“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”
2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)
Here’s the verse that was always given to me to support “the Bible is the word of God and 100% infallible.” Not that it’s not circular, but it does exist.
Remember, the Bible has a lot more in it than folk tales and cultural laws. There are a lot passages that are prophecy, poetry, or theology - sometimes all three at once. It’s just that the stories are a lot easier to remember and internalize.
I have to put my 25 years of religious education and devotion to use somehow now that I no longer go to church. I figure helping non-belivers better understand Christianity is a pretty worthwhile endeavour.
I’m glad you’re out there. I just get really frustrated when I see people making sweeping assertions about Christianity without really knowing anything about theology.
Fire, thank you for using NIV, I learned on King James and find that using King James quotes over NIV lead to so much extra confusion like it isn’t a translation from the 1600s.
I’m not Christian anymore, but the modern bible never “disowns” the old testament. Maybe there were books written around Jesus’ time that got eradicated with the gnostics. There was a real debate over whether or not Jesus was a rebirth of God or just a manifestation of God though. I mean OT God is kind of a bastard, dude literally drowned almost every living thing on the planet, would tell parents to get on the verge of killing their children as “faith tests”. In comparison, NT God and Jesus are far more loving than pretty much anything we see in the OT.
I grew up with the NIV, so it was just natural. It was also the default option when I went to biblegateway.com to copy the text, so I just rolled with it. I know there are some people who would be scandalized that I didn’t use the KJV, but that’s their problem, not mine.
I wouldn’t argue that the modern BIble “disowns” the OT, but some NT authors were doing their best to sweep it under the rug to make their fledgling religion more palatable to the Greeks and Romans. Early Christianity was just a sect (some might say a heresy) of Judaism, so it wasn’t inititally designed to appeal to Gentiles. With that lens, you can even argue that the apostle Paul is a more important figure in Christianity than Jesus - indeed, I’ve seen this argued a few times.
And you know what? These sorts of topics are a lot more interesting to me now that I don’t feel compelled to believe the traditional interpretation of them. I became far more interested in the development of early Christian theology after I became an atheist, probably because while I was still a Christian I was afraid of what I would find out if I challenged my beliefs at all. Not an unfounded fear as it turned out, given the arc of my life.
This circular reasoning comes up a lot, I’m sure religious scholars are aware of it. They must have made some attempt to reason it out. Some kind of ontological rigormarole.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”
2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)
Here’s the verse that was always given to me to support “the Bible is the word of God and 100% infallible.” Not that it’s not circular, but it does exist.
Remember, the Bible has a lot more in it than folk tales and cultural laws. There are a lot passages that are prophecy, poetry, or theology - sometimes all three at once. It’s just that the stories are a lot easier to remember and internalize.
Interesting. Thank you for the informative response.
I have to put my 25 years of religious education and devotion to use somehow now that I no longer go to church. I figure helping non-belivers better understand Christianity is a pretty worthwhile endeavour.
I’m glad you’re out there. I just get really frustrated when I see people making sweeping assertions about Christianity without really knowing anything about theology.
Fire, thank you for using NIV, I learned on King James and find that using King James quotes over NIV lead to so much extra confusion like it isn’t a translation from the 1600s.
I’m not Christian anymore, but the modern bible never “disowns” the old testament. Maybe there were books written around Jesus’ time that got eradicated with the gnostics. There was a real debate over whether or not Jesus was a rebirth of God or just a manifestation of God though. I mean OT God is kind of a bastard, dude literally drowned almost every living thing on the planet, would tell parents to get on the verge of killing their children as “faith tests”. In comparison, NT God and Jesus are far more loving than pretty much anything we see in the OT.
I grew up with the NIV, so it was just natural. It was also the default option when I went to biblegateway.com to copy the text, so I just rolled with it. I know there are some people who would be scandalized that I didn’t use the KJV, but that’s their problem, not mine.
I wouldn’t argue that the modern BIble “disowns” the OT, but some NT authors were doing their best to sweep it under the rug to make their fledgling religion more palatable to the Greeks and Romans. Early Christianity was just a sect (some might say a heresy) of Judaism, so it wasn’t inititally designed to appeal to Gentiles. With that lens, you can even argue that the apostle Paul is a more important figure in Christianity than Jesus - indeed, I’ve seen this argued a few times.
And you know what? These sorts of topics are a lot more interesting to me now that I don’t feel compelled to believe the traditional interpretation of them. I became far more interested in the development of early Christian theology after I became an atheist, probably because while I was still a Christian I was afraid of what I would find out if I challenged my beliefs at all. Not an unfounded fear as it turned out, given the arc of my life.
This circular reasoning comes up a lot, I’m sure religious scholars are aware of it. They must have made some attempt to reason it out. Some kind of ontological rigormarole.