No, I just think when someone says “they don’t challenge biblical authority” and then go on to say that “such and such things in the bible are false” I think they are being at least a little dishonest. I don’t recognize your distinction of said peoples understanding of scriptural authority as legitimate.
No. Are you implying that tomndebb attributes all biblical errors to allegory?
I’m a little confused by your wording. Yes I think a Christian can believe in symbolic truth in an allegory. However I think I can come up with several examples of bible verses that Christians would prefer to disbelieve both literally and symbolically.
No, but again, I don’t think most of the nominals on this board will consider all errors as symbolic truths. Perhaps my assessment is wrong but it would be interesting to see them make a case out of specific examples.
Well it is anyway.
If said person is arguing that certain facts are self contradictory or in error (not just a fictional story), then no, I really do not think they can “honestly” believe that said text is authoritatively true. Even if they did honestly believe this, they should come up with better terminology so as to not appear so self contradictory, to people like Bible man who really does think that the bible is authoritative.
Yes.
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“I believe in God” is not a declaration which, in itself, is anything I feel any particular desire to argue with (nor does it contain a falsifiable claim which could be empirically debated anyway).
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You think the Christian concept of god can be falsified via the problem of evil, do you not?
I think you admitted some emotional sympathy for certain nominal Christians once before. Don’t you think a little bit of that might still color your responses?
I would say that I don’t think it’s always apologetically consistent. It takes some work, some glossing and some ad hoc* improvisation to make every part of the Bible theologically consonant but as long as the stories are read as stories then certain kinds of “truth” (especially historical truth) can be seen as immaterial and some kind of underlying “inspiration” can at least be believed to inform the text and believed as authoritative without any conscious dishonesty. It’s also been my experience that people who take this intuitive – or shall we say “impressionistic” – approach to reading the Bible also tend to be amenable to the notion that such inspiration can inform other sacred texts besides the Bible. I’ve even heard people argue that they can perceive divine inspiration in non-religious (or at least non-“scriptural”) texts or works of art like Shakespeare, Mozart or Michelangelo. That is to say that they find an inspired element not in the medium itself. necessarily, but in something which transcends the words or the brushstrokes or the violin arpeggios. It’s a very subjective, experiential thing which they recognize as emanating from imperfection – and which may indeed contain imperfection, but which speaks to them nonetheless. I guess I’m trying to say that they see an imperfect reflection of the divine rather than a direct image and that humans are a dirty mirror. That doesn’t mean that they don’t honestly believe they can discern something pure being reflected in that dirty glass.
i don’t want to speak for tom because i don’t know exatly how he interprets or resolves everything. I believe that he does see some of the errors as just errors.
This I agree with. Like I said, I thinks it’s nearly impossible to really own everything in the Bible as inspired or transcenent.
I suspect that most of them would be willing to acknowledge a lot of the errors as simple human error but would likely argue that the errors do not affect the messages.
I think you’re both using a simplistic and erroneous view of how they perceive "authority’ in the text.
I think that the assertion of an omnimax God can be falsified thusly, yes, but the omnimax concept is not the only concept and it’s not even the only Christian concept.
I’m sure I didn’t use the word “nominal”
I don’t think “symapthy for” is the right construction, it’s more like a lack of antipathy as long as they leave me alone and don’t try to impede science or abridge civil liberties, etc. I’m sure some of that comes from the familarity of being married to one of them.
The bible is a book developed by committee. There have been conferences during history in which church concils determined what would be included . It is a book written and edited by men for their own political and personal reasons. Just another religious tract. Please get over iit.It has undergone translations and changes.
I’m not a bible scholar. It might not have been. But I cannot think of a way to discern which parts are supposed to be literally true and which are not. So if you question some of it based on historical data, you would have to question all of it. And that, to me, would be “to challenge biblical authority”.
The authority of the bible (or any holy book) is its ability to correctly convey the word of the god(s) it purports to represent. There is one movement in Christianity that claims that the bible must be regarded as literal history. While there have been instances of that belief in prior years, it has only been recently (<200 years) that people believing that idea have organized into sects or denominations. If some random person wanders by and insists that everyone must share in the particular version of authority that they espouse, one has not challenged the authority of scripture by denying them; one has only challenged the authority of their theology.
From the Encyclopædia Britannica on Historiography:
So, in a culture in which the writing of both history and biography had a primary intent to convey moral lessons, not footnoted facts, an assumption that what was written had to be held to a standard of modern history or biography is silly. The authority of scripture is moral authority, not factual representation. (The narrative tales of the bible were written as history and only later recognized as the Word of God, so the rules of historiography apply to them.) That authority is the authority given it by the people who pass it down–with commentaries–through the generations. There is an enormous body of commentary in both the Jewish and Christian traditions that indicate how the stories are to be viewed and the authority is that which is recognized by the group of believers.
Translations and changes? Are you suggesting that the Scriptures were translated from one language to another, and that as a result, the versions we now have are highly distorted?
And exactly what are these changes that you mentioned?
We can split the Bible into four categories - historically false sections, historically accurate sections, moral teachings from God, and moral teachings from those who wrote the Bible. Is that fair?
Now, isn’t it reasonable to suspect that the moral teachings associated with section that are not historically factual do not have the authority of God? I’m not claiming these moral teachings are incorrect - we can have valid morality without God, just that they should not be given this authority. Why? Because of God inspired moral correctness in the author, why didn’t he inspire factual correctness at the same time? (I’m only considering portions which claim to be correct internally, not parables.)
Now, portions which are historically accurate may be morally inspired or not. Certainly historical accuracy is no guarantee of moral accuracy, or else we would follow the moral teachings of historians. The moral teachings may be correct, but how can we determine this?
Just as we interpret the moral teachings of a novel outside the context of the novel if we wish to apply them, we need to evaluate the moral teachings of the Bible in the context of our real society. Except through faith, and long term belief, I don’t see why we should accept any moral teaching of the Bible as being from God.
On what basis do you make those divisions rather than simply noting that the entire bible (as with any scriupture) is the moral teaching of a people as they understood it at the time, regardless of the genre used?
OK. On re-reading your statement, I see that you are relying on the approach of those literalists who have anachronistically imposed post-18th century historiography on the bible, demanding literal accuracy.
If the moral component was primary, then the fact that various narratives are not factually accurate would be of no concern to God, since he was simply inspiring the moral component and leaving the delivery to the human authors when both the authors and the audiences recognized that the history was not written with the intention to provide the accuracy of the Times (London, New York, your option).
I think that you’re categories are incomplete and somewhat tendentious. The various texts of the Bible are comprised of a number of different genres – origin myths, folktales, poems, apocalypses, allegorories, folk legends, historiographies, hagiographies, genealogies, liturgical instructions, legal codes, prophetic works and others. Some of those texts employ the form of historical narrative but in most of those cases it can be argued that those narratives served a purpose specifically relevant to time and context for the audience being written to and which were designed to actually comment on present situations (relative to when the texts were written) rather than just to provide an accurate history lesson.
For instance, the Book of Daniel has been mentioned in this thread. That’s a book which was set during the Babylonian exile and ostensibly narrates some of that history but which was actually intended as a commentary on the Jewish revolt against the Selucid occupation in the 2nd Century BCE. As Tom noted above, its factual accuracy with regards to the Babylonian period is hopelessly muddled and sometimes just plain wrong, but since the intent was never to give a journalistic account of that period anyway, its lack historical accuracy doesn’t really affect the message that the author was trying to convey.
An example of this kind of thing from modern literature might be something like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – a play which is ostensibly about the Salem witch trials but which is really a commentary on the McCarthy era of the 1950’s. Even beyond that, it’s about “witch hunts” as a socio-political phenomenon in general. The validity of Miller’s observations, commentaries and larger themes is not diminished because his play was fiction and it wouldn’t matter if one could hypothetically find some historical error in his description of 17th Century Salem.
Daniel is not the only book of the Bible which arguably uses this technique. There is a lot of scholarly theory, for example, that the Exodus story (while probably rooted in some dim memories and legends about the Hyksos expuslion) was composed during the Babylonian exile as a way to comment on the “current” situation by pointing to “another time we were in exile.” There is much in Exodus about people backsliding into idolotry and worship of foreign gods and that’s a theme which could have been an admonishment during the exilic period not to do it again. Essentially there’s an underlying message that says, “stay faithful to our God, don’t give up and God will send someone to deliver us.”
In any case, the moral authority inherent in a text does not necessarily have any dependent relationship on the accuracy of a historical narrative because (if one is so disposed to read them as such) they aren’t really about then, they’re about now.
Try to read my post again. I am in no way assuming literalism. I am in no way saying that a moral statement associated with a literally incorrect historical passage is morally incorrect.
What I am wondering about is why a deity who cares that a moral message is received and understood by readers would allow that message to be associated with factual untruths. I’ll grant that the writers of the Bible might well have believed the history they wrote to be correct, so I’m not calling them liars. I’m also not assuming a requirement for strict accuracy. A deity wishing to make a point about creation could certainly inspire a reasonably accurate creation story (fire came from nothing condensed into the stars and dust, which made the worlds more plentiful than grains of sand - a very, very long time ago) rather than the crap that is in there. No equations required.
Why would god inspire moral messages along with text carrying the seeds of doubt and disbelief. I don’t recall you taking the “if God told the truth, we wouldn’t need faith position” but even accurate history does not guarantee the truth of the moral message. In your view, it is almost as if God either wants us not to believe or doesn’t care. Assuming you believe Jesus did the miracles, why did he bother? Why not state his message as a normal man then?
In addition, a basically accurate inspired text could have errors around the edges creep in without diminishing its believability in any way. We know transcribers are fallible, and errata in a history text does not invalidate the entire text.
In your view, when someone was inspired to write down the Ten Commandments, did God say “make up something about how I gave them?”
I don’t know that he did and I cannot control anyone else’s approach to belief.
My only point was that I can recognize a moral message in the various books of the bible–including those with historical inaccuracies–without challenging the authority of the books because I recognize that different literary traditions employed techniques that are not consistewnt with our post-Enlightenment approcah to history. All the “Why did God…?” or “Why should God…?” questions can only be answered in a discussion of the beliefs held. While a person without faith (in the particular portrayal(s) of God in the bible) can still see some of the moral messages, the entirety can probably only be accepted by a person who already believes in the Jewish (Tanakh) or Christian (OT/NT) traditions. I am not embarked on an effort to persuade anyone outside those faith traditions of their truth. I am merely pointing out that one may recognize the literary character of the bible without challenging its moral authority (for those who already believe).
I am in no way claiming the purposes of the Biblical passages can be split as simply as I defined - only that we, with hindsight, can split them that way. But divine inspiration, and a supposed inspirer who know the absolute truth, puts things into a different perspective.
Of course. To give another example, the claims of a great Davidic empire had obvious pplitical utility for a Judean monarchy. Viewed as a purely human written and inspired work, there is nothing odd going on in the Bible at all, and while it is interesting to discover the motivations of the writers, there is nothing radically different from Shakespeare’s motivations in distorting history in the history plays. Some of the errors may be deliberate, for political reasons, some may be from lack of data, some may be from invention. But the question is why would a deity inspire or allow fiction?
But Miller is making a moral argument by analogy, and is not claiming perfect moral authority. If he had claimed to be inspired by God in showing how Salem provided a moral argument against McCarthyism, then we would doubt his claim if one of the underpinnings of the moral argument turned out to be false. (As I responded to Tom, minor inaccuracies don’t matter much.) A good example is the absolute centrality to Christianity (but not Judaism) of the Fall. I know the Catholic workaround, but if there is no evidence we were ever perfect, that has big implications for Christianity. I got taught it as a just-so story, and I was taught that Jewish history really started with Abram, and what came before never got taught as being factual. Abram being factual is another matter.
What do you consider the strength of the moral authority? If you mean moral authority from the likes of Gandhi, MLK, or a possibly historical Jesus, I agree. If you mean exact and perfect moral authority from God, I’d expect more accuracy. That’s what I meant about evaluating the moral message in secular terms. But if the moral message comes from God, we are not supposed to evaluate it in secular terms. You and I no doubt both agree “You shall not commit adultery” is an interesting view, mostly correct, though there may be cases when doing so is moral. A religous person does not have that freedom. If the words were written by some priest in the Temple, as opposed to being handed to Moses on tablets, we are more likely to be correct in our view, don’t you agree?
First of all, I am an atheist exactly because of factual issues. I had a lovely experience with religion growing up, and I don’t think religious people are monsters. But, when comparing the hypotheses that the Bible was human written and uninspired, vs. that it was inspired in any way, the former keeps on winning.
Here’s an example - a secular one. Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll has a strong moral message, is very moving, and is a classic. However when you learn, as I did when someone posted the background of the case a while ago, that she died from a pre-existing condition, and that William Zanzinger could not have known that his throwing the cane at her might kill her, his six month sentence is not nearly so powerful a cause for our tears. The accuracy of the song has a lot to do with the believabilty and accuracy of the message.
Remember, I’m not even disputing the moral messages. I’m just wondering why we should give Biblical moral messages primacy over those of Plato, Senecca, or even Dylan.
That is a separate issue that I was not addressing. I was accused of denying the “authority” of the bible. My only point was that I have not denied that authority. Persons who do not recognize the bible as The Word Of God are not going to find any particular authority in the bible in any case, so my comments on the historical record are pretty much irrelevant to them. For persons who do follow the bible, I have simply pointed out that I have still not attacked the authority of the bible in its realm, spirituality, (although I may have offended some persons who follow the rather recently proposed belief that the bible is the “authority” on all subjects, spiritual, physical, historical, etc.).
In order to make a larger moral point. The use of fictionalized historical narrative is just a device to make a point (or can be read that way), not the point in itself.
I’m not so sure this is true, especially if he was only claiming that his inspiration was to condemn McCarthyism and that his use of the Salem analogy was his own device, not God’s.
I agree the Fall is difficult, but it’s not impossible. One could read it as an allegory about humans evolving to the point of self-awareness and moral accountability, thereby losing the “innocence,” they had as mere “animals” en route to becoming cognizant homo sapiens. I know that’s not a very clean interpretation and it’s complicated by the fact that the Genesis story can be traced back to earlier Mesopotamian myths but I still think one can take away an “authoritative” message that “at some point, humans became morally aware, and therefore, morally responsible.” I do agree that the reason given for the loss of innocence has logical problems.
i’ll go back to the parables of Jesus again. It’s not the historical truth of the story that matters, it’s the moral of the story. one could hyothetically regard the morals of Aesop’s fables as being perfectly, divinely authoritative without believeing that a single one of them comes close to an accurate reflection of animal behavior. If you can find that one “tagline” in a Biblical story (e.g, “Don’t disobey God,” or “Be kind to strangers in need,” then that oe particular moral message is all that need be taken as perfectly authoritative and the story taken only as a means of conveyance.
I would hazard a guess that in the kind of religious view we’re dicussing (I don’t know about tom, but my wife would be an example of this), the idea of God writing on tablets with his finger is seen as hyperbole and that all divine communication is filtered through humans. I also don’t think divine “laws” need to be read as rigidly literal either. There is a spirit or intent behind those laws which can largely be intuited (in some Christian traditions, this can be facilitated by prayer and the guidance of the “Holy Spirit”) but can also be elucidated by concordant texts or traditions (such as the Mishnah in Jewish tradition and similar traditions in Catholicism).
I guess I should emphasize that there is a degree of personal intuition or (what is felt as) divine “guidance” when it comes to divining exactly what should be read as authoritative in Biblical texts.
So you’re not going to answer.
Actually, I can find the Bible meaningful without recognizing its authority. When I asked about primacy, I was not implying that the moral teachings of the Bible should be ignored even if one does not think any of them came from God. The people who wrote the Bible, and who are quoted in it, might well be moral thinkers worthy of studying. That’s the Jeffersonian view of Christianity.
It was quite clear that you were not denying the authority of the Bible, and I certainly agree with your dismissal of Bible Man’s somewhat simplistic views. But I’m still curious about whether your acceptance of the authority of the Bible comes from faith alone, or from some other source. It is something that I don’t get, being faithless in the literal sense.
