Transcript
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Greg Kokel (0:29)
Hello, friends. Greg Kokol, your host on Stand To Reason. Thank you for joining me today. And I want to give you the number because Amy told me to. I've been doing that. I went for so many years doing live radio, commercial radio for the Crawford Network at KBRT here in Southern California, some of their other stations. I was always ringing out that number, you know, and people would be calling in now. We're, we, we do broadcast when people are calling in, but that's because they know when we're broadcasting. But the broadcast is not live anymore in the way radio was live in the past. Now it's podcasting for the and we do have a radio presence on the American Family Radio Network, just one hour a week, I think. But our numbers 855-243-9975. That's 855-243-9975. Somebody's just calling in now to add to the queue. So you can call if you're live streaming, either through our app or however you do that, and you're welcome to do that, or if you're not, then you can just call in during our live show, four to six on Tuesday nights, Tuesday evenings, Los Angeles time. Now, I want to talk about something. We've been knocking around a bit as a team, kind of trying to get some precision on this issue, and it's the issue of inerrancy. Now, there has been a lot of talk about this, what it means and how to understand the concept as applied to Scripture. And I want to make a couple of distinctions. I'm not going to resolve this issue now, but I want to just throw a few things out there for you to think about. Incidentally, I know John Noyce is working now on an stru on the issue itself, and that'll be later this year. Which reminds me, we've got two fairly new courses available for Standard Reason University. Tim Barnet is teaching one on Uncertain the Role of Doubt in the Christian Life. And Alan Schliemann has got a new teaching out, relatively new, called Engaging Muslims with the Gospel. You can find that@str.makethatraining str.org and those of you who are familiar with STR University, you know how that works. Just go to our website. You can find it. Those coming up, those are up. And John's coming up, because this is an important issue. But let me, let me clarify something about the inerrancy discussion. And basically, this is a discussion about whether or not the Bible has errors in it or if it does, does it have errors in places that really matter. And I'll explain that in just a moment. But one thing that's always been for me really important about this is that we see, we understand that this is actually an intramural discussion. It is an in house discussion. It's a discussion between those who are convinced that the Bible is God's word in some significant sense, that God had a role in inspiring the words of the text. Paul says in 2 Timothy 3, All Scripture, all these writings are theo neustos. They are God breathed. And they are profitable therefore for teaching and reproof, for correction, for training and righteousness, so that the Christian, the man of God, can be complete, adequate for any good work. So there is a purpose for the Scriptures and the Scriptures can accomplish their purpose because of their authority and their author is God. But in what sense and how precise is that authorship? That's kind of the in house discussion. People outside, they don't think the Bible's inspired. And so getting their view of inspiration isn't very useful. There's a book out now, it's called Five Views and Inspiration and four of those views are people who believe the Bible is inspired and the fifth one inerrant. That's right. Well, okay, yeah, inerrant. And thank you, Amy. And Peter N says no, well, he doesn't even hold to inspiration, inerrancy of any sort. I don't know why he's in the book. But nevertheless, this is an in house discussion on what it means for Scripture to be in inerrant. Have I been using that word the whole time or have I always talked about inspired? I'm okay, all right, senior moment. So inerrant and to be inspired, at least in a biblical sense, generally means that it's God's words there. And if God can't err, if the Bible is God's word and the Bible and God can't err, then the Bible can't err. I mean, that seems to follow. And that's a standard little syllogism that has been useful for people thinking about this issue. Okay, but notice that there is this conviction from the outset that the Bible is God's word. Now there's a defense for that conviction. I'm not going to go into that now. There's a couple of ways of going about that. But just to make the point that the inerrancy debate is an in house discussion. All right, so in that discussion there are basically two views and the words are oftentimes used interchangeably, but they don't mean the same thing theologically. So when I hear people talk about inerrancy or infallibility and then infallibility and inerrancy, and they toss these words back and forth as if they're synonyms, I just take that at face value coming from the person who's speaking. But they are not synonyms in the theological world. They are two different standards. And it seems like infallibility would be the higher standard and inerrancy would be the lower standard. So in other words, if you say that the Bible is inerrant, you're saying essentially it has no errors. That needs to be qualified. But simply put, it has no errors. But if you say it's infallible, you're saying it's not even capable of having errors. So if it's infallible, it's inerrant because it's not capable of having any errors. So the infallibility language would seem like it's the more weighty word, okay? But in theological circles, it's just the opposite. All right? That is infallibility is a lesser standard of authority from the Scripture. And this concept comes out, they call it the fuller standard from Fuller Seminary. But infallibility, again, when used in technical terms, and a lot of people use them interchangeably, you're not going to get a fuss out of me. But when used as a technical term, theologically, infallibility means the Bible is without error in the areas of teaching of faith and practice is the standard way of putting it. In other words, what it teaches theologically, how to live and what God is like, the moral teaching, etc. That's where the Bible is completely reliable. It is God's word without any errors in it in those areas. Now, when it comes to science and history in those categories, there may be errors on this view. So if you believe in infallibility, you're comfortable with everything the Bible teaches theologically and morally. We got that. But I'm not going to hold the Old Testament historical accounts to that standard. There are mistakes in the Old. This is what they'll say. There are mistakes in the Old Testament. There are scientific mistakes. Actually, these were ancient people. They didn't understand things. So we're not going to hold that against them. We're just going to hold them to the moral, ethical, and theological claims that that's what we can rely on. That is called infallibility. Now, inerrancy as a standard, as a word takes it further. It said, yes, the Bible is reliable in faith on issues of faith and Practice, but it's also reliable in everything else that it affirms. That it affirms. So if it claims that something is so, then it is. Now, we have to keep in mind the conventions of language, of course, and different genre. And we have poetry and proverbs. And proverbs aren't meant to be promises, so we don't read them as promises. That isn't the intention of the author. It is giving us probabilities, if you will. And so the genre there has to be taken into consideration. But when all those considerations are made in all areas, not just faith and practice, but anything else that's being spoken of, if we are interpreting correctly, then that whatever the Bible affirms is God's word without error. Now, keep in mind that the Bible will affirm error when the error is spoken by somebody in the text. Sometimes it records a lie being spoken by a liar, but it's recording the lie accurately anyway. That's the standard for inerrancy. If you take into consideration the genre, the normal conventions of language, the circumstances it's written in the intention of the author, then whatever is affirmed to be true is true, is without error, regardless of the category. That's the inerrancy standard, as opposed to the weaker standard called infallibility. So I'm not going to go into a lot more about that. John will do that when the course comes out in a few months. Whenever I did want to offer a thought, though, about how one could justify the claim that the Bible is God's word, because we're actually starting with that affirmation. We are starting with that presumption, presupposition. And then given that the Bible is God's Word, how are we going to understand the intention of God's word regarding accuracy? And that's the inerrancy debate in House. Is it infallibility? Is it inerrancy? Is it something else? A third category? But there is a way that John Warwick Montgomery has offered this and many, many, many years ago. He's still alive, still teaching. Saw him about a year ago, he said like he did. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Well, Amy said he passed away. Well, he must have passed away. He was 93 when I saw him last year. Oh, at the end of September. Okay. Well, well done, good and faithful servant. He offered a way of dealing with Scripture and making a case for the inspiration of Scripture. And I think he called it retroduction. And what he starts with are the Gospels as historical documents. Okay. These are not the inspired Word of God. That's not a starting point. Let's just start with the Gospels as accounts, detailed accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Do we have good reason to trust the content of the information of those accounts? And so, just under purely historiographical kind of analysis, the canons of historical analysis, can we trust what the Gospels say about Jesus life? And the conclusion he comes to is, yes, we can. Okay, now, treating the Gospels as reasonably accurate history, what do we learn about the beliefs and the actions of Jesus of Nazareth? Well, we learn that Jesus of Nazareth actually believed the entire Old Testament was God's word. And he quotes from lots and lots of different places and many times from the most controversial portions of Scripture. So he talks about Adam and Eve. He talks about Jonah and the great fish or the great sea creature. He talks about Sodom and Gomorrah. So he's making reference to these controversial areas that people would read and say, nah, now that's not real. But it seemed that Jesus believed they were. These were historical accounts. All right. And then we also have Jesus in the upper room giving instructions to his disciples on the last day of his life, I should say natural life with them. And he's telling them that they are going to receive the Holy Spirit, who will bring to remembrance everything that he has taught them, that the Holy Spirit would lead them and guide them into all truth. Now, those are two different statements he makes, I think one in chapter 14 and one in chapter 15, maybe 16 of the gospel of John. But he's making reference to what will happen in the future to those that are part of the apostolic band. He's not talking to them as all Christians. The promise to receive all truth from the Spirit is not for every Christian, obviously, because we disagree so much when we have the same Spirit. No, it was given to the disciples to secure a testimony after Jesus was gone. That would be holy writ for the new covenant, just like the Hebrew Scriptures were wholly writ for the old covenant. Okay, so Montgomery's approach then is that he looks at the claims that Jesus made, and then he asks, does he have authority to make claims like this? Can we believe those claims? We have good reason to believe Jesus knows what he's talking about. And this, of course, is secured by the resurrection. If Jesus predicted his own death and his own resurrection, then was executed and three days later raised himself from the dead, if that actually happens. Now, this guy knows a thing or two, doesn't he? He's got credibility. And Paul said at the beginning of Romans, and this is a Fairly early reference, the book of romans in the 50s. He said in the first chapter that Jesus was declared with power to be the Son of God. That's a divine reference by the resurrection from the dead. So the resurrection secures a number of things. And one of them is the authority of Jesus to speak as God himself regarding all things. Now, that puts his statements about scripture, Hebrew scripture, New Testament scripture to come in an entirely different category. Now we can say that God said that the Old Testament in all of its parts were inspired because Jesus cited from all these sections the entire Tanakh, the first five books of the Bible, the law, the Torah, the prophets, the wisdom, literature, the writings, all of these he cited from and said that all of these things speak of him. And so now, speaking with divine authority, having been clarified that authority, he already had it, but clarified now by the resurrection, he speaks with authority to identify the divine source of the Word in the Old Testament and also confirming the disciples, the apostles in the future, to be writing holy writ for them. And this is why this is an issue of canon. Now, what books count and as canon, which is the rule, that's what the word means. Well, Jesus was the rule when he was here. And then those who he trained to follow after him directly, that inside band when he's gone, then they became the rule. And then when they were gone, the things that they wrote became the rule. And that's why apostolic authority attached to any book of the New Testament was vital in almost every case. There's some exceptions, Book of Hebrews, for example. But known apostolic authority and connection was vital to including it in recognizing the books as part of the canon. Now, I've written about this and I'm trying to remember when it came out last year to solid ground. It was the. The canon, which books and why, I think is the title of it. And it might have been like September that it came out. No, it came out. When did that come out? When the solid ground of the canon that I wrote, what was that? November. Which books and why? Or October? Anyway, I was late out of getting into the team. It was November. So November 1st it came out. You can find it online at the bottom of our homepage right now. You can look at it. But I get going in a lot more detail there about apostolic authority, because that was the thing that really mattered. But anyway, all of this is tied together with the concept of the scripture being God's word. And that is the way that John Montgomery, God bless his soul, God rest his soul. Oh, he is resting and he is being blessed because he's with the Lord. Apparently that's the approach that John Montgomery took in kind of ratifying all of Scripture as the Word of God from Jesus perspective. And I think it's a useful approach called retroduction, I think is the way he characterized that. Oh, he did? Okay. Oh, I did. Apparently I wrote an article on this whole thing and Amy's going to link to that as well. That'll be in the show notes. Okay, let's take a break and then get to your calls on standaresan. Stay with us.