Category Archives: Bible

Confessions of a virtual inerrantist

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Recent publication of a book exploring Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy has got me thinking again about this topic.

Readers of Walking With Giants will know that I do not subscribe to a formal doctrine of inerrancy.  I have outlined my reasons for this, and these include:-

Inerrancy is an inappropriate term.  It is not appropriate for the very different kinds of literature we find in the Bible.  It is easy to see what it would mean for a telephone directory to be regarded as ‘inerrant’, but not a psalm.…

The Gospels as eyewitness testimony

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The New Testament writers assert on a number of occasions that the accounts of Jesus’ life and work were based on eyewitness testimony.

Perhaps the most famous of these assertions is the statement by Luke at the beginning of his gospel. Peter also insists that ‘we did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty’ (2 Pet 1:16).  …

The ‘high Christology’ of the Synoptics

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Scholars such as Bart Ehrman (in his recent book How Jesus Became God) stress the differences between the ‘higher Christology’ of John’s Gospel (in which Jesus is represented as God incarnate) and the ‘lower Christology’ of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which he is represented as exalted, but not pre-existent).  For Ehrman, even the Synoptic view of Jesus did not arise until after his followers came to believe that he had been resurrected; and the Johanine view developed later still.…

The Bible vs. the Ikea Catalogue

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According to this article in The Telegraph, 212 million copies of the Ikea catalogue are printed each year, in 29 different languages.  This makes it twice as widely distributed as the Bible (of which there are an estimated 100 million copies either sold or given out each year).

I recently heard Simon Ponsonby remark that one difference is that although the Ikea catalogue is free, you have to pay for everything in it, whereas a Bible usually has to be paid for, but everything in it is free!…

The ‘sensus plenior’ of Scripture

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What follows is based on ‘The problem of sensus plenior’, by Douglas Moo (chapter 5 of Hermeneutics, Authority, Canon, edited by D.A. Carson and J.D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986).  Moo’s chapter is available here.

A belief in the entire truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture raised a number of questions.  One question is this: ‘How can we accord complete truthfulness to [the New Testament] writings that appear to misunderstand and misapply those [Old Testament] texts from which they claim to derive authority and rationale for their most basic claims and teaching?’…

Biblical prophecy – a closed book?

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Unfortunately, the word ‘prophecy’ is thought, in the common mind, to be synonymous with ‘prediction’.

This has had two serious side-effects.

The first is the tendency for certain people to set themselves up as ‘students of Bible prophecy’, and to specialise in speculations about the ‘end times’ that have lost contact with the central message of the Bible.  Never trust a man (I say) who is more interested in Gog and Magog than in grace and holiness; who spends more time with the Revelation of John than with the Gospel of John.…

Inspiration and criticism

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The Christian doctrine of inspiration says that the Bible is the word of God, and therefore uniquely authoritative.

The academic discipline of biblical criticism insists that the Bible is a human word, and therefore subject to ordinary methods of enquiry regarding authorship, interpretation, and so on.

Can these two perspective be reconciled?  And, if so, how?  This is dealt with by John Goldingay in an early (1976) article entitled Inspiration, Infallibility and Criticism.

I would like to summarise Goldingay’s article because I think it’s interesting (not because I necessarily agree with all of it):-

For evangelicals the doctrine of inspiration has, as its corollary, the notion of infallibility (or something similar).  …

‘The biblical God requires child sacrifices for his pleasure’

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This is the strange theory advanced by John Loftus in chapter 4 of God or Godless?.

I call it ‘strange’ because I had not come across it before.  I hastily looked up the passage he cites (Exodus 22:29-30) to see what I had been missing all these years.  We read:

‘You shall not delay to offer from the fulness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses.  The first-born of your sons you shall give to me. 

…

How the Old Testament deepens our love for Jesus

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When we read the Old Testament,

  1. we are reading Jesus’ Bible – the Old Testament Scriptures were Jesus’ Bible
  2. we are learning Jesus’ language – his teaching was saturated with Old Testament words and concepts; more than that, he saw the Old Testament scriptures as fulfilled in himself
  3. we are singing Jesus’ songs – the book of Psalms was Jesus’ hymnbook
  4. we are feeling Jesus’ feelings – passages such as Psalm 22 and 69 display Christ’s sufferings in an especially powerful way
  5. we are hearing Jesus’ voice – as the one mediator between God and us, it is his voice that we hear speaking to and pleading with sinners
  6. we are seeing Jesus in action – as the ‘Angel of the Lord’ he visited the earth many times
  7. we are admiring Jesus’ trophies – considering how much less they knew, the Old Testament saints are in some way even more remarkable the those of the New Testament

Summarising this article by David Murray…

Ephesians 1:10 – ‘The fullness of the times’

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In the New International Version (1984 ed.) Eph 1:9f reads:-

‘[God] made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfilment – to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.’

There are several issues with this translation.  Firstly, ‘to be put into effect’ rather obscures the important word οἰκονομίαν (economy, administration) in the original. …