Poythress Inerrancy and Worldview

Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2390-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Though the Bible presents a personal and relational God, popular modern worldviews portray an impersonal divine force in a purely material world. Readers influenced by this competing worldview hold assumptions about fundamental issues-like the nature of humanity, evil, and the purpose of life-that present profound obstacles to understanding the Bible. In Inerrancy and Worldview, Dr. Vern Poythress offers the first worldview-based defense of scriptural inerrancy, showing how worldview differences create or aggravate most perceived difficulties with the Bible. His positive case for biblical inerrancy implicitly critiques the worldview of theologians like Enns, Sparks, Allert, and McGowan. Poythress, who has researched and published in a variety of fields- including science, linguistics, and sociology-deals skillfully with the challenges presented in each of these disciplines. By directly addressing key examples in each field, Poythress shows that many difficulties can be resolved simply by exposing the influence of modern materialism. Inerrancy and Worldview's positive response to current attempts to abandon or redefine inerrancy will enable Christians to respond well to modern challenges by employing a worldview that allows the Bible to speak on its own terms.

Vern S. Poythress (PhD, Harvard University; ThD, University of Stellenbosch) is Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Biblical Interpretation, and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he has taught for four decades. In addition to earning six academic degrees, he is the author of numerous books and articles on biblical interpretation, language, and science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Poythress, Vern S.

Leseproben

1

HOW CAN ONLY ONE RELIGION BE RIGHT?

Let us consider one common difficulty that modern people have with the Bible: how can there be only true religion?1

The View that All Religions Are Right

People ask this question partly because they are aware of multiple religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, to name a few. How do we respond to this multiplicity? One person, whom we may call Sue, concludes that all religions are equally right. She says that they all have a common core having to do with a loving God and being kind to your neighbor. But in selecting a common core Sue shows her own personal religious preferences. Sue speaks of a loving God. But Buddhism does not believe in a personal God. So Sue has excluded Buddhism rather than being all-inclusive. She has also excluded polytheism, which believes in many gods rather than one.2 Sue speaks of being kind to your neighbor. But some religions have practiced child sacrifice (Deut. 18:9–10).

When Sue talks about a common core, she has also put into the background the irreconcilable differences between major religions. The Bible teaches that Jesus is the Son of God. The Qur’an says that he is not the son of God, but only a prophet. The New Testament part of the Bible teaches that Jesus is the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. Modern Judaism denies that he is. Sue implicitly disagrees with all of these convictions when she implies that they really do not matter. Christianity, Islam, and Orthodox Judaism all exclude one another by having beliefs that are denied by the other two. Sue in practice excludes all three by saying that the exclusive beliefs are not the “core.” Tim Keller observes, “We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.”3

The View that All Religions Are Wrong

Let us consider another example. Donald looks over the field of religions and concludes that they are all wrong. He thinks that they all make arrogant, overreaching claims to know the truth. The differences between the claims show that no one really knows.

Donald’s position is just as exclusive as Sue’s, and just as exclusive as the claims of any one traditional religion. How so? He claims to know better than any religious practitioner the true status of religious claims. But you have to know a lot about God—whether he exists, whether he reveals himself, what kind of God he is—to make a claim that excludes all religions before seriously investigating any of them in detail. Donald thinks that religious claims are arrogant. The irony is that he is acting arrogantly in claiming to be superior to all religions.

Social Influence on Religious Beliefs

Many people in many cultures have had confidence in their religious views. But Donald does not have confidence in any religion. And today in Europe, Canada, and the United States we meet many people like him. Why? Sometimes sociology of religion has played a role. Sociologists observe that many people hold the religion of their parents or the predominant religion in their location and in their ethnic group. Religious convictions are passed on by society, and especially by parents. When Donald observes this social dimension of religion, he concludes that exclusive religious claims are a product of narrow ethnocentricity. Donald thinks that religion as a whole is suspect.

But now let us ask why Donald is so different from many people in non-Western cultures who confidently belong to a particular religion. Just like other people, Donald has received social influences, including the influence of sociology of religion. Donald’s views about religion have been socially shaped. If social shaping undermines truth, it undermines the truth of Donald’s views as well as everyone else’s. Donald’s views are just as “ethnocentric” as everyone else’s, but Donald is unaware of it.4

Worldviews

Part of the challenge in searching for the truth is that we all do so against the background of assumptions about truth. Many basic assumptions about the nature of the world fit together to form a . A worldview includes assumptions about whether God exists, what of God might exist, what kind of world we live in, how we come to know what we know, whether there are moral standards, what is the purpose of human life, and so on. Donald and those like him have inherited many convictions from the society around them.

Most modern worldviews differ at crucial points from the worldview offered in the Bible. When we come to the Bible and try to listen to its claims, we can easily misjudge those claims if we hear them only from within the framework of our own modern assumptions. Letting the Bible speak for itself, that is, letting it speak in its own terms, includes letting the Bible speak from within its own worldview rather than merely our own.

A Personal God

I propose, then, to explore this theme of differing worldviews through subsequent chapters. But I want to focus a little more narrowly. One crucial piece in the biblical worldview concerns who God is. According to the Bible, God is the Creator and sustainer of the world, and God is personal. God’s character makes a difference. If you want to find out about an apple sitting in a fruit bowl, there are many ways you might go about it. You might photograph it, chemically analyze it, smell it, cut it up, eat it. It is up to you; the apple has no choice in the matter. But getting to know a person is different. You are not completely in charge. You may be able to observe a stranger’s actions at a distance. But for real acquaintance, you must meet the person, and the person must cooperate. It is up to the other person how much he or she will tell you.

Some of the thinking about religion makes a mistake right here. If, in our thinking, God or religion becomes like an apple, we are in charge and we do our own investigating in whatever way we please. On the other hand, if God is a person, and in fact a person infinitely greater than we, it is up to him how he chooses to meet us. Until we get to know him, we cannot say whether he makes himself known in all religions equally, or in none of them, or in one particular way that fits his character.

The Bible claims to be God’s communication to us. That is an exclusive claim. But mere exclusiveness, as we have seen, does not disqualify the claim. We have to find out by reading the Bible, not by rejecting it beforehand. And we have to reckon with the fact that God as a person may be different from what we imagine him to be. Getting acquainted succeeds better if it takes place without a lot of prejudice getting in the way.5

1See the further discussion in Timothy Keller, (New York: Dutton, 2008), 3–21.

2A more nuanced discussion would have to consider monism as religion. By breaking down the distinctions between religions and trying to move toward one God behind all religions, Sue may be on the way to trying to break down all distinctions whatsoever. All is one. This view, articulated within philosophical Hinduism, actually has an affinity with polytheism. According to Hinduism, the “One” has a plurality of manifestations in nature, and this plurality is worshiped as many gods. See John N. Oswalt, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), esp. chap. 3.

3Keller, , 13.

4“If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn’t be a pluralist” (ibid., 11, quoting Alvin Plantinga, “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism,” in , ed. James F. Sennett [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 205). “You can’t say, ‘All claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now’” (Keller, , 11).

5See chap. 32, on pride.

2

ARE MORAL RULES A STRAITJACKET?

Consider a second difficulty with the Bible. Some modern people see the moral instruction in the Bible as a straitjacket.1 They may disagree with some of the Bible’s specific moral pronouncements. But they have a deeper difficulty: absolute moral rules seem to them to be an assault on their freedom.

The Worldview Question

People in other cultures have not found the same difficulty with the Bible. Many Christians in previous centuries have valued its instruction. So what causes the differences?

Once again, competing worldviews are one source of difference. The God of the Bible is a personal God. According to the Bible’s teaching and its personalist worldview, God has a moral character. Whether or not we accept his moral guidance matters to him.

But if that is all we say, we can still feel as though moral rules are an imposition on human freedom. The Bible has a many-sided reply to this modern feeling. God made human beings in his image (Gen. 1:26–28), so that we have a moral character ourselves. We have a sense of right and wrong. And God made us with a purpose, so that we would grow in fellowship with him and find freedom and satisfaction in fellowship with him rather than in isolation.

Different worldviews lead to different conceptions of freedom. If...