No; I did not limit my statement to saying “Adventists” were right in doing this; go back to the post and see how I worded it;
I guess Adventists are guilty then, like your denomination, for trying to follow the example of Jesus, in being selective in what we say, to whom, and when. There is nothing wrong with that; it is quite Biblical to do so.
I included all Christians in what I said. I said that we, like you are right to tell people what God directs, and that may or may not be all points on a given subject.
If this is what you meant by it, you shoot a straw man. Your comments were directed at Dennis’ following post
Dennis - 13 April 2008 11:34 AM
Bill,
Like with the Bible, Adventist apologists pick and choose whatever appeals to them--even from their revered prophetess. Consequently, with such a low, humanistic view of inspiration, the White Estate found it necessary to create the so-called “thought inspiration” alibi due to the many contradictions and heresies found in the writings attributed to Ellen White. Moreover, the SDA Church has officially replaced and deleted key words in some of their doctrinal statements (i.e., the words “all-sufficient” and “unerring” were REMOVED from their statement on the authority of Scripture).
Here is our Fundamental Belief #1:
1. The Holy Scriptures:
The Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, are the written Word of God, given by divine inspiration through holy men of God who spoke and wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. In this Word, God has committed to man the knowledge necessary for salvation. The Holy Scriptures are the infallible revelation of His will. They are the standard of character, the test of experience, the authoritative revealer of doctrines, and the trustworthy record of God’s acts in history.
(2 Peter 1:20, 21; 2 Tim. 3:16, 17; Ps. 119:105; Prov. 30:5, 6; Isa. 8:20; John 17:17; 1 Thess. 2:13; Heb. 4:12.)
I understand that “infallible” is something quite different than “inerrant”. The 1931 statement of fundamental beliefs says
That the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament were given by inspiration of God, contain an all-sufficient revelation of His will to men, and are the only unerring rule of faith and practice (2 Timothy 3:15-17).
Unerring, inerrant, means “without error”. No errors in the Bible, everything is God breathed. Because ”all Scripture is breathed out by God”, there remains no room for errors.
Highly important: 2 Timothy 3:16 says
All Scripture is breathed out by God
Notice that the text clearly identifies the content of the Bible as being “breathed out by God”, and consequently, without error, since God does not “breathe out” errors. The inspiration does not involved only the process through which the prophet is moved by the Holy Spirit but the final product, his writings. They are inerrant
Adventists, on the other side, no longer use the word “inerrant” because they don’t believe that God inspired the words, the content of the Bible, but only the men who wrote the Bible.
In the book SDA Believe, explaining the 28 points of doctrine, here is how inspiration is described:
The Greek word theopneustos, translated as “inspiration,” literally means “God-breathed.” God “breathed” truth into men’s minds. They, in turn, expressed it in the words found in the Scriptures.
God inspired men—not words
Notice the difference: the Adventist definition of inspiration is that God “breathed” truth into men’s minds. He did not breathe the Scriptures themselves, the final product. The Bible, the final product, was not inspired, the words of the Bible were not inspired. God’s inspiration stops short before the final product.
That’s a different view of inspiration. And of course, once you denie that inspiration includes the final product, the content and words of the Bible, you lose the inerrant quality of the final product, the Bible itself. And at this point, you no longer can rightfully claim that the Bible is inerrant. This is why “infallible” replaced “inerrant”. It marks a substantial change, not just a semantic one.
I understand that “infallible” is something quite different than “inerrant”. The 1931 statement of fundamental beliefs says
That the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament were given by inspiration of God, contain an all-sufficient revelation of His will to men, and are the only unerring rule of faith and practice (2 Timothy 3:15-17).
“All-sufficent” and “infallible” are pretty clear, words; not sure how you could misunderstand them; except I noticed that you do not give any specific reference for your points.
Why don’t you tell everyone where you got that comment from re the 1931 Fundamental Belief? I think some would love to see who you are plagerizing when you spout off such stuff.
“All-sufficent" and “infallible” are pretty clear, words; not sure how you could misunderstand them; except I noticed that you do not give any specific reference for your points.
Hey, mister, “all-sufficient” appears only in the 1931 statement of fundamental beliefs, together with “inerrant.” The idea is that both words are no longer available in the current statement of fundamental beliefs, which prefers “infallible”. Of course, because it’s not identical with inerrancy.
Protestant 101 - 16 June 2009 08:33 AM
Why don’t you tell everyone where you got that comment from re the 1931 Fundamental Belief? I think some would love to see who you are plagerizing when you spout off such stuff.
I quoted a comment related to the current statement of beliefs, not the 1931. It’s in the book “Seventh Day Adventists Believe”, and it may be accessed online here.
As far as the 1931 statement of belief, it is found here, The link is a page from an online version of QOD, the book that was instrumental in the removal of the label cult from the SDA church. Walter Martin thought that he has in the book the true position of the church, that the church believes in inerrancy of the Bible, one of the central doctrines that unite evangelicals.
Well, after calling me a liar as regarding my profession of faith, you call me a plagiarist. Exciting! I thought that adventists use another word for “plagiarism”, “literary borrowing”. I found the later expression quite often when they speak about Ellen’s plagiarism, sorry, literary borrowing.
“All-sufficent" and “infallible” are pretty clear, words; not sure how you could misunderstand them; except I noticed that you do not give any specific reference for your points.
Hey, mister, “all-sufficient” appears only in the 1931 statement of fundamental beliefs, together with “inerrant.” The idea is that both words are no longer available in the current statement of fundamental beliefs, which prefers “infallible”. Of course, because it’s not identical with inerrancy.
Protestant 101 - 16 June 2009 08:33 AM
Why don’t you tell everyone where you got that comment from re the 1931 Fundamental Belief? I think some would love to see who you are plagerizing when you spout off such stuff.
I quoted a comment related to the current statement of beliefs, not the 1931. It’s in the book “Seventh Day Adventists Believe”, and it may be accessed online here.
As far as the 1931 statement of belief, it is found here, The link is a page from an online version of QOD, the book that was instrumental in the removal of the label cult from the SDA church. Walter Martin thought that he has in the book the true position of the church, that the church believes in inerrancy of the Bible, one of the central doctrines that unite evangelicals.
Well, after calling me a liar as regarding my profession of faith, you call me a plagiarist. Exciting! I thought that adventists use another word for “plagiarism”, “literary borrowing”. I found the later expression quite often when they speak about Ellen’s plagiarism, sorry, literary borrowing.
Gabriel
LOL, you are funny. Calling me “Mister.” But, I guess if you want to continue building your strawman about my character, you can, or that wonderful little smokescreen with your semantic twisting of basic English with the word “infallible.”
I am asking you to clearly identify your faith; something which you seem to be having trouble doing - yet you seem so overjoyed to accuse Adventists of “hiding” who they are. Just come out with it! What Church do you belong to, and what is your main faith background? Why do you have to do all this cookie-cutter anti-Adventist rhetoric in every post? If you really want a discussion, please answer my questions.
Unerring, inerrant, means “without error”. No errors in the Bible, everything is God breathed. Because ”all Scripture is breathed out by God”, there remains no room for errors.
Highly important: 2 Timothy 3:16 says
All Scripture is breathed out by God
Notice that the text clearly identifies the content of the Bible as being “breathed out by God”, and consequently, without error, since God does not “breathe out” errors. The inspiration does not involved only the process through which the prophet is moved by the Holy Spirit but the final product, his writings. They are inerrant
Adventists, on the other side, no longer use the word “inerrant” because they don’t believe that God inspired the words, the content of the Bible, but only the men who wrote the Bible.
Gabriel, must you try so hard to find fault with everything? infallibility vs inerrancy is not an SDA thing. Many Christians believe the same. Inerrancy does not take away from the validity and infallibility of the scriptures and what they say. Notice that the Bible also says that men were ‘moved by the Holy Spirit’. There IS a human element to the scriptures. If God gave direct, breathed, word for word diction to the prophets and apostles He sure didn’t get His facts straight.
Explain why God didn’t seem to make the gospels cohesive in their explanation of the resurrection account? First you have one angel on the sepulchre,then you have two in another account. First you have Mary coming alone, then you have the apostles there, then you have a few other women there. The human element of the gospel recounting is fuzzy on the details for it is written from different perspectives. The MAIN account which is the infallible one and the most important one is that there WAS a resurrection. Jesus rose and appeared to His followers.
There is also an account where two different numbers were given for the amount of people the same event spoken of in two different areas, I can’t remember if it was in the OT or NT. Why couldn’t God give the same numbers? I believe there is also a mistake in one of the geneaologies when comparing two scriptures.
Come on, Gabriel. Sometimes I think you and Jeremy are simply picking a fight trying so hard to distance everyone from Adventism that you are grasping at straws. If you really want to get down to it, it is not Adventism that makes a smorgasbord of the scriptures. Most of evangelical Christianity who makes it sound like they would die on the altar of inerrancy pick and choose much of what they want to believe and disregard the rest. Sunday sacredness, eternal torment and the secret rapture are merely a few things that are grasped onto and the alternative blatantly ignored.
Who is mistreating the word of God more? It ain’t the SDA church.
Gabriel, must you try so hard to find fault with everything? infallibility vs inerrancy is not an SDA thing. Many Christians believe the same. Inerrancy does not take away from the validity and infallibility of the scriptures and what they say. Notice that the Bible also says that men were ‘moved by the Holy Spirit’. There IS a human element to the scriptures. If God gave direct, breathed, word for word diction to the prophets and apostles He sure didn’t get His facts straight.
Explain why God didn’t seem to make the gospels cohesive in their explanation of the resurrection account? First you have one angel on the sepulchre,then you have two in another account. First you have Mary coming alone, then you have the apostles there, then you have a few other women there. The human element of the gospel recounting is fuzzy on the details for it is written from different perspectives. The MAIN account which is the infallible one and the most important one is that there WAS a resurrection. Jesus rose and appeared to His followers.
There is also an account where two different numbers were given for the amount of people the same event spoken of in two different areas, I can’t remember if it was in the OT or NT. Why couldn’t God give the same numbers? I believe there is also a mistake in one of the geneaologies when comparing two scriptures.
Guibox, if portions of the Bible are erroneous, how do you go about determining which parts are truth and which parts are error?
I would like to hear what our friend Stan has to say about all of this, because a central feature of his debate with an Adventist who denied the Trinity was to first establish the inerrancy of Scripture. Guibox, you appear to be attacking this very point. Stan, are you out there?
guibox - 27 November 2009 07:05 AM
Come on, Gabriel. Sometimes I think you and Jeremy are simply picking a fight trying so hard to distance everyone from Adventism that you are grasping at straws. If you really want to get down to it, it is not Adventism that makes a smorgasbord of the scriptures. Most of evangelical Christianity who makes it sound like they would die on the altar of inerrancy pick and choose much of what they want to believe and disregard the rest. Sunday sacredness, eternal torment and the secret rapture are merely a few things that are grasped onto and the alternative blatantly ignored.
Who is mistreating the word of God more? It ain’t the SDA church.
So let me get this straight. Because errors exist in the Christian church, we should give Adventism a pass? By this rationale, we should turn a blind eye toward every error no matter where it is found because all of us are guilty of error at some point. It looks like your underlying message is that Gabriel and others are hypocrites because they find fault with Adventism while errors exist in their own backyard. But Gabriel and others (myself included) have come out of Adventism, and so of course we argue against what we’ve seen directly in front of us. But we have also made arguments against errors outside of Adventism, even within the former Adventist camp. Guibox, you of all people have been around long enough to see this.
In the end, I think what you really want is for Gabriel and others to stop criticizing the church that you have an interest in preserving. There are a lot of consequences for calling error by its name and some of those hit very close to home, impacting family members, jobs and friends. I have a lot of respect for people who have made the difficult decision to face the errors of Adventism head on, in many cases knowing that they would bring suffering upon themselves as a result.
Come on, Gabriel. Sometimes I think you and Jeremy are simply picking a fight trying so hard to distance everyone from Adventism that you are grasping at straws.
Guibox, as Greg alluded to, I’m sure that even your friend Stan would agree with Gabriel and I on this subject. Hopefully he’ll weigh in on this.
Inerrancy vs. errancy is not an unimportant issue.
Gabriel, must you try so hard to find fault with everything? infallibility vs inerrancy is not an SDA thing. Many Christians believe the same. Inerrancy does not take away from the validity and infallibility of the scriptures and what they say. Notice that the Bible also says that men were ‘moved by the Holy Spirit’. There IS a human element to the scriptures. If God gave direct, breathed, word for word diction to the prophets and apostles He sure didn’t get His facts straight.
Explain why God didn’t seem to make the gospels cohesive in their explanation of the resurrection account? First you have one angel on the sepulchre,then you have two in another account. First you have Mary coming alone, then you have the apostles there, then you have a few other women there. The human element of the gospel recounting is fuzzy on the details for it is written from different perspectives. The MAIN account which is the infallible one and the most important one is that there WAS a resurrection. Jesus rose and appeared to His followers.
There is also an account where two different numbers were given for the amount of people the same event spoken of in two different areas, I can’t remember if it was in the OT or NT. Why couldn’t God give the same numbers? I believe there is also a mistake in one of the geneaologies when comparing two scriptures.
Guibox, if portions of the Bible are erroneous, how do you go about determining which parts are truth and which parts are error?
I would like to hear what our friend Stan has to say about all of this, because a central feature of his debate with an Adventist who denied the Trinity was to first establish the inerrancy of Scripture. Guibox, you appear to be attacking this very point. Stan, are you out there?
guibox - 27 November 2009 07:05 AM
Come on, Gabriel. Sometimes I think you and Jeremy are simply picking a fight trying so hard to distance everyone from Adventism that you are grasping at straws. If you really want to get down to it, it is not Adventism that makes a smorgasbord of the scriptures. Most of evangelical Christianity who makes it sound like they would die on the altar of inerrancy pick and choose much of what they want to believe and disregard the rest. Sunday sacredness, eternal torment and the secret rapture are merely a few things that are grasped onto and the alternative blatantly ignored.
Who is mistreating the word of God more? It ain’t the SDA church.
So let me get this straight. Because errors exist in the Christian church, we should give Adventism a pass? By this rationale, we should turn a blind eye toward every error no matter where it is found because all of us are guilty of error at some point. It looks like your underlying message is that Gabriel and others are hypocrites because they find fault with Adventism while errors exist in their own backyard. But Gabriel and others (myself included) have come out of Adventism, and so of course we argue against what we’ve seen directly in front of us. But we have also made arguments against errors outside of Adventism, even within the former Adventist camp. Guibox, you of all people have been around long enough to see this.
In the end, I think what you really want is for Gabriel and others to stop criticizing the church that you have an interest in preserving. There are a lot of consequences for calling error by its name and some of those hit very close to home, impacting family members, jobs and friends. I have a lot of respect for people who have made the difficult decision to face the errors of Adventism head on, in many cases knowing that they would bring suffering upon themselves as a result.
Greg
Yes Greg, I am out here and on the road trying to see if we can get Marti to our Tahoe timeshare, and I am typing this from a hotel room.
I agree inerrancy is very important. THis inerrancy is claimed for the original manuscripts which unfortunately we don’t have. The scriptures were not dictated to the writers, as every writer had their own literary style. The gospel accounts are eyewitness reports according to the eyewitnesses, and if the gospels were identical, then collusion would be the charge.
I don’t claim to speak for Guibox, but he was on the SDA forum that you speak of where I defended the Trinity. Guibox was considered radical and anti-SDA, and got thrown off that forum for criticizing Ellen White, So Guibox, my brother, maybe you are conflicted. You don’t like what traditional SDA teaches, but somehow think it can be salvaged by appealing to Graeme Bradford’s views of EGW? Or a more liberal view of Sabbath keeping?
It is almost impossible to define the SDA church today. So much of SDA in SoCal is so liberal, that no Christian would recognize it.
And then again, Lee Strobel, the author of “Case for Christ” had fellowship with SDAs and spoke at the Loma Linda Univ church on October 30, at the event of the Centennial celebration of LLUMC.
This is why there is so much confusion about where SDA stands today and what it stands for, if anything.
Guibox, if portions of the Bible are erroneous, how do you go about determining which parts are truth and which parts are error?
You don’t because the scripture is infallible. Theologically it is infallible. The theology of the resurrection is true and infallible but the account of that differs in the details due to the human element. In that it may be errant but it in no way detracts from the infallible truths of the scriptures. To do what you are saying (determine which parts are true or not) is if you pitted the bible against itself theologically and made it contradicting. No SDA does that.
Greg - 27 November 2009 09:14 AM
So let me get this straight. Because errors exist in the Christian church, we should give Adventism a pass? By this rationale, we should turn a blind eye toward every error no matter where it is found because all of us are guilty of error at some point. It looks like your underlying message is that Gabriel and others are hypocrites because they find fault with Adventism while errors exist in their own backyard.
No, but that hypocrisy is rampant on this very point by Christians who finger-point at SDAs. The clear teaching of life after death in Ecclesiastes is written off by many Christians as the depressed ramblings and musings of a bi-polar king instead of theology given by God. Much of what bothers people is written off as ‘cultural’ instead of truths for all generations. All denominations are guilty of this. When I hear sanctimonious censure of SDAs saying “You are not promoting inerrancy of the scriptures!’ those people are usually guilty of worse when it comes to how they use and view what is in the scripture.
It is not criticizing SDAism, even I do that as Stan has pointed out. It is being a hypocrite on the very point of issue.
Do you have a problem with what Stan said here?
The scriptures were not dictated to the writers, as every writer had their own literary style. The gospel accounts are eyewitness reports according to the eyewitnesses, and if the gospels were identical, then collusion would be the charge.
The scriptures were not dictated to the writers, as every writer had their own literary style. The gospel accounts are eyewitness reports according to the eyewitnesses, and if the gospels were identical, then collusion would be the charge.
because I agree with it whole-heartedly.
Stan’s statement speaks to the different styles and details contained in the different gospel accounts, but Stan would still consider the Scriptures inerrant in each account. Your position differs in that you say the accounts themselves have errors in them but the theological message of all the accounts is infallible.
This leaves you open to the problem Jeremy points out. How do you know where the error ends and the truth begins? Case in point, the SDA scholar arguing against the Trinity would have affirmed infallibility but not inerrancy, claiming the Trinity doctrine is a by-product of errors in the text. How do you answer this charge if not by appealing to inerrancy? If we argue from your position that Scripture contains errors, we can easily extend the argument to show that portions of Scripture were added at a later time to support the doctrine of the Trinity and as such, the doctrine is invalidated.
This is a crucial difference between the Adventist position and that of Evangelical Christianity. At least by affirming inerrancy, we start from a position of our doctrines being tested by Scripture and not the other way around.
If there are some errors in the Scriptures, then how can you be so confident that there are no theological errors due to the human element?
Jeremy
Faith, brother. The divine+plus the human element are all inspired. Errancy doesn’t mean ‘wrong’ or ‘contrary’ to any other truths in the Bible. The Bible is infallible and does not contradict itself.
Stan’s statement speaks to the different styles and details contained in the different gospel accounts, but Stan would still consider the Scriptures inerrant in each account. Your position differs in that you say the accounts themselves have errors in them but the theological message of all the accounts is infallible.
Oh please. It’s the same thing and what we mean when we say the bible is ‘errant but infallible’. Let’s not make mountains out of molehills. What you and Jeremy are espousing is applicable to those who say ‘Paul was wrong’ or ‘David and Solomon were merely speaking their own minds’.
Greg - 27 November 2009 12:09 PM
This is a crucial difference between the Adventist position and that of Evangelical Christianity. At least by affirming inerrancy, we start from a position of our doctrines being tested by Scripture and not the other way around.
Greg
It doesn’t apply to SDAs (at least any SDA that I know of).
