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Post by todd boudreaux on Mar 20, 2010 20:45:52 GMT -5
mike,
i have a good friend who is a professing christian. for some reason, he has come to the decision that salvation is universal. All of my attempts to refute his thinking have been based on scripture. when i do that he begins to attack scripture and its "unreliability" because of human error. he admits scripture in its original text is the Word of God, but not as we have it today. i've discovered that he has been reading a lot of literature from the tentmaker ministry. what do you know of the tentmaker ministry and how can i defend the Bible as we have it today against his "human error" argument?
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Post by Mike Miller on Mar 21, 2010 6:38:14 GMT -5
Tentmaker ministries is an organization that uses one verse--1 Timothy 4:10--taken out of context to build an entire doctrine. Universal salvation goes against the entire teaching of the Bible, which is clear about hell, judgment, and a book of life.
Just curious for your friend--if the Bible can't be trusted, how can it be trusted to teach universal salvation? Instead of trying to "prove" the reliability of the Bible to him, I'd ask some questions like, "Can you prove the Bible has errors?" He can't, so let me know of any specific arguments he gives, and I'll help you respond to them. Or ask, "Why do you even believe in Jesus if the Bible can't be trusted? Who has the authority to determine which parts are true and which aren't?"
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Post by todbou on Mar 22, 2010 20:26:24 GMT -5
mike,
i asked him to prove to me that the Bible has errors, and this is what i got from him:
2 Kings 8:26 says "Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign..." BUT 2 Chronicles 22:2 says "Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign..."
he has a list of 20 or so "contradictions" from the Bible. what do i say? what does it mean when we say the Bible is without error?
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Post by Mike Miller on Mar 23, 2010 8:48:45 GMT -5
Our doctrine of inerrancy extends only to the original manuscripts--which we don't have. Therefore, we have to ask the question: can we, from the existing manuscripts, determine with accuracy what the original readings were? Since computers (with spell check) and printing presses didn't exist in antiquity, manuscripts were carefully copied over and over. You would think there would be thousands of transcriptional errors (typos, if you will), but there aren't. Occasionally, we can see--by looking at all the available manuscripts--where copyists transcribed something inaccurately. However, by conducting this kind of study, we can also quite accurately determine what was in the originals. Like I said, we would expect thousand of transcriptional errors, but the truly remarkable thing is that there are actually very few.
The example from 2 Kings/2 Chronicles is one of those. Some ancient manuscripts have the 42 year old reading in 2 Chronicles, but many of them say 22 years old. At the time the King James was translated (1611), those manuscripts with "42" were the only ones available. However, the discovery of thousands and thousands of manuscripts in the last 400 years has shed great light on that. Modern translations contain "22."
Interestingly, only critics of the Bible use these kinds of tactics to try to disprove/discredit the Bible. Can you imagine someone saying, "You can't trust that medical textbook because it has a couple of typos in it. Therefore, it is all wrong." That would be stupid. And the medical text was written on computers and had a whole team of editors.
Even with all the so-called errors in the Bible (transcriptional discrepancies), not one single doctrine is affected. It's all simple issues like that, and we can still confidently determine original readings with a few very minor exceptions that relate mainly to a letter or two difference. Your friend can in no way show that the Bible--in its original form--has any errors at all. Typos don't count as errors by any literary scholar's measure. What the Bible says regarding doctrine and theology stands without any mixture of error.
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Post by todbou on Mar 23, 2010 12:19:57 GMT -5
this is exactly the point i have been trying to explain to him. thanks.
todd
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