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]