Authority of the Bible

What are some theological argument for the authority of the Bible that go beyond, “the bible is the divine word of God”? What are some theological arguments that go beyond the idea that we must have faith that the Bible is divine? Are there arguments that argue why we are to believe that Bible is divine that do not involve blind faith?

I’ve asked this same question of many a christian. They pretty much all quote a passage from the bible that says you gotta have blind faith. Only they say it ain’t blind, because they’re guided by the bible. If you press them, they tend to get annoyed because you’re being stubborn. It says so, “right there”. :wink:
Peace,
mangeorge

Of course, what’s most interesting is that there is no theological foundation for belief that the Bible is meant to be taken literally.

That is a doctrine of Man, not of God.

Now, try telling that to a Bible-believing Christian.

If you’re up for it, try this…

Ask where in the Bible are any claims made that the Bible is entirely literally true. For obvious reasons, even the question doesn’t make sense, of course. Very many passages are indeed identified as the word of God, but not the whole shebang. (Not least because, of course, when this stuff was written, there was no shebang.)

Ask if they believe that there really were a bunch of virgins who went out to wait for the bridegroom, or a man who set a feast and got snubbed by all his friends.

Ask them to imagine going back in time and telling Paul of Tarsus, “I and some of my friends have decided that your letters to the churches are the divine word of God.” I believe he’d call you a blasphemer to your face.

If you’re really adventurous, compare the accounts of the conquest of Canaan in Joshua and Judges. There are easier targets, of course, such as mutually exclusive versions of the childhood of David. Or you could write up timelines of the Creation from the first two chapter of Genesis – clearly, we have two very different stories preserved.

The truth is, the doctrine that the Bible is literally true is a modern heresy.

I not asking for arguments the Bible be taken literally, but argument on why we should give it more authority than the Koran, Papal statements, or a Sylvia Browne book.

I’m neither a biblicist nor a literalist so many Christians would disagree with me but here is the matter as I see it:

The Judeo-Christian tradition accepts the Old Testament as divinely inspired and communicated to the prophets of old by the Holy Spirit of God and not by the will of man.

The original basis for the authority of the New Testament comes from the apostolic authorship of its parts. The council that met some 250 years after establishment of the early church agreed that many writings were “inspired” and not all of these inspired writings were included in the canon. Those selected for the canon were selected on the foundation of apostolic authority. Jesus himself was said to have trained these guys as his emissaries and they laid down the framework for a common understanding of the gospel message.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until after the reformation, when certain ecclesiastical leaders got nervous about simple peasants actually reading the scriptures and perhaps coming up with ideas of their own (not sanctioned by the mother church) that the church began hatching ideas of infallibility or inerrancy. The Catholic church decided that the Pope was infallible and the protestants - that the Bible was infallible.

The bible, in my opinion (and that of many others) was never intended to be an “infallible” rule book for Christians or a club with which to beat down the heathen. It was intended to be a record of divine interaction with mankind; an anthology, if you will, of writings that convey to the reader in many literary forms the person and work of God. The “Word of God” is a title that the bible itself gives to Jesus Christ and indirectly to his message of hope and salvation (or the gospel).

As many have observed, the notion that the bible’s authority is established by the bible is an egregious violation of common sense and has made the church appear to be composed of ignorant individuals.

Finally, the bibles uncanny usefulness and insight on matters ranging from history to archeology lends to a belief that in some way, perhaps, divine blessing rested upon its recording. I cannot write with authority on other sacred books, such as the Koran.

I have seen Muslims use the same argument for the divinity of the Koran: supposedly, it provides insight into biology that was impossible to determine scientifically at the time it was written (and therefore must have been divinely inspired, or so the argument goes).

Well, most obviously, God validates the Bible. If there is no God, then the book telling of His involvement with mankind is pretty well discredited. If God exists but is not the Christian God, same thing – it’s a record of what He had to say to the Jewish people and to the early Church. (Obviously, a devout Jew would dispute that – saying that He inspired the Tanakh and not the New Testament.)

But this whole “inspiration” thing is the basic problem that the OP raises. Nothing could be more obvious than that most of the Bible is the writing of human beings, sometimes quoting what God had to say about circumstance X. How, then, is it in any way “the word of God”?

There are a lot of ways in which people understand “inspiration” – with the common-usage definition of the term – knowing Him moved them to write as they did – one tacitly accepted by a lot of people. Others consider it to have been verbally inspired – God used the human writers as an author uses a pen.

One common Scriptural self-endorsement for inspiration is in II Timothy 3:16 – “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God (literally “God-breathed”), and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness…”

The problem here is that the entire third chapter of II Timothy is a single sentence in the original Greek – and those two "is"es are supplied by the translator to make the sentence split out here grammatically sound. It appears that Paul (if he is indeed the author of this; there are suggestions that I and II Timothy and Titus are anonymous 2nd century works attributed back to Paul) is telling Timothy to hang in there, “keeping the faith” in Christ founded in the God-breathed and profitable-for-doctrine-etc. Hebrew Scriptures (which Timothy as a good Jewish boy had learned in his childhood). It’s a very awkward passage in Greek, a typical Pauline run-on sentence, and how one breaks out the specific meaning of it is subject to interpretation.

HTH

This raises the question: Assuming, for sake of argument, that Paul did write this letter, what did he mean by Scripture? There was, as I understand it, no commonly accepted Christian canon at the time; that all came later. The accepted Gospels hadn’t even been written yet, so they couldn’t have been included in Scripture. Paul wasn’t big on the Jewish roots of Christianity so maybe he didn’t even include the Tanakh. What’s left?

If you are not a bible literalist then you shouldn’t. If you are you should not force it on others.

Padeye - Christian but not a complete bible literalist

I have to say, Star Was… that’s one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

But really, are you seriously asking if there are theological reasons to believe that the Bible – as opposed to, say, the Quran – is the preferred scripture, which are not grounded in faith?

Or are you, as the Spanish say, just taking my hair?

I suspect that you’re just having fun with us, seeing if anyone will bite. But if not, please give an example of what in the holy hell might actually constitute objective theological evidence?

The Bible is it’s own authority, that it was the divine “word of God” is it’s own claim. Whether or not it actually is would be up to the reader to interpret.

Even if it was the Divine Word of God, it was written by human (albeit Fallable) hands. Interpretation of what was inspired was written with a human understanding of that inspiration, and then of course translated to aramaic, and so forth, with even more limited human understanding.

It is of notable significance that some religions of that same period had no written language, (certain forms of paganism for example) the traditions of which were passed down by example.

That being said, isn’t it vain to assume that just because a religion doesn’t have Scribes to write their own divine word that they are any less credible?

You’re only supposed to give it more authority if you’re a Christian. If you’re not, you don’t have to give it any authority at all. They (Christians) don’t care that it doesn’t make any sense to choose one “divine” book over another…they just want to be good Christians and believe in the one they like the best. It doesn’t have to make sense…in fact, it can’t make sense due to the blind faith thing. But that’s what they want to believe. You can’t argue with faith, no matter how blind it is.

There is no apostollic authorship in the New Testament. Nothing in the the New Testament was written by anyone who ever knew Jesus. Traditional attributions of apostollic authorship to certain gospels and epistles are fairly late developments and are demonstably spurious in every case.

Actually, the Bible has been all but worthless as any sort of guide to history or archaeology. With the exeption of a few gepgraphical place names and an occasional authentic historical name, almost nothing in the Bible can be verified as historical and much current archaeology has directly contradicted some of the most significant Biblical assertions.

Is it me or does this sound suspiciously like 'My post is my cite."?

And that’s the problem I’ve always had with accepting the bible (or the torah, in my specific case) as divine…who told you…and who told them? Can it be proven?

Agh. It’s an unsolvable riddle.

The bible is product. It is not divine in any way. There is no theological foundation for it of any kind. It’s simply product sold by the church to the gullible.

I woke up this morning thinking, “Boy, that was a stupid thing to write.”

And indeed it is. My apologies to Star Was and others on this board. I was out of line.

Very well put.

Although it’s worth noting that there are portions of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) that purport to be commandments given directly by God through Moses to the Israelites, that were sort of an infallible rule book as to how they were supposed to behave and structure their society. And somehow a few people seem to have gotten the idea that this is what the whole Bible is like, though I don’t see how anyone who’s actually read the Bible could think so. (I’m also not sure what kind of evidence there could possibly be that any words came directly from God—the ability of the Ark of the Covenant to melt Nazis’ faces in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Compare the original manuscripts to known samples of God’s handwriting?)

I’ve also heard it asserted as proof for the validity of the Bible that it contains prophecies that were later fulfilled (e.g. Old Testament prophecies about Jesus); but I don’t honestly believe there’s anything there that a skeptic would find at all convincing.

The New Testament is authoritative for Christians in the sense that it is the best source we have for what Jesus said and did and for what the earliest Christians believed about him. There’s certainly controversy and difference of opinion among biblical scholars as to exactly how reliable a source it is, but I think there’s a consensus that there aren’t any other sources extant that are more reliable than what we have in the NT. For more info (and a clarification of Diogenes’s claim), see the Staff Reports on Who Wrote The Bible.

faith != blind faith

Care to elaborate? How do you differentiate someone who has faith in something versus someone who has blind faith in something?

Maybe another way to ask this question is:

If a person were going to choose a holy book (or religion) to believe in,is their any objective reason to believe that one book (or religion) will be true as opposed to the others?