreservedely apologise for it. Please feel free to PM me any examples either now or should you find them in the future. I am not aware of it happening. If however I point to a baseless argument or a unsupportable comment then it isnt personal.

I cant apologise for being pedantic.
Now can anyone show me what specific questions about scriptures were asked in this thread and were not answered?

BrianCalgary

ISAW wrote:

I cant apologise for being pedantic.
Now can anyone show me what specific questions about scriptures were asked in this thread and were not answered?

I have to agree with ISAW here. I am missing out completely on questions that are asked and left unanswered. I am having trouble finding the questions.

Maybe ask them one at a time in a new thread to be completely clear as to what they are.

ISAW

BrianCalgary wrote:

I have to agree with ISAW here. I am missing out completely on questions that are asked and left unanswered. I am having trouble finding the questions.

Maybe ask them one at a time in a new thread to be completely clear as to what they are.

I am not a conspiracy theorist but:

Does anyone find it curious that the same questions are asked again and again and answered and then when the timewasters are shown up for people that don't really want answers but want to try to cast doubt on or insist Christianiaty must be unreasonable/illogical/wrong and those people are BANNED and then when people are asked what their sincere questions were they have dissappeared? I find that curious. does anyone else?

Scofflaw

ISAW wrote:

I am not a conspiracy theorist but:

Does anyone find it curious that the same questions are asked again and again and answered and then when the timewasters are shown up for people that don't really want answers but want to try to cast doubt on or insist Christianiaty must be unreasonable/illogical/wrong and those people are BANNED and then when people are asked what their sincere questions were they have dissappeared? I find that curious. does anyone else?

I certainly haven't been banned for casting doubt on Christianity, as far as I'm aware, or claiming it's often unreasonable/illogical/wrong - although, as occasionally happens, I can't be certain exactly what ISAW is asking.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Zombrex

ISAW wrote:

I am not a conspiracy theorist but:

Does anyone find it curious that the same questions are asked again and again and answered

But they weren't answered, that was the point. They just came to log jams.

Most of Medinas questions were along the lines of "If there are so many flaws and contradictions in the Bible, how can anyone believe it is the word of God"

The answer given was "There are no flaws or contradictings in the Bible", which isn't an answer to the question because it refuses to accept there are contradictions in the Bible in the first place.

ISAW

Wicknight wrote:

But they weren't answered, that was the point. They just came to log jams.

Most of Medinas questions were along the lines of "If there are so many flaws and contradictions in the Bible, how can anyone believe it is the word of God"

To what questions in particular do you refer? Please cite examples where they were asked. And then we can go and see if they were answered. Making bald assertions isnt really pointing out anything is it?

The answer given was "There are no flaws or contradictings in the Bible",

Where did I give that answer? And to what question?

which isn't an answer to the question because it refuses to accept there are contradictions in the Bible in the first place.

What contradictions in particular? Please post your own questions. If you cut and paste several questions I can just as easily cut and paste several answers. And before you go to such cutting and pasting please show me where they were asked IN THIS DISCUSSION.

Excelsior

I am going to bypass a lot of the debate that has gone on since I started this thread and just elaborate my answer here. As a former moderator I think I will abuse my social capital.

Although I am very firmly under the sway of NT Wright's guiding metaphor of a 5-Act play where we are improvising the final Biblical act as Christians, throughout college (I studied computer science first, not theology) I used a different metaphor which I haven't found anywhere else.

It was based on the misconception that most of my classmates and my debating partners thought that the Christian concept of Revelation was the same as the Islamic picture. For Islam, the Koran is the absolute perfect representation of God's communication to humanity. It almost could be said that it serves the role that Jesus plays for us- as the incarnation of God. It is for this reason that I cannot properly say that I have read the Koran since I haven't even got a copy in Arabic, nevermind the linguistic cunning to read it. Once it is translated out of Arabic, it is an interpretation.

Against this and prior to this is the historical Christian understanding which is that the Bible is authoritative because it is the Word of God, through human interpreters. For me, this is like the difference between a CD recording and an mp3. Christians do not believe that in the Bible we have a perfect and exact representation of God's expression. Rather, the communication he has made is relayed by men who had their own agendas, were immersed in their own cultures and time, bounded by their own finite understanding and even laden with their own aesthetic expression.

Thus we have the competing voices of Hosea and Jeremiah who if memory serves me correctly (I am writing off the top of my head as a FM2006 game loads) were contemporaries. Both write poetically and both make their lives a living expression of their prophesy but they come with different styles and nuance.

The difference between a well-encoded mp3 and the master CD recording is not apparent to human ears at a casual listen. If one plugs an mp3 into a huge sound system however, the noise and dissonance becomes apparent at the edge of the sound. Thus the Scriptures are totally trustworthy for communicating the message of God but they have noise and pointless data packed into them because of the way he has chosen to communicate.

Why didn't he send us the Master CD? Well if you read the story you begin to see that the over-arching preoccupation of YHWH (whether you are a believer or not you will be able to agree with this) is to renew the relationship with his people. He wants to restore the broken relationship with humanity and indeed restore the damage our rebellion has done not just to us but to our culture and our environment, everything. So it just adds a new layer to the poetry of Hosea or David that God would co-commission human hands to implement his grand communication process.

This interpretation of authority guided me for five years and it hasn't been replaced so much as improved on by the ideas Wright brings to the table. What do people make of it? Especially the sharpened skeptical voices that lurk hereabouts?

Scofflaw

Excelsior wrote:

This interpretation of authority guided me for five years and it hasn't been replaced so much as improved on by the ideas Wright brings to the table. What do people make of it? Especially the sharpened skeptical voices that lurk hereabouts?

What a terrible thing to ask! You're inviting the response: "it's a very clever and well-argued delusion, Watson - clearly, we are dealing with a highly intelligent madman".

Excelsior wrote:

Against this and prior to this is the historical Christian understanding which is that the Bible is authoritative because it is the Word of God, through human interpreters. For me, this is like the difference between a CD recording and an mp3. Christians do not believe that in the Bible we have a perfect and exact representation of God's expression. Rather, the communication he has made is relayed by men who had their own agendas, were immersed in their own cultures and time, bounded by their own finite understanding and even laden with their own aesthetic expression.

Hmm. Yet, according to quite a large body of believers, nevertheless capable of writing down only what is true.

Excelsior wrote:

Thus we have the competing voices of Hosea and Jeremiah who if memory serves me correctly (I am writing off the top of my head as a FM2006 game loads) were contemporaries. Both write poetically and both make their lives a living expression of their prophesy but they come with different styles and nuance.

The difference between a well-encoded mp3 and the master CD recording is not apparent to human ears at a casual listen. If one plugs an mp3 into a huge sound system however, the noise and dissonance becomes apparent at the edge of the sound. Thus the Scriptures are totally trustworthy for communicating the message of God but they have noise and pointless data packed into them because of the way he has chosen to communicate.

Why didn't he send us the Master CD? Well if you read the story you begin to see that the over-arching preoccupation of YHWH (whether you are a believer or not you will be able to agree with this) is to renew the relationship with his people. He wants to restore the broken relationship with humanity and indeed restore the damage our rebellion has done not just to us but to our culture and our environment, everything. So it just adds a new layer to the poetry of Hosea or David that God would co-commission human hands to implement his grand communication process.

It is, again, a very interesting suggestion: the Bible as poetic billet doux rather than technical instruction manual. It certainly provides a less legalistic foundation for Christianity, but one I think that better suits Catholicism than any other major strand. Under the circumstances, it becomes difficult, and potentially dangerous, for the ordinary Christian to read and interpret it for themselves - as if a child had, for instruction, only the letters of his/her great-great-great-great-grandparents...and at that, only those deemed canonical by by a committee of his great-great grandparents...

A very tantalising delusion overall - well worked out, plausible, and emotionally appealling. Would allow, perhaps, too much leeway in interpretation. A-

cordially,
Scofflaw

Excelsior

So kind you are!

I think that you have brought out a wonderful point, in that you have brought out one of the chips on my shoulders. I am an evangelical Christian. I can sign any of their doctrinal bases (except the rarer Inerrantist ones). But I hate the individualisation of evangelical Christianity... I'll spare you the rant but here is my point:

The Bible was never meant to be read or interpreted by the individual as an individual. If it was, then for the first 1800 years of Christianity most of the individual Christians who were without actual copies of the Scriptures couldn't understand it properly! Such nonsense!

In reality, when we talk about the perspicuity of the Scriptures and their plain meaning we mean, in Luther's words that an uneducated ploughboy can understand them, as long as they are interpreting it as part of a community of believers. So a side effect of the two illustrations I use to describe the authority of Scriptures is that it places the emphasis for interpretation within the context of a community. It might save us from the tyranny of the individual that has stunted Western Christianity... argh I'm ranting again.

BrianCalgary

Excelsior wrote:

So a side effect of the two illustrations I use to describe the authority of Scriptures is that it places the emphasis for interpretation within the context of a community.

Well said Excelsior.
Nothing is better than studying the Bible with other people in differnt stages of knowledge. The learners ask wonderful questions that we vets sometimes take for granted. We vets get to share our knowledge with the new learners. What ends up happening is we vets become learners ourselves and our Christian walk becomes one that is shared with others.