Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I want to make sure you all know that this weekend I will not be posting on Friday night at least due to my being a speaker at the National Conference on Christian Apologetics. If you happen to come, please be there for my talk on “Should You Believe In The Trinity?”
Tonight, in our look at Inerrancy, we’re going to be looking at the ninth article. Let’s go to the text.
We affirm that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write.
We deny that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God’s Word.
This is a funny point for me to write about after reviewing Dawkins’s “The Magic of Reality.” If you read that review, within that book, Dawkins writes about why is it that the writers did not tell us about electricity or include a cure for cancer in the text. This is a fairly common objection found in your usual internet atheist.
Aside from prophecy to get people to repent, God was not really beaming down information into the heads of the writers. I do not think that Paul was sitting down to write an epistle and then just wait for God to suddenly turn a light on in his and help him to dispense great theology.
I think Paul was just a great thinker and that the Holy Spirit in some way guided his thinking. The Spirit did not tell him what to think. Now there could be a slight few exceptions to this, but they would certainly be just that, exceptions.
Did the writers write from a limited basis? Of course. That hasn’t changed in fact for 2,000 years since all writers write from a limited perspective. That does not mean that they wrote inaccuracies. If that was the case, every major science paper would need to be labelled inaccurate since all scientists today have a limited perspective and could be false.
This article concurs that God worked within the limitations of the people. It is a modern idea that the people in the Bible should have written with modern ideas in mind. An example of this is when people look at the listing of a bat as a bird in Leviticus. A bat isn’t a bird! True, but a bat has wings and the word used then meant “winged one.” We should not fault the Bible because it did not have a word for “winged mammal.”
Thus, when I get done looking at this article, I once again have to say that I agree and I think that this is an important contribution. It is also a reminder of how we need to look at the historical context for the Bible to best understand what is going on in any particular verse. Thus, in conclusion, we support article 9.
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