Virgin of Zapopan

Brother Curtis,

Is the Bible inerrant? Look at Luke 6:20-26. Compare it to Matthew 5. Did Jesus give us the beatitudes on a mountain, or on the plain? Last I checked, those were two very different and distinct geographical settings. Oh no, the Bible is in error! OR, maybe, just maybe, the Bible is not the complete biography of Jesus, or a history book, or an atlus, and "discrepencies" like this don't make it inerrant, when one looks into deeper context and intention?

Just a thought.

Inerrancy pertains to what the subject at hand is. The Catholic Church is not inerrant in that it's members and leaders don't sin. We never claimed as such, and inerrancy doesn't have to deal with that for the Church to still be inerrant in DOCTRINE. If you can't except this (that inerrancy relies on proper context), or are we going to have to argue about what the "true" words of Jesus are when, say, Matthew and Mark have Him wording things a little differently in the same story setting?

 

Curtis,

I'll not take part in a mean-spirited word battle with you, which you just tried to start. You didn't even address my post at all. I'm sorry it was disinteresting to you.

Enjoy your game,

Grant

 

Watch out...they might roll right out of your head.

Of course not. But God does, and being God, can exercise His power in what manners He sees fit.

The only "paying" I saw was to enter the park, which has many attractions, one of them being this. There was no admission fee to see it itself. And this is probably for tourists. Obviously those who go to worship in the temple (Mass), don't pay to go in. The $1 admission fee I'm sure goes to pay for the upkeep, because if thousands of people are visiting daily, it has to be upkept somehow. You blow this totally out of proportion.

No, you deemed it pagan idolatry from the get-go, regardless of how we responded. Telling us we are wrong, after we reply, is just a bonus for you.

I hope you enjoyed your game and laughing at me,

Grant

 

Please don't try and pull the "you're attacking me" card. You started the post, and ended with "pagan idolatry?" My statement was directed to you since you are the first to have said it. Nothing more, nothing less.

You're right. Because the Bible can only be SO long, its authors tended to focus on those things which God inspired them to write about, and not extrapolate exorbantly. Paper was a precious commodity after all. When one story is done, it's time to move to the next one, because there's a lot of ground to cover. If the rest of Exodus sat talking about one thing (like the bronze serpant), and I'm sure that a wordy writer could have done so, we'd never get to other important events!

My point? Because it is never mentioned again is not evidence for anything. We don't konw what they did with it afterwards, so for you to say they did nothing is just as good a guess as me saying maybe they kept it in a special place. We don't know definitively. But, considering it's something God used, I'm betting they were very respectful with it!

And your point? Ever heard of the Ark of the Covenant? Every once in a while, God uses physical, earthly objects to accomplish things! GASP!

Thanks for not reading my response. Oh, and what "command?" How about you drop all the window dressing and display some accuracy?

No, it's obvious that you believe that the Catholic Church is a pagan institution, and with that prior misconception, you twist the meaning of all its activities to suit your agenda, even when our beliefs strictly forbid what you say we practice. To he who has ears, let him hear.

I don't have that option, because we aren't talking about "slight" problems. I can't judge the hearts of the people. Are some of them worshipping incorrectly? Hey, maybe so. But I don't know which ones. You assume they ALL are, and thus, the ENTIRE thing is wrong in your eyes. For you to even SAY that I "refuse to admit there may be a slight problem" is ridiculous, because you make this so big as to say the whole Church is wrong.

Just like God Almighty does not talk to us, or heal us, or answer our prayers through a bronze serpant. If you would drop your warped view of Catholicism that believes we do these things, you might just have a glimpse of understanding.

You're smart enough to see through the misconceptions, but you don't.

 

Actually, I think you mean Luke 6:17.

You are a bit confused here. Look at the Greek. Literally, it says "flat place [spot]." It is not a stretch of the mind to imagine a plateau on a side of a mountain (or large hill, if you will, which is what mountains usually refer to, not the huge mountains that we think of today) on which Jesus was standing to give the Beatitudes. See? No error. Another option is that they are two separate sermons with similar content. I prefer the former explanation.

I don't think anyone claims this. At least not that I know of. I don't claim it. However, what history is given in the Bible should be true and reliable. If that is wrong, why should we trust anything else in it? If it can get the simple things right, why believe anything else it tells us? So I do think it is important that the history it gives is correct. Also, while not a complete biography, it is the only thing that we can use to verify claims. Anything stated outside of Scripture about Jesus (or anything relating to doctrine or people) is merely a claim, unverifiable. That is why I reject apostolic tradition. It is unverifiable. There is nothing objective by which to judge it.

If there are errors and discrepencies in these simple matters, there is no reason to believe it in other matters. Everything becomes completely subjective.

God Bless,
Neal

 

Neal,

I think we are thinking parallel to one another. The Bible is inerrant, but when Jesus says that the smallest seed is the mustard seed (and we know now, that this is not true), that does not make the Bible no longer inerrant. The Bible is not a science book, either, and so if scientific facts are not stated perfectly, that does not mean that Jesus made a mistake.

I hope you see what I'm getting at.

 

This is contradictory. We do not have any of the original texts of the Bible; they're all gone now. The only reason that you believe that Scripture has remained inerrant over several thousand years is because you have FAITH that this is so. You cannot prove it objectively without having those ORIGINAL documents in your hands, to prove it has never changed. But you believe the Holy Spirit has preserved it through time. Great; I believe it too, and I simply also believe it about Apostolic Tradition.

 

I disagree. It's theological content is inerrant, because that is why God gave it to us. But if it says that Solomon reigned X number of years, and we later discover that it was X-1 years (I'm just making up an example) through archaeological evidence, that wouldn't make the Bible errant, because the Bible was written not to tell us about Solomon, but about Solomon in relationship to God.

We may even later discover that the number of his reign may have been a symbolic number to mean something else (or some such thing). See my point? It can be inerrant without every one of the little non-theological facts being perfectly in line (like the mustard seed).

 

Only problem, we don't have thousands of copies of the Apostolic tradition in the original languages. Study a little textual criticism and you will see we get pretty close to the original.

I will have to look into the mustard seed bit when I get time. But I still hold my position. The only time I could maybe see "errors" is in textual transmission, which would be fairly clear that the problem is in transmission, not inspiration. Saying the Bible is not science and all kinds of other things allows us to dismiss what we don't like or just symbolize what we don't want to accept. We follow the world way to much in this area. I choose to believe that God said what he wanted to say correctly in the first place. I agree it is not a science book; however, the science in the Bible should be trustworthy, else the Creator made a mistake in understanding his own creation.

In Christ,
Neal

P.S. You didn't comment on my explanation of the "problem" that you gave. You may be willing to just dismiss them and not concern yourself with them, but I don't think that is wise. If we hold that it is God's Word we need to seek an answer to such things. (And before you start peppering me with different "problems," I do not claim to know all the answers. However, I do believe there are answers.)

 

When Jesus spoke to people and used examples, he spoke to them where they were and used examples that they could understand. Yes, today with the invention of the electro-microscope we know that there are seeds that are smaller than the mustard seed. However, the people that Jesus was speaking to did not know that. He used an example that they could understand. Do you really think that the Creator of everything that exists did not know that there where seeds smaller than a mustard seed? You see the problem is that the people he addressed did not know that there were such seeds. The point Jesus was making was in regard to the lack of faith he observed in the people he was addressing. He was saying that if they only had the very smallest amount of faith they would experience wonders via His power working through them. It is not about the actual size of the seed. You must learn to distinguish the use of figurative speech in the biblical text from historical/grammatical narrative. I suggest that you find the nearest Bible College (preferably one that holds to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy) and sign up for a single Hermeneutics class.

 

BibleBoy,

Thanks for missing my point, too.

 

Hey Gracesaves,

Since there are at least three of us who have missed your point would you mind providing a cogent explanation of what you are trying to communicate?

 

How bout it Grant?

 

It was a lost, confused argument because of Brother Curtis's circular argument. He had already decided that the Virgin of Zazopan was erroneous, and thus declared that the Church was in error because of the error that he declared. I tried to make an analogy to this, but apparently my attempts were unsucessful. People took it as an attack on Scripture, when in fact I was in no way attacking the inerrancy of Scripture, but rather attempting to show that to many people (not Christians) the Bible is FULL of errors. However, if we sincerely approach the materian with an unhardened heart, we see that they are not really errors at all, because we approach the material in its proper context (ie, the mustard seed is not the smallest seed as Jesus declared it to be, but in that historical context, it was the smallest known, and so that makes the best sense when telling a parable).

The same applies to the Virgin of Zazopan (or some other example). Non-Catholics treat the situation like a non-Christian treats God's Word. They approach it from an antagonistic standpoint that "it's wrong," and then try to build up a defense as to why it's wrong, rather than letting it simply "BE," and then decided whether or not it is right or wrong. If we approach anything with a closed mind, the mind cannot be changed.

THUS, Brother Curtis believes this is an error before he is actually objective about it, understanding true Catholic context on images and the like (and not listening to our responses), so thus it is invalid for him to call it a Catholic error which thus makes the Catholic Church fallible in its teaching. It is a logically invalid argument, because he is not viewing the situation in the context that is properly demanded: a Catholic one. Otherwise, it's like a devout Jew saying that Christianity is in error because the Messiah has not yet come, because it doesn't say so in the Old Testament. One must take the Christian perspective to understand Christian things.