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Every now and then I like posting something incisive that was written in the past because it speaks so well into the present. The sweet thing about this is that these guys, who are often waved away today, have dealt with a lot of the same issues while remaining simultaneously (by the modern mind) ignored.
Last year I did a fairly expedited reading plan that was planned for 90 days but wound up taking longer. This year, I’ve set up an 84 Day reading plan which will push harder for an earlier completion but if I miss a day or two, it shouldn’t result in missing the 90 day read. I figure this way, I can read the Bible each quarter and allow me to do some of the deeper studies I’m normally accustomed to.
But there are others out there who might want to read along so I’ve included the plan for you. Last year I focused more on order of writing but this year I just wanted to get some solid reading done so it will consist of an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading, some Proverbs and some Psalms, every day.
Drinking from an empty glass is useless; so is using words that have been emptied of their meaning.
Due to their opponents embracing a faulty anthropology, Evangelicals have often been accused of having a Docetic view of Scritpure. “Come now! Scripture is a human book,” their opponents say “and that necessitates error—not only because humans are sinful (a minor point) but because humans are finite and necessarily make mistakes!”
An obvious fallacious conflation of categories: why conflate bad breath and miscalculations with affirming erroneous beliefs—indeed, even morally wrong beliefs (which they may use examples as slavery, monarchism or patriarchies)?
Yet, this question about the ontology of a human as it relates to a human product cannot be so easily brushed away when one approaches the letter to the Hebrews. The author looks beyond the human author to establish all his arguments—and this refutes the Nestorian(1), or even Kenotic Arian(2), view of Scripture.
I’ve been arguing online with folk who don’t hold to inerrancy on, what I think, is faulty grounds.
For example, some folk deny inerrancy because the “distinctly evangelical doctrine causes too many problems.” Okay, but how is that a reason to chuck a doctrine? Then there’s another common (silly) argument that “holding to inerrancy is a distinctly docetic view of Scripture that gets rid of the messiness of human frailty” or, in other words, since humans make mistakes we should expect Scripture to make mistakes. I’ve off-handedly argued that error isn’t necessarily human and that humans actually do speak inerrantly all the time. If it’s possible once, its surely possible twice—and so on.
In all my discussions, I might have given off the impression that the doctrine of inerrancy is central to Christianity—lose inerrancy and lose Christianity. Surely I’ve left people in an epistemological quagmire to force them to think, but surely I don’t want to give the impression that they’ve lost their Christianity.