Opera Nut

If you believe that Jesus' teachings are the best basis for an ethical life, please explain the following: Jesus in Matthew 10 saying "I come not in peace but with a sword, I have come to [split families apart]. "

How do you explain that?

Christianity has split many families apart, in my experience. Even to the extent of people not speaking to each other for two or three generations, fifty or sixty years.

What family values are those?

jbernier

Aside from the fact that this is not properly a statement about ethics, the hermeneutic being practiced here is essentially the same as that practiced by fundamentalists. Rather than attempt to locate the saying in its larger systemic context the statement is just being pulled out, quoted and exegesis is limited to "The Bible says X. So there." It is called proof-texting and it is not a serious grappling with the text.

Now, the immediate question that must be asked about the quoted text is "Why does Jesus bring division?" I would contend that this statement should be located within Jesus' (and Paul's) general thematic concern that humans place the proper value upon things. Each has a firm understanding of the impermanence of that which is finite. Nation, ideology, creed, family: All of these are impermenant. Are any of these a bad thing in and of themselves? No. But if one is forced to choose between loyalty to any of these things and loyalty to the ethical demands that result from the conforming of oneself to the faithfulness of Christ one must choose the latter.

Or, to come at it another way: Peace without justice is no peace at all. Sometimes peace is not what ethical living requires. An example: Recently there has been another thread going on here in which several people suggested that Christians did not do enough to side up to the Nazis. These are fair critiques; too few Christians did too little. Now, let us imagine that you are a Christian pastor living under the Nazis. You learn that your brother has joined the Nazi party. Do you grin and bear it, remaining at peace with a brother who is associating with and supporting a horrifically evil regime for the sake of peace in the family? Think of that dilemma and maybe what Jesus says makes more sense. I do not see that statement as a statement about what ought to be but more one of realpolitik: If you follow me you will defy principalities and powers (to use Paul's term) - and that will not always be peaceful.

Uni

actually you just helped me...if it was infallible in the begining then it would not have been copied or translated incorrectly as that would be impossible. infallible is unable to be made false, that would be making it false...but i will drop it if anyone finds this discussion annoying.

jdlongmire

:notworthy:

jbernier

This is an important point. Many Christians have essentially the same theology of scripture as devout Muslims have of the Koran. In traditional Muslim thought Muhammad did not write the Koran; he merely recorded the words dictated to him by the angel Gabriel. The words themselves, right down to the letter, are sacred. Indeed, there is a perfect copy of the Koran in heaven of which the written copies are just types (essentially a Platonic notion here).

This idea is essentially shared by many Christians re: the Christian scriptures. The Bible was given in an infallible form straight from the hand of God, goes this party line. Human hands may have recorded but there is really none of them in there; or, at the very least, what is of them in there has been infallible by the activity of the Holy Spirit in them as they wrote. Now the point to be made is that this is really not a mainstream Christian belief; Christianity, unlike Islam, has always maintained that the human was involved in the production of the scriptural texts and, much like the incarnation, the texts (or least their production) must somehow be viewed as a joining of divinity and humanity. By the way, the comparison to Islam is not meant as a critique of Islamic thought; it is merely to suggest that Biblical inerrantists are often better Muslims than they are Christians.

Uni

but my argument is not flawed is it?

Magus55

I still think it is. Assuming the original scripture is infallible, why couldn't humans take whats written and make it fallible? It doesn't affect the original, but infallibility doesn't haven't to extend to every copy on Earth to maintain the original scriptures infallibility.

jbernier

Then infallibility becomes an empty concept as there is no way of knowing whether or not this particular copy is fallible or not. It becomes essentially meaningless whether or not the originals were infallible. In fact, exegesis becomes almost impossible as the fundamental uncertainty about how about close to the "original" a particular copy of a text may be means taht we can never be certain that we are reading the infallible word of God or the word made fallible by the actions of human beings (this is, of course, assuming that one's exegesis is dependent upon the notion of infallibility, which it likely is if one is arguing for infallibility in any sense).

Moreover, what do you do with the texts that are obviously the result of editorial processes: Such as pretty much the entire Pentateuch, most of the prophetic books, most of the wisdom books, all of the gospels (particularly Matthew and Luke), etc.? What would be the "infallible original" in these cases? Why is it that the degree of editing evident in these texts did not bring their infallibility into jeopardy? When is editing too much for a text to remain infallible? Or did they become infallible at a certain stage of editing (which means they were fallible before they were infallible, which is problematic in the extreme).

The other option is to drop the whole infallibility routine entirely. This strikes me as the hermeneutically proper course of action.

jbernier

No, indeed it is not. As you say, to be infallible does simply mean to be without failing - it also (and more properly, I would say) means to be without the capacity to fail. You have hit the nail on the head, I would say.

Jonathan

Dean Anderson

The problem with this argument is that we have no way of knowing what the 'original' said.

What if the infallible original said that Satan was the good guy and Yahweh the bad guy - but we only have the versions edited by the Yahwehists who altered it to put their god on top?

The versions we have - right back to the earliest manuscripts available to us - are flawed and unclear and contradictory. Even if there were an infallible 'original', then this is no use to us because we have no idea what it said.

Also, if the Bible is so important to Yahweh - why doesn't he prevent it from being miscopied and altered? Giving us his infallible instructions is a pointless act if he knows that we will we then mangle them in copying and translation over the centuries until we end up with the tangled mess that is today's Bibles.