What I believe (and don't)

A recent conversation around the blogosphere has left me pondering whether or not my readers actually know my viewpoints regarding much of Christian theology. After all, the name of the blog is The Christian Agnostic, isn't it, and how many of my readers actually know where I stand on key issues of Christian theology? I'm not sure, to be honest. So, then, what exactly are my Christian leanings? That is, what do I really believe regarding the tenets of Christian theology? In light of such questions I have decided to compile a list that briefly surveys said beliefs, and it is this list that follows:

• The Bible: I don't believe the Bible is perfect, inerrant or infallible. I believe it is a book written by wholly human authors that contains the same imperfections that permeate humanity. However, I agree with the writer of 2 Timothy when he says scripture is, "useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and for instruction righteousness." It is, to me, a medium that does in fact aid us in growing more intimate with God, despite its shortcomings.
• Biblical Criticism: I generally believe what the consensus of scholars and historians have inferred about the documents that make up the Bible, as well as what they have concluded about the Israelite culture. For example, I believe the Israelites came from Canaan  (and not from Egypt), that the book of Isaiah is composed of multiple authors, that the book of Daniel was written years after the events it "predicts" etc. 
• Genesis: I don't take the opening chapters of Genesis as history--the rest of Genesis is most likely an etiology. I don't believe in Adam and Eve or the story that describes their supposed fall. This, to me, is just another creation myth--albeit the most sophisticated of the ancient Near East--most likely promulgated in contrast to the opposing pagan creation myths of the time. However, I do believe that it communicates an important point: we are fallen creatures who have removed God from the pedestal.
• Jesus: I don't believe Jesus was God, and it seems pretty clear to me that some of the earliest sources that attest to Jesus--Paul, Mark, and Matthew--have little idea of such a concept. I agree with the majority of scholars that Jesus was most likely a self-proclaimed eschatological prophet who sincerely believed that the end of the world was coming in his follower's lifetime. That being said, none of this turns me away from Jesus. I do believe his words should be heeded--as long as they're interpreted in light of his radical eschatology--despite his mistakes. And I do, especially, believe that Jesus is the best moral prophet to grace mankind, and that he gave us the best example of what a life devoted to God looks like--again, as long as we interpret his life in terms of his extreme apocalyptic worldview. Jesus is, to me, still the best gateway we have to the mind of God, and takes us as close as we can be to the face of God himself. 
• Trinity/Incarnation: Since I don't believe that Jesus was God in the flesh, then I obviously don't believe in the incarnation, or the trinity. Both of these concepts, as I hinted to earlier, seem to not have been promulgated by the earliest Christians. There are only verses here and there, mostly from the later New Testament writings, that even seem to hint at such things. (In fact I believe that if we were to read the Bible from a fresh perspective, with no previous assumptions from outside sources--e.g. the Nicene Creed--we wouldn't close the Bible thinking that there was anything like a trinitarian ontology promulgated.) 
• Atonement: I don't believe Jesus atoned for anyone's sins, and while the Christus Victor theory of atonement appeals to me, it only does so in a metaphorical sense. And I certainly do not hold to the Penal Substitution theory, which seems to make a mockery of any God worthy of worship. 
• Jesus' resurrection: I believe, or at most hope, that Jesus resurrected from the dead. However, I don't believe that the evidential arguments for his resurrection are without their flaws. And I certainly don't believe that said arguments are overwhelmingly irresistible or undeniable. A reasonable person can very much be skeptical about such things, and, if they don't believe in God, then their skepticism is even more warranted.
• Heaven/Hell: I definitely believe in an afterlife--for both logical and emotional reasons. But I don't think anybody knows what the nature of such a life will be. Heaven and Hell, to me, are in the same camp as the opening of Genesis: they are myths that we have constructed to make sense of what we deeply take to be true. In any event, if God does exist, and if he is infinitely loving, and if heaven and hell do indeed exist as well, then I can't help but be a universalist. Moreover, on these conditions, I believe that hell is only temporary, and, in some sense, simply a mental anguish created from enmity towards all that is good and just (i.e. God himself).

God has not revealed

I don’t believe that God has explicitly revealed anything to us as a human race, and it’s here that I part ways with the traditions of mainstream Christianity. I don’t believe scripture is God’s revelation to man—i.e. I don’t believe scripture can be preceded by a “Thus saith the Lord.” Obviously, I think the same regarding all other self-proclaimed holy books—even without needing to read them (see below). (Note that I do not take this to imply that scripture is not inspired, since I don’t believe inspiration necessarily entails any objective revelation.)

So why do I hold this belief, despite my self-identification as a Christian? Well for one thing, if the Bible is God’s be-all end-all of revelatory knowledge, he seems to have done a poor job of unambiguously alerting us to this fact. Are all the individuals who were raised Muslim, or Mormon, or Hindu just supposed to have a Damascus Road experience, and subsequently bow down to the book that completely contradicts their own worldviews that they have been indoctrinated with? Were all the millions of individuals who have perished, and continue to perish, without accepting the “good news” of Christianity simply being rebellious sinners who resisted God’s clear revelation? Forgive me, but I find this to be ridiculous. I personally have met adherents of other faiths (as we all have) who were devout and faithful followers of their God, and I find that it strains all credulity to believe that they knew that it was actually the Holy Bible that was God’s perfect revelation, as opposed to their own holy book, and were simply resisting this intuitive knowledge.

Moreover, are we just supposed to take the Biblical claims of revelation at face value? Well, if we can do this, then we have warrant for doing this for any self-proclaimed holy book or piece of writing, and thus we end up in confusion and contradiction. Heck, I once encountered a homeless man who claimed that he was a modern day prophet for God. If claims of revelation can be taken at face value, then who are we to say this man is a false prophet?

This leads us to another point, namely that the act of God supposedly choosing prophets to privately record his revelation seems extremely problematic. Understand that inspiration by God of prophets in order to expound revelation is a private and subjective experience, on the part of the prophet. So how can we, who are not in any way involved in this experience, ever objectively verify that God is behind the scenes pulling the strings, as it were? As outsiders we are in no epistemic position to affirm, or deny, that an individual is indeed a spokesman for the big man upstairs. The role of prophet, then, as a medium for revelation is not satisfactory—at least not if God wants this revelation to be clearly given to all mankind.

This isn’t even the worst part, however, regarding God’s supposed method of revelation. For it’s not as if the so-called vehicles of divine revelation are contemporary individuals with whom we can converse and question. No, the mediums of so-called divine revelation are primitive, anonymous authors writing hundreds (and some thousands) of years ago. How can a reasonable person ever be convinced that writings of this nature are indeed God’s clear message to the human race? Not to mention that these writings are liable to a myriad of different and often conflicting interpretations. Couple this with the fact that there are innumerable denominations based on these differing interpretations, and one is inevitably drowning in the sea of uncertainty and obscurity. These are the fruits of God’s “clear” revelation.

Please understand that my point of contention here is not necessarily that God has not revealed anything to us. Rather, it is that even if he has indeed done so, he has done so in the most ambiguous, obscure and confusing fashion possible. It is not clear that God’s revelation is to be found in the Christian scriptures (which cannon?); it is not even clear that Christianity is true; it is not clear that Jesus is God; it is not clear that God has explicitly intervened in the world in the past; it is not clear that God has a plan for us; it is not clear that there is hope for a future realm wherein we will be in communion with him; it is not clear that God even desires communication with us; it is not even clear that God exists.  Note again that I’m not claiming that any of these propositions are false, but only that their truth is not clear, irresistible, and unambiguous.

These are the reasons I don’t believe that God has revealed anything to us. This is hard for fundamentalist Christians to swallow, and obviously they wouldn’t agree with me. But my faith is more than believing that the Bible is a manual that has been dropped from heaven, pre-packaged with the do’s and don’ts of God. The Bible is nothing but our own struggle to understand what in world is going on in this universe, and where God fits into this discussion, if anywhere. I’m alright with the ambiguity and obscurity of existence, and we all should be—there’s nothing we can do about it. But most of all we should stop pretending that this ambiguity doesn’t exist and that God has explicitly lifted the veil from our eyes. For as Paul said, indeed we see through a glass darkly.

Dale Allison on the Bible

"The inexplicable divine mystery still speaks through the old pages and through my hermeneutical confusion; and in the end I must pursue the book because it has always pursued me. It has made me feel like a worm and no man, and it has made me sing the song of Simeon. It has made known my transgressions so that they are ever before me, and it has freed me from my past so that I am free indeed. It has so shaped my intellect that, even when I do not end with it, I always begin with it. And what little good deed doing I have done has come from memory of the Good Samaritan and of the Son of Man's words to the sheep and the goats.

I have come to live and move and have my being in the Bible [...] and in the Christian traditions it has brought forth. I want this book read to me on my deathbed. Despite my modernity and my cynical nature, despite my dissection of it and my quarrels with it, the Bible remains profitable for teaching, for correction, and for training in righteousness. It comforts. It inspires. It commands. When I push its pages apart, I lay my finger on God's heart. I hate to see people not reading it."

Taken from The Luminous Dusk .

The Bible and slavery

I was looking through some of my books recently, and came across a famous apologetic book that I bought back in my more theologically naïve days, namely the book Is God a Moral Monster? by apologist Paul Copan. When I read this book—I still accepted the doctrine of inerrancy at this point—I felt a relief that at least there were Christians attempting to grapple with the disturbing and seemingly immoral parts of the Bible. At the time I accepted the things that Copan wrote, but it didn’t take long for me to see the problems with his apologetic reasoning.

One of the difficulties that I immediately felt was not properly addressed or defended—and now I see that it cannot be adequately defended—was the issue of slavery in the Old Testament. Now, it’s not as if the Bible only makes short and vague allusions to the institution of slavery, but, rather, it gives explicit and unambiguous commands and laws about how slavery was supposed to be implemented by the Israelites. And this is where Copan’s apologetic comes in.

For Copan, the slavery alluded to in the Old Testament was not slavery as commonly understood in the antebellum South. Rather, Copan claims, slavery was more like indentured servitude: Israelite servitude was induced by poverty, was entered into voluntarily, and was far from optimal. (p. 127) Now this is half true. As critical Old Testament scholar John J. Collins states, “The most common cause of enslavement in the ancient world was debt: people who could not pay their debts were forced to sell their children, or themselves, into slavery.” The problem is that this was not the case with regards to foreign slaves. These slaves were pretty much captured against their will, and were treated much differently than Hebrew slaves, as we’ll see below.

Copan continues his apologetic by arguing that this “servitude” wasn’t all that bad.  Slave owners were not allowed to mistreat their slaves and were required to release these slaves after seven years. Not too bad, right? Wrong. This, again, only applied to male Israelite slaves, and not women, or foreign slaves. Women and foreign slaves were passed down through the slave owner’s family like property. Moreover, there was a loophole that allowed slave owners to keep male Israelite slaves for life. All they had to do was give their slave a wife, and hope that the slave, when freed, wanted to stay with his wife—since his wife was the slave owner’s property.

Then there’s this kicker:

And if a man beats his male or female servant with a rod, so that he dies under his hand, he shall surely be punished. Notwithstanding, if he remains alive a day or two, he shall not be punished; for he is his property. (Exodus 21:20-21 NKJV)

These verses speak for themselves. You could beat a slave nearly to death, and as long as he didn’t die immediately you were free and clear. Not only that but this law applied, once again, only to Hebrew slaves. Who knows what was permitted of foreign slaves? The point is that there simply is no way to spin this apologetically. It is simply not right for one human to possess another, and it is not right for one person to beat another almost to death only to be acquitted of responsibility because he owns him.
Furthermore, even if one could provide a proper apologetic response, I don’t see that it would salvage much. The fact is that it’s quite obvious that these Old Testament laws are simply the product of their primitive and barbaric environment. We find these very same laws in surrounding ancient Near East cultures of the time. Sometimes the Old Testament laws are a bit more sophisticated, and sometimes they are not. But what is completely absent is any trace, or reason to think, that God Almighty actually commanded or ordered such laws to be followed in the first place.

Now, maybe it’s the case that God did command such things and simply accommodated himself to the traditions of the Israelites and met them where they were. Perhaps. However, for me it seems more likely that these were simply the tribal laws promulgated by a primitive culture. This culture was simply so steeped in the traditions of its surrounding nations that it couldn’t help but think just like they did. Hence these slavery laws were simply the norm, unfortunately. Now the interesting thing is that this culture, namely the Israelites, would eventually shed much of this aNE thinking and give us the first-fruits of a novel monotheistic theology that eventually culminated in the theology of the New Testament. But this gives us no warrant for ignoring, and not coming to terms with, these parts of scripture that we can, and should, so vehemently disagree with.

God did not write the Bible

The title of the post should be self-evident if taken in a literal sense, since, to quote the perfect grammar of Russell Brand, “the Holy Spirit ain’t got a pen.” That is, it seems quite obvious, even to fundamentalists, that God didn’t literally take up the task of writing the Bible. So, why did I take up the task of writing a post that asserts the obvious? Because, although many Christians wouldn’t claim that God literally wrote the Bible, they do claim that the Bible is the written Word of God. That is to say, many Christians believe that because of revelation and inspiration, scripture is “wholly and verbally God-given” and that God “caus[ed the] writers to use the very words that He chose.” (See the Chicago statement on Biblical Inerrancy.) Thus stated, such Christians adhere to the claim that God is the author of the Bible, though not in a direct sense.

My claim is that God cannot be said to have authored the Bible in this sense. What better way to demonstrate this, then to survey the Bible itself, and I believe the best way to do this, is to quote passages from the Psalms:

Hear me, Lord, my plea is just; listen to my cry. Hear my prayer-- it does not rise from deceitful lips.--Psalm 17:1

Arise, Lord! Deliver me, my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked—Psalm 3: 7

You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.—Psalm 63:1

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.—Psalm 51:1-2

I chose these Psalms—there are many more like them--for a specific purpose. You see, these Psalms are all prayers and pleas to God himself; they are the pleas of pious hearts and souls crying out for their creator. As such, it seems quite obvious that God did not author these verses in any sense, for then that would imply the absurdity that God is praying and pleading to Himself. So, we see that these verses cannot be preceded by “The Lord says.” Thus stated, we have direct evidence from the Bible that not all of its verses were “wholly and verbally God-given”.

All it takes is simple examples like these to collapse the foundation of inerrancy. For if we can find verses where God clearly did not author them, then we cannot say with any certainty that the rest of the Bible was authored by God. Now this is not to say that the Bible isn’t inspired by God in some sense, but it puts to bed the idea that the inspiration of God somehow controls the words written on the page.

Fundamentalism and a primitive god

Most individuals that have kept up with the current trend of “new” atheism are quite familiar with the names Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens et al. Now, while I vigorously disagree with much—mostly on the philosophical side—that these individuals have published, I do, occasionally, find myself agreeing with a few of their insights. And one of these insights that I believe illuminates a hint of truth is Richard Dawkins’ famous jab at the God of the Old Testament in The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Ouch. Now, while I wouldn’t agree with Dawkins that this is the only, or even the dominant, portrait of God painted by the Old Testament, I would agree that this is a version of God that is peppered throughout the Bible. Moreover, this barbaric rendering of God is not restricted to purely moral acts; it reaches to the over-all cultural viewpoint that the ancients had of the divine. The Bible (though, admittedly, mostly the Old Testament) many times paints a picture of God that one finds difficult not to describe as primitive:

We’re told that God had a garden that he used to walk through. That in that garden he planted a tree that literally and intrinsically contained the knowledge of good and evil. That he built a firmament (that is, a solid clear dome) above the earth. That he punished all of humanity for the sins of one couple. That he physically wrestled with a human being. That he was not competent enough to exercise his will for humanity and, therefore, drowned all life he had created to start his divine plan all over again. That he ordered the massacre of hundreds of men, women, children and animals. That he fought a fire-breathing sea dragon with multiple heads. Etc etc.

Now, it seems quite plausible to attribute such predications of God to the primitiveness of the Israelites. All the above descriptions make sense as promulgations of a society surrounded by barbaric ancient Near Eastern cultures. These are the cultures that believed that every single event was caused by its own respective god; the cultures that believed that their own gods could be manifest in inanimate objects (i.e. idols); the cultures that believed that the gods could be manipulated and deceived by the actions and rituals of humans; the cultures that believed that the gods were just like humans except to a higher degree of being; and that’s why they could make mistakes, or feel anger or regret, and even eat.  Thus stated, Why would we expect the Israelites not to mimic and, least of all, be greatly affected by the cultures that influenced them and gave rise to them in the first place!

This is nothing to shy away from. The Israelites wrote Hebrew scripture, and the Israelites were, by all means and even by the Bible’s own standards, far short of sophisticated. Through the Israelites worldview we see the evolution, growth, and the first-fruits of the formulation of orthodox theology; but it should be observed that this process was very long and did not always progress in a straight line. The picture of God that we hold today did not emerge overnight through some sort of once-and-for-all revelation. Rather, it is a picture that took hundreds of years to formulate. A picture that was argued about; a picture that was questioned; a picture that was constantly revised and expanded; a picture that was immature and only progressed towards maturity; a picture that was stunted by our own imaginative shortcomings as human beings; and a picture that, many times, mirrored our own faults rather than Gods.

This picture of God evolved throughout the Bible. It illuminates our struggle as finite human beings to grasp and understand the divine. I maintain that it reflects our own shortcomings, and not God’s.

Now, by the time one closes the Bible they are left with an impression of God that is infinitely greater than the above primitive renderings. One is left with a God that is spirit; a God that is love itself; a God that is forgiving and desires that all reconcile themselves to Him; a God that does not admonish evil and wrong-doing; a God who is a loving father who welcomes all people into His kingdom no matter their past, present, race, ethnicity, or gender. In short: it is the God Jesus served and revealed to the disciples. Now, this is not to say that the Old Testament does not contain many of the aforementioned impressions as well. It surely does. But while these impressions are only scattered in the Old Testament, they are fully culminated in the later writings of scripture—though I would argue that even the later writings of scripture still contain pictures of God that we should regard as adolescent.

So, why should one get so upset at Dawkins’ remark above? His comment is not wholly true, but it does speak with some forceful insight. Why should this trouble us as Christians? Why can we not recognize and take possession of the primitive cultures and beliefs whereby our current picture of God had its genesis? The reason is this: fundamentalist formulations of scripture. To one that holds to the inerrant and one-dimensional truth of scripture, admitting any sort of erroneous pictures of God into the Bible is the worst sin one could commit. For the fundamentalist, all portraits of God in the Bible are valid portraits, and any seemingly contradictory or primitive renderings of God are attributable only to our own finite shortcomings—and yet they hold that these shortcomings could not have influenced the very same human beings who formed such portraits of God in scripture! Their Bible is a static bible; a bible with no room for growth of the understanding of the divine. For them, the God that walks in a garden and drowns the whole human race is the same God that is spirit and admonishes us not to repay evil for evil.

Has any idea ever seemed so contrary to reason? Is it any wonder that Christians by the dozens are losing the faith they grew up with? Is it any wonder why atheists mock and ridicule Christians? These fundamentalists Christians are my brothers and sisters, yes; but, they are making a mockery of the faith that I take so seriously. They have turned the beauty of Christianity into a primitive superstitious Bronze Age fable; and I maintain that as long as their adolescent picture of God is paraded around, Christianity will continue to lose adherents.

The portrait of God that we as humans expound to ourselves will never capture the true majesty of God. Even our modern conception of God must be considered primitive compared to His actual being. Our ideas of God have evolved and will continue to evolve. To turn to any one portrait of God and regard that as the final insight into God’s nature is, simply, spiritual immaturity and intellectual laziness. The Bible might be God’s word, but it is not, by all means, his final word.

God's inclusive inspiration

"Ask pardon of your Lord and then turn unto Him (repentant). Lo! my Lord is Merciful, Loving. "

“Verily, that which is with God is the best for you, if you but knew it: all that which is with you is bound to end, whereas all that which is with God is everlasting.”

“ Yea, thou art merciful unto thy children when they cry unto thee, to be heard of thee and not of men, and thou wilt hear them.”

“...when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God."

Shall we care to speculate whence these verses derive? Contrary to a prima facie assumption, these verses are not from the Bible. The first two derive from the Koran, and the latter two from the Book of Mormon.

What is a Christian to make of these verses above? Is he not to agree with them? Is it not true that (as the Christian believes) God is merciful and loving, as the Koran says? Is it not true that those in service of fellow human beings are also in service of God almighty? Of course the Christian will uphold such truths regarding the nature of God. Yet, simply because other self-proclaimed holy books occasionally hit the bulls-eye regarding the character of God, this is not enough for one to grant those books the same divine status as the Bible. For there are still a multitude of verses in these aforementioned books that most Christians would adamantly disagree with. Fair enough.

However, is it not at least the case that some of these holy books are also inspired in some sense—though perhaps to a lesser degree—by God Himself? The Christian might cringe at such a thought and retort that “the Bible is the only inspired Word of God”. Yet, what exactly the word inspired means is by no means agreed upon by Christians—even fundamentalists. So if this is the case then how can we rule out a priori that other books such as the Koran, or the Book of Mormon, do not contain some hint of divine inspiration? I maintain that we cannot.

But, let us tread a step further. As I articulated above, Christians will no doubt uphold the aforementioned verses as valid reflections of God’s nature—that is, they will agree that God is merciful, loving, everlasting etc. It might seem that identifying the truth of these verses is no big deal—for an occasional true proposition about God in a written book does not necessitate that said book be labeled holy. But, an interesting question can be raised here: where does truth come from? Surely all truth derives from God himself? Just as all being, goodness, love etc., derive from God, it seems that truth must also derive from the same source. Doesn’t James 1:17 state “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning”?

But, if every good thing, which must include truth, comes from God, then surely any valid proposition regarding the nature of God must come from him as well. For where else are we to find a wellspring of pure goodness? This leads us to the conclusion that the aforementioned verses, along with hundreds like them, must ultimately derive from God. How then can we deny that these verses are not in some sense inspired by God?

I maintain that these verses are indeed inspired by God. And if they are inspired by God, then we can reach an interesting inference regarding God’s revelation: God has indeed revealed his truth outside of the Christian religion. And if this is true, then it’s time we take a closer look at religious inclusivism.

Textual Criticism and its implications for inerrancy

As a Christian I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on and pondering the case for inerrancy. The reasons for this are numerous. First, it was probably the doctrine that could have potentially led to the loss of my faith had I chosen to hold to the “inerrancy-or-bust” mentality that plagues fundamentalists. Second, it was after rejecting this doctrine that I truly felt my faith strengthened—I could put my faith solely in God instead of setting up the bible as my spiritual focal point. Third, it seems to me that this doctrine is more of a spiritual crutch to many to be held at all costs instead of a position deduced by pure logical inference.

 With such reasons thus stated, I find myself occasionally running through my mind the reasons why this doctrine is simply unwarranted and untenable. And let me say that the reasons I, personally, have for rejecting this doctrine seem to be miles wide in scope and miles deep in substance. Yet there are a few arguments I have come across (or have come up with myself) that I feel have really put the final nail in the coffin for the doctrine of inerrancy and it is in this post that I would like to expound one of those very arguments.

 This argument begins with the recognition regarding the findings of Textual Criticism. In case the reader is unaware, Textual Criticism is the endeavor of attempting to ascertain the original form of a text. Now, usually appealing to any kind of secular scholarly consensus regarding the bible is something that fundamentalists and inerrantists will not react favorably towards—since in order to affirm the doctrine of inerrancy one would have to reject almost all consenses reached by the academic community. Yet, there is one area where even fundamentalists will (usually) yield to academia and that is in the science of textual criticism. In New Testament textual criticism scholars have reached conclusions that cannot be denied, since these conclusions have concrete evidence to ground them. For instance, it is unanimously agreed that all the (thousands of) New Testament manuscripts we possess have scribal errors. Some of these errors are simple copying mistakes while others are blatant textual additions. These variants reach a mark as high as, and most likely higher than, 400,000.

It’s important to understand that most of these errors are completely insignificant (e.g. spelling mistakes). However, there are many that are quite significant indeed. 1 John 5:7-8 is one of the only places where the doctrine of the trinity is explicitly taught, and yet these verses are not found in a majority of NT manuscripts; the story of the adulterous woman (John 7:53-8:11) is completely absent from many early manuscripts of John; and the resurrection ending of Mark (Mark 16: 9-20) was not added until two centuries after the Gospel of Mark began to circulate. Let me articulate once more that these conclusions are based on concrete physical evidence of the manuscripts we possess.

 So, what is the significance of the above conclusions, and how do they affect the doctrine of inerrancy? Well, first let me begin by correctly articulating the inerrantist position. The doctrine of inerrancy only states that the original texts of the bible are inerrant, and not that God would keep the editors and scribes, who transmitted the texts, from error. Fair enough. But there is double standard employed here; and I believe presuppositionalist  Greg Bahnsen demonstrated it in his own writings:
 

There is no scriptural warrant for holding that God will perform the perpetual miracle of preserving His written Word from all errors in its being transcribed from one copy to another.

 Notice the problem? Did God ever claim that he would keep the scribes and editors from corrupting his word as it was transmitted textually? No. But, similarly, did God ever claim that he would keep the human writers of scripture from corrupting his word as they wrote scripture? No, he did not. (Let it be known that an appeal to the inspiration of scripture does not save this claim unless one already assumes that inspiration necessitates an inerrant text--which would need to be demonstrated.) So, how can one claim that the original text should be inerrant but not the text after transmission, since both of these assertions rest on the same lack of promulgation of the divine will?
 
Moreover, what makes the bible different after the original text is formed? Is it not still the “Word of God”? Of course it is. So, why would God not allow error to corrupt his Word during the writing of the original text but he would allow error to corrupt his Word during its textual transmission? Surely any answer given in vindication of the former would not also apply to the latter? So, I maintain that we can form a valid dilemma regarding the nature of scripture: Either (1) God desired that no human error intermix with his Word or revelation, or (2) God did not desire such a thing. But we know for a fact, again due to textual criticism, that human error did corrupt God’s Word as it was textually transmitted. So, we have warrant for rejecting (1) and are therefore completely warranted in accepting the conclusion that God allowed human error to intermix with his message—whether it pertains to the original text or not. Thus, we have logical airtight reasons for denying the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

Christian Fundamentalist double standards

A while back I was discussing the topic of evolution with my father-in-law. He is a devout Christian of whom I admire and look up to very much. However, he is also what could be labeled a fundamentalist Christian. That is, he is a young-earth creationist, biblical inerrantist, and a Calvinist. Since I adhere to none of these it should be obvious that we rarely agree when we discuss theology. This aforementioned discussion was no different, though I abstained from voicing my objections that I will presently promulgate.

During this discussion regarding evolution, we stumbled upon the topic of animal death. My father-in-law articulated that one reason he cannot believe in evolution is due to the fact God, in Genesis, is said to have looked at his creation and labeled it good. “But, I cannot believe” he said, “that God would have looked upon His creation, whereby the means of survival was death, struggle and suffering, and called it good”. This is, most likely, a common attitude of fundamentalists regarding evolution, and understandably so—understandably even from my perspective. For such an argument rests on our moral intuitions, and most of those intuitions would prefer a means of creation free from death and suffering.

However, my objective in this post is not to stand as an apologist for God creating through the medium of evolution. Rather, it is to demonstrate that the aforementioned objection raised by fundamentalists betrays a fallacious line of reasoning that is employed when viewed in light of the rest of their theology.

Notice that the above objection against evolution is predicated on the following line of reasoning: If I find moral problems with event (a), then God could not have directly been the cause of (a). For the fundamentalist claims that they find the idea that God created through evolution morally suspect, and since God labeled his creation good, and morally suspect events cannot be good, then God must not have done such a thing. Fair enough. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with such reasoning at all.

But, does the fundamentalist apply such reasoning across the board? In short, no. Take the story of Noah’s ark, or the genocides supposedly ordered by God in the OT. Do fundamentalists take these narratives as depicted in the Bible as fully and literally true? If they’re biblical inerrantists they do. So, is drowning the entire human race—including women, children, and the very animals the fundamentalists were so worried over just a moment ago—and subsequently ordering the slaughter of whole nations—including, again, women, children and animals—morally suspect? This would seem self-evident.

Surely the double standard of the fundamentalist is blatantly manifest. Why is one allowed in one instance to utilize their moral intuitions to deny attribution of an event to God, but not in another instance? Either we are allowed to engage in the former or not. But, the fundamentalist knows that if we are allowed this principle across the board, then inerrancy will collapse. Such is the paradox of the fundamentalist.

Harry McCall responds (sort of), and profundity does not ensue

Harry McCall and I have been engaging in a back and forth regarding his thesis that the OT—yes, the entire OT--is a forged document from the late second temple period. I wrote a blog post demonstrating logically, historically, and textually why McCall’s thesis is unreasonable. McCall has claimed that he will properly deal with my arguments. In the comment section of this recent post at DC, McCall claimed the following: I'm going to post a full article here at DC tonight (It's just about finished) that takes you [sic] blog's post apart piece by piece. However, McCall never posted this article that was supposedly “about finished”, or if he did I have yet to see it materialize.

What he did do, however, was post a short rebuttal comment to an argument I promulgated over at DC in the comment section. Is this the material he claimed was going to take up a full article? I can’t say. And why McCall did not post this “response” on his own blog instead of the comment section of my blog is strange. Usually McCall parades his idiosyncratic theses around the DC pages. But, when claiming to take my arguments apart “piece by piece” he seems to not want many to see his responses. And after reading his so-called rebuttals, I can clearly see why.

So, the purpose of this post is to demonstrate why McCall’s recent answer to my arguments fall short of the mark, are predicated on more non-sequiturs, and only deal with a small fraction of my original arguments.

Let me set the stage and begin with McCall’s argument, as articulated at DC, on how to “deprogram a Christian”:

1.  Demand textual proof that any verse of the Old Testament was written before 200 BCE. (There's 23,145 verses to prove them right or wrong.)
2. Demand historical proof (apart from using the New Testament to prove the New Testament) that Jesus Christ existed. (Let's see absolute truth prove itself.)

As you can see, 1) is predicated on McCall’s biblical forgery thesis, and 2) is predicated on Jesus Mythicism. My response was as follows:

 

How to Deconvert/Deprogram a believer in the writings of Tacitus
(1) Demand textual proof that any volume of Tacitus' Annals was written before the ninth century.

 

How to Deconvert/Deprogram a believer in the existence in Caesar Augustus
(2) Demand historical proof (apart from using the writers that already assume Augustus existed) that Augustus existed.

This response was put forward in order to demonstrate the double standards that McCall employs in making his historical arguments against the Bible and Jesus’ existence. And it is to this response that McCall has offered his so-called rebuttal. McCall’s response begins as follows:

 

We know Rome existed! We don’t need either the writings of Tacitus nor Caesar Augustus to prove this. There ARE tons of archeological evidence from the time they discuss that one can see in Rome and Italy today. However, there is totally NO evidence Biblical Israel existed as described in the extensive and detailed text of the Bible.

McCall’s assertions here greatly confuse me. I never argued that Rome did not exist. McCall’s and mine discussion has no bearing on the topic of the existence of Rome. Second, neither did I ever claim that the writings of Tacitus or Augustus were necessary in order to demonstrate such a thing. So, McCall’s comments here have only caused more confusion, and have not even begun to scratch the surface of my arguments against his thesis. McCall continues with his next objection:

Neither Tacitus nor Caesar Augustus give detail word for word statements from hundreds of people over thousands of years. While Steven wants to play down the myths of Adam, Eve and the talking Snake, Steven then depends heavily on the internal Biblical chronology itself to link it to some history, but sadly for him, there is none[.]

There are many responses here. First, McCall’s objection here seems to, once again, not even pertain to the discussion. Remember that the discussion, based off of McCall’s own thesis, regards whether or not we have any reason to believe that the Hebrew Bible was forged in the second temple period. McCall’s (attempted) point in the above comment is that the Bible claims to give history over many centuries while Tacitus’ writings—I never mentioned the writings of Augustus, so I fail to see why he uses Augustus here—only claim to give historical details over a period of decades. So, what exactly does this latter point have to do with McCall’s original thesis? I profess that I have no idea. Whether the Bible was a forged document has nothing whatsoever to do with how long its purported historical recollections are. This seems to be another non-sequitur, the mark of McCall.

Second, even if McCall’s above objection was efficacious, it fails to take into account the nature of the biblical data, and draws a false parallel between the OT and the writings of historians of antiquity. For remember that the OT is an anthology, and was therefore written by dozens of authors. So, of course it makes sense that the timeline of dozens of authors stretches across centuries, while the timeline of one historian only stretches across decades. What else would we expect?

Notice that nothing McCall has objected here has even touched upon my original objections to his thesis. McCall is attempting (though not succeeding) to pick off the fleas while ignoring the dog that the fleas rest on. McCall continues:

Sadly for Steve, he’ll find totally nothing like this for the works of Tacitus or Caesar Augustus nor the total lack of evidence for a Classical archeologist digging in Rome or the Roman Empire because the Roman Empire existed (unlike the myth of the Biblical Israel).

McCall once again seems to have blatantly missed the point. The discussion is not over the existence of Rome. Rather, the discussion is regarding whether or not we are warranted in extending the existence of a writing beyond its earliest existing manuscript, and how this ties into the biblical textual evidence. Apparently McCall has amnesia and has forgotten exactly what we are discussing.

McCall articulates his third and final objection:

A major error Steve is making in his analogy is early evidence for a book (the Bible) that records 4,000 years of history before Christianity. Steve come up totally empty hand for any early Biblical text apart from the late post 200 (250?) BCE Qumran Scrolls.

Um, ok. McCall is oblivious to the fact that I have already conceded this. I agree that we have no copy of a biblical text that dates to before 250 BCE. Did you catch that? I agree. But, McCall has missed the point yet again. The debate is not regarding the date of these texts, but, rather, whether we can date the originals of these writings to before our earliest copies. The answer is  of course we can! Again, to reiterate what I already said in my last post on this subject, nearly all writings from antiquity survive on copies that date to centuries after they were written. So, to claim that we can project an earlier date for the originals of these copies from antiquity, but not for the Bible, is to enact a double standard! McCall has heard all this before, but instead of reformulating his thesis so as to avoid special pleading, he simply ignores the damaging objections to it and continues to promulgate such weak hypotheses. McCall continues:

Neither Tacitus (born 100 BCE) or Tacitus (born 56 CE) claim to record in detail direct speeches from both men, angels, demons and god, but are late down to earth documents we would expect of ancient historians of the time[.]

McCall is, again, missing the point completely. First, the topic of the writings that we’re discussing is irrelevant. What is relevant is when we can date these texts. Just because the Bible claims to report speeches from angles, demons, and God says nothing at all about when we can date the writings of said texts. McCall has formed another non-sequitur.

Second, and more importantly, there are many writings from reliable historians in antiquity that can be put in a similar genre as some of the writings of the Hebrew Bible. Let us take Tacitus, since we have already been using him as our prime example. Tacitus recorded that Roman emperor Vespasian miraculously healed a blind man and a lame man. That is, Tacitus recorded a miracle! A miracle, you know, like the kind found in the…the Bible.

Let us look at another example from the great historian Herodotus. Herodotus records that a horse gave birth to a rabbit. He also records a supposed fulfilled prophecy from the God Apollo. He also records that a Persian magi cast a spell to stop the Persian War on the fourth day. Herodotus even records that the Temple of Delphi miraculously defended itself with lightning bolts and rock avalanches! After reading these accounts one might label Herodotus as a dubious historian. On the contrary, he has been dubbed the “Father of History” and is regarded as, arguably, the greatest historian in antiquity.

All this is to demonstrate that there are indeed miraculous accounts in other writings from antiquity that can be paralleled with biblical accounts. So, McCall cannot claim that the miraculous nature of the Hebrew Bible allows us to discount an early date for its composition—a blatant non-sequitur—unless he is willing to do the same for other writings from antiquity. But, so far, we have seen that he is not, for then his illogic would be explicitly manifest.

McCall then ends his comment by listing a number of textual documents that demonstrate that other ancient nations existed in antiquity. However, seeing as how I have not called into question the existence of these nations, I fail to see McCall’s logical punch-line. To reiterate ad nauseum, the discussion is about the warrant one has for dating a writing earlier than its oldest manuscript; and a list of other nation’s textual writings adds nothing to my objections to McCall’s thesis.

In short, McCall’s thesis remains predicated on illogic, double standards, and a blatant ignorance of the actual textual evidence. I have demonstrated this before, and McCall’s most recent answer is drowned in more of the same—double standards and non-sequiturs. But, as I said, this seems to be the mark of McCall.