I could have placed something other than Psalm 27:13 -- "I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living" alongside of Psalm 56:13 -- "that I may walk before God in the light of life". A better companion text might have been Psalm 36:9 -- "For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light." The natural pairing of "life" and "light" goes all the way back to Genesis chapter 1. I am not systematic in my study; I just was "enjoying" both of those psalms recently and it seemed that both psalms suggested similar themes: in both I could see the Light coming into the darkness, being opposed, surrounded and oppressed, but ultimately the Light overcomes. Both psalms conclude with the Light returning triumphantly home to its Source.
Well, what's the issue here? Well, for one thing, how can the RecV present itself as the "consummation of 2,000 years of Bible study", and yet so studiously ignore textual themes which were probably self-evident to OT and NT readers, much less to contemporary scholarship?
Secondly, if WL doesn't have an issue with the prophet Samuel hacking king Agag to bits with a sword (1 Sam 15:33), why use David's "unchristian" sentiments to dismiss the bulk of the Psalms? The Israelites were clearly told not to accommodate or compromise with the dwellers of Canaan (e.g. Deuteronomy 7:1,2), but when WL saw David not accommodating the Philistines he judged David's writings as "natural" and "fallen". I suspect that WL was using this as an excuse to ignore the text; he simply didn't want to be bothered. Why? I don't know. Strange, when the character David is clearly such a "type" of the coming Messianic king.
Third, how could anyone sit through this? Abraham slaughtering the kings in Genesis 14:7 was okay (Hebrews 7:1 even cites Melchizedek's blessing of Abraham afterward), but David slaughtering Philistines is not? How could anyone sit through this kind of a "training" and not feel some warning lights flashing? "Disconnect! - disconnect! - disconnect!" How could thousands of otherwise intelligent "trainees" actually sit through this stuff?
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Originally Posted by james73
Copernicus didn't disprove anything, he simply proposed a new theory based on new observational data... Galileo's observations were not trying to disprove anything either, he was driven by curiosity and ability to see what is out there...
Why is this important to inerrancy? Because as I understand it, we don't have all available data yet, as far as the bible goes. We haven't yet seen Jupiter's moons.
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I don't think we can "prove" or "disprove" whether Psalm 56:13 -- "that I may walk before God in the light of life" -- which David hoped and struggled (violently) for -- is connected to, for example, 1 John's presentation of our "...handling the word of life" and "...walking in the light" (1:1,7), but WL's treatment of the Psalms seems quite "geocentric" and not "heliocentric". The evidence simply doesn't support it. The only thing that I see holding WL's thesis together is a "revelation" that he is God's oracle, and whatever he says is right, even when he's wrong. In other words, our spirit of wisdom and revelation here only says, "WL is inerrant".
Regarding the "Christian meaning" of the texts, as
james73 said, "we don't have all available data yet". I am still struggling to see "Jupiter's moons" here in the Psalms. I don't presume the vision of the age.
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I guess my point is, we'll never know for sure that the bible is inerrant until the very end.
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We likewise don't "know for sure" what Psalm 56 or 27 or 35 might be telling us as Christians today. And we don't need to "prove" that some verse of the Psalms shows some aspect of Jesus Christ. Certainly many of them seem suggestive of NT themes. But what was Paul praying for a spirit of wisdom and revelation for, anyway? Just for our reading of his epistle to the Ephesians?
It certainly would take quite a lot of faith for me, at this point, to see WL's study of the Psalms as substantially revelatory.