Mistakes in understanding

[pukku]

I was reading this discussion (which I didn't finish), and had a sudden thought:

Several of the people in this discussion (at least, near the start) argue that Christianity is incompatible with science because the Bible, if taken literally, is incompatible. My issue here is that the Bible never claims to be infallible. Or at least, under Christianity, it doesn't. Several books in the Old Testament (the Law) claim to be handed down from God directly, but Jesus (according to the gospels selected for the New Testament) explicitly overrides the Law. Excepting Acts and Revelations, the rest of the New Testament is letters purported to be from various personages, not from God. Acts is obviously a history recounted by a person, and Revelations is properly the Revelations According to John, again a person.

Unlike Islam, Christianity's Book does not claim itself to be the infallible word of God (at least, not that I can recall; I admit to being too lazy to re-read the entire Bible before making this post); hence there seems to me to be no problem with admitting that the Bible should be read interpretively (indeed, even if it made the claim to be directly the word from on high, unless it claims to be literally true, there isn't a problem...).

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Right, so I'm re-reading a book called "Chapter and Verse: A Skeptic Revisits Christianity". It's written by an agnostic who spends a year hanging out at a Southern Baptist bible college in Texas, and it's good reading. Anyhow, he sums up a lot of Fundamentalist/Evangelical thinking on this in Chapter 3, which I just finished, and has a lot of info I'll skip over.

There *are* a couple verses in the NT that assert scriptural inerrancy, and perhaps the best-known is 2 Timothy 3:16: "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." (King James translation, natch.)

And of course you can argue about self-assertions like this, but the point for F/E Christians is that Scripture came from God, it *says* it came from God, and that settles it...because also, once you start arguing about whether this bit is true or that bit is false, the door
is opened to every kind of speculation and you end up with no faith at all.

Anyhow, the book is worth looking up. Also, you never sent me that second email so GUILT.

Saint Aardvark/Hugh

[pukku.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected — although I still might argue that Timothy is supposed to be written by a human (unlike, say, the Koran, which is supposed to be the exact word of God, not just the revealed word of God).

Re the email, it's suffering from the problem of my having too many emails in my inbox, hence I never get around to any of them. However, since I'm home sick right now, I may get to it...