Is Scripture Trustworthy?
Discussions in other forums spawned by my previous post seem to have boiled down to an essential question.
How do we establish the trustworthiness of Christianity’s claims about Scripture in a way that multiple, contradictory claims by other faiths are not all rated as equally trustworthy?
So far, the person who started the conversation with me keeps appealing to presuppositional dodges: “If we first accept that Scripture is true…” isn’t a very reassuring start to a discussion of why Scripture is trustworthy. I wouldn’t normally press this particular point, but the original question was his and I’m hoping that I can salvage something out of it.
Anyone out there who has something to offer, please chime in. It’s not an attempt at a sucker-punch; I’m just trying to suss out how reasonable this expectation even is.
Of course, answering questions with other questions.
What does Christianity claim about scripture?
Is this even an answerable question to begin with?
Is there a single set of claims that one must agree to to call themselves “Christian” to begin with?
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Submitted by Pearson on Thu, 12/06/2007 - 22:19.Chuck! :D
I think you’re going in the right direction there, honestly. This issue in particular seems to be damning only to the ‘Sola Scriptura’ branch of Christianity. Or at least, other branches that embrace tradition and/or mysticism have more to fall back on when these questions are raised.
I certainly think that some kinds of trustworthiness claims can be verified. You have to figure out what your evaluation criteria is, though, naturally… And that’s what I’m trying to figure out for thise question in particular. Is there a set of evaluation criteria that can be used that doesn’t beg the question?
I want to clarify that I don’t think that this question is some sort of ‘faith trump card’… Just one of those building-block questions that I’m trying to gather together. I think an honest (Kierkegaard-style) approach would have to admit that external empirical validation of Christian exclusive-spiritual-truth-claims are frustratingly nonexistant, and that embracing the faith is — by definition — is a leap into the unknown driven by one’s internal sense of God’s existence…
It’s not inherently a bad thing, but it does take the wind out of a particular Western ‘empirical’ brand of Christianity. The difficulty, of course, is that the followers of that branch of the faith have spent the past couple centuries attacking the other branches of the faith that don’t carry the empiricism flag. The ‘all or nothing, provable or falsifiable’ mantra that they’ve been echoing for so long may have gotten to me more than I realized, despite my conceptual fondness for paradox…
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Submitted by Eaton on Thu, 12/06/2007 - 22:31.Post new comment