[soc.religion.christian] Basic policies for soc.religion.christian

christian@geneva.rutgers.edu (02/19/91)

This is a regular reposting of the basic charter of the group.
Note particularly my comments on avoiding overuse of
included text.  I'm seeing excessive >'s begin to creep in.

----------------------

Based on some responses I've been getting, I think now might be a good
time to review the charter of this group.  As I understand it, this is
a group for discussion of Christianity and issues related to it.  It
is not per se a Christian group.  By that I mean that contributions
from non-Christians or even heretical Christians are welcome.  However
they should be relevant to Christianity.  As to why this is, I can
cite two things:

  - Tradition.  This group was created by a vote, and many of the
	people voting for it would not have consented to a moderatorial
	policy that judged postings based on their theological views.

  - Usenet and University policy.  Usenet uses lots of resources 
	of various universities and governmental agencies.  It would
	be inappropriate to use these resources for an overtly
	religious group.

I take a wide definition of Christianity.  For the purposes of this
group it includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Quakers, Christian
Science, etc.  (This doesn't necessarily represent a personal
endorsement of these groups.)

The purpose of moderation is primarily to increase the "signal to
noise ratio" of the group.  Most postings (about 83% at the moment)
are accepted.  Those that are rejected generally fall into one of the
following categories:

  - personal attack, or postings that are likely to generate
	discussions that are primarily ad hominem
  - redundant postings.  This means that if I got lots of responses
	saying the same thing, I may choose just some of them.  It
	also means that when a discussion seems to have gotten to
	the point where the same thing is being said over and over,
	I will sometimes close it off.
  - postings irrelevant to the subject matter
  - postings that do not make sense on their own (see below)
  - postings falling into certain specific categories for which
	there are specialized groups.  This includes

	  talk.origins - discussions of evolution and related issues,
		in their scientific aspects.   The theological implications 
		of creation and exegetical issues involving the creation 
		account are fair game.
	  sci.med.aids - discussions of the medical and social aspects of
		AIDS
	  talk.abortion - all aspects of abortion

I almost always send mail when I reject a posting.  This means that if
you don't see either the posting or a reject notice, some
communications failure has probably happened.

The most difficult judgement to make is "postings that do not make
sense on their own".  There is a tendency in Usenet groups for
postings to include other postings, sometimes nested several levels
deep.  These discussions very quickly become impossible for anyone
other than the participants to make sense of.  This may require some
thought.  It's generally a bad idea to start out with someone else's
posting and just insert random comments.  It's better to start with a
blank screen and try to come up with something that makes sense on its
own.

I may make some edits to postings.  These changes fall into one
of the following categories:

   - where a posting includes a previous posting, I may abbreviate
	the included material, or replace it with a summary.  I may
	also supply additional background about the context of the
	discussion if it seems to be necessary.  Doing this
	intelligently takes time.  I'd far prefer for authors
	to do this themselves.  Please try to keep down the quoted
	material to a few lines.

   - I sometimes correct obvious spelling and grammatical errors.
	In fact I do this very seldom, but sometimes it is obvious
	that English is not an author's native language, and I take
	pity on them.

   - I will sometimes add my own comments.  I normally
	do this when there's a fairly obvious response, in an attempt
	to avoid getting 50 identical responses.  I will also sometimes
	suggest fruitful issues that I'd like responders to think about,
	if it seems likely that when left on its own a posting would
	tend to generate mostly flames.  These comments are always
	in brackets and signed with my initials [like this --clh]

I do not modify postings in other ways.  A few times in the past I
have gotten postings that were mostly fine but had one paragraph that
was offensive or otherwise unacceptable.  Removing one portion of a
posting -- even when I included an explanation of what I did and why
-- has always resulted in bad feelings.

My own views should not affect the way I do moderation.  However in
the interests of openness, I will tell you what they are.  I am an
Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  My theology is very strongly
influenced by Calvin.  I do not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture,
but I am at the conservative end of those who do not.  I am a Vulcan.
This is visible both in my philosophy and my temperament.  Infinite
diversity in infinite combinations is central to my view of the way
God works.  This commitment is very useful for a moderator.

kwilson@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Kent Wilson) (02/28/91)

In article <Feb.18.23.54.51.1991.16971@athos.rutgers.edu> you write:
|>I do not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture,
|>but I am at the conservative end of those who do not.  

Would you explain why you adopted such a view?  What specifically is 
in error?  I fail to see why my God, who raised Jesus from the dead, 
could not see to it that His words to us are not in error.
                                                                        

Thanks,
Kent
===============================================================================

[God could certainly arrange for his word to be delivered and
preserved without error.  The question is not whether he could but
whether he did.  I see no evidence for it.  While I regard the Bible
as a reasonably accurate document, it is not necessary for its purpose
that it be supernaturally accurate.  I have several problems with the
theory that it is:

1) It can tend to distract our attention from Christ.  The Word of God
is Christ, not a book.  The book is a witness to him.

2) All I ask of witnesses is that they give me enough information to
decide the truth of the case I'm interested in.  If they claim to be
competent witnesses, I have some idea of how to assess them.  I can
try to evaluate their motivations.  I can try to crosscheck them with
each other, and with whatever objective evidence I can find, etc.  We
make lots of important decisions in our lives based on information
that is good but not inerrant.  But if they claim to be inerrant, I
have no idea how to evaluate that claim.  Now we have to start
collecting evidence about the Bible, and we make the Bible itself a
matter of faith.  What's wrong with simply saying that we have reports
by fellow Christians who were near enough to the events to have
reasonably good sources of information?  Isn't that enough to base on
decisions on?

3) It doesn't seem consistent with the way God works.  He isn't big on
unambiguous revelations.  I agree that if I were God, I would probably
give the church a direct pipeline to me.  But I'd also be inclined to
throw lightning bolts at everybody who refuses to accept me.  God
works much more indirectly.  His idea of how to deal with rebellion is
to come to earth and submit himself to the forces of repression.  His
idea of how to run a church is to let it make its own mistakes.
Inerrancy seems to come from the same mindset that found a crucified
Messiah inconceivable.

4) The Bible shows signs of human reporting.  I don't want to overplay
the concept of "contradictions" in the Bible.  Many of them have
reasonable explanations, and the history of Biblical criticism and
archaeology suggests to me that explanations of others may well show
up.  However if you look at the first three Gospels side by side, it's
pretty clear that we don't have a word for word account of what Jesus
said.  I'm not claiming that his message was seriously distorted, but
there are certainly differences in wording and emphasis, enough to
show that we don't have what modern historians would consider to be
direct quotes.  Take a look at something like Gospel Parallels to see
this.  It's present in every story that appears in more than one
gospel.  There are differences both in what Jesus says and in details
of the narrative.  As far as narrative, one that comes to mind at the
moment is how many entities of what type were present at the empty
tomb (one or two?  men or angels?  or Jesus himself, as in John?)  Or
Jesus' birth in Mat and Lk, with different geneologies and different
accounts of the birth and surrounding events.  Or Gen 1 and 2, which
show different types of creature created in a different order.  Surely
I don't have to list here all the problem passages?  There are lists
of these things all over the place.  There are also books full of ways
of reconciling them.  About all I can say is that the proposed
reconcilations always look to me like they are forcing us to interpret
passages in non-obvious ways.  E.g. Gen 2, which looks at first glance
like a well-written narrative, is typically taken to be a set of
explanatory comments on Gen 1, because if we take its apparent
sequence seriously we get a contradiction.

5) The arguments for inerrancy all seem to be circular.  The most
quoted evidence is 2 Tim 3:16.  The problem is that nowhere does this
say that the Bible is inerrant.  It simply says that it is useful.  To
get an argument for inerrancy out of this, you must come in with the
assumption that tn order to be useful, the Bible must be inerrant.  As
I've argued above, I think that's wrong.  Generally, responses to
comments like the ones I've made are "but if the Bible isn't inerrant,
how can we be sure about everything?"  Note that this again is
circular.  Because we want to be sure, we argue that the Bible must
provide us with certainty.  Nothing I know about God suggests that he
provides guarantees, except maybe on very basic issues such as
salvation.

Finally, I'd like to note that inerrancy is less relevant than you
might think.  Most issues of Biblical interpretation are not over
supposed errors.  The hot issues that depend upon how one deals with
the Bible are things like ordination of women, homosexuality, divorce,
abortion, etc.  And none of these depends upon whether or not there is
an error somewhere.  The real issue is not the inerrancy of Scripture,
but what I call the "immediate applicability" of Scripture.  That is,
those who favor ordination of women don't claim that Paul has made
some sort of error of fact, or indeed any error at all.  Rather, they
claim that he was giving advice based on his situation in the the 1st
Cent., and would be horrified to have that advice turned into a new
Law, that applies literally in all circumstances.

--clh]