Consciencebound

In my discussions with various friends who are Christians or reading Christian books or online articles and posts I frequently come across an argument that I wanted to comment on here. The argument is directed towards someone like myself who does not think that the Bible is authoritative and who tries to understand the world, ethics, politics, history etc through using logic and critical thinking alone. Although the argument varies from person to person in some respect, it goes something like this:

- Trusting man who is finite is a foolish and arrogant thing to do.

- Relying on your own understanding (prov. 3:5,6) will always lead you down the wrong path and into error.

- Therefore, you should instead trust God and listen to what He tells us in his word, the Bible.

This argument takes on many different forms but the gist is the same in all of them. The assumption that we KNOW what the word of God is in the first place is not ever questioned. Although most Christians will not argue that the Bible as we know it just fell out of heaven written in the King’s english, they operate on assumptions that might as well be the same thing. To them, there is no question what THE word of God is. There is no possibility that we could be mistaken in attributing divine authorship to the old and new testaments. I realize that a Christian MUST assume the truth and divine origin of the Bible or everything pretty much falls apart but my question remains, is the Christian really any different than anyone else when it comes to “trusting God” or “trusting man”?

In order for the Christian to put his or her trust in God, they have to first put their trust in man and there really is no way around that. The only way around that would be if God Himself spoke directly to the Christian, teaching him what to believe and telling him what is to come. Some Christians would say that God in fact has done that and talked to them directly but I think they are probably few and far between. Others might say that in essence, God has spoken to them and given them the “eyes of faith” which verify to them that the Bible is true and is the very words of God. But the only way that the Christian interprets said faith is in the light of what the Bible says about faith. And what the Bible says about faith is mediated to us thought the hands of fallible men. A long string of fallible, sin prone, selfish, and in many ways uneducated men. The Christian must “trust” that this long string of men have preserved the writings of the Bible exactly as God intended them to be in order to have a “sure word from God”. If only it were as simple as stipping back all of the traditions and “uninspired” additions and getting back to the kernel of truth that is God’s holy word things would be so much easier. But alas, we don’t get off that easily. We have to guess. We have to assume. We have to read into history what we would like to be there in order to come up with the conclusion that the Bible is the perfect word of God. As much as the Christian would like the history of the text of the New Testament and of the early church to be a clear, orderly and godly history, the unfortunate reality is that there is a lot that is very hard to understand and much of it is not very clear. There is a ton of assumptions that we have to smuggle in if want to be able to speak from the pulpit with confidence that the Bible is God’s word. Some of those assumptions are below. Each of them you will notice requires a trust in “man” over and over again before you get to being able to “trust in God”:

1. We must assume that the histories that we have are accurate, reliable and true. I am not even talking about the text of the Bible itself, I am talking about the histories about the Bible and about how it was put together. I am not saying that we can’t know anything about what happened in the past, I am merely pointing out that we have to assume things about what we read because we only have a small sampling of the writings of that period of time. While it is true that this would call into question many ancient histories, we are not staking our eternal souls on most ancient histories as we do with the Bible.
2. Since we don’t have any actual originals of the New Testament letters, we have to assume that what we have reflects what was actually written by Paul, John, Peter, Matthew, Mark, etc. We have to assume that the text was preserved and that those copying the text were PERFECT in what they copied and did not have any ulterior motives which might influence what they wrote.
3. We must assume that the writers we assume wrote the gospels and other new testament letters were in fact the actual authors. Most of the New Testament books do not contain a name in the actual text of who the author is. It is only church tradition which appears many, many years later which attributes many of the letters to certain people.
4. Even if a NT letter has a name in the actual text, we still must assume that it actually was that person who we think it was and that someone was not merely using a pseudonym and writing in the name of that apostle (which was actually commonly done in those days).
5. If we do assume that each NT book was written by who we think it was written, we then have to assume that they faithfully and honestly wrote down what they saw or what they were told.
6. We have to then assume that the sources that they used were themselves reliable(which they clearly used) or if they were writing based on their own experience, we have to assume that they accurately remember what they saw or heard. Keep in mind that even the most conservative scholar’s estimates place the writings of the Gospels 20 to 40 years after the events that they were writing about.  A person needs only to reflect on their own propensity to error in recounting details of the past or their own faulty memories to show how big of an assumption this really is.
7. Even if we give the benefit of the doubt to every text of the new and old testaments, we have to assume that God Himself actually intended to communicate through these texts. This is not at all an obvious truth. We assume it because the Bible suggests in a few places that it is inspired by God but we don’t have recorded testimony from God himself telling us that we should simply read this book if we want to know what He thinks.
8. We also have to assume what books of the Bible are to be included in the whole since nowhere in the Bible itself are we given an inspired list of books which are to be included. The only way that we know what books are “supposed to be in the bible” is by assuming that the church has correctly assembled these books.
9. If we assume all of the above, we still have to assume that all of the books in the Bible must agree with one another. Since the Bible does not define itself (meaning does not tell us what is supposed to be in it) we assume that since it is supposed to be God’s word, it cannot contradict itself and it cannot have any error. But just as God supposedly created man who then sinned and fell into error, we have to also accept the possibility that even if God himself did direct and inspire the original writings of the Bible, it is extremely likely (given the nature of man) that it too fell into error. Especially when we consider the fact that even when we assume the conservative Christian view of the Bible, nowhere has God ever guaranteed the copying of the texts to be free from error. This possibility is confirmed when we see the internal contradictions and historical inaccuracies that are present in the Bible upon closer examination.

It is when considering these above points that I am left with the conclusion that the Christian who has the Bible is no better off when it comes to understanding truth then anyone else who seeks to understand truth without the Bible. Whether we like it or not, we are all left to trusting fallible human beings of the past and our own fallible senses and minds in the present when we want to know anything about this world or God or anything else for that matter.

For another short post of mine on this topic, please see this link

Jeff

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