Dick Tracy isn’t concerned that he’s learning about theology from an agnostic.
Tracy is in the Adult Forum Sunday school class at Trinity Episcopal Church, 1011 Vt. The class is working its way through a 24-part video series by Bart Ehrman (at right), a noted theologian at the University of North Carolina who grew up attending Trinity.
“I have heard that he is an agnostic now,” Tracy says. “Of course I’m not, so we disagree on that point. However, I don’t think that affects what he presents. Maybe it just makes his point of view less slanted in favor of one or another sect.”
The video series is called “The Great Courses,” and Ehrman’s portion talks about the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Good Lord, I used to attend this parish. They were nuts then. Looks like things haven’t changed much in twenty years.
Lord have mercy.
I love Bart Ehrman’s books. He makes things simple for the novice and interesting for the well-educated.
Having read a few reviews of Ehrman’s work (but not the work itself) it sounds like he is a entertaining speaker, and readable writer — the only problem being that he doesn’t write truthfully or as a scholar. These are common faults from many of the left-leaning critics who seem to be predisposed to using straw-men and other half truths. Probably the shortest review that gives a flavour of the overall feel of his work ends.
“In sum, Ehrman’s latest book does not disappoint on the provocative scale. But it comes up short on genuine substance about his primary contention. Scholars bear a sacred duty not to alarm lay readers on issues that they have little understanding of. Unfortunately, the average layperson will leave this book with far greater doubts about the wording and teachings of the NT than any textual critic would ever entertain. A good teacher doesn’t hold back on telling his students what’s what, but he also knows how to package the material so they don’t let emotion get in the way of reason. A good teacher does not create Chicken Littles.”
http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2006/03/misanalyzing-text-criticism-bart.html
Another, more scholarly review can be found at:
http://www.denverseminary.edu/dj/articles2006/0200/0206
Scholarly theology involves a logical methodology: identifying and explicating a theological problem, proposing a hypothesis to solve the problem, attempting to find data that contradicts the hypothesis; failing to do so, one is justified in tentatively holding the hypothesis. If one finds data that successful critiques the hypothesis, then one adjusts the hypothesis to account for this data or proposes a new hypothesis.
A theological hypothesis (as any other type of hypothesis) should be robust, chancy, and provocative, basically, easily criticizable. Then if it holds up to criticism, it has a strong explanatory power and increases knowledge. A conservative hypothesis on the other hand, may hold up to criticism, but doesn’t appreciable increase knowledge.
Margaret
Your article sources are from fundamentalisst who argue the untenable belief in inerrancy.
From Irenaeus’ REVISIONIST DICTIONARY:
“SEMINARY: Educational institution that affirms Progressives and reeducates the Orthodox.”
Lawrence is something of the liberal drain here in Kansas; they all seem to flow downhill into that town. I live 12 miles from Lawrence and actually attended Trinity a few times. By and large they are completely lost lambs, and their parish has become little more than a petting zoo for the favorite animals of secular liberalism.
This is a parish that for many years refused to allow the Alpha Course because it was too radical and evangelical. The same Alpha Course whose group leaders are instructed (firmly) to accept all points of view and never (never!) correct an unbiblical position.
Their previous pastor “worship[ed] the ground Frank Griswold walks upon” and eventually got in trouble because he wouldn’t keep his marriage vows. He shoulda messed around with a guy … he might be a bishop by now.
Just so you know:
Definition of Inerrancy
Inerrancy is the view that when all the facts become known, they will demonstrate that the Bible in its original autographs and correctly interpreted is entirely true and never false in all it affirms, whether that relates to doctrine or ethics or to the social, physical, or life sciences.
A number of points in this definition deserve discussion. Inerrancy is not presently demonstrable. Human knowledge is limited in two ways. First, because of our finitude and sinfulness, human beings misinterpret the data that exist. For instance, wrong conclusions can be drawn from inscriptions or texts. Second, we do not possess all the data that bear on the Bible. Some of that data may be lost forever, or they may be awaiting discovery by archaeologists. By claiming that inerrancy will be shown to be true after all the facts are known, one recognizes this. The defender of inerrancy argues only that there will be no conflict in the end.
Further, inerrancy applies equally to all parts of the Bible as originally written. This means that no present manuscript or copy of Scripture, no matter how accurate, can be called inerrant.
This definition also relates inerrancy to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the science of biblical interpretation. It is necessary to interpret a text properly, to know its correct meaning, before asserting that what a text says is false. Moreover, a key hermeneutical principle taught by the Reformers is the analogy of faith, which demands that apparent contradictions be harmonized if possible. If a passage appears to permit two interpretations, one of which conflicts with another passage and one of which does not, the latter must be adopted.
Probably the most important aspect of this definition is its definition of inerrancy in terms of truth and falsity rather than in terms of error. It has been far more common to define inerrancy as “without error,” but a number of reasons argue for relating inerrancy to truth and falsity. To use “error” is to negate a negative idea.
Truth, moreover, is a property of sentences, not words. Certain problems are commonly associated with views related to “error.” Finally, “error” has been defined by some in the contemporary debate in such a way that almost every book ever written will qualify as inerrant. Error, they say, is willful deception; since the Bible never willfully deceives its readers, it is inerrant. This would mean that almost all other books are also inerrant, since few authors intentionally deceive their readers.
Some have suggested that the Bible itself might help in settling the meaning of error. At first this appears to be a good suggestion, but there are reasons to reject it. First, “inerrancy” and “error” are theological rather than biblical terms. This means that the Bible applies neither word to itself. This does not mean that it is inappropriate to use these words of the Bible. Another theological term is “trinity.” It is, however, more difficult to define such words. Second, a study of the Hebrew and Greek words for error may be classified into three groups: cases of error where intentionality cannot be involved (e.g., Job 6:24; 19:4), cases of error where intentionality may or may not be involved (e.g., 2 Sam. 6:7), and cases where intentionality must be involved (e.g., Judg. 16:10 – 12). Error, then, has nothing to do with intentionality.
Admittedly, precision of statement and measurement will not be up to modern standards, but as long as what is said is true, inerrancy is not in doubt.
Finally, the definition states that inerrancy covers all areas of knowledge. Inerrancy is not limited to matters of soteriological or ethical concern. It should be clear that biblical affirmations about faith and ethics are based upon God’s action in history. No neat dichotomy can be made between the theological and factual.
Brian
I am not sure of the first review, but the second one is not of that character.
But surely you don’t anyway subscribe to the
conservative=wrong
liberal=right
level of scholarship.
Both reviews raise substantive issues with both the examples given by Bart Ehrman and the way he uses them. I would have thought my summary of his use of straw-men and half-truths was justified by both these and the other reviews I read.
I was real tempted to say “Get a clue, Dick Tracy,” and leave it at that. But I have known some atheists or agnostics who not only understand Christian doctrine, but give it a fairer exposition than many church people I could name.
#10 Barry-A helpful comment, but I think you are mixing up two similar but different terms, inerrancy and infallibility. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy would indeed state that the Bible is <i>infallible</i>, that is, not capable of error, only in the original divinely inspired manuscripts; and that the Bible is
(try italics again with bb code)
#10 Barry-A helpful comment, but I think you are mixing up two similar but different terms, inerrancy and infallibility. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy would indeed state that the Bible is [i]infallible[/i], that is, not capable of error, only in the original divinely inspired manuscripts; and that the Bible is [i]inerrant[/i] in a faithful translation, that is, capable of containing errors since copied/translated by fallible humans, but in fact containing no errors by the grace of the Holy Spirit who wishes His word to be faithfully and accurately transmitted.
Brian from T19:
Your rebuttal source is an untenable attempt to use the fundamentalist smear word to avoid what for you is an uncomfortable truth-that God did not stutter or mumble when He gave us His word.
Deuteronomy 29:29 The secret things belong to God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we might uphold all the words of this Law.
I guess they’ll be getting what you get from most Episcopalian bishops.
I have listened to several courses from The Teaching Company. Erhman is typical of a lot of NT scholarship and presents the story of the evolution of the NT. It is hard to tell what, if anything, he believes.
Irenaeus — could you provide a little help from “Irenaeus’ REVISIONIST DICTIONARY”
We know what fundamentalism is historically, but a revisionist has used the term upstream, and in order to dialogue with him we will need to know the definition of the term from your nice dictionary.
Thanks!
I’ve read several of Ehrman’s books, and have also watched some of his videos with our Bible study group. He strikes me as an honest inquirer whose first loyalty is to the search for truth.
I think he’s missing the boat in being an agnostic. But in his self-distancing from his fundamentalist upbringing, I give him great credit for stopping at agnosticism and not letting momentum carry him all the way to atheism. I’m guessing he hasn’t yet found a path back to theism, but it’s hard to believe he’d be doing theology as a career if he weren’t looking for one.
[blockquote]Truth, moreover, is a property of sentences, not words.[/blockquote]
Not so. Consider a short, simple historical situation. There is a queue outside a cinema. A bald man, B, joins the end of the queue at time T1. At a later time, T2, a young man with a full head of hair joins the queue. At a later time, T3, a woman joins the queue. Let us call the queue Q. Now consider the following sentence:
S1: The man at the end of Q is bald.
S1 expresses a different proposition depending upon the time at which it is uttered. It expresses a true proposition at T1, a false proposition at T2, and it is meaningless (it fails to refer) at T3. The truth of the proposition expressed by S1 at T1 is not contradicted by the falsity of the different proposition expressed by S1 at T2. Therefore, truth is a property of propositions, not sentences.
#19…Logical truth is expressed in propositions (the structural logic content of sentences). Empirical and ontological truth is expressed in theories which must be tested for their truth content. Tested with what? It depends on your theory of truth. Tested with the facts (correspondence theory), tested for logical coherence (coherence theory), tested by its practical implications (pragmatist theory).
#20: I’m sure that between us we could make Pontius Pilate wish he’d never asked…
Fundamentally yours. B.
Retrieved from: [url=http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_Inerrancy]http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_Inerrancy[/url]
[b]Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy
C. Infallibility, Inerrancy, Interpretation [/b]
Holy Scripture, as the inspired Word of God witnessing Authoritatively to Jesus Christ, may properly be called ‘infallible’ and ‘inerrant’. These negative terms have a special value, for they explicitly safeguard crucial positive truths.
‘Infallible’ signifies the quality of neither misleading nor being misled and so safeguards in categorical terms the truth that Holy Scripture is a sure, safe and reliable rule and guide in all matters.
Similarly, ‘inerrant’ signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.
We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of his penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.
So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: Since, for instance, nonchronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.
The truthfulness of Scripture is not negated by the appearance in it of irregularities of grammar or spelling, phenomenal descriptions of nature, reports of false statements (for example, the lies of Satan), or seeming phenomenal descriptions of nature, reports of false statements (for example, the lies of Satan), or seeming discrepancies between one passage and another. It is not right to set the so-called “phenomena” of Scripture against the teaching of Scripture about itself. Apparent inconsistencies should not be ignored. Solution of them, where this can be convincingly achieved, will encourage our faith, and where for the present no convincing solution is at hand we shall significantly honor God by trusting His assurance that His Word is true, despite these appearances, and by maintaining our confidence that one day they will be seen to have been illusions.
Inasmuch as all Scripture is the product of a single divine mind, interpretation must stay within the bounds of the analogy of Scripture and eschew hypotheses that would correct one Biblical passage by another, whether in the name of progressive revelation or of the imperfect enlightenment of the inspired writer’s mind.
Although Holy Scripture is nowhere culture-bound in the sense that its teaching lacks universal validity, it is sometimes culturally conditioned by the customs and conventional views of a particular period, so that the application of its principles today calls for a different sort of action.
[b]D. Skepticism and Criticism [/b]
Since the Renaissance, and more particularly since the Enlightenment, world views have been developed that involve skepticism about basic Christian tenets. Such are the agnosticism that denies that God is knowable, the rationalism that denies that He is incomprehensible, the idealism that denies that He is transcendent, and the existentialism that denies rationality in His relationships with us. When these un- and anti-Biblical principles seep into men’s theologies at a presuppositional level, as today they frequently do, faithful interpretation of Holy Scripture becomes impossible.
[b]E. Transmission and Translation [/b]
Since God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture, it is necessary to affirm that only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired and to maintain the need of textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips that may have crept into the text in the course of its transmission. The verdict of this science, however, is that the Hebrew and Greek text appears to be amazingly well preserved, so that we are amply justified in affirming, with the Westminster Confession, a singular providence of God in this matter and in declaring that the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free.
Similarly, no translation is or can be perfect, and all translations are an additional step away from the autograph. Yet the verdict of linguistic science is that English-speaking Christians, at least, are exceedingly well served in these days with a host of excellent translations and have no cause for hesitating to conclude that the true Word of God is within their reach. Indeed, in view of the frequent repetition in Scripture of the main matters with which it deals and also of the Holy Spirit’s constant witness to and through the Word, no serious translation of Holy Scripture will so destroy its meaning as to render it unable to make its reader “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).
[b]F. Inerrancy and Authority [/b]
In our affirmation of the authority of Scripture as involving its total truth, we are consciously standing with Christ and His apostles, indeed with the whole Bible and with the main stream of Church history from the first days until very recently. We are concerned at that casual, inadvertent and seemingly thoughtless way in which a belief of such far-reaching importance has been given up by so many in our day.
We are conscious too that great and grave confusion results from ceasing to maintain the total truth of the Bible whose authority one professes to acknowledge. The result of taking this step is that the Bible that God gave loses its authority, and what has authority instead is a Bible reduced in content according to the demands of one’s critical reasoning and in principle reducible still further once one has started. This means that at bottom independent reason now has authority, as opposed to Scriptural teaching. If this is not seen and if for the time being basic evangelical doctrines are still held, persons denying the full truth of Scripture may claim an evangelical identity while methodologically they have moved away from the evangelical principle of knowledge to an unstable subjectivism, and will find it hard not to move further.
We affirm that what Scripture says, God says. May He be glorified.
Amen and Amen.
We used Ehrman’s textbooks in undergrad religion classes. I wouldn’t say they were any better or worse than other textbooks on the subject. Obviously they’re approaching the subject of religion from a secular standpoint and observing it using merely scientific/historical methods, which, for the believer, leaves a lot of ground uncovered.
Margaret, after reading both the reviews and the book, I think Ehrman still remains interesting and useful. Witherington notes that Erhman is treading familiar ground in the first half of the book. The second half he says Ehrman has an axe to grind. I’m not sure. I didn’t find it myself.
It may be true that the suggested scriptural problems wouldn’t damage orthodoxy. However, what is evident is that early Christians did not read scripture as uniformly as others would desire – thus the scribes needed to clarify the context of the text. Ehrman correctly demonstrates (along with Robert Wilkin in another book), that Christians believed many sorts of things. Neither of the two critics really show that Ehrman’s central point, that scribes were interested editors of scripture, was wrong. You may still argue that it was “inspired” if you mean that scribes had an interest in defending a theological viewpoint. What Ehrman does do is locate scripture in the culture, as written by real persons, which gets lost in the vocabulary around the bible. Surely Ehrman doesn’t change the fundamental story. Nor would he want to. He just reveals the humanity behind the work. Personally, I think that is what the cross does also.
I admit, I detected just a little envy by Witherington (is this any different than saying Ehrman has an “axe” to grind?). Ehrman is a success. He’s sold lots of books. The other two are good bible scholars, to be sure, but neither one really offers an academic slam dunk. They offer begrudging praise to him. They diminish his story by categorizing it in right-left categories, which actually undermines their own arguments. Ehrman’s project is a success precisely because it makes the bible human – in the first four chapters – even when he did not have an axe to grind.
Margaret, perhaps you should read the book and see if you think the reviewers are right yourself.
“I don’t know wherether or not God exists, but I shall teach you how to study him.”
Yep, sounds like the ECUSA. {Yawn}
The proposition, “God exists” is a logical nonsense since existence is not a predicate (Kant). We need to ask the question: what are the predicates associated with God? It is by those predicates and how they correspond to reality that we can hypothesize about God. A philosophical discussion about the predicates is possible whether one is a theist or an atheist.
Theologically, are there any ‘real’ theological problems? If there aren’t any problems that can be demonstrated for which theology has an answer, then theology is an illusion and we don’t need to study it any longer. An atheist can also ask this question and try to determine whether there are theological problems (a question within philosophical theology).