Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Scripture, Divine Inspiration, and Ethics (and more)...
Augustine: "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it's not the gospel that you believe, but yourself."
Pete: "lemme fix this quote: "if you believe what you like in the BIBLE, and reject what you dont like, its not the BIBLE you believe, but yourself." I hate how people believe in jesus and what he taught, but then go and pretend that the entire first half of the bible doesnt exist. the old testament deals with a God who supports genocide, slavery, stoning of children, the submission of women, execution for apostasy, the sex slavery of young virgins, and human sacrifice, but everyone pretends like it doesnt exist. they throw out the entire old testament because they dont like it, and decide to only believe in the new testament. they picture God as Jesus; a loving person who helps the poor, but ignore all the horrible things he has done in the past. please, if you are going to believe in the Bible, believe the ENTIRE bible. dont just pick out the good parts and ignore everything else."
Brian: "Great thoughts to bring up. Fortunately we have the teaching authority of the Church to help us out with that :) Without that, what do you do with a passage like 2 Kings 2:23-25 where Elisha curses the boys who jeered at him and 2 she-bears come out of the woods and tear 42 of the children to pieces? GK Chesterton says (and this is totally paraphrased) that if an onlooker came upon a procession through the main street of a town and saw people carrying all kinds of statues and candles and wearing funny vestments and singing weird songs and praying weird prayers and carrying a book they said was their sacred scriptures, why would the onlooker take the book they used as their scriptures and dismiss everything else in the procession and judge the procession based on the book they took out of it? Again that was very paraphrased, but Chesterton is really emphasizing there the importance of the whole Church with its teaching, Tradition, Sacraments, and of course Scripture as well. Also it's important to see the Bible as a Library of books of all different genres and not just as one book, certainly not as one historical book the way we would flip through old newspaper reels. If somebody were to just flip through the Old Testament without any connection to what the Church actually teaches about each of the books in the Bible and their content, etc. understandably it would seem like there would be lots of contradicting stuff especially between parts of the OT and the New Testament, but again if one were to take the ENTIRE Bible holistically, in light of the Church's wisdom and many centuries of study and commentary, it begins to make a lot more sense. Also Augustine's quote here specifically referenced the Gospels, and is more aimed at people who claim to believe everything in them and don't live their lives accordingly I'd say."
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Facebook is a great place to start conversations, but not a great place to continue sustained, thoughtful conversations. Too many distractions, etc.
ReplyDeleteI thought Pete brought up a really interesting topic, but the way in which you brought it up was problematic.
First, your criticism is either baseless or aimed at an irrelevant fringe. Who looks at Jesus and forgets about the Old Testament? The Church, from Augustine to Benedict XVI, has always interpreted the gospels squarely in continuity with the Jewish scriptures (I forget the specific name, but there was a heresy early on which claimed that the old testament was invalidated by Jesus).
Second,I think it important to point out that your criticism is concerned with Christian beliefs about and interpretation of the Bible, not with ethical beliefs per se. I think it's important to keep this distinction in mind as we discuss these issues (in part because Christian moral theology is in many ways historically responsible for many of the moral beliefs held up by the so-called "secular humanists."
All that being said, I think Pete's question (and Brian's response) raise very interesting questions about Christian beliefs concerning scripture and divine inspiration. What does it mean that, say, Exodus is divinely inspired given that it has God give Joshua the famous orders to conquer the foes of Israel even to the slaying of every man woman child and beast? No easy answer, it would seem...