djo@pacbell.com (Dan'l DanehyOakes) (12/15/89)
Time for the Silent Christian to bump heads again... First, my primary concern is with the Gospels, and I'll suggest a way out of some of the alleged contradictions there in a minute. But first a word from Dave Mielke. In article <Dec.11.04.30.38.1989.25303@athos.rutgers.edu> bnr-fos!bmers58!davem@watmath.waterloo.edu (Dave Mielke) writes: >I believe that perfect harmony throughout the Scriptures is absolutely >essential to our faith. If we were trusting in a God who could not even >give us a consistent message then we would be trusting in a flawed God. Sigh. Dave, this is putting Descartes before de horse. For absolute harmony of Scripture to be "absolutely essential to our faith" would imply that 1. Scripture is literally true and inerrant; 2. It's been passed down with absolute accuracy through many centuries of human-hand transcription (and, in the case of many parts of the OT, oral tradition before written forms were created); 3. The translation we happen to be working with is absolutely accurate. Note that #s 2 and 3 are necessary even if we accept #1 -- which *NOT* all Christians do. >*side note*< There's going to be *someone* out there who claims that if you don't believe in the literal and inerrant truth of the Bible you can't "really" be a Christian. So let me set forth my working definition of a Christian: for me, a Christian is one who can honestly say -- allowing for quibbles about "sexist terminology" and suchlike -- that they "believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; that he descended into Sheol; that on the third day he rose again from the dead; that he descended into Heaven; that he shall come again to judge both the living and the dead and his Kingdom shall have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit; the holy Church of all Christians; the Community of Saints; the Forgiving of Sins; the Resurrection of the Dead; and the Life Everlasting." If you believe all that, you're a Christian, in my book; quibbles about literalness and predestination are snares set in our path by *youknowwho* to prevent us from acting in true fellowship and community. A Christian may think that predestinarians are hardhearted, or that literal-inerrantists are living in a dream world: but to upbraid them with that is not acting in anything like Christian charity. >*end of digression*< So, in the light of my lemma, to insist that flawed Scriptures would imply that >we were trusting in a flawed God is, to my mind, an uncharitable and thus un-Christian position. Dave, I wouldn't dream of trying to talk you out of your belief that the Scriptures are completely harmonious: but please don't insist that we all accept that belief. It isn't necessary to salvation. >We can not be sure of anything at all if we do not have an irrefutable >source of truthful information. Well: we do. It's called the world. St. Thomas Aquinas observed that, when the revelation of the world and that of Scriptures seem to be in contradiction, we have not understood Scriptures correctly. Thus, if the empirical evidence points to a Big Bang and evolution, we are free to reevaluate our understanding of Genesis -- as many Christians have done. (And, no, though I admire and revere the wisdom of Aquinas, I am *not* a Catholic.) ************* Anyway: about the Gospels. Since I've made it clear I'm *not* a literalist, I may as well state my position on the Gospels: I believe they're true. That is, I believe that they are eyewitness accounts of events that happened in and around Judaea around AD 30-40. (No doubt someone out there has much better evidence of when; I'm not all that interested. Exact dates are fiddlin'.) But: if they're eyewitness accounts, then the actual eyewitnessing doesn't begin until the calling of the Apostles. Thus, right off, I've eliminated any concern I might have about the early life of Christ: whatever the Evangelists say about it is hearsay. It's undoubtedly in large part true, but that it doesn't agree in details is no shock. Ah, but what about the parts they *did* witness? CSLewis gave me the key to this. Consider eyewitness reports of a car crash: it's a fairly short-term event, and the witnesses are questioned shortly thereafter; often within minutes. Yet their descriptions often seem to refer to entirely different events. How strange it would be, then, if four men, who didn't see all the same events, over a period of a few years, remembered exactly the same story years or even decades later! If the Gospels *did* agree on every point, then, we would have cause to be *most* suspicious -- suspicious that the Evangelists had gotten together and collaborated to perpetrate their story. Since there *is* such apparent disagreement on details, it's clear to me that they *were* each telling the story as they remembered it. This gives me more faith in the gospel accounts than in any other ancient historical account. Dan'l Danehy-Oakes