Ya’ll seem to be split between two points, the infallibility of the scriptures; and the other side, who seem to doubt the possibility of any man made object -such as the Bible being perfect. While I admit, there are many parts of the bible where I wonder… ‘What the heck is going on here?’ and then I remember what has become the core of my Christianity.

“Everything in the Bible has a context, everyone has an interpretation of the Bible and every true Christian believes that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and that he rose from the dead on the third day and rose to heaven soon afterwards. All true believes have asked him to come into his heart and hence they will go to heaven when they die, and that’s all that truly matters in eternal hindsight” – Me.

In other words; ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with your entire mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.’ You keep this commandment and the entire bible falls into perspective and it all becomes open to Christ led interpretation, not that any single interpretation is right or wrong, but it is that person Christianity and their way growing closer to Jesus.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that while the Bible itself was inspired by God certain things in it pertain to the time period in which it was written, like TBG said, in the bible God starts out as gentle, loving, approachable God, who after the fall becomes separated from man due to sin. Only accessible though certain means, later when Jesus comes to earth, he once again becomes the original gentle and loving God that Adam and Eve knew. So God progressively revealed himself through the Levite priest to the Israelites and through John the Baptist and finally though Jesus Christ himself.

So while the OT makes statements that seem utterly ridiculous to us today… The thing is I think some of it should be odd, otherwise we wouldn’t be human. Since Jesus was the finally chapter in the progressive revelation of God, and he said that we should love our neighbor as ourselves than clearly we aren’t to be going around following obsolete old testament laws that the Christ himself wiped out century’s after they were written.

Well, that’s my two cents for now.
- Little Joe

I'm not talking about the belief of God, I am talking about the belief of an infallible Bible. To me, those are two separate issues.

But they aren't. Unless you accept the Scriptures as containing the self-revelation of God, then how do you know anything about Him? To me, it seems that you are simply projecting yourself onto God, in which case the god that you worship is no God at all. Your god isn't there.

TBG

Yes, they are two separate things. For one, without God there would be no bible, without the Bible, there is still God. You can know a lot about the English language without picking up an encyclopedia, just by looking around. The same concept goes for God. God is unlimited, he can reveal himself to people in whatever way he seems fit. The is not the only means to do this.

It really irks me when people put limitations on God.

"But Jesus looked at them and said, With men this is impossible, but all things are possible with God." – Matt. 19:26

"For with God nothing is ever impossible and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment." – Luke 1:37

"Surely, as I have thought and planned, so shall it come to pass, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand
For the Lord of hosts has purposed, and who can annul it? And His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back? – Is. 14:24-27

We don't call him all-powerful for nothing.

If I may ask, which Bible you believe is infallible? For thousands of years, people believed the "apocrypha" was infallible until the protestant reformation, when it was suddenly deleted from nearly half of the bibles in print.

As a Catholic, I (along with the other 1 billion Catholics worldwide ) believe that the Catholic bible is God-inspired, and that most protestant bibles are incomplete. How can you claim to say that "Rose's God doesn't exist" because she is unsure of the whole bible being the inerrant word of God, if you may yourself not even be getting the bible in all it's fullness?

Would any of these things be acceptable if God commanded you to do them today? Would you carry them out?

If something or someone told me to do those things today, I wouldn't believe it was God, and therefore would not carry it out. Those scriptures were part of the Law -- a Law that has been fulfilled. We aren't under that Law anymore. Now that we live in the age of Grace after Christ's death, the old law has been fulfilled, and we live in a world with a bit different set of rules. Sin is no longer atoned for by sacrifices or physical punishments. Now it's a matter of salvation through Christ in our hearts. So the answer is, no I would not, today, carry out any order like those in the Old Testament, because those laws no longer apply.

~Riella

I'm not talking about the belief of God, I am talking about the belief of an infallible Bible. To me, those are two separate issues.

But they aren't. Unless you accept the Scriptures as containing the self-revelation of God, then how do you know anything about Him? To me, it seems that you are simply projecting yourself onto God, in which case the god that you worship is no God at all. Your god isn't there.

TBG

Yes, they are two separate things. For one, without God there would be no bible, without the Bible, there is still God. You can know a lot about the English language without picking up an encyclopedia, just by looking around. The same concept goes for God. God is unlimited, he can reveal himself to people in whatever way he seems fit. The is not the only means to do this.

It really irks me when people put limitations on God.

"But Jesus looked at them and said, With men this is impossible, but all things are possible with God." – Matt. 19:26

"For with God nothing is ever impossible and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment." – Luke 1:37

"Surely, as I have thought and planned, so shall it come to pass, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand
For the Lord of hosts has purposed, and who can annul it? And His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back? – Is. 14:24-27

We don't call him all-powerful for nothing.

No one is saying that God is limited in any way. And I certainly believe that God can speak to someone outside the Bible. That's why I think a lot of people in obscure places who have never heard of the Bible can still be saved.

However, what I think TBG was saying was that when God speaks to you, or The Holy Spirit reaches out to you in some way, He won't do so in any way that is contrary to scripture. Only in accordance with it. God would not tell someone something, or place something inside them that tells them, that something in the Bible is incorrect.

And while God can use other methods besides the Bible to speak to someone or lead them to Him, the Word of God is still a part of God. You must believe this if you believe the Bible, because the Bible tells us this.

~Riella

God can reveal himself through ways other than just the Bible, but God's Word should be the measuring rod for all Truth. You need to go back to the Bible and study it to see if your experiences/beliefs/understandings line up biblically.

God can reveal himself through ways other than just the Bible, but God's Word should be the measuring rod for all Truth. You need to go back to the Bible and study it to see if your experiences/beliefs/understandings line up biblically.

I never doubted that the bible was the word of God, I posted towards the end there that I believe the bible is God-inspired. Yes, my beliefs and understandings and experiences match up with the bible, but not only that- they also match up with the tradition of my faith.

My whole point was that you can be a Christian without the Bible, or believing that it is not 100% inerrant. You certainly don't receive the luxuries and knowledge of believing it is inerrant, or even having the bible in the first place, but you still know who and what God is and can believe in him.

I don't believe you can be a Christian without believing the Bible to be 100% God-breathed. Yes, you can be a Christian without reading but without hearing it? I don't think so. The Bible is the litmus test for God's Truth. Also, to grow in your faith and become more Christ-like it's very important to read and study His Word. That's the main way God reveals Himself to us, through the revelation from the Holy Spirit by reading the Bible. It also minimises the ability to be swayed by false teachings (eg. the prosperity gospel etc.)

Warrior -

I've been doing a lot of research today, and I find the concept of a single infallible Bible rather improbable once one learns the history of how it came to be.

The Old Testament as many know it today started developing by a compilation of the 3 Jewish canons into one volume. The first was the Torah - the 5 books at the beginning of the bible commonly referred to as the Pentateuch. The second is the Nevi'im - the history of the Hebrew peoples, Israel, and Judah. The third is Ketuvim - all of the poetic books like Psalms and such.

All those books were binded together with some other assorted books that the Hebrews didn't recognize as official cannon to form the Septuagint. This volume was then translated into Greek, and it was the primary reference source for the authors of the books that eventually became the New Testament. And as such, the New Testament was in Greek, not Hebrew.

So how did the New Testament form? Well, during the following centuries after Jesus' death, in addition to the Septuagint, Christians added various writings that they had access to. As a result, a bunch of different lists of accepted written works about Jesus came to be. In the 4th century a series of synods (councils of the church) produced versions of the New Testament that had 39, 46, 51, 54, and 57 books. The 27-book canon of the New Testament that was compiled in the Synod of Hippo in AD 393 was the one that stuck.

(So, in the first few centuries of the church, it was impossible for Christians to get ahold of bibles that remotely resemble the ones we have today. What would they have had to use as a source?)

But, of course, the history doesn't stop there. The term "Apocrypha", coming from the Greek word meaning hidden, was first used in regards to Martin Luther's Bible of 1534. He decided to print 1st and 2nd Maccabbees, Tobit, Wisdom, Baruch and Sirach (which we now call the Apocrypha) as a separate inter-Testamental section.

Later, during the English Civil War, the Westminster Confession of 1647 excluded the Apocrypha from the canon and made no recommendation of the Apocrypha above "other human writings". The hostile attitude towards the Apocraphya resulted in actions like the refusal of the British and Foreign Bible Society in the early 19th century to print it in their Bibles. So over the course of hundreds of years, the Apocrypha gradually got tucked away, and eventually disappeared from all the Protestant Bibles you now refer to as inerrant today.

So which version of the bible is inerrant? Is it your Protestant version, which has 66 books, is not the same as the one Martin Luther himself made and is currently used by about 50% of Christians worldwide?

Is it the Catholic version, which has 72 books, uses the Septuagint as it's source instead of the original Hebrew cannon and is used by about 45% of Christians worldwide?

Or is it the Greek Orthodox version (of which I didn't even cover the history of), which has 76 books including 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, and the Prayer of Manasseh, and is used by about 5% of Christians worldwide?

(Or is it the Gregorian version, which has 77 books including 4 Maccabees, and is used by less than 1% of Christians worldwide?)

No matter how you slice it, at least 50% of all Christians either have an incomplete Bible or one that is not one hundred percent infallible. In this way, notions like "That's the main way God reveals Himself to us" seem ridiculous. Why would God leave the compilation something so important up to such human interpretation and subjectivity, especially when the results are exactly as error-filled as one would expect?

I assume you're Protestant. So with statements like, "I don't believe you can be a Christian without believing the Bible to be 100% God-breathed", you've not only condemned at least 1 billion people who consider themselves Christian worldwide, you've also condemned every Christian that existed up until a few hundred years ago that had the bibles with the not-God-breathed apocryphal books in them.

I don't believe you can be a Christian without believing the Bible to be 100% God-breathed. Yes, you can be a Christian without reading but without hearing it? I don't think so. The Bible is the litmus test for God's Truth. Also, to grow in your faith and become more Christ-like it's very important to read and study His Word. That's the main way God reveals Himself to us, through the revelation from the Holy Spirit by reading the Bible. It also minimises the ability to be swayed by false teachings (eg. the prosperity gospel etc.)

What about people in obscure places that the gospel has not reached yet? Do you believe they all go to Hell, or do you think that God could reach them in a more personal way that would still save them?

~Riella

God wrote His Law on the hearts of everyone he's created. There are few places now that the Gospel hasn't reached but it's still important to reach the lost. All I know is that none can come to the Father except through Jesus Christ. How God works in the backgrounds of the other people's lives, I don't know. I'm sure he has plans in place. And He will reveal himself however He sees fit.

Just a few words about Islam, which I do consider to be the worst of the world's major religions today.

1)Taqqiya, or dissimulation, does not mean Muslims can lie to advance the cause of Islam; it means they can deny being Muslims in the face of religious persecution i.e. during the Inquisition or during the slaughter of Musims at Srebrenica.

A modern example would be a Chinese Christian taking his family to a meeting of the local underground house church. He runs into the local Communist Party secretary, who asks him where they are going. Should he speak the truth and inform the authorities where the meeting is?

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

Martin Luther.

2) The selections from the Koran 9 have to be taken in context:

Koran 9:3-5

3 And an announcement from Allah and His Apostle to the people on the day of the greater pilgrimage that Allah and His Apostle are free from liability to the idolaters; therefore if you repent, it will be better for you, and if you turn back, then know that you will not weaken Allah; and announce painful punishment to those who disbelieve.
4 Except those of the idolaters with whom you made an agreement, then they have not failed you in anything and have not backed up any one against you, so fulfill their agreement to the end of their term; surely Allah loves those who are careful (of their duty).
5 So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

This is during the time of the conquest of Mecca. Muhammad had lived peacefully in Mecca, urging his followers not to resist oppression. However, they were expelled by the pagan rulers, who worshipped various gods- those are the idolaters mentioned.

Having become established in Medina, the Muslims were attacked by the Mecans, and after some conflict a peace treaty was established. Then (according to the Muslims, of course) the Meccans broke the treaty. Muhammed then marched on Mecca, taking it quite easily.

He then cleansed the Ka'aba, the central shrine of Islam tossing out carven idols and denouncing worship of gods other than the one true God of Ibrahim, Yakub and Ishak, and forbidding polytheism and other idolatrous practises.

Since this was the time of the great pilgrimages, he gave a period of grace to the pagans, but warned them not to come back. The idolaters who are to be slain and enslaved are those who broke the treaties; note the passage exempts even those pagans who kept their agreements with the Muslim- and of course, by referring to idolaters, it exempts the People of the Book: Christians and Jews.

http://www.quranandwar.com/

I'm not talking about the belief of God, I am talking about the belief of an infallible Bible. To me, those are two separate issues.

But they aren't. Unless you accept the Scriptures as containing the self-revelation of God, then how do you know anything about Him? To me, it seems that you are simply projecting yourself onto God, in which case the god that you worship is no God at all. Your god isn't there.TBG

Not quite. In the big picture, yes, the Bible is God's word. As you said beforehand, the Old Testament is the Law, and the New Testament is its fulfilment. But whichever way you hack it, in the minutiae, the Bible, itself, was written by men, in their own time and age. Inspired men, perhaps, especially the prophets. But still ordinary fallible men, writing in their own times and customs, not being able to see into the future more than 'through a glass darkly', and not knowing more than the then current state of education allowed them to know.

The Torah spells out overall that God made the world, that this is an all-powerful God, who brooks no other Gods before him. We are to worship him, give him thanks for his great glory. And we are to love our neighbour as ourself. If we look at this splendid overarching overview, there is no difficulty with the concept that God made the world. If we believe the Bible too literally, we would get too bogged down in the times and beliefs of the people who wrote it so many centuries ago without having access to what we know now.

If you start examining the minutiae too closely the laws about slave ownership, public health measures etc that would have been quite revolutionary in the day of Moses, sound perfectly dreadful today. However, their overall thrust was very much in the spirit then of Jesus' summary that we need to learn to love our neighbour as ourselves, understanding that he has the same human rights as we do.

However inspired the books of the Bible were - and are - it is possible to get too hidebound on bits and pieces of the Bible without looking at the whole, without understanding its great meaning, just like the Pharisees did with Sabbath observance and the collection of tithes in Jesus' day. An example is Paul's dictum about women teaching, which to this day keeps women away from any sort of ministry. Never mind that women might have to lead by default and that there were at the time of Paul's ministry, during the Emperorships of Claudius then Nero, good practical reasons for his saying what he did.

The Qur'an, like the Bible, is subject to historical and social factors. Just as in the Bible we find verses in the Old Testament that seem to contradict the peaceful and loving life Jesus instructs us to live, so in the Qur'an we find passages that contradict the peaceful life its followers are told to live. You are willing to make this distinction for the Bible, but not the Qur'an - why?

Yes, you are right that both the Bible and Qur'an are subject to historical and social factors. For example, some of the public health measures in Exodus and Leviticus are anachronistic in this day and age, to say the least. Maybe the same applies to some of the rulings in the Koran - about women for example.

However, it seems the followers of Islam are just as apt as Christians to think their holy book, the Qu'ran, is the Infallible word of God, as passed down by Mohammed, even though it was his followers who wrote most of it, and that it borrows heavily from the Old Testament, in particular. It seems that it, too, has been learned by rote, that many of the people who hear it have to learn Arabic to understand what it says, and sometimes what it says is not fully understood by its practitioners.

And it seems that some of the strictures on women that conservative Muslims want to practice, hark back to the 7th century, when Mohammed, by opposing idolatry and saving the lives of unwanted girl babies was truly a revolutionary reformer. It seems as if Islam is fossilised in the past, somehow, and that it needs to move forward into a modern era.

Unfortunately, I fear that atrocities like 9/11 have made it harder for Muslims even to just get along with their lives than it used to be.

Do you consider stoning somebody to death acceptable? Do you consider burning somebody alive acceptable? Do you consider slicing a child to death with a sword in front of their parents acceptable? Obviously you do, since you stated that you had a desire to follow God's commands. God commanded humans to do all these things at some point in time. Would any of these things be acceptable if God commanded you to do them today? Would you carry them out?

Again, you are taking these things and ripping them out of their social, moral, and political context. For example, stoning was the standard method of execution for capital crimes and was used because it was essentially communal. Burning and cutting infants in half, on the other hand, are never recommended.

And God simply wouldn't command those things today because revelation has been fully realized in Christ until He comes again. You can't rip OT commands out of their redemptive-historical context like this.

I've been doing a lot of research today, and I find the concept of a single infallible Bible rather improbable once one learns the history of how it came to be.

That's a category mistake. You can't apply probabilities here because either God did or did not inspire Scripture.

What you can't seem to get you head around is a doctrine that Scripture is compiled and written by men, yet inspired and made infallible by God. For the purposes of this debate, let's limit ourselves to the 66 books that all Christians agree on (going into RC and OE doctrines about deuterocanon is another subject for another time, IMO).

TBG

This is the "free will defense" most theologians will use to justify the existence of evil. But the argument falls apart when one considers heaven. Heaven is a perfect world. But a world without freewill cannot be a perfect world. So heaven must have free will. Which means that humans must have the choice to do evil in heaven. But evil cannot be in a perfect world. So it makes no sense.

You are right that evil cannot be in a perfect world, but the choice to do evil can be in a perfect world.

If you ask me, heaven would not be a beautiful place if people were all forced to do good. It would be a beautiful place because people would have the choice to do evil, and yet they would rather do good because they would rather please their god.

This is the "free will defense" most theologians will use to justify the existence of evil. But the argument falls apart when one considers heaven. Heaven is a perfect world. But a world without freewill cannot be a perfect world. So heaven must have free will. Which means that humans must have the choice to do evil in heaven. But evil cannot be in a perfect world. So it makes no sense.

You are right that evil cannot be in a perfect world, but the choice to do evil can be in a perfect world.

If you ask me, heaven would not be a beautiful place if people were all forced to do good. It would be a beautiful place because people would have the choice to do evil, and yet they would rather do good because they would rather please their god.

Just adding on... in a perfect world no one would want to do evil, so it wouldn't be a problem. Before we enter heaven the desire for evil would be wiped clean from our hearts. Even if we had the option of choosing it we wouldn't want to. (And yes I still classify that as free-will) Plus at the very least one would hope that we've learned from Adam and Eve's mistake.

A modern example would be a Chinese Christian taking his family to a meeting of the local underground house church. He runs into the local Communist Party secretary, who asks him where they are going. Should he speak the truth and inform the authorities where the meeting is?

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

Martin Luther.

I would tend to think lying-even then- a sin, as he still has the choice to not talk at all. He may loose his life for it, but it would be better than lying and betrayal.

(Edited)