Ah, back from vacation and finishing up the teaching on a class about the sacramental nature of water in the creation story to our high school to the high school class… Life is good.
The only time we deviated from the lesson was a brief excursus into Biblical inerrancy and textual criticism issues. One of the students is sure that the Bible we have today is does not contain Paul’s, Peter’s or John’s original letters much less the Gospel accounts because “there has to be mistakes because it’s all a copy of a copy of a copy.”
Yeah, I’ll be happy to take up the inerrancy issues as soon as we are done with our study of God using water for salvation in both the New and Old Testaments. The student that made the statement above didn’t know quite what to say when I said that we would be happy to address the issue but that we would have “play CSI and follow the evidence.” I think that there are a great many people that are simply afraid to conduct such a study because they believe that the extra-Biblical authors and sources as well as sciences such as archeology will contradict Scripture when that is not the case at all and no reason to not hold such apologetics classes for youth as well as adults.
One thing our class has never shied away from is dealing history and science. Both these fields of study are the Christian’s friend and can certainly be brought in to teach especially when it comes to both textual criticisms. Yeah, we’ll get to that…
Maybe a mistake here or there in words...but never in Word.
ReplyDeleteI hope you had a great vacation.
Welcome back!
Thanks Steve, I had a great vacation. I wish I got more than a few outlines of posts jotted down…
ReplyDeleteI would be careful with the word mistake in your comment. We can say there are variations in the oldest manuscripts that we have but the variances do not constitute mistakes.
If there are mistakes, it is in our modern translations where the translators seek to read into the texts the authors intended meanings and divine the message so we poor modern folk can see into the mind of God without all the cultured biases that offend our post modern politically sensitive ways of thinking…
I meant human error of course. God never makes a mistake.
ReplyDeleteBut He does use earthly vessels to accomplish His purposes.
This is evident in the bread and wine and water, in the poor words of the preacher (us), and in our Dear Lord Himself.
Unlike the Muslims, we do not need a perfect book to have a perfect God.
That said, everything in that book is true. The message is inerrant.
The Word is perfect.
And with message being inerrant and the Word being perfect, do we not have a perfect book? It sorta sounds like you’re hedging your bets there
ReplyDeleteSteve, the comment above is mine, not sure why but I couldnt sign in for a few minutes
ReplyDeleteNo, Frank, I'm not.
ReplyDeleteThe finite contains the infinite.
Not every jot and tittle has to be perfect for the message to be perfect.
It actually bolsters my faith and trust in the Word, that not every single word need be just so.
I would love for my teens to take such a class. I think that sounds fantastic.
ReplyDelete