Foundations (Part 2)

In my last post, which I wrote a long time ago, I discussed the importance of a solid foundation for one’s belief system and the Bible as that foundation for Christians.  I just want to dwell on the Bible for one more post because it is so important.

I wrote last time that the Bible claims to be God’s words and I gave some arguments from outside the Bible for that claim.  However, I didn't go quite far enough explaining what this means.  

The big theological term for my stance on the Bible is “Verbal Plenary Inspiration.” Hang with me. This term defines the belief that God inspired, lead, men to write God’s words and that all the words in the Bible are inspired words from God.  This leads to two other huge points.  First, the Bible is inerrant, everything that the Bible claims to teach historically or theologically is accurate.  Second, the Bible should be interpreted literally, allowing for figures of speech and other such language tools.

Before I lay out the arguments for these claims, let’s talk about construction again for a minute to understand why full inspiration of the Bible is important. Walking on a truss roof is scary, but walking on a rotten floor can be even more scary.  The problem with a rotten floor is that you never know if what you are stepping on is going to hold you.  If you are not extremely careful, you won't find the rotten spots until you are laying on your back in the basement.  It is an incredibly dangerous foundation to walk on. To make it safe you have to rip out the rot and scab in new pieces.

If we say that only parts of the Bible are God’s words and without error, then our fondation becomes like the rotten floor.  What parts are rotten and what parts are solid?  If parts are rotten, then I need to scab in my own ideas to fill those holes.  We replace the objective standard of God with a system we build ourselves.

However, if we hold that all of the Bible is God’s words than we are walking on a solid floor.  We can trust that we won't step on a weak point and fall through.  It allows us to not spend all our time examining the integrity of the floor, not that its wrong to critically examine the Bible at times, but instead use the floor to stand and build on.  If the Bible is the perfect Word of God, our foundation is solid.

I understand that this a controversial topic today, even in the church, and that genuine Christians disagree with me on the points I've made above.  However, it is not just that this stance makes Biblical theology easier, I believe it is what the Bible claims about itself.

Charles Ryrie argues for the complete inerrancy of the Bible with this logic,

“God is true (Rom. 3:4); the Scriptures were breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16); therefore, the Scriptures are true (since they came from the breath of God who is true).”

It is important to note that in 2 Timothy 3:16 Paul is referring to all Scripture, the Bible, fitting the inspired criteria.  Also, 2 Peter 1:21 states, that no prophecy comes from man’s interpretation, it is all the Word of God.  So, if we believe that the Bible is all the Word of God, then it is necessary to believe it is all truth because God cannot lie.  I realize that this is somewhat of a circular argument, the Bible arguing for the Bible, but my point is that we must either accept both points and the conclusion or reject all of it. 

I'll end with one final argument for inerrancy, Jesus’ view of Scripture.  Of course, when Jesus spoke of Scripture he was referring to the Old Testament, because that’s all that existed while he was on the earth, however, New Testament authors validate each other as being on par with the Old Testament. (1 Timothy 5:18, 2 Peter 3:15-16) Thus, I think we are safe to expand Jesus’ thoughts to the whole Bible.  

Anyway, in Matthew 5:18, Jesus states that “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”  Jesus is asserting that Scripture is a solid foundation that will stand throughout time.  More important for our discussion is that he doesn't just refer to the general themes of the Bible or general principles but highlights the importance of the most minor of details, the iota and dot.  Jesus is literally referring to the smallest Hebrew letter and a tiny punctuation mark.  Scripture will stand and be fulfilled to the smallest detail.

Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus uses Scriptures to make arguments.  In Matthew 22:32, Jesus makes a point based on the Biblical principle of resurrection.  He is also very careful of his use of verb tense.  A small detail but hugely important in his argument.  In Matthew 22:41-46 and John 10:34, Jesus uses small details from Old Testament passages to make arguments.  Clearly, Jesus cared about the little details of the Bible and that all those little details were true and without error.

If the Bible is not all the word of God and not all without error, then how could Jesus or any of us create beliefs based on the details of the Bible.  There would be no surety that any detail is accurate.  We are left with just the broad principles of the Bible and even those can be slowly eroded away with doubt.  I believe that the Bible is inerrant because that is what it claims to be and that is what Jesus believed it to be.  This then makes it a solid foundation to build a belief system on, live on, and find hope for the future on.

Foundations

This might be surprising to some of you but I really dislike heights. I love rock climbing and I have been cliff jumping multiple times but I still do not enjoy heights. When I was in college, I worked a few summers doing residential construction. One of the things that I hated the most was working on roofs. Roofing of any form is hard work but that's not why I hated it. I would always be incredibly nervous walking on the roof, especially if it was a steep pitch. The worst roofing jobs were when we had to walk on bare trusses and nail down sheeting. This task required moving heavy 4 x 8 foot sheets of plywood while walking on 2 x 4's spaced sixteen inches apart. I was just waiting for that one misstep that would send me crashing through the ceiling and into the second floor of the house. Doing this type of work for a couple summers really put in perspective how "hard" my college studies really were and made it really clear to me why I was in college and not doing manual labor for a career.

I tell that story to make the point that it is good to have a solid foundation under your feet. Life is much safer and more comfortable when you are walking on solid ground and not skipping across planks twenty feet in the air.

The same principle is true as we begin to study together what we believe. We need some solid foundation on which to stand and build our belief system. Many people today have built their belief system on the foundation of personal experience and maybe the experiences of some others close to them. This type of foundation stems from the idea that truth is relative to each individual and thus every individual must build up their own worldview.

Like the truss roof, however, experience is a very precarious foundation. Our experience, no matter our age or how much we have been through, is very limited. There are many gaps of information even in the midst of what we have seen in our life. Many things we experience we just cannot fully understand by logical processing alone. Also, like a roof, experience can only carry us so far until our toes are dangling off the edge and we can only peer into the distance beyond. Experience can be valuable to tell us some things but it only offers a very limited view of what is beyond ourselves. So, if we are to answer the question of “Who is God?” we need something or someone beyond our experience to give us that answer.

This need for an outside source has been understood by man throughout all of human existence. Most cultures and religions have some set of traditions, legends, or a holy book that claims to come from someone beyond the group of humans that exist today. This source is generally some type of God or god-like figure who has come from outside the natural human world to bring the truth to humans.

For Christians, this outside book is the Bible, which explicitly claims to be written by the one God who created and rules over the world. In the Old Testament, there are over 3,800 occurrences of the phrase, "thus saith the Lord" or an equivalent. Each of these Old Testament prophets, authors, claimed to be speaking and writing on behalf of God to give a message to God’s people. By the time of Jesus, the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament had been commonly accepted by Jewish scholars as the Word of God. This view is even confirmed by Jesus throughout his ministry. (Luke 24:44, John 10:35) In the New Testament, Paul makes the claim in 2 Timothy 3:16 that the Bible is the inspired words of God. Later in 2 Peter 1:21, Peter would make the same claim. While these are internal claims and can not make an argument in and of themselves, it is important to understand that these men all believed they were writing God's words, confirmed each other, and were willing to suffer greatly, some even dying, for what they wrote.

Internal claims to be a divine book do not, however, make an ironclad case that a book is divine. Like I said earlier, most religions have some form of teachings that claim to be divine. There are some things however that separate the Bible from other holy books.

First, the continuity of the Bible points to divine origin. The Bible was written over a period of hundreds of years by forty different authors on three different continents. The different books were then collected and compiled in their original form by various groups of Christians during the first centuries AD. (We still have many pieces of manuscripts from this period and close to it.) The Bible was then officially and widely recognized in its current form in the fourth century. Even with this variety in composition and collection, the Bible still follows one main theme with no major contradictions. To see how amazing this is, turn on the news or Sportscenter and notice how hard it is to get even a small group of people sitting in the same room to agree on something.

This continuity issue is huge when you compare it to another book that claims divine authorship, the Quran. The Quran contains the teachings of one man. Those teachings were compiled by one and soon after compilation all manuscripts that varied from the official manuscript and sources were destroyed.

Second, a majority of the Bible describes events that can be archaeologically and historically verified. The Bible describes the actions and events of individuals and groups of people from throughout history and uses these events to teach who God is. It is not simply a collection of sayings. This means the events described can be confirmed by outside sources. One example of this is the Hittite nation often mentioned in the Old Testament. For centuries, this people group was lost to history with the only evidence of their existence coming from the Old Testament. However, in the eighteenth century archeological evidence was found to verify their existence.

The third and final evidence that separates the Bible from other holy books is more personal. As I have studied the Bible over the past few years, I have found nothing that more clearly explains our world. The Bible explains so clearly why we humans behave as we do and the world functions as we experience it. There are also many times where God has used the Bible to guide me through issues in my life with incredible insight and wisdom. I believe there is no other teaching in the world with the richness and depth of wisdom as the Bible.

I encourage you if you do not already buy into the validity of the Bible as God's word to examine it more thoroughly. This post only touches the surface of the argument for the Bible. Remember its important, whether you believe the Bible or not, to have a solid foundation on which to build your worldview. If the foundation is not solid, then you can easily stumble as you build on it.

Finally, going forward I will be using the Bible, without completely discarding experience, as the foundation for finding the truth of who God is and who we are. I will also try as much as possible to give some arguments outside the Bible for my different points because they can only further strengthen our trust in the Biblical foundation.

"Wow, There are a lot of different beliefs out there"

It's been a long time since I wrote on this blog.  (Probably not a good thing that every other post starts with that line.)  I'm hoping to begin writing more regularly but life is always crazy, so who knows.

"Wow, there are a lot of different beliefs out there."  This statement was repeated to me multiple times as I talked to a fellow at the gym yesterday.  He is a very friendly older man who I have had the pleasure to talk with a number of times about a variety of topics.  Like a lot of older people in Johnstown, he is a retired steel worker and a lifelong devout Catholic.  After he found out about my varying educational and career background and that I am currently a pastor in town, he became very inquisitive as to what my church believes and practices. Throughout our conversation, he was blown away by the vast difference, especially in practice, between his traditional Catholic church and my very non-traditional Protestant church.  It was like I was opening a whole new world to him that he had never studied or experienced.

That conversation reminded just how much I can take my beliefs for granted.  They have been practiced and ingrained in me for so long, it becomes assumed in my mind that this is the way things are done.  However, there is a vast range of beliefs and practices in our city, in our country, and in our world.  Even the realm of Christendom has many different flavors.  So, why believe what you believe?  Why practice those beliefs in a certain way?

In Matthew 16, Peter is confronted by Jesus with the two most important questions anyone, no matter what belief system, must answer in life.  First, Jesus asks Peter who he believes Jesus is.  Essentially, Jesus is confronting him with the question, "Who is God?"  Second, after Peter's answer to the question, Jesus tells Peter who Peter is. This gives Peter the answer to the second most important question, "Who am I in relation to who God is?"

Everything else in our worldview stems from those two questions.  Why is the world the way it is?  Why do people act like they do?  What is the purpose of my life?  What happens after I die?  All these questions can only be answered in light of who we believe God is and who we are in relation.  However, many people either overlook those questions or blindly follow what they have always believed, not even knowing the foundation from which those beliefs come.

Over the past six months, I had the opportunity to go through the process to be a licensed minister in the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches.  This required a thorough study of what I believe and why I believe it. It was some of the most intense studying I have done in my life but I came out more thoroughly convinced of what I believe than ever in my life.  Over the next couples months, hopefully, I want to share with you what I learned.

I'll confess upfront, I'm not a theologian or an academic.  I'm just a normal guy serving Jesus as a pastor.  A guy who gets pranked by the students in the youth group and swarmed by little kids after the Sunday morning service.  I don't have advanced degree, years of study, or a megachurch.  Simply, I love Jesus and people and, hopefully, through what I write I can connect the two.

This the great thing about the Bible.  It is so profoundly deep that men can devote their life to studying it and not reach the end but it, also, presents truths so clear and simple that children can grasp them and know God.  God wants you to know who he is and know who you are in relation to him.  Join me as I examine what I believe and why I believe, then answer the questions for yourself.