Why are you asking me these questions? You, not I, have the notion that when prophets speak under divine influence, they do so infallibly. I’m asking you to support that argument.
Not good enough. According to you, if God spoke to Moses and by that same fact Moses was made infallible in his capacity to communicate God’s will to the Israelites, I want to know by what foolproof means I am to know when Moses was acting infallibly as a prophet, and when he was acting fallibly as Moses the Mortal.
Similarly, I read in my commentaries that St. Paul sometimes speaks as Paul the man, and sometimes as Paul the Apostle – according to you, infallibly in the latter case. I want to know by what foolproof method I am to know which is which?
How long do you plan to dodge that question?
You say God’s message is important. Seems reasonable, but we have know way of knowing how God feels. Therefore the statement is a presumption; an axiom. Christians presume, based on their characterization of God’s message and its significance to them, that God must consider his message important. Christians then go on to say, “God’s message is so important that he will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure it is accurately delivered.”
But what has he done? He has chosen various mortal men whom Christians call prophets or apostles or seers or whatever, given his message to them, and they in turn give the message to the rest of the people, apparently in their own words. I don’t presume to say why God works that way. I have a theory, which I’ll get to later. It’s important for now just to observe how God works without understanding why.
But we know these agents are not infallible. They make mistakes. We know that they can’t be made infallible because an infallible mortal violates the basic Christian tenet that God in all his persons is the only sinless one. Plus, as you brought up, there’s an issue with free will.
So in order to keep the original axiom (i.e., that God’s message is so important he will go to all lengths to ensure its correct transmission), you have to formulate a process by which people are fallible in one context, yet fallible in another context. But it’s impossible to disambiguate these cases, so it’s an empty proposal. So in short, you formulate a complicated (and still unsatisfactory) process by which God’s observed behavior is artificially made to correlate to the axiom you’ve stated about him.
I instead choose to relax the axiom. I don’t believe God’s interest in the accurate transmission of his message motivates him to do whatever’s necessary to accomplish that. Remember that the Christian God is supposed to be omnipotent. In that context, “whatever’s necessary” has no limit. God could, if he wished, provide each and every person on earth with a complete understanding of his message. Prophets, apostles, and the Bible are irrelevant if your axiom is to hold.
If the message were so important, why resort to an inherently flawed method – fallible human agents, inconsistent writings, translation problems, preservation problems, interpretational problems – and then go to herculean lengths to “patch up” that process so it can be considered infallible? Better to simply provide an inherently flawless process.
No, I believe the axiom is naive.
God doesn’t need prophets. Indeed, for an omnipotent being the word “need” has limited application. Hence God’s use of prophets, the Bible, etc., must have some purpose other than the accurate transmission of his message. Now to many Christians the notion that God would intentionally withhold the pure and accurate version of his message seems alien. Just bear with me.
Now my theory. Jesus spoke in parables, and the New Testament gives the reason for this. Many believe it was to protect Jesus politically by hiding his teachings in language containing enough ambiguity to fail to hold up in court. But Christian believe has it that it was to keep the pure doctrine from those whose faith was not yet strong enough. Both can be true.
There’s your motive.
Sure, it’s only a theory, and if you want to call be a blasphemer or an idiot for expounding it, then so be it. The bottom line for me is that if I don’t assume God will go to great lengths to ensure the accuracy of his message, then a lot of the problems with Christian models of divine authority melt away.
Well, true in one sense. In English “girl” used to mean a young person of either sex. It doesn’t mean that now; it has a more restricted meaning. The concept behind the word “girl” has changed. Or more accurately, has evolved over time.
Only if you insist on judging them anachronistically. A middle English text that used “girl” in its formerly general sense would be wrong by today’s standards. But it was not wrong when it was written, so we cannot accuse its authors of committing an error. If the meaning of words can change over time, then a “logical” comparative method would have to account for this.
Words, once uttered or committed to paper, are locked into the milieu of diction and understanding which prevailed at the time. They cease to be dynamic, whether they form a grocery list or an allegedly inspired document. The words I currently write are expected to be understood in the context of the colloquial American English of 2001. Let’s say 200 years from now, someone reads this article. Let’s say in the intervening time the word “axiom” has come to mean a sort of greenish pig. Would she be justified in saying I had committed an error by using the word “axiom” in a way contradicted by the definition she understands?
You insist on judging words uttered and committed to paper more than 150 years ago as if they had been written today, with today’s knowledge.
When asked to justify this, you wave your hands weakly at vague notions of infallibility. Coerced infallibility is irrelevant; it makes no sense in the context of Christian inspiration, is not observed to have happened, and at any rate it doesn’t forbid Smith from choosing a word in his vocabulary which – in that time and place – meant exactly the concept God allegedly conveyed to him.
If God had hypothetically conveyed by some means the notion of “a young person of either sex” to a middle English cleric in a monastery, and that cleric records the notion using the word “girl”, has that cleric committed an error solely because hundreds of years hence we understand that word differently? And let’s suppose an angel of God appeared to that cleric directly and spoke in the cleric’s language so as to be understood, and used the word “girl” to refer, correctly in that time and place, to a young person of either sex. Let’s suppose the cleric dutifully recorded the exact middle English words the angel spoke to him. Would that record now be wrong?
Forgive my impudence, but it appears you are trying very hard to create a problem where I see none. As I said, I’m not here to defend the Mormon viewpoint. I’m trying to ensure that the criticism of Mormonism is not a mad rush to judgment, but instead a discussion where reason and logic prevails.
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