Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
I will not question Bible inerrancy on this forum except to know what is meant by the term. It is a negative term for what we are discussing. It's positive counterpart is perfection. Inerrancy requires perfect knowledge and perfect execution. It's substance is the breath of God, the Spirit who is God Himself. The reception of the breath of God is inspiration by which is meant to be infused with the Spirit.The question remains: How is this so?
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I went to a ministry meeting last night with a DVD from Bob Sorge, the last in the series of "Secrets of the Secret Place". I find I don't agree with Sorge's ideas in a lot of places - last night he was labouring to find what the seven flames in the lampstand in Zechariah 4 represented but it sounded like a concordance project to me.... (now, search "fire", now find seven instances which sound great in a sermon....)
However, I did sit up and take notes when he started talking about the two Olive trees in Zechariah 4:11, because it seemed this was what we've been discussing a little here: he says, in his interpretation (and he said he could well be wrong) :
the two olive trees by the side of the lampstand are the Word and the Spirit.
He said you need both - if you get the Spirit without the Word, "we'll wave goodbye to you, because you're off, you're gonna get weird". I found that quite funny and appropriate to our discussion here the last few days. I think a couple of people waved goodbye to me when I suggested you could enjoy the spirit without the word
Thinking about Sorge's idea, I had a slightly new perspective on the Word as a
guide to the experience of the Spirit - a God-inspired guide written over the centuries to help us understand this strange spirit experience. In this case, inerrant therefore being a better word than perfect. You would never see the instruction manual for a piece of IKEA furniture being described as "perfect" but you would hope it was "inerrant", because without it you'll be lost.
Perhaps it is irrelevant to discuss bible inerrancy without the Spirit, because without the Spirit the bible is not the Word, it's just a collection of books. The instructions to a Billy bookcase are only inerrant for a Billy bookcase construction, the bible is only inerrant when read with the Spirit.
It's a kind of chicken and egg mystery - the Spirit and the Word. Historically was can argue, well obviously the Spirit came before the
bible, because writing wasn't invented until the Slovenians perfected ink manufacture in 1066AD etc etc- but that's not the mystery - the mystery is, which came first, the Spirit or the Word?
A Buddhist answer to chicken and egg is that both are an illusion, names given to a collection of cells. The bible itself is an illusion too, a complicated mess of translations with a cover and a stamp on the front, it's not a "bible" it's a collection of atoms. We can argue over its source and we'll only go back to atoms and printing presses, but the Word - this is not a physical thing, it's aligned with the spirit. The Word lives in the bible when the Spirit is present.
What we have in LC is the bible, not the Word, because the spirit is denied by the Life Study and the footnotes. We won't get the Word until we delete the footnotes and open to the spirit.
This, to me, is the concept of inerrancy. Not "verse X says Y" which kills the spirit so quickly. Once, feeling generous, I said to my LC group that indeed, the concept of Locality was a great idea, I wanted to share something about it and immediately someone jumped in, piously, looked at me quite pityingly and said "it's not a concept! it's in the bible". My sharing was just killed dead. This is the sort of "bible inerrancy" which gives bible inerrancy a bad name, it's confusing inerrancy with interpretation and assuming the interpretation is inerrant.
OK sorry for the longish posts---- this is probably all first grade to most of you, I'm just enjoying exploring these ideas. Plus it's lonely out here in GMT+8 while you guys are probably all sleeping or out guzzling kegs