Loading...This fifth installment of a six-part video thread by Kurt Jaros, an evangelical Christian apologist, considers my views of Scripture back in my hard-core conservative evangelical days and their (possible?) impact on my later decision to leave the faith altogether. My ears are tingling!
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In this video, I look at the young Bart Ehrman’s theological reflection on the doctrines of inerrancy and the preservation & inspiration of the Biblical text. Did the young Ehrman have a misconception, misunderstanding, or invalid inference pertaining to these doctrines? Image a world in which those doctrinal beliefs were formulated even slightly differently. It may have taken the young Ehrman down a different path.
This is the problem with philosophically trained theologians. They think they define things out of the realm of pragmatics. It’s a weird theology that says that God could inspire men to write down his words upon which salvific faith must be placed in order to attain justification and eternal life, yet that he would inspire them to write errors in the text itself. There is clearly a link between a perfect God who makes no mistakes inspiring people to create a perfect document that demands that people place their faith in it and the assumption on the part of those very people that it would not contain errors. Inerrancy emerges from the doctrine of God’s utter perfection and his direct inspiration of the text. You were not wrong.
Hi jaihare,
Thanks for your comment.
I did not say that God “would inspire them to write errors in the text itself.” That’s not my position or claim. One of the variables theologians consider is how much the Fall affected humanity. Thus, God is working with and through fallen human beings. I think this would be a variable to consider, and hence there is no necessary causal relationship between “a perfect God who makes no mistakes inspiring people to create a perfect document that demands that people place their faith in it and the assumption on the part of those very people that it would not contain errors.”
This is not defining things out of the realm of pragmatics but incorporating a comprehensive view of Christian doctrine.
Are you saying that God couldn’t make an imperfect human commit no errors? Wouldn’t it violate the omnipotence of God for him to be unable to get a human to write down what he wanted? Humans are fallen, sure, but I could get a fallen human to write down something just as I said, so how come God couldn’t? And if God somehow can’t, surely he could just correct the errors himself after they’re done. After all, he can literally do anything.
“Inerrant” is a pretty absolute term, by definition. If anyone wants to shift that meaning to something more flexible, perhaps it would be better to avoid that word. What they may do better with is “reliable,” in some essential sense and not with a total dependence on every detail. Even the basic idea of inspired can be subject to various meanings. Parts of “The Lord of the Rings” may have been inspired by Tolkien’s experiences in WWI, but that should not be taken too literally in the final product. Presumably, the inspiration for the OT and the NT are rather different, as the NT at least claims to be mostly a witness to the key events it relates (although certainly none of the authors were present at the birth of Jesus, nor his early childhood). No human writing the Bible could possibly have been present for the creation. The question then becomes if God inspired the Bible, why did he fill it with so many stories that are almost certainly not true? The Garden of Eden and the Flood, to name only two such stories, are highly problematic if they are meant to be taken literally in any sense.
I really liked the other videos in Jaros’ series. This one felt like he was trying to untie the Gordian knot rather than hack it with a sword.
To me it’s as simple as looking at the four gospels, along with Paul’s writings. They agree neither on major theological issues, nor minor details.
Why did God need 5 tries to get it right, and why could he not recall what he inspired previous authors to write?
Hi DoubtingTom,
Great analogy on the Gordian knot! My slogan/tagline at Veracity Hill is: “Disentangling Complex Theology” 😀
Re: Gospels, I take them to be 4 portraits of Jesus. Different painters can provide different perspectives of the same subject.
How do you know all four gospels were meant to be canonical? How can you know any book is canonical? If God can’t prevent people from writing down errors in his holy books, couldn’t he also be unable to prevent them from putting false or heretical books in the cannon?
Hi Kjaros
“Re: Gospels, I take them to be 4 portraits of Jesus. Different painters can provide different perspectives of the same subject.”
This just piqued my curiosity . . . .
Do you think ALL the events covered in the 4 gospels, actually happened, in that case?
A good video that I can easily relate to.
For me, a lot has changed, and especially what I read from the NT. When I speak for myself, I do not even have to pay attention to non-canonical texts such as the Gospel of Thomas to get an understanding that the core of the message is internal. When I read some of the canonical sayings of Jesus, and also Paul in, for example, the second letter of Galatians about the personal experience of Christ, etc., and the way I really understand the Book of Revelation as an inner development (ascension), it gives me an inner meaning/ picture of the message. What has developed out of it is for me an apocatastasic understanding that we are evolving to a higher level ,,, higher level of ,,, perhaps consciousness. It gives me a feeling that it is we who break into divinity and not the familiar divinity who invades man.
I am left with a bitter taste of what preachers, some scholars, have transferred religion to technique and rituals, over centuries with an emphasis on biblistical and not always Christianity, and transformed it all into a biblistical religion. A fundamental problem of being inside such a biblistical religion is when the ground begins to shake, when we discover that the Bible is also a human book, written by humans, and is not inerrant. This can shake people who are led to stand on such a ground, on such a biblistical ground, in this biblistical religion as they are equated with all of Christianity.
I much wrong have been done through the ages in the name of christianity!
“It is we who break into divinity and not the familiar divinity who invades man”. I really like that comparison. So inspiring and empowering! 🙂
I remember being attracted to Greek mythology in Grade 5. The stories captivated me. No one told me I had to believe them… but at the same time, I was learning stories from another religious culture… my own. I was not given the freedom to read stories about Adam and Eve, Jonah and Baalam with the same freedom that I could read stories about Zeus, Atlas and Theseus. This morning I started reading those stories again… the ones that drew me into a strange world of cyclops and centaurs. I am wondering if the beauty of the bible stories got lost in the need for them to be more than stories. With the Greek Mythology, I discovered crazy stories that allowed my imagination to soar and not be confined to the mental ascent of flawlessness. I am hoping I can find that freedom again with stories like a talking snake in and enchanted garden, a man eating fish, and a donkey that stands up for himself. Inerrancy and the need for that in my culture took that away from me.
Here here. This bible mythology is interesting enough as is when contextualized across ancient civilizations and ideas. This idea that it is more real than all the others distracts us from finding value in the message and window into our human condition.
Seems like a response to this might be required, Bart.
^ What he said.
🙂
Nice presentations BTW, KJaros, looking forward to the next.
I enjoyed this video for two reasons:
1) It was interesting to see the “God of the gaps” demonstrated so well. As time goes on, the amount of theological real estate that continues to erode while biblical scholarship at the same time continues to gain ground is quite stark.
Theologians of course don’t see it that way, but the ongoing dilution of once robust theological precepts and explanations is hard to square with the advances in biblical scholarship. You wouldn’t expect such an inverse relationship, but it certainly looks that way at least within conservative theological circles.
2) I liked what Kurt did with Bart’s supposed amnesia and apparent misunderstanding of inerrancy. That was clever!
Unfortunately, cleverness didn’t prevent Kurt from recrafting a psychologized narrative of those events, of which we have perfectly clear first-person accounts in spoken, written and video form, i.e., from Bart Ehrman himself.
It’s a familiar tactic that attributes an individual’s loss of faith to some error in understanding or traumatic event or any number of cognitively-dissonant explanations. But then again, embellishing and distorting historical events to fit pre-conceived narratives is an art form theologians have perfected for over two thousand years now. Ta-da!
Chiming in, I suppose its hard to square the Bible being true when its tied to a doctrine of God that we can literally observe being disagreed over and debated in the Bible itself, developed over time and somehow the reason some will burn forever and others don’t. How does this work without a number of the authors burning as well for their widely divergent views on Christ’s divinity or lack thereof or their sometimes opposing views of how salvation occurs??
It simply doesn’t square as far as I’m concerned.
The concept of “Inerrancy” seems pretty straightforward – no mistakes – but what does “Inspiration” mean? What are the qualities you find in the New Testament that lead you to the conclusion that it is “inspired”?
Yes; the situation In England, for example, it is not as clear cut as it may at first appear. Evangelicals opposed women being ordained as priests because, they said, women were not originally his disciples and could not therefore attest to Jesus’s death and his resurrection.
When I pointed out that none of the male disciples had witnessed his death because they ran away, and therefore could not claim that they had witnessed his death, and that Jesus’s women followers stayed with him to the end, as well as being the first people to recognise what they believed to be his resurrection, I was not well received by the evangelicals who seemed to think that I was playing dirty tricks by quoting the bible which they claimed was inerrant to prove the opposite of what they claimed. Those pesky women who insist on reading the bible even after we’ve told them what it means…
Very well explained jkeith
Logically speaking you are correct: verbal plenary inspiration of original texts doesn’t logically necessitate inerrant transmission by subsequent scribes copying those texts. But I think Bart’s point goes to a practical consideration that is worthy of consideration. What certain use are errant texts for the creation of doctrines and reliable existential guidance if the original texts aren’t either preserved or inerrantly transmitted to subsequent copied documents? That makes the original texts temporary one offs that are of tentative use to the vast majority of humanity. It makes the original texts largely unhelpful and therefore largely pointless.
DanaGarrett: «That makes the original texts temporary one offs that are of tentative use to the vast majority of humanity. It makes the original texts largely unhelpful and therefore largely pointless.»
You are completely correct. What would be the point of a timeless, infinite, omniscient deity giving a perfect revelation to people who will, within his own awareness (because he knows all things and is not bound by time), pass it on imperfectly to the next generation, who will pass it forward even more imperfectly to the next. He may as well not give a revelation at all, if this is the case. Makes you wonder how infinitely intelligent and all-knowing such a deity might truly be.
At 8:11 – weak foundations? This really pushes my hot button. I’m not eloquent enough to really express why. I just feel like this is always an excuse (in one form or another) made by believers for sincere people who leave the church.
Why is there plinging music running throughout this presentation? Is it thought that the argument is too dry/ too difficult/ too disturbing to stand on its own without the sort of ‘soothing’ music from relaxation tapes running in the background? That is either patronizing or insecure. We Ehrman bloggers are by definition interested and alert to what you have to say.
Jaros turned his brilliant mind and philosophical training towards a lost cause.
The ordinary understanding of inerrancy is pretty clear. If Genesis [or “Moses”] says that the earth was created in 6 days, it was; hence young earth creationism [creation ca 4000 BCE] (count the generations).
The first stage of retreat was ‘inerrant in the originals’, where it’s conceded that we have no originals. Yet that’s fishy.
This second, the Jaros stage, is beyond fishy. “Inerrancy” refers to inspiration, that intangible something that, for example, Jeremiah ‘heard’ (no ears) from God. Whatever Jeremiah originally said in words about what he’d ‘heard’ from the Lord is already subject to human imperfections, says Jaros. And this applies to any ‘original,’ in words, he may have written.
It’s rather understandable why the young Bart never thought of this complex set of maneuvers; if he did, he’d have said (I think), as I do. “You’ve conceded all the points a liberal and scholar would want to make. Your new label of ‘inspirational inerrancy’ is essentially empty.”
As far as the inspiration argument, Bart simply said that the perfect, loving, involved God could have made things easier for humans.