Post tagged with inerrancy

  • Al Mohler says the devil is in the details. Ironically enough, he’s right.

    September 22nd, 201104:26 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Imagine a defense attorney that is trying to defend his client's innocence against the charge of murder. To his initial delight the defense attorney comes across an eyewitness who is emphatic that the attorney's client did not commit the murder. The reason? The eyewitness says he saw another man commit the crime. Do you think the attorney would be ...

  • One Word in many, many words: A Review of Thom Stark’s “Human Faces” (Part 2)

    July 28th, 201102:09 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Thom Stark. The Human Faces of God: What Scripture reveals when it gets God wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries To Hide It). Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011, 248 pp. ISBN: 13:978-1-60899-323-9. For Part 1 of this review click here. In the first chapter, "The Argument: In the Beginning was the words" Stark introduces us to his foundational premise: ...

  • How fundamentalists undermine the authority of scripture

    July 25th, 201110:53 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Christian fundamentalists like to trumpet the authority of scripture over all things. Unfortunately the way that fundamentalists read scripture tends to undermine that authority. The key problem is that fundamentalists widely subscribe to a hermeneutical (that is interpretive) principle that the text should be interpreted literally when possible. T...

  • On slurring Cretans and Indians

    June 01st, 201105:28 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Happily ensconced within my hotel in South Bend, Indiana and with a couple hours until this evening's reception, I have decided to avail myself of a bit of blogging. I'll focus on responding to a key excerpt from davidstarlingm's defense of Paul's comments on the Cretans in Titus 1:12-13: Paul was telling Titus to rebuke those people, who were "ac...

  • Inerrancy, liars, evil brutes and lazy gluttons

    May 31st, 201108:34 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    The word "Cretan" means (not surprisingly) an inhabitant of Crete. But it also means an uncouth, uneducated person as in: "When we were in Moscow I tried taking Billy to the Bolshoi Ballet but the Cretan listened to his heavy metal garbage the whole time on his iPod." So the word "Cretan" in fact doubles as a racial slur not unlike calling someon...

  • On Babinski's Evidential Burden: Lessons from the Tentative Atheist

    June 26th, 201010:48 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Hey, I'm on my way out for the evening but before I go I thought I would do a Thomas the Tank Engine and get some of you troublesome trucks back on the right track. Here's the problem. Now I'm being asked: "Gimme gimme gimme some evidence to believe the bible is divine revelation!" That's a nice request for another day, but alas it diverts us fro...

  • Did Jesus have any false beliefs? A look at the Gospel of Mark

    January 07th, 201009:38 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    A brief recap In this post we return to our exploration of the omniscience of the incarnate Son of God. To recap all too briefly, we saw that a blastocyst cannot be omniscient, and therefore at the point where Jesus was a blastocyst (or fetus, or neonate) he could not be omniscient. Further, our intuitions on deity leave us to conclude that omnisc...

  • Why did God command human sacrifice? (Part 2)

    May 03rd, 200911:54 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    So for the Christian discontent with residing in mystery, what are the options for understanding the Canaanite genocide? We can wade into the turbid waters by asking the following question:         Did the Canaanite genocide (and related divinely-mandated atrocities) occur? Many Old Testament scholars (thou...
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An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).