Comments on: Bible the “Word of God?”

By: Salvos against Christian orthodoxy at Making Chutney

Salvos against Christian orthodoxy at Making Chutney — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 04:22:03 +0000

[…] 1.1. The Bible does not claim to be the Word of God. It claims that Jesus is the Word of God. So which is it, the book or the man? […]

By: CP

CP — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:11:51 +0000

Something I wonder sometimes is … Did God influence human events in order to make sure that Christianity became a world-wide religion, knowing that people would fudge it up along the way (burn texts, misinterpret, mistranslate, kill in the name of, etc.), but thinking that was still better than it being lost completely, because some people would get it right? Sorry for the run-on.

By: Bill Baar

Bill Baar — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:43:11 +0000

I live… not leave… I blog before my first cup of coffee

By: Bill Baar

Bill Baar — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:42:31 +0000

Scott,

If you think the Bible the inerrant word of God, or if you think the Bible is so imporant not to risk mistranslation, we still have this shared focus on precise meaing of certain words.

Fundamentalism a very American religoius expression as is UUism. I think we share more than we care to admit. One of which a notion you can deconstruct the text to a core truth that’s independent of history.

I leave a short hop from the Evangelicals of Wheaton College. One of centers of Bible publishing in the world I think. They’ll translate the Bible into all sorts of obscure languages. They’ll sacriface some precison with God’s words through translation to get the core message out. That’s what’s important to them.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:44:41 +0000

Uh, Bill — be careful where you go when painting certain Universalists as fundamentalists. All you described was a care for scholarship, and precise meaning of certain words. (I suspect some of the Greek headstones were ainonian “everlasting, of divine duration” since this was a popular concern among Universalists studying Greek.) A key concern among Universalists over a number of generations was mistranslation. Considering that the KJV was the lingua franca of the Bible in English until about fifty years ago, I think an original languages inscription was probably wiser and less contentious than an eccentric, private translation or trying to enter an exegetic dispute on a headstone.

Chutney: watch out. This was one of the steps that made me the Trinitarian I am today.

By: chutney

chutney — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 21:54:32 +0000

But as a counter…

Timothy’s giving scripture the status of being “god-breathed” (that is, “inspired”) is a wholly human metaphor, as we are all also god-breathed.

…the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

The Timothy passage then reads more as modest instructions for what scripture is good for.

As for Mosaic law, evangelicals (as all Christians) discount its importance. So they should be held to that here too.

To add a little more, the “now hear the word of the Lord” of the prophets is often taken to be evidenced of Christ existing before the New Testament. (Just like the “let us make man in our image” of Gen 1.) If memory serves, it is rare to see a distinction between the “word of God” and the “Word of God,” though I do remember it. In any case, fundamentalists don’t make this distinction. And distinction by capitalization is not possible in the biblical texts (as the biblical languages have no capital letters), which, presumably, they would want to base their theology upon.

The phrase “Word of God” (however capitalized) is simply too central to evangelical/fundamentalist ideology to allow the phrase to have more than one meaning. In fact, the possibility rubs hard against the grain of that ideology. If, however, they do wish to make that case, they still are left with the need to make it—they certainly haven’t made that case so far.

I’ll add one more charge to the mix: their idolatry of the Bible-as-Word-of-God stands in roughly the same place as their traditional accusation that Catholic Mariology is idolatry of an unnamed fourth member of the Trinity. Either that or the Word of God has had two incarations: flesh and book.

By: smijer

smijer — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 18:57:34 +0000

Being from a fundie family, and being married to a wild-child evangelical, I'm sure the answer from their perspective to this particular conundrum is found in the ambiguity of translating the Greek 'Logos' to English. In John 1, it is used in the sense that Heraclites intended - as a timeless, unifying principle giving order to the universe --- which is translated as "Word" in English... Then, there is "word" as in the collective regular old words found in the scriptures... They support the notion of the Bible as God's "word" in this sense by 2nd Timothy 3:16:

All scripture [is] given by inspiration of God, and [is] profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness

, as well as individual statements of Moses ("thus saith the Lord"), and Jesus ("one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled"). There's plenty of room for argument, certainly... but the seeming contradiction is just the use of one word with more than one meaning.

By: VirusHead

VirusHead — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 18:47:02 +0000

Excellent point! The collection of texts called the Bible has a history of its own, and the theory of divine inspiration came after libraries full of unacceptable materials were burned to the ground. The multiple readings of the word “Word” in christian traditions is worth study in itself.

By: Bill Baar

Bill Baar — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:35:09 +0000

We're you listening to WGN's Milt Rosenberg two nights ago? He had an author BART D. EHRMAN, chair of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the new book Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why who made the point about John's Gospel. EHRMAN started at the Fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute and continued at Evangelical Wheaton Colllege. Fundamentalism and Evangelicals not the same thing and these two quite different schools. There is a kind of Universalist Fundamentalism. Go to Concord Michigan. There is a now closed Universalist Church there. Go to the cemetary and you'll see a row of graves of the original members. There are quotes in Greek and Hebrew. I have no idea what they say, or what text they are from. But I'm certain those buried so concerned about the literal translation of those passages, so concerned that their fundamental meaning be retained, that they engraved them in the original; without translation. That's fundamentalism.