Biblical inerrancy and metaphorical truth
Regarding inerrancy: After reading Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman (among other things), I don't think the Bible is inerrant. The Bible was written down by humans, and copied by other humans hundreds, if not thousands, of times. We have lost the original manuscripts in all cases, and there are more differences in the surviving manuscript than there are words in the NT. It is reasonable to conclude that versions of the Bible that exist today are not inerrant.
However, it has been pointed out by Marcus Borg (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time) and others that the audience for both the OT and the NT did not necessarily take things at face value. It has been postulated that the intent of the authors was not historical record but rather teaching through analogy, just like Jesus did with the parables.
For instance, no one believes that The Good Samaritan was supposed to historically represent a real person, but that doesn't mean that the story isn't "true"--on the contrary, I think it's one of the fundamental points of the "New Covenant." It just isn't historical fact.
Therefore, although I'm still a skeptic, I read Genesis 1 as metaphorical, not literal. Assume for a moment that God set The Big Bang in motion. Would an ancient people understand how The Big Bang Theory works? I doubt it. So does it matter how the world came into being, or is what matters the fact that God made it, and wants humans to understand that He made it? (And if you argue that times have changed, and why would God put in an inaccurate version of history, all I have to say is that modern people have the ability to understand metaphor just as well as ancients.)
I read the account of the Deluge the same way. There are a ton of problems, scientific and chronological, with the Deluge. But it doesn't need to have actually happened for it to be "true." The lesson of the Deluge is that the farther away we get from God, the more destructive our lives can become. Even today, we see how people clean up their lives after finding God. While I don't believe in the actual cause that losing one's faith leads to destruction in one's life, I certainly see that the point is valid in many cases, and that finding God is one way (though certainly not the only way) people can straighten out their lives.
Reconciling "Biblical inerrancy" in the light of "metaphorical truth" solves some of the problems I see, but raises many other questions. For instance, I now heavily doubt the omnipotence of God. After a much more critical reading of the NT, I now doubt that Jesus was talking about salvation, as I see major accuracy problems with the Gospel of John. I see that many of the letters (often attributed to Paul) contradict each other greatly (1 Corinthians and 2 Timothy about the role of women in the church in particular). I'm inclined to view everything after the Gospels as theological criticism, to be given no more weight than the writings of Aquinas, Spong, or Dobson.
Much of this post was included in a comment I left on the Debunking Christianity blog, as a response to other comments left here.
However, it has been pointed out by Marcus Borg (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time) and others that the audience for both the OT and the NT did not necessarily take things at face value. It has been postulated that the intent of the authors was not historical record but rather teaching through analogy, just like Jesus did with the parables.
For instance, no one believes that The Good Samaritan was supposed to historically represent a real person, but that doesn't mean that the story isn't "true"--on the contrary, I think it's one of the fundamental points of the "New Covenant." It just isn't historical fact.
Therefore, although I'm still a skeptic, I read Genesis 1 as metaphorical, not literal. Assume for a moment that God set The Big Bang in motion. Would an ancient people understand how The Big Bang Theory works? I doubt it. So does it matter how the world came into being, or is what matters the fact that God made it, and wants humans to understand that He made it? (And if you argue that times have changed, and why would God put in an inaccurate version of history, all I have to say is that modern people have the ability to understand metaphor just as well as ancients.)
I read the account of the Deluge the same way. There are a ton of problems, scientific and chronological, with the Deluge. But it doesn't need to have actually happened for it to be "true." The lesson of the Deluge is that the farther away we get from God, the more destructive our lives can become. Even today, we see how people clean up their lives after finding God. While I don't believe in the actual cause that losing one's faith leads to destruction in one's life, I certainly see that the point is valid in many cases, and that finding God is one way (though certainly not the only way) people can straighten out their lives.
Reconciling "Biblical inerrancy" in the light of "metaphorical truth" solves some of the problems I see, but raises many other questions. For instance, I now heavily doubt the omnipotence of God. After a much more critical reading of the NT, I now doubt that Jesus was talking about salvation, as I see major accuracy problems with the Gospel of John. I see that many of the letters (often attributed to Paul) contradict each other greatly (1 Corinthians and 2 Timothy about the role of women in the church in particular). I'm inclined to view everything after the Gospels as theological criticism, to be given no more weight than the writings of Aquinas, Spong, or Dobson.
Much of this post was included in a comment I left on the Debunking Christianity blog, as a response to other comments left here.
posted by SuperSkeptic at 8:32 AM
1 Comments:
I would like to address your comments to my blog, however I am in a time crunch. I believe I have some solutions for reading for you, as I struggled with what laws to keep, accepting JC as personal Saviour when I did not know who He really was for about a year. http://rdlb-spirit.blogspot.com/
In His Service and yours,
rdlb
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