Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron W.
Two distinct responses:
1) Why must all-or-nothing be the only route? If I have a friend who gives excellent poker advice, but makes really bad life decisions outside of poker, wouldn't I still trust his poker advice?
2) What does it mean to "trust" the "entire Bible"? We'll pick the easy-to-get-into-an-argument topic of creation. I can say that I "trust" the creation account insofar as it's giving me a theological reference point for understanding who God is and God's purposes, while not "trust" it as giving me a detailed literal historical account of the beginning of the universe. In your view, have I distrusted part of the Bible by understanding it in one way as opposed to the other?
Fair enough questions.
My response to your first and probably your second question would be this.... If your friend seems to give good poker advice but then you discovered he was lying to you about many other things he told you, wouldn't you begin to question his poker advice and pretty much every story or "fact" he told you? Put very simply, sort of like the little boy who cried "wolf!". How do you know when to believe your friend and when not to? Unless the Bible explicitly says or implies that a particular story or potion is a parable, how can we start waving our wand over certain parts and deciding what is a parable or allegory or not?
Let's use the creation account example you mentioned. The Bible gives a very detailed timeline of the events of creation. If you choose to believe it's just a parable or a story to help you understand God's plan for creation but it's not a literal historical account, where did you get that information? No where does the Bible say that it's not factual and literal.
Following that line of thinking, how do we know the story of Noah is true, or Exodus is true concerning all the plagues and miracles surrounding the story of the Israelites escaping the captivity of Pharaoh? And if those miracles aren't all true, let's skip forward and talk about the miracles of the New Testament. Was Jesus really born of a virgin or was that a story told to help explain how important and special Jesus was? Did he really perform all the miracles the Bible claims he did? Did he really say that "no man comes to the Father, except through me."? Or was He just letting us know that He is one of the ways? Did Jesus really die on the cross and rise from the dead 3 days later or did he just "seem" dead? Or is the whole resurrection a hoax put on by the Apostles?
I'm not saying you disbelieve all these things because I honestly have no idea what you believe but these are lines of thinking I've heard before when people start saying they believe this but not that in the Bible. Without some magic truth meter how do we determine what is true and not? What is literal and not, especially where there are no clues that tell us it's a parable?
Speaking about these sort of common beliefs/disbeliefs, it's not unusual to find people who say, "Yes I believe Jesus was a good teacher. He had a lot of good things to say about being a good person and we should listen to what he says, but there are other ways to get to heaven than just Jesus." What they have done is seemingly randomly chosen to believe the parts of the Bible where Jesus gives us moral instructions but decided to not believe the part where he says he is "THE way, the truth and the life and no man comes to the father except by me." So either Jesus lied there or that part of the Bible is incorrect. Either way, how would one decide which verses were true and which weren't?
I hope that makes a little sense. I'm on my phone typing and it's late.