What is manly? II

The video above is Pastor Mark Driscol of Mars Hill and he is talking about basically stay at home dads. As well as a mans role in providing for his family. I well let the video speak for itself before I get to involved in the pros and cons. But it seems to me that he has taken the verses that he uses out of context. Please watch it and let me know your thoughts on it.

30-Days Muslims and America

A few of you may have heard about our "Saturday night group" plan for next Saturday night. Saturday the 27th we will be discussing an episode of "30 days". The episode we plan to discuss (please watch before hand to discuss) is the Christian in a Muslim world. I found the episode on line at the following web site:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/5276/30-days-muslims-and-america

Or I'm sure you can rent it from Blockbuster or Netflicks. If this works well we will discuss a different movie or show the fourth Saturday of each month. I'll try to come up with a few good discussion questions, hopefully before next Saturday. I'll send them out in advance. Feel free to come up with your own, also it would be fun to bring in "scripture" (however you define that) or other quotes to share that relate directly to this episode.

I think this will be interesting, fun, and challenging. I look forward to seeing you all there.

My Thoughts

Last week I posted an article that I had read on the so called "Lakeland Revival". I felt that it was both an interesting piece and one that said a fair amount about the confusion that is going on today in religious circles. With so many different versions of faith in the world all of them seeming to take on aspects of their dominant and subordinate cultures it is hard to know what is real and what is imagined.

That is where a lot of my own personal confusion lies. If I am willing to give authority to the scriptures. Then am I supposed to feel that any interpretation that is different then mine is completely false? How am I supposed to put my faith in a mans opinion of the scripture when some many things that in the past have been taken as fact are now thought of as something else entirely?

This is just a beginning as I began to unpack my thoughts concerning both religion and faith and if it is really possible for the two to coexist in today's world. Is the failing ultimately with me or is it with society?

Never believe the hype

I stumbled across this article talking about the rise and fall of the man behind the so-called Lakeland Revival. It is really sad actually

"On Friday, August 15, the Board of Directors of Fresh Fire Ministries issued a press release, announcing:

We wish to acknowledge, however, that since our last statement from the Fresh Fire Board of Directors, we have discovered new information revealing that Todd Bentley has entered into an unhealthy relationship on an emotional level with a female member of his staff. In light of this new information and in consultation with his leaders and advisors, Todd Bentley has agreed to step down from his position on the Board of Directors and to refrain from all public ministry for a season to receive counsel in his personal life.

For the past couple weeks, there had been controversy and consternation at a previous announcement that Todd Bentley, a Canadian faith healer who had been on a rocket ride to worldwide fame and acclaim in Pentecostal circles for leading the "Lakeland Revival", was official separating from his wife Shonnah under the guidelines provided for by Canadian Law. With the announcement that "Brother Todd" had been involved in an "unhealthy relationship" with another woman, and was stepping down from public ministry, Bentley's start had crashed to earth even faster than it had risen.

Brother Todd, Revivalist Healer

And risen it had. When Bentley showed up in Lakeland, Florida in the first week of April this year, he had travel plans to return at the end of that same week. As it turned out, Brother Todd would stay in Lakeland for the better part of six months, leading a revival that would draw hundreds of thousands to Florida and spawn satellite revivals in places as far away as England and South Africa. Earlier revivals like the Toronto Blessing and the Pensacola Outpouring of the early-mid 1990s did not exploit the Internet; the Lakeland revival was not just daily services with 10,000 attendees to witness "healings" and the "outpouring of the spirit", it was streamed to the world, with Pentecostals all over the planet logging into watch, chat, and get "healed" right through their cable modems.

After a long session of worship music, Brother Todd would get up, and the "healings" would begin. Bentley's signature move was a shout of "Bam!", as he pushed/hit/kicked the faithful into a state of spiritual ecstasy, leaving the anointed writhing on the floor in convulsions, or simply catatonic, "slain in the spirit", in the language of the Pentecostal (watch this video, for example).

Aching joints were miraculously healed. Intestinal problems disappeared. Wheelchair-bound people were miraculously able to walk, or at least not fall down as they stood on the stage with the assistance of a couple fellow believers on either elbow. Cerebral palsy, ruptured discs, spinal problems, all healed, the Revivalists claimed, through the anointing of Todd Bentley, and the outpouring of the spirit he was presiding over in Lakeland (see example report from CBN here from the height of the revival frenzy).

The miracles accumulated and multiplied, and by late June and July, reports where making their way back to Lakeland that Todd's work had unleashed the ultimate work of the spirit -- the raising of the dead (see, for example, this video, this video, or this video ). Brother Todd eventually claimed more than a dozen cases of people being raised from the dead as part of the revival he led. At its peak, the throng exalted in reports like this from Bentley, reading a letter recounting one such resurrection (from this video ):

"My dear brother died, so the medical world thought yesterday. We requested at our all-night wake that GodTV would be on, the revival would be on. And we declared that our brother would not be embalmed. At 2:19 am my brother began to stir in his coffin. My brother sat up in the coffin, praising God and Reverend Todd Bentley. My dear brother all day has been telling us about his journey to heaven and how he thought he would never come back. He thought he would never come back here on the earth to be with us, but then he heard our beloved Reverend Todd and his voice pulling his spirit out of heaven. All of us at the funeral home began screaming and shouting fro more fire. Thank God for the revival on GodTV."

Brother Todd, False Prophet

For all the heady events in Lakeland, the revival was not without its critics within the church. Christian cessationists like the Calvinist bloggers over at TeamPyro have rejected the legitimacy of Bentley and his revival from the outset. Other mainstream Christian continualists like John Piper have now taken time to speak out against the Lakeland Revival, but as Frank Turk notes at TeamPyro, only after the fact, in light of Bentley's fall from grace due to his marital infidelity. How come frauds like Bentley cannot be identified and decried before they've duped tens of thousands of believers and brought shame, ridicule and cynicism to the faith? With Bentley's revelation of his betrayal of his wife and the impending end of their marriage as a result, even many of the once-fervent revivalists have now concluded that Bentley was a fraud all along (see this thread at the Charisma magazine forums, for example). While Bentley's star was on the rise, the gullible hopped on the bus to Florida and the rest of Christianity just watched, silent for the most part, managing a frustrated frown here and there.

It's no mystery why people like Todd Bentley can manage to rise to prominence and world-wide notoriety, despite the frustrations of Christian cessationist "skeptics" like Frank Turk. It's hard for a man with a glass worldview to throw stones, after all. Some forms of Christianity are much more level-headed, evidence-based and skeptical then others, but fundamentally, the epistemology of even the most skeptical Christian makes that term an oxymoron, useful only for gauging various degrees of credulity in a group that is profoundly credulous at its base.

I was a 'healing skeptic' when I was a Christian. Over the years, at many points where I expressed my skepticism about claims of miraculous healings, proponents of the miracles regularly pointed out that I wasn't in a position to say what God had or had not done in healing Aunt Martha, and moreover, if it was divine healing, by denying the miracle, I was denying the power of the Holy Spirit -- a kind of non sequitur as arguments go, and a rather transparent ploy to bring the fear of blasphemy on the doubter. But despite these problems, the core of their retort was a powerful one: Christianity is a subjective discipline, and one Christian cannot appeal to objective analysis of another without undermining their own claims to faith and knowledge of God. Ultimately, I appealed to revelation and supernatural intervention -- externally unverifiable intervention -- as the justification for my belief. I could point to some historical testimonies in scripture and claims about the lives of Christ and his followers, and some intuitive senses I had about God's existence as a brute fact, but without the appeal to my perception of the Holy Spirit's intervention in my life, my basis for belief could not hold up to scrutiny.

Defenseless Against Frauds

Such are the wages of a worldview based on the primacy of subjective experience. Christians who are skeptical of claims like those made by Todd Bentley and friends have to resort to the same kinds of defense for our own claims as Brother Todd does for his. Despite the differences I, or Frank Turk, or John Piper might have had with Bentley, we all embrace the same worldview, and see reality as subject to the magical, unpredictable, and impassible nature of God. For Christian's this is God's universe, and exegetical quibbles aside, God can do anything he wants and does what he pleases. If God wants to miraculously transform some teeth in a revivalist's mouth into gold (see here ) while just a couple miles away, young children languish in St. Joseph's children's hospital, suffering from brain tumors and all manner of other agonies, well, God can do what he wills, after all. To be a Christian is to give up the right to ask why, for many important questions.

With Bentley's fall from grace, people are disowning him right and left, and making much of the misgivings and doubts they had all along, even if they weren't announced or articulated at the time. Christian critics from the beginning, though, can complain all they'd like, and suppose they are "prophets" themselves of a kind, full of "discernment" regarding Bentley. When pressed, however, their skeptical verdicts ended betraying their debt to the stolen concepts of skepticism and evidence-based analysis, which, if applied consistently, debunk them as thoroughly as they debunk Brother Todd. Cessationism is a way to insulate and isolate their own credulity, to stuff all the magic back into the first century, reducing the footprint of exposure to critical analysis. Of course God doesn't shower God dust, miraculously given, down on the worshippers at Ignited Church! But of course the disciples could heal at will! Brother Todd can't do what the disciples did in the book of Acts, because that was then, and this is now.

All of which is a bit of uncomfortable special pleading. Bentley may be laid low for now, but Benny Hinn carries on, flitting hither and yon across the planet on his private jet working miracles and healing in the name of Jesus, as do many others, even if some of them have to console themselves with a first class seat on a commercial flight rather than the pampered leathers and chrome of Hinn's Gulfstream. The rest of Christianity is powerless to mount any substantial critique of Bentley, Hinn, et al. There can be no "Christian James Randi", that exposes Brother Todd, because Christianity, even the "skeptical" kind, is predicated on credulity and subjectivity. Frank Turk wonders how Brother Todd can get away with being such a hypocrite, and shows his own hypocrisy in doing so. This is why so much BS is always being tolerated and ignored in Christendom. It's an ideology built on credulity toward fantastic, unbelievable claims, even for the most conservative believer."

Trinity?

I stumbled upon this and was truly amazed it is mind boggling. I honestly am not sure what to even make of it.

Out to the Abby!!

I have been meaning to post on this but I have just been lazy. So my apologies, about two or three weeks ago now a group of us went out to the Mount Angel Abby to view and take part in a Eucharist service (communion). I found the experience interesting though , for me, not fulfilling in any way. The layout of the sanctuary really seemed to emphasize the separation or perceived separation that the Catholic faith feel is between God and man. The process seemed to be one of repeated phrases and the singing seemed almost to consist of droning chanting that was almost mesmerizing in away. Do not get me wrong everyone their seemed very sincere in their actions and we were not made to feel unwelcome in any way. But I did feel like I needed a guidebook almost to understand the process that people were going through. I would say that overall it was an interesting and relatively eye-opening experience. Thought, anyone, thoughts?

What is manly?

Mark Driscoll is tougher then Arnold.

I had to post this now before I forgot but I will write more about it later. The link will take you to the Wittenburg Door site and it is a very funny article. It also raises some interesting questions about both Mark Driscoll and what it means to be a pastor in America right now.

We are all human!!

Bertrand Russell in a A Free Man's Worship Writes

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring-affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of their sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindness, that makes the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

This passage really makes me think. I feel that it really hits on what I am striving to do and what I feel we all should be striving to do as people and as humans as members of the human race. It shouldn't matter to me what a persons religion is or what their sexual preference is, or their income bracket, or their country of origin. What should matter is that I m doing all I can to help them live a good life. That I treat them with kindness and with the respect that they are due as persons of worth. To do anything less, is I feel just as much of a sin as any of the ten commandments. It is hard to always remember but we are all people and we all have the same spark of humanity within us.

An Immoral Christian?

Nietzsche writes in his book Daybreak "morality is nothing other (therefore nor more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be; Customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller, the circle of morality." This is an interesting quote because the word moral or morality is such a weighted word for Christians but in this context the word isn't being used to convey good or evil. But the context of tradition and people behaving in a way that society has come to expect them to act. The key point here is the need to understand why we do the things we do and why do we believe what we believe. I think that this has even more resonance when we look at the modern mainstream church and the differing rules and traditions that we follow, without understanding why we follow them and where they came from. The point of this is that we need to look at why we do what we do, why we believe what we believe, and then figure out what caused these traditions and whether or not they came from something good and right or from the mere concept of tradition. Then after you figure that out you move forward and do it again and again as long as it takes to move to becoming a better Christian and a better human being. I feel that this is what we are doing on Saturday nights and this is a very important process. I think that if this process makes us/me Immoral then so be it. I believe that at the end of the process I will be a better Christian and have a stronger understanding of why I follow and believe the rules that I do.

"DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE BIBLE"

That is the title of a fascinating book written by Kenneth C. Davis. I was reading through it today as I indulged three of my favorite activities 1. Reading, 2. Drinking Coffee, 3. Pipe Smoking. These are a few of my favorite things. But back to the book, it really is very interesting and brings up some good questions and then works to answer them in a respectful way. Questions like "Who wrote the Old Testament?" and "Who really killed Goliath?" or "Did Jesus have brothers and Sisters?" These are all interesting questions in that they are not salvation questions but they call in to play what we are taught in Sunday school and in private Christian schools or at church. It really amazes me what people take for granted when they are taught things. I will most likely write more on this book as I move further into it but these were the thoughts in my head as I was reading today.

Divine Foreknowledge/Freewill

I have just been reading Boethius's CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY and if you are at all into philosophy I highly recommend it. But on to the issue at hand. Do we in fact have free will? The deeper question is this one if God knows all that we do and all decisions we make is that truly free will. Boethius argues that we do have free will. He says that God resides outside of time and that for God he sees all possible choices we might make. The thought being that since God is outside of time there is no past or present or future. That for God all these happen at the same time. I would argue that his defense is flawed in that I believe that if we feel that God's knowledge is divine and that he can not make a mistake. Well then if God were to see us do something and then we do something else it brings into question the divinity of God or whether or not he can make a mistake. I think that is the flaw in Boethius's reasoning. I am not sure if I feel one way or the other on this issue. I lean toward the no freewill side of the argument but I feel that while Boethius's defense of it makes some sense. I feel that he makes that one fatal flaw. Thoughts?

What is a Christian?

I read this excerpt from Frederick Buechner this morning and thought it was worth passing along. I'd be curious to hear what you all think of what he says.
"Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily believes certain things. That Jesus was the son of God, say. Or that Mary was a virgin. Or that the Pope is infallible. Or that all other religions are all wrong.
Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily does certain things. Such as going to church. Getting baptized. Giving up liquor and tobacco. Reading the Bible. Doing a good deed a day.
Some think of a Christian as just a Nice Guy.
Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me"(John 14:6). He didn't say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn't say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could "come to the Father." He said that it was only by him--by living, participating in, being caught up by, the way of life that he embodied, that was his way.
Thus it is possible to be on Christ's way and with his mark upon you without ever having heard of Christ, and for that reason to be on your way to God though maybe you don't even believe in God.
A Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of whom to thank.
A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else. Just better informed."
courtesy of Erin

I am not sure what to think?

The following is a post from www.time.com and is an interview with the fourth most senior bishop from the church of England and I am still a little puzzled I leave this for you to read and hopefully comment on.

Thursday, Feb. 07, 2008
Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop
By David Van Biema

N.T. "Tom" Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. As Bishop of Durham, he is the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England and a major player in the strife-riven global Anglican Communion; as a much-read theologian and Biblical scholar he has taught at Cambridge and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.

It therefore comes as a something of a shock that Wright doesn't believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term. In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children's book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What's Heaven, which describes it as "a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk... If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]... When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him." That, says Wright is a good example of "what not to say." The Biblical truth, he continues, "is very, very different."

Wright, 58, talked by phone with TIME's David Van Biema.

TIME: At one point you call the common view of heaven a "distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope."

Wright: It really is. I've often heard people say, "I'm going to heaven soon, and I won't need this stupid body there, thank goodness.' That's a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.

TIME: How so? It seems like a typical sentiment.

Wright: There are several important respects in which it's unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.

TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?

Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.

TIME: But it's not where the real action is, so to speak?

Wright: No. Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.

TIME: That is rather different from the common understanding. Did some Biblical verse contribute to our confusion?

Wright: There is Luke 23, where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." But in Luke, we know first of all that Christ himself will not be resurrected for three days, so "paradise" cannot be a resurrection. It has to be an intermediate state. And chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation, where there is a vision of worship in heaven that people imagine describes our worship at the end of time. In fact it's describing the worship that's going on right now. If you read the book through, you see that at the end we don't have a description of heaven, but, as I said, of the new heavens and the new earth joined together.

TIME: Why, then, have we misread those verses?

Wright: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.

TIME: Can you give some historical examples?

Wright: Two obvious ones are Dante's great poetry, which sets up a Heaven, Purgatory and Hell immediately after death, and Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel, which portrays heaven and hell as equal and opposite last destinations. Both had enormous influence on Western culture, so much so that many Christians think that is Christianity.

TIME: But it's not.

Wright: Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.

TIME: That sounds a lot like... work.

Wright: It's more exciting than hanging around listening to nice music. In Revelation and Paul's letters we are told that God's people will actually be running the new world on God's behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it's a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation.

TIME: And it ties in to what you've written about this all having a moral dimension.

Wright: Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their "souls going to Heaven." If people think "my physical body doesn't matter very much," then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn't matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.

TIME: That's very different from, say, the vision put out in the Left Behind books.

Wright: Yes. If there's going to be an Armageddon, and we'll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn't matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.

TIME: Has anyone you've talked to expressed disappointment at the loss of the old view?

Wright: Yes, you might get disappointment in the case where somebody has recently gone through the death of somebody they love and they are wanting simply to be with them. And I'd say that's understandable. But the end of Revelation describes a marvelous human participation in God's plan. And in almost all cases, when I've explained this to people, there's a sense of excitement and a sense of, "Why haven't we been told this before?"

Food For Thought?

I have been reading Peter Abelard's Ethical Writings : Ethics and Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian So far this has been a very interesting book and I wanted to address some points he made and see what people thought about them. Abelard first a little background was born in 1079 at Brittany and chose to pursue logic and philosophy as areas of study. In 1113 he appeared in Paris and began to study theology. He ultimatly became a monk and a lecturer and has left behind an impressive number of philosophical and theological writings. Abelard writes

Fore he who says, "Do not pursue your lusts, and turn away from your will," commanded us not to satisfy our lusts, but not to do without them altogether. For satisfying them is wicked, but going without them is impossible in our feeble state. And so it isn't the lusting after a woman but the consenting to the lust that is the sin. It isn't the will to have sex with her that is damnable but the will's consent.

I find this makes for an interesting viewpoint it appears that Abelard is saying that since we are fallen and weak and we can not control our thoughts that lusting isn't a sin. So in effect thinking anything isn't a sin it is just taking action on those thoughts that is the sin. Any thought?

UPDATE

So after discussions with my philosophy instructor my understanding of what Abelard is trying to say has changed. It seems that Abelard is saying that the sin comes in consenting to the thought within the mind. So the action of doing the sin doesn't change the impact one way or the other but when you first think the thought and then you consent to doing it you have sinned whether or not the action takes place. By just consenting to the idea then the sin has taken place.

QUESTION FROM NICOLE?

How do you love a G/god ?

BIBLE ACCURACY

Bible Accuracy - P. Wesley Edwards
(updated 4-Sept-2004)

The question of Bible accuracy is important in many debates, particularly those regarding creationism and certain defenses of Christianity. Creationism is, in fact, an attempt to make science compatible with the fundamentalist requirement of Biblical literalism and infallibility. Christian theism typically defends its claim to truth by appealing to supposedly fulfilled Bible prophesies. Before tackling these issues, we need to understand the context.

A Brief History of the Bible:
The Bible descends from what was an ever-changing and expanding body of written and oral traditions dating from as early as the 12th Century B.C. The reformulations and additions continued from then all the way up until the 4th Century A.D. when, out of a large collection of candidate books, some were selected to be part of what we now call the Bible. It is important to remember that literally none of the original manuscripts of either the Old or New Testaments has survived. The Bible was passed down by individual manual copying and translation right up to the discovery of printing in the 15th Century A.D. The oldest manuscript copies date from sometime during the first 3 Centuries A.D.

The original language of the Old Testament was Hebrew followed by Aramaic translations appearing in the period following the Exile and then Greek translations following Alexander the Great. It was not until around the 2nd Century, A.D. that the contents of the Old Testament had become fixed.

The original language of the New Testament was Greek. As with the OT, no originals now exist, and the oldest of the manuscript copies dates from the 2nd Century, A.D. Before the NT was "canonized" into its current form, each of the early Christian communities apparently had a gospel of its own, in some ways redundant, in some ways in direct conflict, with the gospels of other communities. Some of these included the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, a Gospel of the Egyptians, an Apocalypse of Peter, an Apocalypse of Paul, and the Epistle of Barnabas, to name just a few.

What the Christians used as an "infallible" Bible was different depending on which Christian community you talked to, at least until the year A.D. 325. In that year, Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea, which not only did the picking and choosing of the books, but also ended a power struggle in Christian circles as to the nature of Jesus. As Roman Emperor, Constantine decreed that the Trinitarian view would become Christian dogma (which is remarkable considering how weak his Christian credentials were), and this decree silenced the large Christian segment that said Jesus was only a man.

Of course, the history doesn't end there. As the Bible was translated into Latin, Augustine ultimately complained of the "infinite variety" of Bible translations. Under the direction of Pope Damascus, Jerome attempted to standardize the Latin Bible. Drawing on Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, he completed the "Vulgate" by sometime around A.D. 405, which was ultimately recognized as the Standard Bible of the Roman Church (1546).

The first English Bible was completed in the late 1300's by John Wyclif, an Oxford instructor in religion and philosophy. Condemned by the church, it lasted in the underground for some 150 years. Then, around 1524, William Tyndale, an Oxford and Cambridge educated linguist, who was influenced by Erasmus and Martin Luther, published a New Testament translation based on medieval Greek copies. Then Mike Coverdale's Bible appeared (~1535) based on his translation of German and Greek translations, as well as drawing from Tyndale's work. John Rogers and Richard Taverner also published their particular translations (~1539) drawing from and adding to each other and to Tyndale's work. All of this was eventually edited by Coverdale into the Great Bible, which the King approved. Separately, the Roman Catholic church created its first English Bible, the Douay version, which was based directly on the Latin Vulgate (~1609).

In 1604, King James I wanted a fresh start, and pulled together Oxford and Cambridge scholars, as well as Puritan and Episcopal priests. This large group used the Catholic Douay, Luther's German translation, the available Hebrew and Greek copies, and to a very large extent Tyndale's work, and created the King James Version (~1611). Language, of course, is a fluid thing. Just how fluid can be seen in just a few examples: In 1611 "allege" meant "prove," "prevent" meant "precede," and "reprove" meant "decide." To cope with this, the English Revised Version came out by 1885, followed shortly by the American Standard Version.

Clarifying Infallibility:
One thing this long history over the last few thousand years tells us is that the infallibility of the oldest manuscript copy (let alone a remotely descended English Bible) would require divine inspiration all along the very, very long line of manual copying and translating (remember, this is all occurring before the advent of the printing press). However, once one puts the stake the ground and says "The King James Version is infallible," then one eliminates any appeal to "mistranslation" from the Hebrew or Greek. On the other hand, if only the original, autograph manuscripts are infallible (none of which exist), while all subsequent copies and translations are vulnerable to transcription or translation errors, then the whole line of copies from the oldest manuscript copies (like the Dead Sea Scrolls) to all of today's descendent versions of the Bible are not infallible.

It is important to understand in which sense your opponent believes the Bible to be infallible. In the first sense, contradictions and factual / scientific errors are all one needs to falsify the claim of Biblical infallibility. In the second sense, the notion of infallibility is simply irrelevant to both the Bible and the oldest sources we have available today, and so amounts to little more than an empty claim.

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ERIN V's THOUGHTS!!

I had a few thoughts after last nights meeting.
1. I liked Scott's take on the 2nd Tim. passage - that being we can view what is Scripture based on if it holds up to the things listed: inspiration of God,profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. My thought in light of this however is - what if some of those passages DON'T stand up to the afore mentioned list? Do we not view that as Scripture(even if it's in the Bible)? - and how does that impact us and how we use the Bible?
2. I also felt like it was HUGE that we in essence said that writings that are not the Bible could be viewed as Scripture. That's pretty big for me and leads me to my next question: If that's what we really believe than why do we usually exclusively study just the bible without bringing other sources in? What would it look like to bring in other sources? Are we afraid of this? (Courtesy of Erin V)