Oh, no question about it. My point is the same as the one you also made along the way: it’s an OT law that isn’t dietary, so it hasn’t been abrogated AFAWK by any NT teaching, but it’s pretty clearly disregarded by the vast majority of people who claim they believe in Biblical inerrancy.
Good, then, we’ve solved religion. On to politics. 
The problem is, where does that ‘full understanding’ come from? Along the lines of what other people have said in this thread, the Bible doesn’t resolve the ‘apparent’ contradiction; inerrantist humans have to do that, using extrabiblical means. And there’s no set of rules written down anywhere for how these extrabiblical means work.
Effectively, what Biblical inerrancy means is that the people who have been given the standing by the evangelical community to decide what the Bible means, get to decide what the Bible means, because they can resolve apparent contradictions however they want, and wave away contradictions between what the Bible actually says and what they actually do and advocate, in any way they please.
God made us the boss
God gave us the cross
We turned it into a sword
To spread the word of the Lord
We use his holy decrees
To do whatever we please
And it was good - yeah!
And it was good - yeah!
And it was God damn good!
-Leonard Bernstein, Mass
Um, no. For instance, the story of Jonah is quite clearly just that - a story. But I can’t recall having ever talked with an inerrantist who believes it didn’t happen. Ditto the story of Job.
Oh yeah, and parables. Yes, I have had conversations with fundies/inerrantists/whatever who hold that belief - that if Jesus tells a story, the events of that story actually happened to those people in the manner recounted by Jesus.
I have spent much of my life around people who regarded the Bible as inerrant. There really are people like this. You cannot wave them away. They may have not been present in the churches or other groups you fellowshipped with, but they’ve been in the ones I have - and nobody looked at them and said they were crazy when they argued that the people and events in Jesus’ parables were all real. (Except me - but I’ve been lucky: I’ve never been in a position where I had to rely on fundies/inerrantists/whatever for fellowship or friendship: they were always part of my world, but never the whole thing. So I was in a position to question where others had less freedom to do so.)
That at least coincides with my experience.
BUT practically every fundie/evangelical sermon I’ve attended has had a few random cheap shots at libruls or people who live in San Francisco or whatever. Usually cheap enough that it amounted to bearing false witness against them. (Guess they didn’t want to be neighbors to those people.)
Actually, no. Christians that hold to inerrancy also usually combine doctrines such a the “priesthood of the beliver,” and “sola scriptura,” in such a way that mean that every individual can and should interpret scripture for themselves. Various authority figures may offer their opinions, which people accept or reject, and in some cases specific interpretations of specific passages may be the official reading of this or that church.
But that’s not as common as you may think, and there are certainly no “people who have been given the standing by the evangelical community to decide what the Bible means,” except in the sense that some people are well-regarded as trustworthy and reliable interpreters.
It’s really quite chaotic.
What’s worse is that when you try to explain it, the Catholics just sort of smile smugly.
Craig Blomberg is a self-described inerrantist who thinks Genesis 1 is not historical. As I said upthread, though, that’s kind of a rare duck.
Yes, most inerrantists regard Job and Jonah as historical. Not all, though.
I’ve heard that view, too. I’m not handwaving it away. But I am saying that
- they were likely laypeople in literalist churches, who were a little fuzzy on what their church teaches, and
- that is nowhere near the majority view of the much larger group of those who hold to inerrancy.
See the wiki links above for the distinctions between the two.
That may have once been true. It hasn’t been like that since the rise of the religious right in the 1970s.
I’d say “except in the sense that some people are megachurch pastors or have their own TV broadcasts.”
And you’ve attended how many fundamentalist churches?
Sorry, but Jerry Falwell and crew were no more influential than Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday or Billy Graham were in their days. Within evangelicalism, they were less influential, and certainly they didn’t have any real impact w/r/t biblical interpretation.
They were bog-standard evangelicals/fundamentalists, engaged in a political project aimed at the broader society; not a theological movement aimed at the rest of the church.
This is most definitely true. There is currently on going a fight for the evangelical soul (yes, that is putting it overly dramatic, but that sounds cool ;)) on a variety of issues from homosexual marriage to the concept of Hell. The more individualistic ways of Biblical interpretation allow for more of an ability for anyone to claim the speaking stick (as it were) and try to convince other evangelicals that this is the way they should be. After all, for all the conservative evangelicals who may be apparent (like Franklin Graham), there are those who are more moderate (like Rick Warren) or pretty left leaning (like Jim Wallis or Rob Bell). And then you have evangelicals who are into stuff like Prosperity Gospel (like Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes). And none of them have any authority over the other. They are speaking out into the crowd of evangelicals trying to get people to follow their Biblical viewpoint.
It can be a mess. But sometimes its a good mess.
Someone on this board - I wish I could remember whom, to give them credit - once posted that the very best thing is to be the Muslim assistant of a Jewish executive in a Christian country; holiday-wise, you’re golden.
I, too, appreciate the civil tone of this thread - religion is a fascinating and deeply-embedded component of human culture that I suspect is an inevitable outgrowth of our pattern-seeking and curious brains, and well worth analysis, discussion and debate. (Too many of my fellow atheists dismiss it as simply stupid and hateful. It’s one thing to dismiss religion’s validity; denying its complexity is arrogant and ignorant.)
This does mean, though, that it is possible, and sometimes necessary, to argue or challenge the tenets of a faith, or the implications that can be drawn from them. It’s not an attack, for example, to point out that the inerrantist belief that Jesus’ miracles were actual, historic events is an unproveable assertion, and thus cannot be adduced as evidence for his divinity to those who have not already accepted that assertion. But, as this thread shows, it’s also possible to have those debates without rancor or venom.
Going meta here, for a moment, this suggests pretty strongly to me that religion, like art and literature and politics, is a nonrational (not irrational) creation of human minds. It’s one of the arguments that led me to finally abandon Christianity and leave the Church.
I’ve stayed away from direct involvement with conservative Christian churches, etc. for the past 15 years. But before that, I rubbed shoulders with these guys more or less continuously since about 1971. Hell, I taught at an evangelical college for five years. So can we drop the credentialing here?
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The political project may have been aimed at the larger society, but that didn’t mean it left American evangelicalism alone. Guys like Al Mohler were engaged in a long-term project to enforce what one might call ‘evangelical correctness’ within the Southern Baptist Convention, which used to explicitly hold the ideals you refer to. Those ideals have been gone from the SBC in practice for 20+ years.
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OK, how about something totally apolitical: Love Wins by Rob Bell. How free are evangelical/fundamentalist/inerrantist pastors to speak out in favor of this book?
I want cites on this one.
I doubt that they are as separate as you make out. Take as an example the Church of England; they are slowly making themselves irrelevant by their lack of confident and assertive beliefs. But I’m sure if you looked at some dry policy statement of the CofE somewhere you would find they have a position which differed from the position of other churches; which - you would say - goes to show they think they are right and other churches are wrong.
The point being, actions speak louder than words. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Handsome is as handsome does. The fact that some Methodist leader at some time in history wrote down some dusty stuff which you can point to as being “what they believe in” is far less important, in reality, than how your average Methodists behaves. It says something far more important about one’s religious culture than mere manners that one doesn’t loudly proclaim one’s own correctness.
I’d agree that it’s not an attack, but I’d say that it’s unprovable to say it’s unprovable – that is, there are plenty of evangelicals that would present coherent arguments as to why the biblical accounts are indeed trustworthy as historical accounts. You and I might not buy those arguments, but they can be made.
And certainly there plenty of inerrantists who have built apologetics that don’t start with scripture: typically, they argue for the existance of God, then on to Christianity, then on from there, winding up at inerrancy. Again, you might not buy those arguments, but there are intelligent people making them.
I’m speaking here, obviously, of theologians and intellectuals. If you’re talking with a layperson, especially with fundamentalists, yeah, you’re likely to get “the Bible is true because it says it is.”… but then I’ve talked with “lay atheists” that can’t form a coherent argument, either. That doesn’t negate all the (IMO) sound arguments for Atheism.
Hmmm… can you rationally justify your faith in rationalism?
JUST KIDDING, we’re not going down that rabbit hole! 
‘Some’ carries a lot of weight there. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, went back and forth over the centuries over whether witches should be put to death, but for most of its history it answered in the negative. Although at times they gave in to popular sentiment and joined in the witchcraft hysteria, most of the time they didn’t.
Witchcraft is of course condemned in the New Testament, which is why it was ‘carried forward’.
The belief that the miracles of Jesus were actual, historical events is definitely ‘unproveable’ in the logical sense: it’s possible that the authors of the Gospels made them up, or didn’t intend them to be taken as historical truth. I just happen to think both those hypotheses are unlikely. If I was trying to convince someone of the divinity of Jesus, I certainly wouldn’t assume the truth of the Gospels, but I’d do my best to persuade the other person that they’re reliable witnesses. I think that most defenders of the historicity of the Gospels would say something similar.
Agreed. I didn’t say it had NO influence. But that influence had nothing on the order of negating the belief that believers can and should interpret scripture for themselves. FFS, those doctrines go back to the Reformation.
What would such a cite even look like? Some pastor saying “I quoted Rob Bell and didn’t get stoned?”
I’ve never heard of the guy, but going from what I just read about, the book, he’s a theologian and pastor who advances a theology that a lot of people have judged to amount to universalism. I haven’t read the book, so I won’t judge (and don’t care), but it certainly sounds like he comes close.
Assuming that’s accurate, then speakers would probably have no problem referencing him in general (AFAIK, it’s not like he’s some huge frightening name that makes people recoil in horror), but they’d run into issues if they started endorsing his (alleged) universalism. I’ve heard plenty of Evangelicals and even fundamentalists approvingly cite people whom they have profound theological differences with, from Augustine to Luther to Calvin and on and on. They just don’t cite the things where they disagree. C.S. Lewis came by some accounts comes awfully close to universalism, and certainly he’s no evangelical, but he’s immensely popular among evangelicals. Heck, fundamentalists approvingly cite things non-Christians say when they agree.
If a pastor starts approvingly citing the parts that sound like universalism, he’s probably going to be having a long conversation with his deacons/elders. That doesn’t mean Evangelicals don’t think either Rob Bell or their pastor is entitled to interpret scripture as they see fit, it means they don’t think the pastor of an Evangelical church should endorse doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible with Evangelicalism.
If a high-level Democratic Party employee said he opposed legalized abortion and progressive taxation, I imagine he would be in for a similarly long chat. Doesn’t mean the party thinks he doesn’t have a right to his own views … just maybe not those views and that job and the same time.
And by the way, for those interested: the controversy over Bell illustrates the way Evangelicals wrestle with interpreting poetic and metaphorical passages. See this review, for example.
Agreed in general, and as I said, Methodism in particular has a lot of diversity, and I suspect Shagnasty went to one of the more liberal congregations. But there are others that are quite conservative/evangelical, so IMO if you’re going to ask what they as a denomination believe in, their official statements are the place to start. The stuff I cited was not what “some Methodist leader at some time in history wrote down some dusty stuff,” it’s the formal doctrinal statements of the denomination.
Some of it was written long ago, but it doesn’t mean they don’t regularly debate and amend things. The Methodists have been fighting like crazy over homosexality/gay marriage for years, and they’ve still come down on “no.” That puts them at odds with the Lutherans and some Presbyterians; if they switch it’ll put them at odds with different Presbyterians and most Baptists.
And your line about what is “far more important” is very much a matter of dispute. Lots of Christians, now and historically, would say that doctrine is more important than practice. YMMV, certainly.
I think some people are inclined to think that church leadership is always more conservative than the congregation. IME, that isn’t the case at all. In many times and places, the leadership (and thus the official denominational statements) is more liberal than the members.
It depends on the situation. Sometimes it’s as simple as just bothering to pay attention to the plain text. For example, it’s sometimes claimed–and for the life of me, I have no idea how this got started–that Genesis 1 and 2 give two different accounts of creation. Whereas, if you bother to actually pay attention, it’s abundantly clear that it’s ONE account, with Chapter 1 giving the overall outline of events, and Chapter 2 giving more details.
On the other hand, there are a few passages (such as when Mary was pregnant with Jesus) that cannot be fully understood without having some knowledge of ancient Jewish culture.
It may be clearly one account to you but when I read Ch 1 the animals are created then man and woman at the same time from the dust of the Earth. In Ch 2 man is created. God then makes animals to be mans helper but then aren’t good enough so he causes man to fall into a sleep and takes a rib to make woman.
No way these are the same. Two different creation myths combined in one book.
Quibble and clarification. I completely agree with the last sentence. Furthermore, the biblical Jesus himself could be kind in one passage and harsh in another. He also did a lot of backpeddling which is often interpreted as reflecting the additions of later evangelists. Maybe so, but they also might have been conveying the idea that while Jesus taught us to set high (or rather higher) personal standards, he wasn’t an idiot. And the “Not an idiot” part may very well have been ultimately based on the tales of those who knew him.
At any rate the stance I was trying to convey here was both tolerant in some ways and judgmental in others. I mean I do push a POV. Overall, I oppose fundamentalism for scientific, theological and moral reasons, but some of my previous page parody was in important part unfair. Most parodies are.