Sunday, February 19, 2006

Scriptural Innerancy, Another Problem For Synergists? (Part I cont...)

Before I address the more practical issues which arise from synergist theology there is one more vital theological issue to address. All genuine christians confess that the Bible is the inspired innerant word of God and our source for absolute truth of God and man. By inspired I mean that God is the one whose words are recorded in the bible. By innerant I mean that the bible is without error, the bible is wholly the word of God. These are basic truths that are embaced by all genuine christians. My question is how can these truths be supported by a synergistic view, more particularly a libertarian view of free will. By libertarian I mean a view that the human will is absolutely free and must be by neccessity for personhood. This means that for God to override and govern human will results in humans losing their personhood.

Now in reference to the bible's innerancy I ask how could it be innerant and libertarainism in men be preserved? How can we be certin that the bible is indeed wholly the word of God if the men who penned scripture had a will which God could not govern? The apostle Peter for example as we have seen in the gospels was a sinnful man who said "Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord!" (Lk 5:8) and Peter later denied Christ, to say the least he doesn't appear to be a man of great integrity. Yet we have his writings which we call the innerant word of God how can this be? How can we be certin that Peter didn't just throw some of his own personal opnion in the writings or possibly think he was hearing from God and write a mistake that way? God couldn't stop the error for to do so would override Peter's freedom which again is essential for Peter to be a person. To use the words of Geisler and Pearl again for God override Peter's freedom to keep His word from error would constitue "Divine rape." This being so if one has embraced such views of human freedom I think the result will be problematic in trying to defend biblical innerancy.

I am not sure what the mechanics of the inspired writing looked like, I doubt that Paul and Peter suddenly went into trances and penned the epistles in a zombie like fashion. The mechanics really is irrelavant to the issue at hand. The problem for the Arminian libertarian view of free will is that it teaches God has no right lawfully to exert His will over man's will. Again as before I ask where does this view come from? As a Calvinist I have no problem defending innerancy because I have no such view of personhood and free will, God in the Reformed system is not bound in any such way. God I believe in some way (the mechanics I don't know so I am not going to just make something up) superimposed His words into the men who wrote the bible leaving no room for error. God has every right to do so and no harm is done to the personhood of the authors whom God chose to use in the task of writing His word for man.

This is a crucial issue to get this wrong will result in many problems. It is easy to trace the line of descent from Arminianism to theological liberalism. Liberalism has denied innerancy for these very reasons. To be honest I think liberalism is in a way Arminianism which is simply consistant. Not to be mean I really do respect a lot of Arminian teachers even Norman Geisler's work in apologetics I have been blessed by not to mention J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, although I think they have tweaked their views of libertarian will to be more consistantly solid. However I simply think that these problems arise from such views, where from a Reformed perspective these are non issues. I do not wish to put down Arminian brothers in Christ but I think these are problems which arise out of their school of thought.
Too much is at stake to get innerancy wrong as it is written:
"All scripture is inspired by God, and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be well fitted and adequately equiped for every good work." (2 Tim 3:16-17)

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