Encountering Challenges to Biblical Inerrancy

welcome to the table podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary welcome to the table where we discuss issues of God and culture and today our topic is the scripture the inspiration of Scripture and particularly issues that swirl around the concept of inerrancy and the trustworthiness and reliability particularly of the New Testament and I have two very distinguished guests and and actually good friends online here over Skype Mike Krueger and andreas custon Berger I'm not sure I did the the Germanic nature that name much justice but I did it I did my best on dress and as you can see they're both with us on skype because they're in different locations on driest why don't you tell us where you are and and what you do where you are all right there great to be with you and with you Mike I mean Wake Forest North Carolina I'm a senior research professor here at the southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary very good and Michael you're you're in at another locale where are you and another busy guy that's right I'm in Charlotte North Carolina I'm about three hours away from ondrea's right now wish we could do this together but we're in the same state so I'm at Reformed Theological Seminary - Charlotte campus and I'm a professor of New Testament here and also president of the campus yeah it just happens to be precedent you know so well I really do appreciate you guys joining us for this and then we'll just dive straight in and I'll tell you tell everyone kind of how this podcast came to came to be a topic we wanted to discuss over the last year they've been a series of blogs really around raising questions about inerrancy in one way or another pitched probably at a younger audience in many ways to discuss the nature of the scripture and Michael was watching this go on and and wrote Andres and me among others to participate in some responses to some of the issues that were raised and so we did that and in the midst of that you know I raised the question well let's not just do it on a blog let's go ahead and talk about it with people and kind of work our through the issues so Michael why don't you fill that out and talk about how that happened and where people can find that information and then we'll dive into the topic straight away yeah well thanks Darryl all of us keep up with what's going on at a biblical world from time to time regarding an arrant some inspiration and probably most of us know we've been seeing the blog site over at Pete enza's blog I forget the title of it right off the top of my head where yeah the series going called aha moments in biblical scholarship and that series was designed to highlight scholars who changed their view of Scripture once they realized there were things in it they they didn't expect and so these were sort of evangelion scholars that later became more moderate and sometimes even further than that down the line and they had these epiphany moments regarding usually contradictions they found in the Bible and there was a long list of these that he had on his website so as you know I contacted you Andres and a number of other scholars and said hey you know why don't we go through these alleged contradictions sort of one by one and offer a response so that the the world out there particularly the lay level folks can get a short succinct answer to some of these bible challenges and so we did that my sites name is called cannon fodder obviously one end for cannon unless you miss the punt and the clear eye and we've been doing that series for a while we've had about eight or nine installments we've got little pause I'm waiting for Don Carson's and Stan Porter's maybe we'll be waiting a while longer you know how these things go yeah it will wrap up the series but it's been great I've been looking at all kinds of things Old Testament issues New Testament issues it's been fun so yeah and the and the thrust of this the feel of these pieces was you know the closer I looked and the harder I looked and the more mature I became in working with the scripture the more realistic of view of Scripture I I came to heaven it kind of works through as you call them epiphany moments and we'll talk about the light associated with the moment in a minute but andreas when when Michael asked you to do this I know you responded positively as I did why do you think this is an important conversation to engage in I really feel like this is a bit of a new development that somewhat unprecedented in that you have no longer someone like Bart Ehrman who clearly is not an evangelical who stands outside of the orthodox evangelical christian faith who basically takes you know takes a strong position of doubt and skepticism and any many ways just tries to frontally you know contradict and undermine the scriptures this is very different here you have some some people who would like to be considered evangelicals who believe they are evangelicals who are claiming to actually try to to strengthen other people's faith and to uphold the trustworthiness of scripture but they have forged this new paradigm that they call trustworthy but flawed or or inadequate but but but just but still reliable and if you and I you know think that's a contradiction in terms I think what they feel like is well it's kind of like you know a marriage where you know both people are sinners right but just because they're sinful people doesn't mean they can't still have a great marriage mm-hmm so it appeals to this newer younger generation that says well we're too sophisticated to still believe that Scripture you know is is inspired and inerrant but we still need a foundation of our faith and we still think Jesus you know it's great and so so it's this new movement within the evangelical movement and that's why is particularly dangerous I think it needs to be responded to so so Michael you you put forward these the these blocks and are in the process of posting them and look why is this an important discussion in your mind well many ways I I get these questions all the time just in my role as a professor I know you guys do too I mean students are asking and they're usually asking because their congregations are asking and the average person that few is asking and so if we don't have a response to these things then then our seminary students as they go on the pulpit are to know how to interact with these issues the other thing I'll add to it too is part of the newness of what's happening here isn't just the retention of davon Jellicle label while you critique the Bible which is sort of a weird hybrid but also the idea of taking this to the lay audience has been sort of the trend for the last 10 or 15 years it's been a much more popular thing Herman certainly has done this he sort of bypasses the Academy goes right for the lay people and many of his works you look at Pete ends his recent book the Bible tells me so written very much at a lay level popular level published by Harper won no footnotes all designed to go for the lay level so the reason I thought the blog was important is because even though the three of us have written about these issues in books the average person we know today for better or for worse isn't reading the books we write necessarily they're reading blogs or reading the websites we want to reach the average person which is why I thought this series was so important yeah it is well let's talk a little bit about about the teaching of the inspiration of Scripture in inerrancy and of course the thing you often hear about inerrancy from some people is it's a new doctrine it's it's relatively recent in its development it doesn't reflect the views of the early church those kinds of things now if I had been really smart I would have gotten historical theologian who majors in this to discuss this but I think you guys are capable of handling it what do we do with the idea or the claim that an Aaron C is new and and I think to start off this discussion I want to put on the table something that I teach an exegesis that really is important and that is what I call the word concept fallacy which is that just because you don't see the word in a discussion doesn't mean that you don't have the concept on the table and I like to illustrate it this way it might be tough since you guys are in North Carolina but my illustration is the Cowboys are going to the frozen tundra to melt the cheese heads and when I say this I asked my class what am I talking about and of course they respond well that's American football and I say well how do you know that's about American football American football is nowhere in that sense and of course they're able to triangulate the various linguistic clues in the topic that tell me that's what it's about or another example that I'll use its theological the Nicene Creed never uses the word Trinity explicitly in in its layout and yet it's all about the Trinity so just because you don't use a word doesn't mean you don't have a concept so with that kind of is the background I don't know which one of you want to speak to this first but let's deal with the idea that an Aaron C is a new concept in a new doctrine well one thing would be to start out by pointing out - you know what you might call the self at the station of Scripture you know scripture says of itself that it is trustworthy that it is truthful you know you think of some Psalms like Psalm 19 or some one my 1:19 you think of Jesus own statement that the scripture cannot be broken and you know you think of other statements where you see that the New Testament writers like the Gospel of John has a strong emphasis on eyewitness testimony that's truthful and so the first thing to be said not the lasting would be that really you know even in Scripture itself you already see that that you have this testimony that scripture can be trusted because it is the Word of God yeah that's exactly right I would add a couple more things one of things I find fascinating about those who don't like the word inerrancy and think that's new I usually prefer terms like infallible and of course I always point out that in some sense and fables even more stringent than inerrancy and heresy just simply says the Texas without error but in follow means it's incapable of airing and so in one sense I you could point out the inconsistency there the other response we'd make which is a typical one is that historically studies have shown that in fact it's not a new idea it's not simply a 20th century fundamentalist concept it dates all the way back to we would argue the early church certainly as Andres has pointed out this thoroughly scriptures themselves but I was looking just in Augustine's work recently and you look at a gustin's interaction with the synoptic Gospels and doing with the synoptic probably makes a number of statements that are very clearly consistent with what we would call in Aaron C even though he leaves or doubts you can take this all the way back to the early church now obviously there are key texts in the New Testament that addressed this as well that talk about the scripture being God breathed to use the good very literal translation of the word that often gets translated as and inspired this is the second Timothy 3:16 passage we've got the passage in Peter which talks about no prophecy comes by human generation if I can say it that way but is directed to an act of God so the trustworthiness has to do with ultimately a statement that God is responsible for for the contents of Scripture and thus it rests in the character of God and Aaron see has two major concepts to it one is the association of authorship and in the divine roots of the generation of that authorship and the second is a slightly more controversial addition and that is the qualification in the original manuscripts this is something that gets put forward that a lot of people will raise and they will say well we don't have those original manuscripts so what's the point of referring to them so let's let's deal with that question a little bit how do you all respond to the idea that that that it's important to make a statement about original manuscripts versus say the copies of the scripture we hold in our hands maybe I can just give a brief summary statement and let Matt Mike elaborate a bit but I think the important thing to point out is that we don't have the original manuscripts but we do have original text we have the text of Scripture and along with that it is actually the text that is inspired not the ink you know on the parchment yeah that's absolutely correct me if you read Herman's misquoting Jesus he makes this argument regularly which is hey we don't have the autographs we don't have the original copies he almost thinks of original text as a physical object that if you if you if you don't have the physical object the autographs and you therefore you don't have the original tax but we would argue the original intent can be preserved in other ways so that the text can exist without the original physical copies and as we've argued in our own book the heresy of Orthodoxy and other places have done this you know our copies are so very close to the or constructive tax is so very close to the original that it's really not a relevant point to suggest that we don't have the original tax in a sense we do have the original tax at least close enough for any reasonable discussion about what the original author said yeah and we have so much manuscript evidence for what this text is extended over multiple copies and over multiple centuries you sometimes get into a discussion about how far back many of those copies go but you're dealing with a line in which you're making copies because as copies wear out you reproduce them in order to keep the text alive you know you're before the printing press here before Macs and PCs and and so this is how you preserve the text is to copy them again and again and again and again and the masses of manuscript evidence that we have in comparison to other classical pieces of literature tell us that we have the text I like to tell my students our problem is we have about 105 percent of the text absolutely rather than 100 percent of the text we've got the text plus all the variants that have come in through the process of copying in the process of text criticism is to whittle away at those options and and for a lay person for whom you know text criticism and manuscripts is a completely different almost foreign world even they get some access to this conversation because a good Bible will oftentimes in the margin have a note that says or that tells you what the alternative is so you know if it's not the reading that you have in the text then the option is this thing that's sitting off in the margin that's telling you what the wording is so there are we've got access to the original text in many ways yeah the analogy I like to use is it's like having a puzzle with too many pieces mm-hm so you take a puzzle and you dump out the box and you're trying to make the picture makes sense on the front and you have when you're done making you have these extra pieces left over and that's kind of what textual critisism as you pointed out is we have more than the original and if there's only certain ones that fit right and you can make a good distinction between the ones that fit and the ones that don't and that's really what the next critical task is all about yeah another point that I like to make I remember having a discussion when I was a doctoral student in Aberdeen with with an evangelical who had come from another seminary context and we in he was he held the kind of this next view of inspiration over from from my own and we were over dinner with our wives probably not the most exciting conversation our wives have ever participated in and and I turned him we were discussing inerrancy we're discussing original manuscripts and I turned to him and we both were working in Luke ax and so I said to him when you preach in the church do you preach manuscript D and he said to me no and I said well why not I mean if the statement the original manuscript doesn't make any sense then why not just pick the text of Acts that you like and and of course he came back to me and said well I don't think D is and he you know kind of paused and and I said yeah that's the point and I think sometimes we forget that when we've got a doctrine like an errand C there actually is something we're trying to affirm that's important and that is that when I approach the text I approach the text with it with a with an openness and a trust that this text is accurate that it's designed it's designed not just to affirm something but to deny something at the same time and what it's primarily denying is the idea that the scripture airs that when I approach it I've got to approach it with some kind of an understanding and appreciation that did it that I read it in such a way that I that I make try and make sense of it first rather than simply assuming that it's wrong and I think sometimes people forget that when they think about this doctrine and of course their Allah Mike I think the three of us are primarily focused non-scholarship on the New Testament but I think the same could be extended to the Old Testament as well as you know the Dead Sea Scrolls of on earth numerous Old Testament manuscripts such as the famous Isaiah scroll and I think you know what you see is about a thousand years prior to up to that point the earliest manuscripts that the Masoretic tradition people were amazed how close to to that tradition that the reading was which goes to show that strives to great care to preserve manuscripts because they believed this was the Word of God this was most Sacred Scripture and so if anything they were scrupulous in trying to preserve you know their holy scriptures now I would add to that on the New Testament side in my book the question of Canon I do this a little bit in our book the heresy of orthodoxy I go deeper into also the Christian scribal infrastructure what does that look like what we're Christian scribes like what evidence do we have for the way they copy the text and how scrupulous they were and what sort of formats they use and as we all know there was impressive things about early Christian scribal activity that suggests a great deal of organization and uniformity and intentional planning within the Christian Scrabble process and I think that's always another layer of trust while we have the original text now of course this isn't all to suggest that there aren't issues to discuss I mean the reason why we have these conversations and these blogs are going back and forth arguing positions pro and con is because there are issues out there there there there can be an assumption that an aaron c means certain things that it may not actually mean and therefore some ways in which I find inerrancy gets attacked or challenges by foisting on inerrancy a standard that that itself the scripture itself is not trying to maintain and so people wrestle with things like the differences in parallel accounts between the Gospels the differences in details about certain kinds of events that kind of thing so Mike let me start this kind of new direction in our conversation off this way what were some of the kinds of specific issues that that came up that your blog response has been dealing with and and let's think about them kind of in generic kinds of categories about the kinds of questions people have when you say the scripture doesn't err with regard to the original manuscripts yeah so there's several different categories here one of the most common is the parallel passage category right and this particularly is true for the Synoptics you know whereas Synoptics tend to not seem to have Jesus saying the same things or doing the same thing in the same order so this is a common issue and Synoptics of course be Matthew Mark and Luke thank you yeah you know so one of the issues is how the Bible squares with itself and there's a number of those largely related to the Gospel accounts but then there's another category of objections that came up in terms of how the Bible squares to what is said in other disciplines or what is said and other historical accounts so not just the issue of the Bible disagrees with itself but is the Bible disagreed with Josephus or about the census of kyrenia so it doesn't disagree with other things we know about the ancient world and how things were done and so those are two large categories of the kind of attacks that went down is the Bible disagrees with the South and the Bible disagrees with other known facts of history ok let's let's go through some specific examples here so we help help people sort out kind of what's going on and also create the right kinds of expectations for the types of things that the Bible is doing one example that comes up this goes back to an article that I did for a book called Jesus under fire that was in kinda untitled the words of Jesus live jive or Memorex so Memorex doesn't exist anymore so it's a it's a it's a faded metaphor but that of course that was a kind of tape that that people recorded things on and those of you who are under 25 just look up dictionary the word tape and we're not talking about the type of thing that holds things together but a recording tape anyway so and here's one of the examples that came up that I think illustrates the kind of problem that we're dealing with I'm thinking about the confession that the Peter makes it says iriya Philip I and he's answering the question and in fact even the question raises the question to some degree who do people say that I am or who do people say the Son of Man is I mean the question gets asked in two different forms to begin with and the answer comes back the Christ the Christ of God and then the Christ and then I like to embellish the methine version the Son of the Living God so you've got you know these these three different replies that you're dealing with and so the question becomes you know in relationship particularly to the idea of a red letter Bible you know Jesus said exactly this what's going on here so how would you explain that kind of an example to to your audiences or to your students well first of all Jesus probably spoke Aramaic not Greek and the Gospels are written down in Greek so you have first of all a translation issue at work here and secondly you have literary dependence between the Gospels as well you have thirdly different emphases made into different Gospels and and this being an oral culture I think you simply don't have the same obsession with with literalistic precision as as we today might find so somebody could conceivably paraphrase the Aramaic in a certain way and and and somebody else could paraphrase it slightly differently in both feeling if adequately and accurately a paraphrase the original statement might no it's yeah I tell my students all the time you know look you know do we have the actual words of Jesus well it depends what you mean right we certainly don't have them in Aramaic because Andre has already pointed out assuming he spoke Aramaic which is debated and then it's very common in ancient in story ography to condense summarize paraphrase and then even when you do condense summarize or paraphrase you do it on certain terms like what's my audience what part do they need to know about what what thing don't want to emphasize the person I'm speaking to and so it's not just that you're doing those things you're doing those things with a particularly in sin so no wonder that matthew has a slightly different than luke but they're all trying to condense or paraphrase to summarize what Jesus said in some fashion so you have a whole number of different dynamics swimming around and we compare this the other historians in the ancient world is exactly what they did they hear a speech they don't give you the whole speech they summarize the speech in a statement and then put it on the lips for the person who spoke it doesn't mean it's inaccurate it means that it's accurate in the way that ancient historiography was done and of course at this particular example what I like to point out is is that what you've got going on is you've got a confession that Jesus is the Christ and all three the gist of what is being said here is is clear particularly in light of what was said before with the prophetic categories that were that were that we're mentioned by you know what do the who do people say that I am versus you know who do you say that I am and so you've got those kinds of different another example that shows this kind of difference I like to point out happens and something as significant as the wording at the last supper you've got the difference between this is the blood of the Covenant versus this is the blood of the New Covenant okay and you go you know you know the very very literal person says okay what did Jesus say and of course there's only one covenant that hasn't been established by the time Jesus is talking the Abrahamic covenant is already operative the Davidic covenant has been been going for a while it's the new covenant that was being anticipated to be realized and so when he's talking about establishing the blood of the Covenant it's quite possible that's all Jesus said but implicit in that was the Covenant that was being referred to which was the new covenant so someone comes along and makes explicit what's implicit it was already there it just wasn't on the surface and in the process you get a difference of wording so those kinds of situations I think that happened actually pretty regularly and can be anticipated Michael you look like you want another example even within early Christianity outside the New Testament of this happening so often what would happen is patristic writers would translate the work of another Patricia Crider and when they translate it into another language they make explicit what they know was implicit in the original text mm-hmm for example this is refined as of Aquileia who translated a lot of origins works from Greek and the Latin and when he did that he would often take what is implicit in origin and make it explicit for the needs of his audience people would accuse her finance of not being a good translator but actually he did very similarly when no doubt the New Testament writers would do when they would quote people sometimes they would take something that's implicit make it explicit for the sake of the audience nevertheless true okay well that's one category let's let's deal with another here and now I have in mind the sequence of the three temptations which is another good example the different sort I'll let one of you explain the nature of the problem and then I'll let either one of you discuss how you how you deal with that one who wants to take on the temptations of Jesus undress in Matthew 4 and then Luke 4 both an account of Jesus temptation there's a shorter version of course in mark just very very quickly in keeping with with marks brevity but both in Matthew and Luke you have a more extensive you know you met almost a blow-by-blow account where you have a series of three temptations and the memory serves the the first temptation is the same in both but but Matthew and Luke reversed the order of temptations numbers two and three Luke concluding with the familiar temptation of Jesus throwing himself down from the temple and that and the many believe well I'll let Mike explain interpreters deal with this yeah I think we're Andres was headed with that of course Darrell knows there's anybody being the Lucan scholar as people think that Luca rearranged the temple at the end because of his focus on the temple and other aspects of his gospel and you this is a good example again of how theological concerns can also dictate the way history is presented it doesn't dictate whether history is true or accurate it's not that Luke was making something up but you present history in such a way to address the theological needs of your audience and the theological needs you have and that's one of the explanations for that particular order regardless you know it's a great reminder that chronological order is in principle not something that gospel authors always felt the need to follow me one of the perennial examples of this which probably are headed to Darrell is the issue of the of the cleansing of the temple right in the Synoptics versus John which another example of potentially at least chronological order issue and there's a number of other examples yeah and in fact I like to say how many sporting event reports to begin that we read begin with the way in which the tip-off happened or the kickoff happened and then proceed in in chronological sequence through the story of the game we actually do this today in our own historical writing we just don't think about it very much usually when I pick up a story of an event the key play is usually at the front end or some key part of the game and then at some point we go back in and either review some times in sequence some times out of sequence what happened in the game in some cases the choices made that something happened or its relationship to something else is more important then talking about the canal chronological sequence in which it happened and and we allow historians today to make those choices we ought to allow ancient historians to make those choices as well thanks for listening to the table podcast for more podcasts like this one visit VTS edu slash the table join us next week for part two downs Theological Seminary teach truth love well you

Channel: Dallas Theological Seminary

Views: 12,153

Rating: 4.7197452 out of 5

Keywords: Dallas Theological Seminary, DTS, inerrancy, inspiration, Scripture, Bible

Id: wja4JmjIx60

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/pjsans]

Dr. Kruger is the man. I've been listening to more of his stuff lately. He is just a really smart and really fair dude. I'll have to check out the other two guys.

[u/HmanTheChicken]

I've read part of Kostenberger's commentary on John, it's very good. It's part of the Baker Exegetical Commentary to the New Testament, which is altogether really worth looking into for specific issues.

Thoughts on issues for inerrancy?