Ancient Christian Witness

Dr. Jeannie Constantinou, continues her new series on "Introduction to the Bible":

As takin from the site:
"How are we to understand words like "inspired" and "inerrant" when it comes to the Holy Scriptures?"

http://audio.ancientfaith.com/searchthescriptures/sts_2008-06-14.mp3


This is going to set off some fire works for some, she is talking about a very touchy issue that many have very strong feelings about.....both for and against.


The common Orthodox view is that the Bible is looked at much in the same way as Christ. Just as Jesus is both 100% Divine and 100% Human, so also Scripture is also 100% Divine and 100% Human.

It's a synergistic type of view.


But yeah, this podcast is going to be very touchy. My personal belief is that Scripture is both 100% Divine & 100 Human and without error......just like Jesus is 100% Divine and 100% Human and without sin. I also see scripture as being both Transcendent & Immanent. Immanent in how it spoke to the people of it's time, and Transcendent in how it speaks to people in every generation.

And as we know, God is also Transcendent & Immanent.

However, how I understand error is from a pre-naturalistic scientific revolution context. How they understood things is different from how the 18 & 19 hundreds understood things. The Ancient World relied on human Testamony for alot of things, and they had a messure of checks and balances to know who was credible and who wasn't. In some parts of the ancient world, ones word was their bond. Oaths were created later to help safegaurd against those who lie, (those who had an untrustworthy character) and ones charactor was known by the community around them, so how the ancient World understood "perfection vs error" was different from how such things were understood in modern times.

we should take the ancient worldview and system into account when looking at this issue. I know that for some of the pagan philosophers "perfection" meant being static. It wasn't allowed to move, or be mobile, because if it moved then that would mean it wasn't "perfect". I think that some of us may have the same kind of understanding when looking at the perfection of scripture. We may think that in order for it to be "perfect", it can't move. It's not allowed to be mobile, it's not allowed to be translated, copied or anything. the truth is, Perfection shouldn't have to be limited to the confines of being "static. Scripture can be perfect and dynamic at the sametime.

We should also compare the ancient view to the modern view. So that we will know how to respond to some of the arguments of those with a naturalistic scientific bias of what perfection and error is.






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