FAULTY DOCTRINE (Hippity Hoppity)

Originally posted April of 2013, UPDATED with the NET Bible and commentary at the end.

Here is a quick 101 on the history of the Word Faith via GOT QUESTIONS:

The Word of Faith movement grew out of the Pentecostal movement in the late 20th century. Its founder was E. W. Kenyon, who studied the metaphysical New Thought teachings of Phineas Quimby. Mind science (where “name it and claim it” originated) was combined with Pentecostalism, resulting in a peculiar mix of orthodox Christianity and mysticism. Kenneth Hagin, in turn, studied under E. W. Kenyon and made the Word of Faith movement what it is today. Although individual teachings range from completely heretical to completely ridiculous, what follows is the basic theology most Word of Faith teachers align themselves with.

At the heart of the Word of Faith movement is the belief in the “force of faith.” It is believed words can be used to manipulate the faith-force, and thus actually create what they believe Scripture promises (health and wealth). Laws supposedly governing the faith-force are said to operate independently of God’s sovereign will and that God Himself is subject to these laws. This is nothing short of idolatry, turning our faith—and by extension ourselves—into god.

From here, its theology just strays further and further from Scripture: it claims that God created human beings in His literal, physical image as little gods. Before the fall, humans had the potential to call things into existence by using the faith-force. After the fall, humans took on Satan’s nature and lost the ability to call things into existence. In order to correct this situation, Jesus Christ gave up His divinity and became a man, died spiritually, took Satan’s nature upon Himself, went to hell, was born again, and rose from the dead with God’s nature. After this, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to replicate the Incarnation in believers so they could become little gods as God had originally intended.

Following the natural progression of these teachings, as little gods we again have the ability to manipulate the faith-force and become prosperous in all areas of life. Illness, sin, and failure are the result of a lack of faith, and are remedied by confession—claiming God’s promises for oneself into existence. Simply put, the Word of Faith movement exalts man to god-status and reduces God to man-status. Needless to say, this is a false representation of what Christianity is all about. Obviously, Word of Faith teaching does not take into account what is found in Scripture. Personal revelation, not Scripture, is highly relied upon in order to come up with such absurd beliefs, which is just one more proof of its heretical nature.

[….]

The Word of Faith movement is deceiving countless people, causing them to grasp after a way of life and faith that is not biblical. At its core is the same lie Satan has been telling since the Garden: “You shall be as God” (Genesis 3:5). Sadly, those who buy into the Word of Faith movement are still listening to him. Our hope is in the Lord, not in our own words, not even in our own faith (Psalm 33:20-22). Our faith comes from God in the first place (Ephesians 2:8Hebrews 12:2) and is not something we create for ourselves. So, be wary of the Word of Faith movement and any church that aligns itself with Word of Faith teachings.

Here is an example of one verse striped of context via the Word Faith movement:

Geisler & Rhodes opine:

JOSHUA 1:8—Is this verse a key to financial prosperity, as Word-Faith teachers suggest?

MISINTERPRETATION: Joshua 1:8 says, “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have suc­cess” (NASB). Word-Faith teachers say this verse is a key to financial pros­perity.

CORRECTING THE MISINTERPRETATION: Word-Faith teach­ers are reading a meaning into this verse that is not there. The context of this verse is military, not financial. In fact, finances are nowhere in sight in this entire chapter of Joshua.

In the conquest of the Promised Land, God promised Joshua that his military efforts would prosper if he maintained his commitment to meditate upon and obey God’s Word. The prospering also no doubt includes the full outworking of the land promises that were given uncon­ditionally by God in the Abrahamic Covenant (Gen. 12:1-3). Later, just before his death, Joshua urged the people to continue living in sub­mission to the Scriptures (Josh. 23:6).

What a healthy view of this Joshua verse is this:

… Sometimes we misunderstand what it means, ‘to succeed’ or ‘to prosper’ which has given rise to a prosperity teaching which places the emphasis on temporal, worldly prosperity rather than eternal spiritual wealth. God may choose to bestow worldly wealth on His children or He may permit the alternative, but the goods and chattel of this world are passing away, and like Paul we need to be content in all things.

What is important, is to know the Word of God, to trust the Word of God, and to apply the Word of God in every circumstance of life, knowing that to do so will lead to success in the Christian life; for all things work together for good to those that love the Lord and trust His Word.

We should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Word of the Lord. We should study God’s Book of instruction, particularly those passages that relate specifically to the Church, and we should continually feed on His Word in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving.

We should meditate on His Word, memorize His Word, trust His Word, and love His Word, and we should be sure to obey His Word and apply His Word in our daily lives, for in so doing we will certainly prosper and succeed in all we do, to His praise and glory….

Or s the NET BIBLE rewords a bit:

1:8 This law scroll must not leave your lips! You must memorize it day and night so you can carefully obey all that is written in it. Then you will prosper and be successful.

1:9 I repeat, be strong and brave! Don’t be afraid and don’t panic, for I, the LORD your God, am with you in all you do.”


Biblical Studies Press, The NET Bible First Edition; Bible. English. NET Bible.; The NET Bible (Biblical Studies Press, 2005), Jos 1:7–9.

A decent extended commentary can be found here to help separate the wheat from the Chaff, as competing theologies fight over interpreting verses:

1:6–9. The second half of God’s speech also begins with two imperatives (“Be strong and courageous”), though these two are effectively synonyms. These imperatives follow logically from the promise of verse 5—if no one could resist Joshua, then there was no basis for fear. Instead, as leader he was to distribute the land that God had sworn to give to their ancestors (adapting phrasing found five times in Deuteronomy). The land is thus simultaneously God’s gift and something to be claimed and allotted. Verse 7 provides a more specific focus for Joshua: He was to be strong and very courageous in carefully observing all the instruction (תּוֹרָה) that God had given through Moses. This was not simply a set of facts to be known but rather a life that was to be lived—and living this life would take effort. Drawing on the common metaphor of life as a journey, the idea is that Joshua should stay on the path that this instruction provides rather than take alternative routes, for this is the means by which he would succeed. This success is related to the task that God had given Joshua, so walking faithfully in the Mosaic instruction was the means by which Joshua could lead the people into the land that God had promised.

Joshua was to meditate (הָגָה) on this instruction. The verb, with a similar promise of success, also occurs in Ps 1:2 and means something like “growl” or “mutter.” This verbal element is more apparent in Ps 2:1, where it is translated “plot.” It is difficult to match this word to a single English verb since “meditate” is often thought of as a silent activity. That the instruction was to be in Joshua’s “mouth” is an idiom that goes naturally with the verb. Thus, he would continue reflecting on its meaning, with such reflection being verbal. This relates to the fact that reading in the ancient world meant reading aloud. In the same way, reflection on it was verbal. But what matters in particular is that Joshua’s life was to be shaped by faithfulness to God’s instruction. At this stage in the book we might think of this as unproblematic, but as the ensuing chapters unfold it becomes clear that Joshua would need to wrestle with the intent of the instruction in order to determine how it was to be applied in a range of circumstances. This would require seeing the instruction as guidance for situations that would be faced rather than as a comprehensive set of rules that could simply be applied. Joshua would need a deep knowledge of God’s instruction, which meant both knowing its content and reflecting on how it could be applied. Therefore, it could not depart from his mouth, because only by continued recitation/meditation could he both know it and understand how to apply it. Psalm 1 then broadens out this possibility for all believers.

God’s speech then concludes with a reminder of the command to be strong and courageous so that Joshua would understand there is no place for fear because Yahweh would go with him. Joshua could succeed and lead his people to success when he understood that his role as a leader was to journey with God, know God’s instruction, and shape his life by it. Success here does not mean something financial but to receive the things that God is giving. We might perhaps think of “success” as flourishing in the life God has prepared—which is the way it is developed in Psalm 1. Here, that flourishing would be military, as Israel received the land God gave.


David G. Firth, JOSHUA, ed. T. Desmond Alexander, Thomas R. Schreiner, and Andreas J. Köstenberger, Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), 72–74.

This from CROSS WISE (2011) explaining a bit about the above:

In light of another Calvary Chapel pastor making an appearance on TBN’s Praise-the-Lord program, I thought it apropos to share a tape in my collection of how a Bible believer should behave when invited onto TBN or any of the other errant “Christian” networks. What sort of message is communicated when a solid Bible teacher shares the platform with heretics and does not bring reproof? Certainly it gives the impression that the guest endorses the teaching of the hosts and /or founder of the Christian network.

Some argue that if they can’t go on TBN due to its corruption, then they couldn’t show up on ABC, NBC or CBS either. They don’t understand the distinction between being salt and light to the unsaved world and practicing biblical separation from so-called Christians who are spreading false teaching against Jesus Christ. To the unsaved, we can use their media to spread the Gospel, but to the errant brother we are to bring correction and divide if they do not stop their false teaching. For a proof-text consider 1 Corinthians 5:11:

But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called a brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or ban idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one. (NASB)

When Calvary Chapel Albuquerque’s pastor Skip Heitzig went on TBN last week acting like he and his host Phil Munsey were old friends, it was a shame to the spirit of that passage. Phil Munsey and his brother Steve Munsey are two of the most infamous extortioners in the field of Christian television. Munsey has used new age ideas of paradigm shifts and panentheism to spread his unbiblical dominionist views.

In contrast to the compromisers, the late Walter Martin tried to bring correction the last time he made an appearance on TBN. This video tape has never circulated and has not been available anywhere until now that I have posted it to YouTube.

Back in 1985 my younger sister was Martin’s secretary. She and my older sister and I all regularly attended his weekly Bible study. I used to share my research with him and also with my friend author Dave Hunt. Walter and Dave disagreed on many things regarding their styles of apologetics and discernment. Whenever there was a difference of opinion between the two of them, I usually agreed with Dave.

I had had some discussion with Dr. Martin over Dave’s book, The Seduction of Christianity. Walter had been critical about it on the radio having never read it but based his criticisms upon what his personal editor had told him.

One day my older sister was watching Praise-the-Lord when Hal Lindsey was a guest. He was her pastor at that time. Back then Hal used to challenge the teaching of other TBN regulars and Paul Crouch put up with it. However, that got old with the Crouches and when Hal wouldn’t stop criticizing the Kingdom Now doctrine, he was put on the shelf until he learned to kow-tow to them. When my sister heard Hal bring up Walter’s name in the show, Paul and Jan agreed that he was a brilliant man and Hal said you should have him on some time. They both responded – oh sure we will.

So she informed our little sister who told Walter and Walter told her to call TBN and arrange it which she did. However, the Crouches wouldn’t host him so they got prophecy teacher Doug Clark to do so. My younger sister called me on the day of the taping saying that Walter wanted me to go through Dave Hunt’s book, The Seduction of Christianity and highlight things he would be in agreement with. I was happy to do so for him. He used that information to challenge TBN’s blackballing of Dave Hunt and other whistle-blowers.

I stayed home to work the VCR I didn’t know how to program, while my two sisters attended, one in the green room and one in the audience we had stacked with many friends. Walter gave it to them with both barrels. Not only was the program not replayed at its regular slot, but the tapes were not available when people followed up to request one. Back in those days any Praise-the-Lord program could be bought on audio cassette for a small fee. And both Walter Martin and Doug Clark were never invited back. We had heard years later from Doug Clark that during the interview he kept receiving notes from the stage manager telling him to “shut that guy up” and other nasty notes….

Of Thermostats and Salt n Light | RPT’s Musings

An early morning Bible study and a question from the presenter got me thinking though the idea presented. The question was this:

  • if someone had never heard of a thermometer and a thermostat, how would you explain each and differentiate between them?  When it comes to us living out our faith, do you think we’re called to be a thermometer or a thermostat?

So I gave my thinking on this question and expand a bit in the video. Enjoy… it is for the strengthening of my fellow believers. Or as Steven Lawson says, it is to get you into an offense mode.

The two articles on business strategy can be found here:

….A thermometer reflects the temperature of the environment. It simply reacts to what’s happening around it. If the temperature is hot, it tells you so. If it’s cold, the thermometer reflects that reality as well. It’s a dumb instrument in the sense it doesn’t contain intelligent, multipurpose functionality. It has one purpose and one purpose only.

A thermostat, on the other hand, regulates the environment. It sets the desired temperature of the room and actively works to maintain it within a given range. If the temperature rises above the goal, the thermostat signals the air conditioner to crank up and cool the room down. If the temperature falls below the goal, the thermostat causes the heater to turn on in order to warm the room up. The thermostat is intelligent in the sense it’s always monitoring the environment, and if the temperature gets too hot or cold, it decides what to do to correct the situation…..

[….]

A thermometer reads the temperature in a room. If it’s hot in the room, it tells you it is hot in the room. If it is cold in the room, it tells you it’s cold. A thermometer tells you the temperature in the room.

A thermostat regulates the temperature. It helps control the temperature in the room by making small adjustments to heat or cool the room. If it gets too cold in the room, the thermostat adjusts and warms it up. If it gets too hot in the room, the thermostat adjusts and cools it down. It’s all a matter of what temperature you want to set.

The reality is that many leaders, teams and company cultures get stuck in thermometer mode. Their temperature just fluctuates up and down depending on who is in the room or what happens day to day. If it’s cold in a meeting and there is no life in the room, everyone goes cold. If it’s hot in the room and plenty of conflict or drama, everyone gets hot. Day by day their culture is just up and down depending on the temperature of the day.

But, the very best leaders, teams and company cultures operate more in thermostat mode. They are very clear what temperature they are trying to set. They intentionally take time to make sure all on their team understand what type of culture they are trying to create. They are precise with their language, they communicate consistently, and they coach others to understand what temperature they are striving to achieve every day. When it gets too hot in a room, they are able to regulate the temperature back down. When there is no life in a room and it’s way too cold, they are able to breathe life and warmth into the environment….

Thermometer vs. Thermostat (leadership lessons)

Are You a Thermometer or Thermostat Leader?

What Is Fascism? Biden Admin and Amazon Explain

The NATIONAL REVIEW article Dennis Prager is reading from can be found here: “Biden White House Pressured Amazon to Censor Vaccine-Skeptical Books, Internal Emails Reveal” The PRAGER U video mentioned (and the excerpt I included) can be found here: “Big Business & Big Brother”. And the other THOMAS SOWELL video is via this YouTube Channel. Must read JIM JORDAN’S Twitter thread as well.

How biased are these pushes? Mollie Hemingway and Laura Ingraham explain:

‘The Federalist’ editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway discusses NewsGuard’s global disinformation index categorizing right-leading media outlets as ‘risky’ and left-leaning outlets as ‘least risky’ for disinformation on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’

 

Teaching Kids How To Think Through The Headlines (Transphobic?)

This is utterly brilliant. A student accuses @jk_rowling of being transphobic. This teacher skillfully dissects the claim and challenges it by asking questions.

He teaches not what to think, but how to think critically.

Watch until the end.

(Lee Harris)

TWITCHY is all in:

The lawyers in the audience will be very quick to recognize what this is: The Socratic Method. To quote the University of Chicago Law School website on the topic:

Socrates (470-399 BC) was a Greek philosopher who sought to get to the foundations of his students’ and colleagues’ views by asking continual questions until a contradiction was exposed, thus proving the fallacy of the initial assumption. This became known as the Socratic Method, and may be Socrates’ most enduring contribution to philosophy.

In practice, it is not always about finding contradictions, but about exposing assumptions and basically teaching people to literally question everything. Of course, as the old saying goes, you don’t want your mind to be so open your brain falls out, but you should always check your own assumptions.

For instance, applied here, we should note that we have no idea when that video was shot. We aren’t even sure where it was shot, or who was participating. We are sharing it because it has recently gotten attention and it speaks for itself. But we admittedly don’t know much beyond that.

The Socratic Method is also a fun way to drive a person crazy on TSMSFKA Twitter (The Social Media Site Formerly Known As Twitter), Socratically interrogating the positions of leftists and showing how incoherent it is. But it’s also probably why this author is on a lot of leftist block lists. As one TSMSFKA Twitter user noted a while back:

Twitter media account Discussing Film called Harry Potter author a ‘known transphobe’ when reporting on her being made an executive producer on the Harry Potter reboot series. Some people will NEVER stop hating this woman… unless they get sued for defamation, probably.

More info via CLOWNFISH TV:

The controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling and the Discussing Film Twitter account’s labeling of her as a “known transphobe” stems from a series of tweets and public statements made by Rowling over the past few years. These comments have been widely criticized by the transgender community and their allies.

The controversy began with Rowling’s reaction to an article discussing “people who menstruate,” where she seemingly mocked the inclusive language by tweeting, “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” This tweet and subsequent comments by Rowling conflated sex and gender, leading to widespread criticism. She argued that “erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives” and maintained that “sex is real”​​​​.

Rowling has repeatedly stated that she supports transgender rights and that her comments are not meant to be hateful but are rather an expression of her belief in the importance of recognizing biological sex. She has expressed concerns about the impact of “new trans activism” on women’s rights and spaces. However, organizations like GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign have criticized her comments, stating that they target trans people and distort facts about gender identity​​​​.

The Discussing Film Twitter account’s reference to Rowling as a “known transphobe” in a tweet about her being an active executive producer on the ‘HARRY POTTER’ series reflects the ongoing controversy surrounding her views on gender and sex. This characterization of Rowling has been supported by some and criticized by others, with various reactions emerging on social media. The backlash and support for the tweet highlight the polarized nature of the debate around Rowling’s comments and their impact on the trans community and broader discussions about gender identity and inclusion​​​​.

Patrick Bet-David Exposes Bill Maher’s “Informed Choices”

A tense moment of Club Random as Patrick Bet David asks Bill Maher to name one positive thing Gavin Newsom has done Bill is rendered unable to do so, and deflects to a pathetic “You’re better than this” platitude

If you ever want to see one of your liberal friends throw a tantrum, just ask them to defend their own logic and reasoning. They cannot win an argument without a government mandate

(Eric Abbenante)

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks about Valuetainment’s Patrick Bet-David tricking Bill Maher into admitting Gavin Newsom’s failures on the “Club Random Podcast”; Bill Maher attacking Joe Biden for lying about his ability to stop the border crisis on “Real Time with Bill Maher”; Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and 149 other Democrats voting against deporting illegal immigrants for drunk driving; NYC District Attorney Alvin Bragg releasing the migrants who attacked officers of the NYPD; CNN’s Erica Hill realizing why migrants are stealing in NYC, spending the money in Florida, and then returning to NYC; Jordan Peterson telling Michael Malice how the same focus on group identity that the Left is pushing today also led to countless deaths in Rwanda and in the Soviet Union; re-elected President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele pointing out the hypocrisy of activists’ hyper-focused concern on the rights of criminals at the expense of regular people, and much more.

Archaeological Evidences for the Bible

(Originally Posted July of 2010)

CRI’s EQUIP post has a short list to make the point:

A Common Flood Story. Not just the Hebrews (Gen. 6–8), but Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Greeks all report a flood in primordial times. A Sumerian king list from c. 2100 BC divides itself into two categories: those kings who ruled before a great flood and those who ruled after it. One of the earliest examples of Sumero-Akkadian-Babylonian literature, the Gilgamesh Epic, describes a great flood sent as punishment by the gods, with humanity saved only when the pious Utnapishtim (AKA, “the Mesopotamian Noah”) builds a ship and saves the animal world thereon. A later Greek counterpart, the story of Deucalion and Phyrra, tells of a couple who survived a great flood sent by an angry Zeus. Taking refuge atop Mount Parnassus (AKA, “the Greek Ararat”), they supposedly repopulated the earth by heaving stones behind them that sprang into human beings.

The Code of Hammurabi. This seven-foot black diorite stele, discovered at Susa and presently located in the Louvre museum, contains 282 engraved laws of Babylonian King Hammurabi (fl. 1750 BC). The common basis for this law code is the lex talionis (“the law of the tooth”), showing that there was a common Semitic law of retribution in the ancient Near East, which is clearly reflected in the Pentateuch. Exodus 21:23–25, for example, reads: “But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot…” (niv).

The Nuzi Tablets. The some 20,000 cuneiform clay tablets discovered at the ruins of Nuzi, east of the Tigris River and datable to c. 1500 BC, reveal institutions, practices, and customs remarkably congruent to those found in Genesis. These tablets include treaties, marriage arrangements, rules regarding inheritance, adoption, and the like.

The Existence of Hittites. Genesis 23 reports that Abraham buried Sarah in the Cave of Machpelah, which he purchased from Ephron the Hittite. Second Samuel 11 tells of David’s adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. A century ago the Hittites were unknown outside of the Old Testament, and critics claimed that they were a figment of biblical imagination. In 1906, however, archaeologists digging east of Ankara, Turkey, discovered the ruins of Hattusas, the ancient Hittite capital at what is today called Boghazkoy, as well as its vast collection of Hittite historical records, which showed an empire flourishing in the mid-second millennium BC. This critical challenge, among many others, was immediately proved worthless — a pattern that would often be repeated in the decades to come.

The Merneptah Stele. A seven-foot slab engraved with hieroglyphics, also called the Israel Stele, boasts of the Egyptian pharaoh’s conquest of Libyans and peoples in Palestine, including the Israelites: “Israel — his seed is not.” This is the earliest reference to Israel in nonbiblical sources and demonstrates that, as of c. 1230 BC, the Hebrews were already living in the Promised Land.

Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. In addition to Jericho, places such as Haran, Hazor, Dan, Megiddo, Shechem, Samaria, Shiloh, Gezer, Gibeah, Beth Shemesh, Beth Shean, Beersheba, Lachish, and many other urban sites have been excavated, quite apart from such larger and obvious locations as Jerusalem or Babylon. Such geographical markers are extremely significant in demonstrating that fact, not fantasy, is intended in the Old Testament historical narratives; otherwise, the specificity regarding these urban sites would have been replaced by “Once upon a time” narratives with only hazy geographical parameters, if any.

Israel’s enemies in the Hebrew Bible likewise are not contrived but solidly historical. Among the most dangerous of these were the Philistines, the people after whom Palestine itself would be named. Their earliest depiction is on the Temple of Rameses III at Thebes, c. 1150 BC, as “peoples of the sea” who invaded the Delta area and later the coastal plain of Canaan. The Pentapolis (five cities) they established — namely Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gaza, Gath, and Ekron — have all been excavated, at least in part, and some remain cities to this day. Such precise urban evidence measures favorably when compared with the geographical sites claimed in the holy books of other religious systems, which often have no basis whatever in reality.10

Shishak’s Invasion of Judah. First Kings 14 and 2 Chronicles 12 tell of Pharaoh Shishak’s conquest of Judah in the fifth year of the reign of King Rehoboam, the brainless son of Solomon, and how Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem was robbed of its treasures on that occasion. This victory is also commemorated in hieroglyphic wall carvings on the Temple of Amon at Thebes.

The Moabite Stone. Second Kings 3 reports that Mesha, the king of Moab, rebelled against the king of Israel following the death of Ahab. A three-foot stone slab, also called the Mesha Stele, confirms the revolt by claiming triumph over Ahab’s family, c. 850 BC, and that Israel had “perished forever.”

Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. In 2 Kings 9–10, Jehu is mentioned as King of Israel (841–814 BC). That the growing power of Assyria was already encroaching on the northern kings prior to their ultimate conquest in 722 BC is demonstrated by a six-and-a-half-foot black obelisk discovered in the ruins of the palace at Nimrud in 1846. On it, Jehu is shown kneeling before Shalmaneser III and offering tribute to the Assyrian king, the only relief we have to date of a Hebrew monarch.

Burial Plaque of King Uzziah. Down in Judah, King Uzziah ruled from 792 to 740 BC, a contemporary of Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah. Like Solomon, he began well and ended badly. In 2 Chronicles 26 his sin is recorded, which resulted in his being struck with leprosy later in life. When Uzziah died, he was interred in a “field of burial that belonged to the kings.” His stone burial plaque has been discovered on the Mount of Olives, and it reads: “Here, the bones of Uzziah, King of Judah, were brought. Do not open.”

Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. King Hezekiah of Judah ruled from 721 to 686 BC. Fearing a siege by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, Hezekiah preserved Jerusalem’s water supply by cutting a tunnel through 1,750 feet of solid rock from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam inside the city walls (2 Kings 20; 2 Chron. 32). At the Siloam end of the tunnel, an inscription, presently in the archaeological museum at Istanbul, Turkey, celebrates this remarkable accomplishment. The tunnel is probably the only biblical site that has not changed its appearance in 2,700 years.

The Sennacherib Prism. After having conquered the 10 northern tribes of Israel, the Assyrians moved southward to do the same to Judah (2 Kings 18–19). The prophet Isaiah, however, told Hezekiah that God would protect Judah and Jerusalem against Sennacherib (2 Chron. 32; Isa. 36–37). Assyrian records virtually confirm this. The cuneiform on a hexagonal, 15-inch baked clay prism found at the Assyrian capital of Nineveh describes Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah in 701 BC in which it claims that the Assyrian king shut Hezekiah inside Jerusalem “like a caged bird.” Like the biblical record, however, it does not state that he conquered Jerusalem, which the prism certainly would have done had this been the case. The Assyrians, in fact, bypassed Jerusalem on their way to Egypt, and the city would not fall until the time of Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians in 586 BC. Sennacherib himself returned to Nineveh where his own sons murdered him.

The Cylinder of Cyrus the Great. Second Chronicles 36:23 and Ezra 1 report that Cyrus the Great of Persia, after conquering Babylon, permitted Jews in the Babylonian Captivity to return to their homeland. Isaiah had even prophesied this (Isa. 44:28). This tolerant policy of the founder of the Persian Empire is borne out by the discovery of a nine-inch clay cylinder found at Babylon from the time of its conquest, 539 BC, which reports Cyrus’s victory and his subsequent policy of permitting Babylonian captives to return to their homes and even rebuild their temples.

So it goes. This list of correlations between Old Testament texts and the hard evidence of Near Eastern archaeology could easily be tripled in length….

Bible Reliability 3: Archeological Discoveries

Here are some older posts/conversations:

This story has an important facet for us apologists, but first, let us enjoy this finds belated attribution:

Jerusalem Post: Long time archaeological riddle solved

The riddle of the identity of a 3,200-year-old round bronze tablet with a carved face of a woman has apparently been solved, 13 years after it was discovered at the El-ahwat excavation site between Katzir-Harish and Nahal Iron (Wadi Ara) by scientist Oren Cohen of the University of Haifa.

The small, broken-off piece of metal is probably part of a linchpin that held the wheel to a war chariot sent to battle by the Canaanite general Sisera against the Israelites, says Prof. Adam Zertal, who for 33 years has led weekly walks with university colleagues and volunteers over “every square meter” of Samaria and the Jordan Rift to search for archeological evidence from biblical times.

The round, bronze tablet, about 2 centimeters in diameter and 5 millimeters thick, features a carved face of a woman wearing a cap and earrings shaped as chariot wheels. It was found in a structure identified as the “Governor’s House.”

Cohen was unable to find its parallel in any other archeological discoveries. When carrying out a study on the walls of the Temple of Rameses III in Egypt of ancient reliefs depicting chariot battles, Cohen identified a unique decoration – the bronze linchpins fastening the chariot wheels were decorated with the faces of captives, foreigners and enemies of Egypt. He also noticed that these decorations characterized those chariots that were used by royalty and other dignitaries. Cohen found that the linchpin with the woman’s face found near Katzir was almost identical to that found in the Egyptian temple.

The identification as a linchpin, Zertal said, reinforces the claim that a high-ranking Egyptian or local ruler was based at this location and is likely to support the theory that the site is Haroshet Hagoyim – the Canaanite base of Sisera, as mentioned in the fourth and fifth chapter of the Book of Judges, the 70-year archeologist told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

The Egyptians and Canaanites both created linchpins for chariots with the carved faces of their enemies; the place on the wheels were considered “very undignified,” said Zertal, like the Jews putting Haman’s name on the soles of their shoes for beating against the floor while the Book of Esther is read aloud…

…Sisera was the captain of the army of Yavin, king of Canaan. According to Judges 4:3, Sisera led an army of 900 iron chariots and oppressed the Israelites for two decades. Deborah the Prophetess, then leader of the Israelite tribes, persuaded Barak to face Sisera in battle. He led a force of 10,000 and destroyed the army of Sisera, whose origin was completely unknown. The battle, the Bible says, led to a 40-year peace…

…The Haifa archeologist was raised at a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz and severely wounded in the Yom Kippur War. “I spent a year at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and I became interested in archeology. Although I had argued that the Bible was full of myths, I decided after my recovery to travel the land by foot to look for archeological evidence.”

Zertal, who took the walks often using crutches from his decades-old injury, added: “I am a man of science and have to investigate whether what is described in the Bible suits the geography. Nobody thought there was an altar on Mount Ebal, but the evidence was found. It is not a legend. When you do archeological research as you should, you see a lot [of the biblical stories] is reality.”

…(read more)…

This last part is key, let me explain. Archaeology has served as one of the great evidences for the skeptical person to have many of their doubts answered. I wish to display the above in some past debates I have had. Since many of these past debates are about a decade old or older, referencing isn’t up to my current par… but you will get the main point of the discussions at hand. Also keep in mind these are portions of larger responses… so you may feel like you just stepped into the middle of a conversation – you would be right.

The first presentation is a discussion between myself and Rocket Girl, the second between myself a Nightmyre.

Discussion with Rocket Girl

Rocket Girl made reference to where the evidence for Noah’s Flood is, Sodom and Gomorrah (here is an article, see video as well), and the like. I respond:

People use to say the same about David, Saul, Solomon.  The Bible makes mention of the Hittites 47 times… people use to say “where is the evidence for these peoples?  It must be a myth!” As with David, Saul, and the many others once thought to be mythical, all have been found.  In fact, Turkey has a museum dedicated solely to the Hittite peoples.

Rocket Girl mentioned wanting proof for Noah’s Ark.  This proof would also require evidence for a worldwide flood, and keeping this short and sweet, over 75% of the earth’s crust is sediment – that is, the matter that settles to the bottom of a liquid; lees; dregs (Webster).  That’s a lot of proof of water at some point in earth’s history.  Over 220 cultures (from the Australian Aboriginal to the South American Indian to the Russians and Chinese) separated by time and water all have stories of the first man being red (Hebrew for Adam means red clay), a worldwide flood, a bird being released after the craft landed, and an animal sacrifice, etc.

It seems funny that one would ask for evidence of Sodom and Gomorrah, as this town has been found.  There are writings from antiquity (other than Biblical) about it as well as the excavation of Bab edh-Dhra.  The writings of Nebuchadnezzar speak of the world having one language and all living around a great tower that he tried to rebuild (that Saddam Hussein is rebuilding as well).  Man-made items found in most geological layers (even the pre-Cambrian).  Dinosaur boned found by riverbeds so fresh at first they thought to be Bison bones.  T-Rex blood found in an un-mineralized bone. As well as dino bones found with blood cells and proteins.  Ancient stone work of Dinosaurs, Etc., Etc.

Sir Frederic Kenyon, former director and principle librarian of the British Museum, was possibly the most respected New Testament textual scholar in our century. Shortly before his death he commented on the significance of the fact that the evidence is overwhelming that the Gospels were composed shortly after the events of Christ’s life and that the early church widely distributed them within its congregations within a relatively short period of time is significant. Kenyon wrote:

“the interval, then, between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.”

After a lifetime of in-depth review of the New Testament manuscripts, Kenyon concluded that the present text in our Bible is absolutely reliable. He wrote: “It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.”

Dr William F. Albright was unquestionably one of the world’s most brilliant Biblical archaeologists. In 1955 he wrote: “We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid bases for dating any book of the New Testament after circa A.D.80.” He was a skeptic! However, over the next several decades of discoveries were convincing enough to make him pen this on the New Testament being written: “probably sometime between circa A.D.50 and 75.”   Albright concluded, from the evidence, that the writing of the New Testament within a few years of the events of Christ’s life and the writing was “too slight to permit any appreciable corruption of the essential center and even of the specific wording of the sayings of Christ.” In other words, Professor Albright, one of the greatest minds in the field of archaeology and ancient texts, concluded (via evidence) that the New Testament records the truth about Jesus Christ and His statements.

Dr. John A.T. Robinson was a distinguished lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge and developed a reputation as a great scholar. Naturally, he accepted the academic consensus universally held since 1900, that denied the disciples and Paul wrote the New Testament and concluded that it was written up to a hundred years after Christ. However, an article in Time magazine, March 21, 1977, reported that Robinson decided to personally investigate for himself the arguments behind this scholarly “consensus” against the New Testament’s reliability because he realized that very little original research had been completed in this field in this century. He was shocked to discover that much of past scholarship against the New Testament was untenable because it was based on a “tyranny of unexamined assumptions” and what he felt must have been an “almost willful blindness.”

To the amazement of his university colleagues, Robinson concluded that the apostles must have been the genuine writers of the New Testament books in the years prior to A.D.64. He also noted that if you were to reject the evidence of the before mentioned research and throw out the conclusions of original authorship of the New Testament. You would also have to throw out every ancient writing of antiquity as well as historical writings of recent and ancient origin.

Some More

Archaeological Discoveries have done nothing but fortify the Gospels and the events in them. The New Testament alone has over 25,000 archaeological sites alone, and every turn of the archaeologists spade reveals one more truth of the evidences of faith. Not one prophecy, historical fact, archaeological, or scientific find about (or in) the bible has been shown to be wrong.

Dr. Nelson Gleuck, president of Hebrew Union College and the leading Palestinian archaeologist of the twentieth century said: “it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible.”

William Ramsay, the English scholar, traveled as a young man to Asia Minor over a century ago for the sole purpose of disproving the Bible’s history as described by Luke in his Gospel and in the book of Acts. Ramsey and his professors were convinced that the New Testament record must be terribly inaccurate. He believed that Luke could not be correct in his history of Christ or in his account about the growth of the Church during the first decades following Christ. Dr. Ramsay began digging in the ancient ruins of sites throughout Greece and Asia Minor, searching for ancient names, boundary markers, and other archaeological finds that would conclusively prove that Luke had invented his history Christ and His Church.  To his amazement and dismay, William Ramsay discovered that the statements of the New Testament Scriptures were accurate in the smallest detail. Finally, Dr. Ramsay was convinced by the overwhelming evidence proving the Bible’s accuracy. Consequently, he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Savior (based on the evidence alone).

A.N. Sherwin-White, was a great (some say the greatest historian of Roman life, history, and culture) classical historical scholar at Oxford University who studied the extensive evidence for and against the historical accuracy of the Book of Acts. Sherwin-White wrote his conclusion after studying the evidence: “For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming… any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd.”

Discussion with Nightmyre

Nightmyre, you said:

“Christianity, and many other religions, put forth the concept of Heaven and Hell. Obviously, there is no basis in REALITY for these two locations. You cannot look on a map and pinpoint the physical location of heavan and hell. However the religion gives you the TOOLS NECESSARY to reach this goal. And using these tools requires a large amount of faith, because you are NEVER certain that you will reach your goal.”

You show a very tainted view of what Christianity actually teaches.  You seem to clump many beliefs (not just Christianity) into one set or way of thinking.  This is not only disrespectful to me (although it really doesn’t bother me), it is disrespectful to others of various faiths.  I make it a goal to, at the least, when I deal with other faiths, to really delve into what they actually teach and believe.  I will post some stuff here to assist in showing you where you are off the mark in just one area of the Christian faith.

Obviously, if the God of the universe has revealed Himself and is the only true God, and if Christ is the only true way of salvation, then we would expect convincing evidence to substantiate this. Not just some evidence, or inferior evidence-so that a person has a dozen equally valid options in the choice of their religion-but superior evidence. Dr. John Warwick Montgomery asks:

“What if a revelational truth-claim did not turn on questions of theology and religious philosophy-on any kind of esoteric, fideistic method available only to those who are already “true believers” – but on the very reasoning employed in the law to determine questions of fact?Eastern faiths and Islam, to take familiar examples, ask the uncommitted seeker to discover their truth experientially: the faith-experience will be self-validating…. Christianity, on the other hand, declares that the truth of its absolute claims rests squarely on certain historical facts, open to ordinary investigation…. The advantage of a jurisprudential approach lies in the difficulty of jettisoning it: legal standards of evidence developed as essential means of resolving the most intractable disputes in society Thus one cannot very well throw out legal reasoning merely because its application to Christianity results in a verdict for the Christian faith.”

Dr. John Warwick Montgomery makes the point again that “the historic Christian claim differs qualitatively from the claims of all other world religions at the epistemological point: on the issue of testability” (“The Jury Returns: A Juridical Defense of Christianity,” in Evidence for Faith: Deciding the God Question, p. 319).  A good example of someone taking the faith up on its claims were Viggo Olsen, M.D., author of Daktar: Diplomat in Bangladesh, and his wife, who were both skeptics who…

“decided to embark on a detailed study of Christianity with the intention of rejecting it on intellectual grounds.  Little by little, as they studied works that deal with data common to apologetics and evidencesthey were led step by step to see the truthfulness of Christianity.  Their study was no minor investigation or causal perusal.  It was an exhaustive search” (Frederick R. Howe, The Role of Apologetics and Evangelism).

And this claim to truth includes the possibility of self-defeating constructs within the framework of Christian philosophy, which I have shown to be in the atheists philosophy.  Mortimer J. Adler is one of the world’s leading philosophers, chairman of the board of editors for the Encyclopedia Britannica, architect of the Great Books of the Western World series and its remarkable Syntopicon, he is also the director of the prestigious Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago.  Adler says, “I believe Christianity is the only logical, consistent faith in the world” (Christianity Today, Nov. 19, 1990).  Did you get that?  One of the greatest philosophers of our time said that unlike Christianity, every religion that claims to have an epistemology is self-defeating.

Dr. Drew Trotter, a Cambridge University graduate, argues convincingly that “logic and the evidence both point to the reality of absolute truth….”  George F. Gilder, one of our century’s “greatest minds,” and author of Wealth and Poverty and Telecosm, says “Christianity is true, and its truth will be discovered anywhere you look very far”] (David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search for Truth, p. 13).  Principle at Wycliff Hall, Alister McGrath, author of Intellectual Don’t Need God and Other Myths, says the evidence for Christianity is akin to that found in doing good scientific research:

“When I was undertaking my doctoral research in molecular biology at Oxford University, I was frequently confronted with a number of theories offering to explain a given observation.  In the end, I had to make a judgment concerning which of them possessed the greatest internal consistency, the greatest degree of predictive ability.  Unless I was to abandon any possibility of advance in understanding, I was obliged to make such a judgmentI would claim the right to speak of the ‘superiority’ of Christianity in this explicative sense” (“Response to John Hick,” in More Than One Way? Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, p. 68).

Noted Christian scholar Dr. Carl F. H. Henry wrote a three thousand page, six volume work on the topic of God, Revelation, and Authority.  After his exhaustive [to say the least] analysis, Henry declared that “Truth is Christianity’s most enduring asset…” (Ajith Fernando, The Supremacy of Christ, p. 109).

Dr. Robert A. Morey writes,

“There is more than enough evidence on every hand from every department of human experience and knowledge to demonstrate that Christianity is true [It is the faith of the non-Christian [that] is externally and internally groundless.  They are the ones who leap in the dark.  Some, like Kierkegaard, have admitted this” (Introduction to Defending the Faith, p. 38).

James Sire points out in his book, Why Should Anyone Believe Anything At All?, that an argument for belief, religious or otherwise, must be secured on the best evidence, validly argued, and able to refute the strongest objections that can be mustered against it (p. 10).  Dr. Norman Geisler adds that “In the face of overwhelming apologetic evidence, unbelief becomes perverse” (Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics, p. 529).

Millian vs Marxian Educational Goals | Jon Haidt

Rapid change… is the goal:

“Two incompatible sacred values in American universities” Jon Haidt, Hayek Lecture Series

On October 6, 2016, Professor Jonathan Haidt gave a Hayek Lecture at Duke. The event was co-sponsored by the programs in the History of Political Economy (HOPE), Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE), and American Values and Institutions (AVI). The event was open to the public, but also served as a guest lecture in Professor Jonathan Anomaly’s PPE course.

Professor Haidt argues that conflicts arise at many American universities today because they are pursuing two potentially incompatible goals: truth and social justice. While Haidt thinks both goals are important, he maintains that they can come into conflict.

According to some versions of social justice, whenever we observe a disparity of outcomes between races, genders, or other groups, we should infer that injustice has been done. Haidt challenges this view of social justice and shows how it sometimes leads to violations of truth, and even justice.

Haidt concludes that universities should be free to pursue whatever goals – truth or social justice – they want, but that they should make it clear which of these two goals is their “telos” – their highest purpose. He ends with a discussion of his initiative, HeterodoxAcademy.org, to bring more viewpoint diversity to universities in order to improve research and learning.

The fuller article is worth your time – via Michael Nayna at the PROCESS:

Haidt used two quotes to exemplify the opposing perspectives, the first from liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…

… he must know them (opposing opinions) in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

This quote reflects a liberal arts perspective. One that considers the discovery of truth as primary and is more concerned with accuracy than what’s to be done with the findings.

Embedded in this spirit of curious humility is a belief that objective reality exists and is accessible to all inquiring minds as long as they’re willing and able to overcome their subjective biases.

We recognize research conducted in this Millian disposition as scientific, with rigorous empirical methods, the development of testable hypotheses, and systematic observation, all being reflections of a striving toward the reduction of subjective bias.

Haidt contrasts this Millian perspective with that of Karl Marx, the father of communism, who was notoriously pragmatic in his pursuit of revolution.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

– Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

This quote reveals an activist’s disposition that regards the effect of thought as its primary purpose. Embedded in this perspective is an eagerness to impose one’s will on the world and it would likely give rise to an eye roll if confronted with Millian appeals to dispassionate analysis….

A related couple posts:

ENDLESS ROADS | Complete Movie (+ Two Old Sector 9 Movies)

ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2014

Complete movie edition that gathers the four chapters that composed Endless Roads. 7 female riders, 1 van, 15 days, 4.300 km, 416 GB of raw material… This film documents the adventure of the trip, portraying the girls, their lifestyle and their passion for longboard.

MUSIC

  • “El Rancho” – Corizonas
  • “George” – The Casters
  • “The Falcon Sleeps Tonight” – Corizonas
  • “Death And Above” – Eric Fuentes
  • “The Bag” – Tuya
  • “La la la” – Anni B Sweet
  • “George” – The Casters
  • “Sabor a fresa” – Alfonso Santisteban
  • “The girl from Spain” – Alfonso Santisteban
  • “Tema de amor” – Carlo Coupe
  • “Hold Your Maker’s Hand” – Joe la Reina
  • “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51” – Johann Sebastian Bach
  • “Cake” – Tuya
  • “Killingberry Blues” – Joe la Reina
  • “Confusion” – Cycle
  • “Appalooza” – Joe la Reina

(Thanks to Subterfuge Records)

Rollin 9

Red 9

And, as a bonus, and old TRUTH video:

Responding To “Science Disproves the Bible” Trope On Facebook

A  meme page of FB makes some good stuff once in a while, and so I follow the page. This comment on one of the memes caught my eye so I chose to respond to it.

This was a comment I noted:

  • The very first chapter of the very first book of the bible has a creation myth that’s dead wrong about every detail of the history of the universe, the formation of stars and planets and the evolution of life, so you don’t know nearly as much as you think you know.

I RESPOND:

When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. In order to make the universe static, he had to FUDGE his equations by putting in a factor that would hold the universe steady.

In the 1920’s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaitre were able to develop models based on Einstein’s theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course, this meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn’t exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this the Big Bang — and the name stuck! [Later in his career, Fred Hoyle confirmed the expansion through work on the second most plentiful element in the universe, helium.]

Starting in the 1920’s, scientists began to find empirical evidence that supported these purely mathematical models.

PAUSE…

LET US TAKE A QUICK BREAK from this excerpt to fill in some information from another excerpt, and then we will continue:

As mathematicians explored the theoretical evidence, astronomers began to make observations confirming the expansion of the universe. Vesto Slipher, an American astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory. in Flagstaff, Arizona, spent nearly ten years perfecting his understanding of spectrograph readings. His observations revealed something remarkable. If a distant object was moving toward Earth, its observable spectrograph colors shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum. If a distant object was moving away from Earth, its colors shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.

Slipher identified several nebulae and observed a redshift in their spectrographic colors. If these nebulae were moving away from our galaxy (and one another), as Slipher observed, they must have once been tightly clustered together. In 1914, he offered these findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, proposing them as evidence the universe was expanding.

A graduate student named Edwin Hubble seas in attendance and realized the implica­tions of Slipher’s work. Hubble later began working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles. Using the Hooker telescope, he eventually proved Slipher’s nebulae were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way composed of billions of stars. By 1929, Hubble published find­ings of his own, verifying Slipher’s observations and demonstrating the speed at which a star or galaxy moves away from us increases with its distance from Earth. This once again confirmed the expansion of the universe.

…CONTINUING…

For instance, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears redder than it should be, and this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Hubble’s astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaitre.

Then in the 1940’s, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the universe’s background radiation — and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There’s no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and a very dense state of the universe, which was predicted by the Big Bang model.

“Certainly there was something that set it all off. Certainly, if you are religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis.” Robert Wilson

Dr. Wilson is an American astronomer, 1978 Nobel laureate in physics, who with Arno Allan Penzias discovered in 1964 the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB)…. While working on a new type of antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, they found a source of noise in the atmosphere that they could not explain. After removing all potential sources of noise, including pigeon droppings on the antenna, the noise was finally identified as CMB, which served as important corroboration of the Big Bang theory.

The third main piece of the evidence for the Big Bang is the origin of light elements. Heavy elements, like carbon and iron, are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded through supernova into space. But the very, very light elements, like deuterium and helium, cannot have been synthesized in the interior of the stars, because you would need an even more powerful furnace to create them. These elements must have been forged in the furnace of the Big Bang itself at temperatures that were billions of degrees. There’s no other explanation.

So predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by scientific data. Moreover, they have been corroborated by the failure of every attempt to falsify them by alternative models. Unquestionably, the Big Bang model has impressive scientific credentials… Up to this time, it was taken for granted that the universe as a whole was a static, eternally existing object…. At the time an agnostic, American astronomer Robert Jastrow was forced to concede that although details may differ, “the essential element in the astronomical and Biblical accounts of Genesis is the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy”…. Einstein admitted the idea of the expanding universe “irritates me” (presumably, said one prominent scientist, “because of its theological implications”)

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” — Robert Jastrow

Quote from: “God and the Astronomers” (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992), 107. Dr. Jastrow became the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and served as its director until his retirement from NASA in 1981. Concurrently he was a professor of Geophysics at Columbia University. Jastrow became the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, which established the scientific goals for the exploration of the moon during the Apollo lunar landings. In 1981 Jastrow left NASA to join the faculty of Dartmouth College as professor of Earth Sciences. He left Dartmouth in 1992 to take up duties as director and chairman of the Mount Wilson Institute, managing the Mount Wilson Observatory in California.

[….]

This should be put in bullet points for easy memorization:

  • Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915;
  • Around the same time evidence of an expanding universe was being presented to the American Astronomical Society by Vesto Slipher;
  • In the 1920s using Einstein’s theory, a Russian mathematician (Alexander Friedman) and the Belgium astronomer (George Lemaitre) predicted the universe was expanding;
  • In 1929, Hubble discovered evidence confirming earlier work on the Red-Light shift showing that galaxies are moving away from us;
  • In the 1940’s, George Gamow predicted a particular temperature to the universe if the Big Bang happened;
  • In 1965, two scientists (Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson) discovered the universe’s background radiation — and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero.

(See more at my post: Scientific and Anecdotal Evidence for the Beginning of the Universe)

I find this video helpful as well to show exactly what science has shown of that first book known as Genesis.

Sumerians, to the Egyptians to the Greeks, Hinduism and Buddhism and other Eastern religious movements, as well as Atheism, etc… the all posit some existence of material [matter] through all time. Eternity. The Hebrew Bible is the only religious text to posit a creation ex-nihilo – from nothing. This space/time continuum did not exist. Natural law or mathematical integers weren’t floating around ready to cause matter to pop in and out of existence. Water was not co-eternal with mind. Etc.

Just one more issue out of the many available.

Can Naturalists Explain Where Life Originated?

This video, excerpted from J. Warner Wallace’s presentation of the evidence for God, summarizes the case for Gods existence from the origin of life. Has science answered the question of life’s origin? How do philosophically natural scientists tackle the “chicken and egg” problems related to the origin of life? What is the best explanation for the information found in the genetic code? For a robust review of the collective case for God’s existence from eight pieces of evidence “inside the room” of the natural universe, please refer to God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe.

(MORE HERE from J. Warner Wallace | as well as my DNA  POST)

If atheism were to have a Pope, Antony Flew would have been it for many a decade. Here we see him deal with the evidence as of late:

  • “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.” After chewing on his scientific worldview for more than five decades, Flew concluded, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” Previously, in his central work, The Presumption of Atheism (1976), Flew argued that the “onus of proof [of God] must lie upon the theist.” However, at the age of 81, Flew shocked the world when he renounced his atheism because “the argument for Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.” (MORE)

So not only is basic biology taught in the Bible, something even the most anti-God can see through nature, but #science has marched forward to reveal the accuracy of the Hebraic text over and above other religious and secular views. But even at the most basic/base view or approach to Genesis and creation vs. evolution, we have good reasons (and reason) to believe.

Science Pauses (Fortune Magazine, 1965) Vannevar Bush

The entire article is reproduced below (page 117 was a full page photo of Dr. Bush):

Vannevar Bush, Science Pauses (Fortune Magazine, 1965), 116-119, 167-168, 172.

“There is a misconception that scientists can establish a complete set of facts and relations about the universe… and that on this firm basis men can securely establish their personal philosophy, their personal religion, free from doubt or error.”

Here is a PDF of the article.


Science Pauses
By Vannevar Bush


[p.116>]People have always held queer ideas about scientists. Once they were regarded as long-haired idealists, likely to wear one black shoe and one tan. Some days they ate two lunches, and some days none, for their thoughts were not on mundane things.

Then came the A-bomb. Now scientists are regarded as supermen. They can do anything, given enough money. If America wants to put a man on the moon, which is really a tough engineering job, just gather enough thousands of scientists, pour in the money, and the man will get there. He may even get back.

In such moonbeams there is a misconception about scien­tists and the nature of science. But carried within this there is still another misconception, much more serious. This is the misconception that scientists can establish a complete set of facts and relations about the universe, all neatly proved, and that on this firm basis men can securely establish their personal philosophy, their personal religion, free from doubt or error.

Much is spoken today about the power of science, and rightly. It is awesome. But little is said about the inherent limitations of science, and both sides of the coin need equal scrutiny. The impact of science on men’s minds has been long in the making, but the age of Galileo gives us one place to start.

Galileo did not, as the Encyclopedia Britannica for so many years asserted, drop heavy and light weights from a tower and watch them fall together. (They would not have fallen together if he had.) He did roll balls down inclined grooves and time their progress. In so doing he developed the first laws of nature, if we wish to call them that, based on observation and calculation. He was not alone, but he was preeminent in his time.

Galileo caused quite a bit of turmoil in intellectual cir­cles. Some of his colleagues refused to look through the telescope he had fashioned. Some looked and refused to be­lieve what they saw—moons swinging around Jupiter, for example. The Church frowned upon him, but did not burn him. He personified a new spirit, and carried with him a new intellectual freedom rising throughout Europe. Here was a new liberty of thought to contend with—and to sup­press if possible.

No doubt many, or most, of those who tried to prevent this awakening were moved by a desire to perpetuate the privileges of an organized priesthood. But there were hon­est men as well, and their point of view was most under­standable, even if shortsighted and doomed.

For centuries men had been indoctrinated in a complex system of myths, built on what had originally been a simple religion but embroidered through the years by tradition and responding to the human tendency to elaborate and ornament. Upon this was erected a rigid code of conduct, enforced by authority based upon asserted superior knowl­edge and upon the fear of Hell. The only science admitted was the science of Aristotle—including its absurdities. The only reasoning permitted about man or nature followed the strict logic of Aristotle—including its fallacies. The scho­lastics argued learnedly about angels. But they did not open an egg and observe the growth of an embryo.

If man now began to learn about nature himself, if he were moved to cut even partway loose from authority and throw out some of the old myths, the code of ethics would go overboard also, whereupon the mass of men would re­vert to savagery. This at any rate was the conviction held by many devoted persons. It was indeed a courageous ad­venture that began when men decided to try to understand nature on their own, and embark on the hazardous en­deavor of building a philosophy of life upon observed facts. We have not yet seen the end of this experiment. It was no wonder that intelligent men, with sincere and worthy motives, hesitated to take the plunge.

Another jolt to entrenched tradition came when Newton and Leibnitz invented the calculus, and when such geniuses as d’Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, and Gauss built an amaz­ing structure of dynamics and optics. A sparkling assem­blage of equations, developed with marvelous ingenuity, could predict the movements of the planets with precision, or the precession of a gyroscope, or the path of light through an assemblage of lenses. Nowhere in the whole history of human thought has there been a finer example [p.118>]of the power of the intellect than in this seventeenth- and eighteenth-century burst.

This burst of analysis is important to ponder today be­cause it led, widely, to a philosophy of materialism, and an especially unattractive form of it. Soon man would be able to understand all of nature, this philosophy ran. Every­thing would be controlled by a neat set of equations. Merely by observing the present state of things, one could predict all the future. All the history of the universe, all of man’s part in it, was, so it seemed, controlled by causal, mecha­nistic laws. Man was merely an automaton. His fancied choice of acts was an illusion; he merely carried out what was inevitable in the light of his nature and nurture. Pride of intellect never went further.

The extremes of materialism that flowed from these be­ginnings did not touch the mass of men. But later there came an upheaval that wrenched even the common man loose from his moorings. Darwin did not originate the theory of evolution, but his meticulous observation and exposition rendered it highly plausible. Herbert Spencer drew from it a great sweep of disquieting speculation. And the man in the street was suddenly confronted with the assertion that he was descended from an ape.

Worse was to come; it soon appeared that princes and people alike were even descended from a bacterium. Myth­ology came apart, and the question of the spontaneous ori­gin of life was fiercely debated. If all living things had descended from some minute organism in a primeval soupy sea, did that organism itself appear by the chance joining of chemical constituents in that complex environment? Much of the reasoning and the experiment to try to prove or dis­prove the thesis of spontaneous generation was absurd. Men sealed up gooey liquids in glass tubes, heated them to destroy all life, and then argued that spontaneous genera­tion was impossible because no new life appeared. But there was no accepted definition of “life.”

How does a spider know how to spin?

Today we are calmer, at least on that front, and it is generally accepted that life began with the appearance of the first self-reproducing molecule. This is merely a chem­ical capable of assembling, from chemical fragments about it, an exact duplicate of itself. One can grasp what would happen when such a molecule appeared in a warm, complex sea, full of all sorts of simple nonliving chemical structures, existing there by virtue of chemical processes and photo­chemical effects. These structures would have included such things as amino acids and nucleotides. (In the labora­tory it has been shown that such things show up when light shines on a chemical soup, chosen to be like the primeval seas as we envisage them.) A single molecule, able to build a twin from such a mess, would proliferate prodigiously until it had used up all the available primary material with which it would combine. It would not be interfered with by predators since, for a time, it would be all alone. But the process would not stop there. By chance, other replicating molecules would appear. Some of these would proliferate by seizing upon material already combined; thereupon the great process of evolution would be on its way. After millennia cells with all their internal intricacy would appear, then organisms made up of cells in combination, then fish and plants and mammals, and finally man.

This account is persuasive because so much of life, as we observe it today, depends upon replicatory molecules. All of heredity, as we now depict it, depends on the genes, which are self-duplicating nucleic acids. These pass the characteristics of an individual from one generation to the next. They control the development of an organism, from sperm and egg to adult, by molding messenger chemicals, which in turn mold the proteins: the hormones, enzymes, and the structural materials that constitute the body ; those chemicals form and control your body and mine. The code by which the gene signals and controls is just now being deciphered in hundreds of laboratories. There is some ques­tion whether all this is sufficient to explain, for example, the linkages in the brain of a spider by which it knows how to spin a web without being taught, so we may be taking only the first step on a very long road. But there is no doubt that the molding of one molecule by another lies at the basis of the wealth of life we see about us.

Man has not yet succeeded in creating life as here de­fined, but there is little doubt that he soon will. Some very simple short-chain nucleic acid, synthesized from inert matter and placed in a chemical soup, will suddenly assem­ble accurate images of itself and the job will be done.

We seem, thus, to have arrived at a concept of how the physical universe about us—all the life that inhabits the speck we occupy in this universe—has evolved over the eons by simple material processes, the sort of processes we examine experimentally, which we describe by equations, and call the “laws of nature.”

Except for one thing! Man is conscious of his existence. Man also possesses, so most of us believe, what he calls his free will. Did consciousness and free will too arise merely out of “natural” processes? The question is central to the contention between those who see nothing beyond a new materialism and those who see—Something.

The enthusiasm, the exuberance, that properly accom­panies the great achievements of science, the thrill of at last beginning to understand nature and the universe about us, in all their awesome magnificence, continues to lead many men all over the world, especially young men, on to [p.119>]this new materialism. In taking what they imagine to be their final steps, they conceive that they are merely follow­ing the dictates of science and carrying them to their in­evitable and logical conclusion. In Russia, of course, ma­terialism is the state religion. But the new materialism is by no means confined to those who further the Communistic organization of society. The philosophy of existentialism, with its powerful appeal to young men, takes many forms, but in every form there is a concern for what the existen­tialist believes to be science, which leads, more often than not, to a rigid atheism. Under whatever name or state they go, there is cause for much concern over those who follow science blindly, or relapse into a hopeless pessimism. It is earlier than they think.

Immortality in a machine

A relatively new development, and a potent one, gives support to the chain of ideas we need, today, to examine.

Long ago man built machines to supplement or replace his muscles or those of his beasts. He also built devices to supplement and extend his vision, so that he can now see the very small: the virus that preys on his flesh, and the very distant : the galaxy a billion light-years away. Instru­ments also extend his voice, so that he can speak across a continent, or to a satellite, which repeats his voice across an ocean. No longer content with the form of the materials he finds on the earth, he produces new metals and new chem­icals. Dissatisfied with the sources of energy in fossil fuels, he taps the internal energy of the atom, and may soon find nearly inexhaustible resources in the sea. Beyond this he creates devices that control and guide his machines, so that they perform in concert to produce the things he needs or desires: automation with all its current problems and its future promise. Still further, he is learning to understand his own physical self, to make new chemical entities to cure his ills soon in similar manner he will conquer the grosser malfunctioning of his brain. All this creates modern civili­zation, with its comfort and its health, limited as yet to the few, but capable of encompassing all mankind if the race acts with wisdom and uses its new powers for the benefit of man’s true interests.

Now man takes a new step. He builds machines to do his thinking for him. These are still in their infancy, but their significance is great. It is one thing to supplement muscles and senses. It is a far more profound thing to supplement intellectual power. We are now in the early stages of doing just this, and in its success, if it is to succeed, we shall have a revolution that can make the industrial revolution, so called, seem a mere episode in mankind’s onward march.

Even the machines that have been built and used thus far do interesting things. They do in a minute a computa­tion that would take an unaided man a year. They conduct the accounting of vast businesses. They search through their vast memories in a flash to produce a desired item. They translate languages, badly, and write poetry, badly. They will do better when they have been taught better. They compose music, still not interesting, but they will someday compose well. They refine the design of a bridge for an engineer, and take over the labor of drawing his concepts. They have not yet solved the problem of our li­braries, about to be swamped by the deluge of printed mat­ter, but someday they will.

But no machine has yet appeared that operates as the brain does. The brain does not operate by reducing every­thing to indices and computation. It follows trails of asso­ciation, flying almost instantly from item to item, bringing into consciousness only the significant. Its associative trails bifurcate and cross, are erased by disuse and emphasized by success. Ultimately we shall produce a machine that can do all this better. Its memory will be far greater and the items will not fade. It will progress along trails at lightning speed. The machine will learn from its own experience, refine its own trails, explore in unknown territory to estab­lish trails there. All this it will do under the orders of its master, and as his slave.

This personal machine has not yet appeared, and waits for progress on the machine of trails. When it does we shall encounter a new form of inheritance. A new form of im­mortality will arrive, not merely of genes, but of the inti­mate thought processes. The son will inherit from his father the trails his father followed as his thoughts ma­tured, with the father’s comments and criticisms along the way. The son will select those that are fruitful, exchange with his colleagues, and further refine for the next genera­tion. The fields he covers will encompass all he learns, all he creates and adopts; for the compass of his memory will be that of entire libraries. No longer, when he is old, will he forget.

When Mercury was found to wobble

Thus our speculations lead us: if scientists can settle the ancient question of the spontaneous generation of life by repeating the process in their laboratories, will not scien­tists also settle the next question by building machines that are conscious and that exhibit free will?

We can hardly approach this tremendous possibility di­rectly. Rather let us consider how science operates, and hence what are its limitations.

Science never proves anything, in an absolute sense. It works by processes of induction, and of deduction. Let us take them in order. Science accumulates data, by observa­tion and measurement. Today its observations are likely to be in the form of the positions of needles on dials, or the optical density of photographic film, or the count of parti­cles arriving in a chamber, for most of the things observed are not accessible to the unaided senses. The scientist at­tempts to select phenomena in which only the variables to be studied are present, with extraneous influences excluded. From an assemblage of such data he constructs a hypothe­sis, a formula that expresses the relationships he finds. With this he predicts, and then measures to determine whether [p.167>]his prediction is valid. If there is general confirmation, and no facts appear in contradiction, he, and scientists generally, accept the hypothesis and proceed on their way. But at any time thereafter a single confirmed measurement found to be in flat contradiction with the hypothesis destroys it com­pletely. The attempt is then made to refine the theory and remove the contradiction.

This has happened hundreds of times in the history of science. A good example lies in celestial mechanics. The observations of the planets by Tycho Brahe enabled Kepler to calculate that they moved about the sun in ellipses, and to formulate rules of their motions. Newton, with his treat­ment of gravitation, verified all this, and showed that the whole procedure could be calculated if one merely assumed that bodies attracted each other with forces proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distances of their separation. He also assumed that geometry on the earth, the Euclidean geometry that harassed us in school, holds also in the wide spaces of the universe. The hypothesis, the theory if you will, held up under tests of prediction. Using nothing else, an eclipse could be predict­ed, the region of the earth where it would be seen, and the time of its advent at a particular spot. In fact, it held up mar­velously; the prediction could be made to a second. Yet to­day it is regarded as merely an approximation, good enough for many purposes but by no means refined enough to ap­ply generally.

What had happened? First, the planet Mercury was found, if one measured closely enough, to wobble in its flight—i.e., not to follow exactly the orbit that theory predicted. Second, the application of Euclidean geometry for the vast universe was shown to be only one assumption among three possible ones. When Einstein produced his general relativity theory, he cured the gross imperfections that had escaped the notice of Kepler and Newton—and the old theory became simply a special case adequate for most local needs. Few believe Einstein’s formulation is the last word, although no one has yet done better. But as for Newton’s assumption that Eu­clid’s geometry held throughout all his range of thought, this involves deductive reasoning, and deduction is more subtle.

More than one geometry

Deduction uses the rules of logic to proceed from a set of assumptions to their consequences. But we have troubles here. Logic itself is by no means a perfect tool and, even if it were, it could do no more than transfer the question of the validity of a deduced relationship to the question of the validity of the premises on which it is based. And these premises are merely statements that are assumed to be valid for the purposes of the argument: simple statements, so sim­ple that they cannot be expressed in terms of statements which are more simple.

This is well illustrated by the history of geometry. Various Greeks, with admirable diligence and insight, developed logical reasoning about matters of geometry. Euclid compiled these thoughts into a form that lasted for two thousand years. He based his reasoning on a set of axioms, assumed to be self-evident, needing no proof or even examination. One of these was the so-called parallel postulate, the statement that if two perpendiculars are erected to a given line they will remain equidistant no matter how far extended. To the scholars of centuries ago this seemed fair enough. On the basis of these axioms it was proved, for one result, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is two right angles.

In the great age of analysis this parallel postulate was questioned by Gauss, Bolyai, Lobachevski. Gauss was so moved by what he found, perhaps appalled by what his col­leagues might say, that he did not publish. The others did. In fact, they worked out whole systems of geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, based on the other possibilities. One is that if the perpendiculars are extended, perhaps out to the most distant regions of the universe, they will diverge. The other is that they will finally intersect. We cannot, at least today, settle by measurement which assumption is more probable. And we have no instinctive reason for believing in any of the three premises. Triangles made of straight lines extending out among the stars need no longer have as the sum of their angles two right angles. In fact, on one assumption we can conceive of a triangle with all of its three sides parallel, or asymptotic, in pairs, a triangle neverthe­less of a specific area. On the other assumption, if we enlarge a triangle indefinitely it will approach the form of a circle, although its sides will still be straight lines. Space may be curved, an idea that it is hard to visualize with our limited three-dimensional outlook. The universe may be closed, but unlimited; there may be a longest line. We have no evi­dence that three dimensions are all that exist. Perhaps we observe merely a three-dimensional cross section of a four-dimensional universe.

The whole long process of deduction that built Euclidean geometry revealed fascinating relations; useful ones also, which enabled man to sail the wide seas, or to build telescopes of great power. But it proved none of these relationships; it merely transferred the question of their validity to that of the axioms upon which everything rested. And one of these axioms was shown to be merely one of three equally reason­able assumptions.

Stepping outside the system

Even prevailing logic itself came under closer scrutiny. Aristotle was found not to be as infallible as he had been considered for over a thousand years. Russell, and others, labored to remove the paradoxes and to straighten out the semantics. The subject became even more difficult when GOdel showed that no closed system could be proved to be free of contradictions without stepping outside the system.

Fortunately, a scientific endeavor does not have to be per­fect in order to yield results. The magnificent structure of dynamics was based on a differential calculus that was, logically, full of holes. Mathematics, on a much firmer basis today, starts with simple assumptions, and produces un­expected and beautiful conclusions. Theorems that glitter, often quite useless when they appear and treasured for their aesthetic appeal, sometimes later become of direct utility. In exploring the nucleus of the atom today, with all its galaxy of particles, and its wholly mysterious relations, mathematics is used that was originally the prized possession of mathematics alone.

Science’s use of logic becomes more and more demanding: the symbolic logic of Russell and Whitehead has been one answer to this demand. Logic can proceed only when the entities with which it is concerned are strictly defined. Science can proceed only when it can observe with precision, and when it can measure. Mathematics becomes useful only when the quantities it manipulates have precise meaning. Many, most, of the classic philosophers sinned badly in this regard. They dreamed dreams, which was well, and constructed sys­tems that were often fascinating. But then they dressed these up with logical arguments based on elements that they did not define, or even on elements that were undefinable. And [p.168>]they often announced their systems with dogmatism and an assumed superiority. Philosophy has come far since those days. It has had to.

Science, too, has come a long way, in delineating the prob­able nature of the universe that surrounds us, of the physical world in which we live, of our own structure, our physical and chemical nature. It even enters into the mechanism by which the brain itself operates. Then it comes to the questions of consciousness and free will and there it stops. No longer can science prove, or even bear evidence. Those who base their personal philosophies or their religion upon science are left, beyond that point, without support. They end where they began, except that the framework, the background, against which they ponder is far more elaborate, far more probable, than was the evidence when an ancient shepherd guided his flock toward the setting sun, and wondered why he was there, and where he was going.

Science proves nothing absolutely. On the most vital ques­tions, it does not even produce evidence.

But is all the labor of science vain to the thinker, the seeker after a sure harbor, amid the mystery, evil, cruelty, majesty, that surrounds us? By no means. Science here does two things. It renders us humble. And it paints a universe in which the mysteries become highlighted, in which constraints on imagination and speculation have been removed, and which becomes ever more awe-inspiring as we gaze.

A belief larger than a fact

The first men who pondered did so on a small earth, which did not extend far beyond the horizon, for which the stars were mere lamps in the skies. Now, we are no longer at the center; there is no center. We look at congeries of stars by light that left them before the earth had cooled. Among the myriads of stars we postulate myriads of planets with conditions as favorable to life as is out earth. We puzzle as to whether the universe is bounded or extends forever; whether, indeed, it may be only one universe among many. We speculate as to whether our universe began in a vast ex­plosion, whether it pulsates between utter compression and wide diffusion, whether it is self-renewing and thus goes on unchanged forever. And we are humble.

But science teaches more than this. It continually reminds us that we are still ignorant and there is much to learn. Time and space are interconnected in strange ways; there is no absolute simultaneity. Within the atom occur phenomena concerning which visualization is futile, to which common sense, the guidance from our everyday experience, has no application, which yield to studies by equations that have no meaning except that they work. Mass and energy transform one into each other. Gravitation, the solid rock on which Newton built, may be merely a property of the geometry of the cosmos. Life, as its details unfold before us, becomes ever more intricate, emphasizing more and more our wonder that its marvelous functioning could have been produced by chance and time. The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes.

And what is the conclusion? He who follows science blind­ly, and who follows it alone, comes to a barrier beyond which he cannot see. He who would tell us with the authority of scholarship a complete story of why we exist, of our mission here, has a duty to speak convincingly in a world where men increasingly think for themselves. Exhortation needs to be revised, not to weaken its power but to increase it, for men who are no longer in the third century. As this occurs, and [p.172>]on the essential and central core of faith, science will of necessity be silent.

But its silence will be the silence of humility, not the silence of disdain. A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is over defined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life. The late Mr. Justice Holmes said, “the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly ac­cepted duty, in a cause he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” Young men, who will formulate the deep thought of the next generation, should lean on science, for it can teach much and it can inspire. But they should not lean where it does not apply.

Modern philosophy divides, roughly, into two parts. One pores through the ancient record and attempts to recover from it thought that is worth preserving and to present this in modern dress. The other labors to refine our logical pro­cesses and our language, that we may reason more assuredly. This is not all that philosophy can do. It can return to its mission in its day of glory. It can dream and it can guide the dreams of men. To do so it will need to present its visions humbly, and in the concepts of the universe that science offers. There are a few who labor to do just this. Their task is difficult, for the universe that science presents as probable is continuously altering, and depends for its grasp upon mathematics that requires deep study for many years. Nevertheless, the opportunity is there to present wide-sweep­ing thought that will sway the minds of men.

And the theologian. He can accept the aid of science, which draws for him a wide universe in all its majesty, with life in all its awe-inspiring complexity. He can accept this knowing that on the central mysteries science cannot speak. And he can then step beyond to lead men in paths of righteousness and in paths of peace.

And the young man. As always he will build his own con­cepts, and his own loyalties. He will follow science where it leads, but will not attempt to follow where it cannot lead.

And, with a pause, he will admit a faith.


Dr. Bush, now honorary board chairman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was dean of its school of engineering when, in the 1930’s, he developed the Bush Differential Analyzer—grandfather of modern-day computers. He left M.I.T. in 1938 for the presidency of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; after the fall of France in 1940, President Roosevelt named him chairman of the National De­fense Research Committee. Five months before Pearl Harbor, in 1941, Dr. Bush’s job became director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which Dr. Bush headed throughout the war and until its mission was accomplished, in 1947.

An Impromptu Study In Protestant Understanding of “Tradition”

As a related aside, the following two posts of mine marry well to the topic below:

Reading a book on hyper-preterism recently has been a great read. I am a pretty classic “pre-mil” guy, but recently I was watching a vlogcast and the guy started getting into his beliefs that were hyper-preterist. I had studied a bit of preterism in my theological studies… but this guy was saying some crazy, unorthodox, shite. So I got this book to learn more about this foreign viewpoint.

A small sentence from said book got my apologetic blood circulating:

  • Below I will highlight a few danger signals that suggest that we may be witnessing the sprouting of a new unorthodox sect that could eventually blossom into a full-fledged cult. (p. 13)

However, as I am reading through this book, I purchased a used book to follow the footnote a bit more thoroughly.

Wow.

So, I will first give the section in the original book, then the very extended excerpt from the book I got via footnote #175:

“Creeds Are Constantly Revised”

Hyper-preterists attempt to protect themselves from creedal con­demnation by arguing that the creeds are continually being revised. Stevens frequently argues that creeds “are constantly being made obso­lete by an ever better understanding” (CPO). He muses: “If the creeds of the early church were perfect and needed no revision, why were they revised and updated in succeeding councils?” (WICW). And “if the earlier creeds, confessions and catechisms were such infallible bas­tions of orthodoxy, why did the Reformers in various European coun­tries compose new ones or make changes to them?” (RGA). He quotes a statement made by the Reformed historian and social critic Gary North regarding the “progress of Christian creeds,” concluding that “That the creeds have been steadily improved” (RGA). Stevens asks of var­ious theological movements, “Why are even more doctrines constantly being developed today (such as the Reconstructionist movement, etc.)? Doesn’t this tell us something?” (WICW). Noe asks: “After all, if the creeds had it all right, what was the Reformation about?” (BET, 216).

We may quickly dispose of the question “What was the Refor­mation all about?” by referring the reader to the previous objections regarding the Reformation principle and the (alleged) contradictions in creedalism. In addition, I would point out that Davis reminds us that “it is important to realize that the sola scriptura principle did not imply for the Reformers a rejection of all church tradition. They affirmed the value and validity of the ecumenical creeds of the early church, and in fact believed that the weight of patristic authority supported the Reformed cause.”175 In fact, in section 4 of his “Prefatory Address to King Francis” in his Institutes, Calvin writes of his papal opponents: “It is a calumny to represent us as opposed to the Fathers (I mean the ancient writers of a purer age), as if the Fathers were supporters of their impiety. Were the contest to be decided by such authority (to speak in the most moderate terms), the better part of the victory would be ours.”

However, the hyper-preterist argument is not just confused; its entire premise is mistaken. The creeds were not revised because of a change in the understanding of biblical doctrine; rather, they were expanded to include additional details that responded to new heresies. The later creeds left the system of truth unchanged, but the volume of truth declared was expanded. Ursinus writes: “Why were other creedsformed and received in the church after the Apostles’ creed? To this we would reply, that these are not properly other creeds differing in substance from the Apostles’ creed, but are merely a repetition and clearer enunciation of its meaning, in which some words are added, by way of explanation, on account of heretics, who took advantage of its brevity, and corrupted it.”176

Thus, it is absurd to allege that creeds are “constantly being made obsolete” (CPO). The newer material did not render the previous the­ology “obsolete,” but rather filled in more details. This is why, for instance, John Calvin could structure much of his discussion in the Institutes around the Apostles’ Creed. He agreed with it even at this much later stage of theological development. In the introduction to the McNeill edition of the Institutes, we read: “The body of the trea­tise of 1536 consists of six chapters. Four are on topics familiar in the history of Christian instruction and then recently employed in Luther’s Catechisms: the Law, the [Apostles’] Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”177


  1. John Jefferson Davis, Foundations of Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 226.
  2. Ursinus, Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, 117-18.
  3. Calvin: Institutes, ed. McNeill, 1:xxxv-xxxvi.

Keith A. Mathison, ed., When Shall These Things Be? A Reformed Response To Hyper-Preterism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004), 55-56.

After finding and reading the portion from Dr. Davis’ book, I loved the surrounding topic so much that I ended up reading the entire chapter (seven) where the quote was pulled from:

Tradition As Theological Authority

It was a great reading on Protestant tradition compared to the Catholic view.

So, here is footnote #175 expanded quite a bit. I will also expand a bit more footnote #176 as well. Both quotes from the source will be emphasized in the larger excerpts

  • PRO-TIP: I will put links in the footnote numbers, if you click it it will “jump” you to either the first-half of the notes, or the second half. Hit the back arrow in your browser to return to your place in the text.

John Jefferson Davis,
Foundations of Evangelical Theology
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 226-243.


Tradition in Protestantism

Sola scriptura and the Reformation

The principle of sola scriptura, a hallmark of the Protestant Re­formers, emerged in Luther’s debate with Johann Eck at Leipzig in 1519. Luther argued that scripture and scripture alone was to be the standard by which councils, creeds, and all ecclesiastical traditions were to be measured. In the seventeenth century the principle was epitomized in the well-known statement of the Eng­lishman William Chillingworth: “The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.”5

Luther was not the first to voice this “Protestant” principle. John Wyclif, one of the forerunners of the Reformation in England, stated, “Even though there were a hundred popes and though every men­dicant monk were a cardinal, they would be entitled to confidence only in so far as they accorded with the Bible.” As J. Loserth has noted, “In this early period it was Wyclif who recognized and formulated the formal principle of the Reformation—the unique authority of the Bible for the belief and life of the Christian.”6

The authorities of the late medieval church did not appreciate the reforming spirit of John Wyclif and his criticisms of the papal system. After his death the Council of Constance (1414-18) de­clared Wyclif to be a stiff-necked heretic, ordered his books to be burned and his body exhumed. This last decree was carried out some twelve years later under the authority of Pope Martin V. Wyclif’s body was dug up, burned, and the ashes thrown into the Swift River flowing through Lutterworth, England.

It is important to realize that the sola scriptura principle did not imply for the Reformers a rejection of all church tradition. They affirmed the value and validity of the ecumenical creeds of the early church, and in fact believed that the weight of patristic authority supported the Reformation cause. As Calvin stated the point, “If the contest were to be determined by patristic authority, the tide of victory—to put it very modestly—would turn to our side.” The Reformers were convinced that it was the papacy, and not they, who in fact had departed from the early Christian tradition. Later historical scholarship has confirmed this judgment.7

Sola scriptura meant the primacy of scripture as a theological norm over all tradition rather than the total rejection of tradition. Creeds, confessions, and councils were to be received insofar as they were consistent with scripture. The sola scriptura principle also presupposed the essential clarity of scripture. The central saving message of the Bible was plain enough to be understood by all and needed no priestly hierarchy to explain it. The Holy Spirit, and not the Roman hierarchy, was the true illuminator of scriptural truth. This Reformation principle of the perspicuity of scripture was later articulated in classic fashion in the Westmin­ster Confession of Faith’s chapter on scripture: “All things in Scrip­ture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and ob­served, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them” (I.vii).

This Reformation emphasis on the perspicuity of scripture has unfortunately been lost in some streams of later Protestantism. Luther complained about the “Babylonian captivity of the church;” with the rise of the historical-critical method there is some reason to be concerned about a “Babylonian captivity of the Bible” at the hands of the biblical critics. Many lay people in the churches have been alienated from the simple biblical message by the imposing developments of critical scholarship.8 By stressing the diversity or even “contradictions” of scripture, critical scholarship has ob­scured the essential clarity of the Bible’s saving message.

In a dialogue at Harvard Divinity School on liberal and evan­gelical theology, Gordon Kaufman stated his belief in the Bible’s obscurity. “There are many biblical positions on almost any topic you wish to take up,” he said. “The Bible is a pluralist library of books, of theological ideas, of values, of points of view. What the biblical position is is unclear. … Even if we could find the biblical position, how to interpret this as bearing on our situation is unclear.”9

It indeed seems ironic that the brand of Protestant liberalism represented by Kaufman has essentially reverted to the position of the late medieval Roman Catholic Church on the question of scripture. The message of the Bible is not plain; it must be me­diated to the people through either an ecclesiastical or scholarly elite. The result in both cases—Catholicism and Protestant mod­ernism—is a loss of spiritual vitality in the churches and the usur­pation of scripture’s divine authority by various human authorities.10

American Protestantism

American Protestantism has not been noted for its appreciation of church tradition. Thomas Jefferson once remarked, “As to tra­dition, if we are Protestants, we reject all tradition, and rely on the scripture alone, for that is the essence and common principle of all the Protestant churches.”11 Such comments need to be under­stood in the light of Jefferson’s own Unitarian and otherwise het­erodox views, but they are illustrative of a significant element in the American religious temperament. The streams of Protestantism influenced by deism and rationalism tended to appeal directly to the moral teachings of Jesus; later developments in church history—especially the great orthodox creeds—were an “obfusca­tion” of the simple religion of the Sermon on the Mount. As the English Unitarian Joseph Priestly saw it, church history was little more than a “sordid history of corruptions.”

Historian Kenneth S. LaTourette has noted the marked tendency of nineteenth-century American Protestants “to ignore the devel­opments which had taken place in Christianity in the Old World after the first century.”12 This low view of tradition is understand­able in part in view of the frontier conditions of early American experience. For those who came to America, and who later extended its boundaries in the West, the nation represented a new beginning, even a “new Eden.” Why encumber the new religious venture with the strife and controversy of the European past?

This ahistorical mentality was also reinforced by the revivalism of the nineteenth century. If the spiritual experience of the New Testament church could be reduplicated through the agency of revival preaching, what more could the believer need? Why bother with the ancient creeds? This anti-creedal mentality found expres­sion in the work of frontier revivalist Barton Stone (1772-1844). Stone was ordained as a Presbyterian, but later rejected Calvinism and in 1804 established the Christian Church (“Disciples of Christ”) through his preaching in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The Disciples of Christ were associated with the slogan, “No creed but the Bible.” Eighteen hundred years of church history were of little or no value; Stone had rediscovered the true “New Testament church.”

There is undeniable value in reaffirming the theology and prac­tice of the New Testament as an essential element of church re­form. However, the problem in rejecting all church history and tradition is that the reflections of less gifted minds tend to be substituted for the wisdom of the spiritual and theological giants of the past. Evangelicals can affirm the primacy of scripture with­out implying that the Holy Spirit has taught nothing to the church over nineteen hundred years. A slogan such as “No creed but the Bible” does not really eliminate all church tradition; it merely sub­stitutes new traditions—those of the denominational leader and his followers—for older ones.13 Anti-creedal and anti-traditional attitudes can lead, theologically and ecclesiastically, to counter­productive efforts that merely “reinvent the wheel.”

Recent developments

There are signs that American evangelicalism is seeking a greater appreciation of the traditions and liturgies of the early church. In Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity, Robert E. Webber of Wheaton College argues that “a return to the historic church, to the great fathers of the first five centuries, is a return to evangelical foundations.”14 Evangelicalism is certainly rooted in the Refor­mation of the sixteenth century and the great revival movements of the nineteenth century, but Webber is urging his fellow evan­gelicals to rediscover their roots in the faith and life of the ancient church. He argues that evangelical understandings of the nature of the church, of worship, of spirituality, of mission, and of theo­logy can all be strengthened through a new study and appreci­ation of the patristic heritage.

In May of 1977 a group of some forty-five evangelical leaders met to draft a statement which came to be known as the “Chicago Call.” The results of this conference, together with explanatory essays, was published in 1978 in a volume titled The Orthodox Evangelicals, edited by Robert E. Webber and Donald Bloesch, which affirmed: “We believe that today evangelicals are hindered from achieving full maturity by a reduction of the historic faith.There isa pressing need to reflect upon the substance of the biblical and historic faith and to recover the fullness of their heri­tage.”15 The drafters of the statement sought to recall their fellow evangelicals to a greater sense of “historic roots and continuity,” “biblical fidelity,” “creedal identity,” “holistic salvation,” “sacramen­tal integrity,” “spirituality,” “church authority,” and “church unity.”

The new interest in the theological and liturgical heritage of the early church is not limited to evangelicals. Thomas C. Oden, a professor of theology at Drew University, has chronicled his own personal pilgrimage from theological liberalism back to “classical Christianity” in Agenda for Theology. Liberal theology’s fascination with and subservience to the “modern mind” has reached the end of its tether, Oden concludes. It has become intellectually barren and spiritually and pastorally unsatisfying. Consequently, it is time for liberal Protestantism in America to rediscover the resources of classical Christianity–“the ancient ecumenical consensus of Christianity’s first millennium, particularly as expressed in scrip­ture and in the Seven Ecumenical Councils affirmed by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions.” Oden’s aim is to “help free persons from feeling intimidated by modernity, which . . . is rap­idly losing its moral power, and to grasp the emerging vision of a postmodern Christian orthodoxy.”16

The new appreciation for the patristic heritage among evangel­icals (and those newly sympathetic to evangelicalism) is an encouraging sign in the life of American Protestantism. While the early church can hardly be considered a model of either theolog­ical or spiritual perfection, nevertheless the new interest in patristics offers evangelicals some much needed historical depth and perspective. The early fathers faced a challenge much like our own—preserving and extending the Christian faith in a declining social order permeated by a decadent humanism. As evangelicals attempt to “recontextualize” the faith to meet changing social con­ditions, and to reconstruct a new social order on biblical foun­dations, there is much to be learned from the fathers of the early church.

In a somewhat different context the work of Brevard Childs in Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, also represents a renewed appreciation for the positive role of tradition in American Protestantism. Childs argues that Old Testament scholarship must take more seriously the canonical shape of the biblical text as it has actually been mediated through the life of the religious com­munities which have preserved it. The dominant tendency of older critical scholarship was to virtually bypass the canonical text as a literary whole in its own right in a search for the (hypothetical) sources and documents behind the text. On the contrary, Childs argues, where the actual text of the Old Testament is concerned, “One begins with the tradition and then seeks critically to under­stand it.”17 This emphasis has the value of recognizing the tradi­tional role that the text played in the life of Israel as a religious community; the Old Testament becomes more than merely a text studied in the abstraction of a modern academic setting. The shape of the canonical text, reflecting actual religious traditions, also provides helpful clues for understanding the thematic unity of scripture as over against the fragmenting approaches of nine­teenth-century scholarship.

Beyond the confines of biblical and theological scholarship there are signs of renewed interest in the role of tradition in the knowing process among twentieth-century philosophers. The German phi­losopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has recently issued sharp criti­cisms of the Enlightenment’s rejection of tradition in a quest for secular, self-grounded certitude. This quest, Gadamer believes, has not been successful. In ‘Ruth and Method, widely read by biblical and theological scholars for its insights in the area of hermeneu­tics, Gadamer argues that tradition is in fact the “horizon” within which we do our thinking. The process of human understanding involves placing oneself “within a process of tradition in which past and present are constantly fused.”18 Tradition is the embod­iment of the linguistic and intellectual heritage of a culture; one can no more think without the influence of tradition than one can think without language.

Michael Polanyi has written that “all mental life by which we surpass the animals is evoked in us as we assimilate the articulate framework of our culture.”19 Or again, “Human thought grows only within language and since language can exist only in a society, all thought is rooted in society.”20 Polanyi is arguing that the precon­ditions of all human knowledge are found in the linguistic heritage of a culture, a heritage which is traditional in nature.

A similar point was made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Phil­osophical Investigations, when he stated that the linguistic prac­tices of a community become conditions through which we see the world.21 These observations by Gadamer, Polanyi, and Witt­genstein, based on new insights in the philosophy of language, help to correct the Enlightenment’s rejection of tradition and to restore to its rightful place the role of the intellectual labors of the past in the knowledge and discoveries of the present.

Tradition in Roman Catholicism

Early positions

Tradition plays a more prominent and authoritative role in Ro­man Catholic theology than in evangelical Protestantism. At the Second Vatican Council it was stated that “it is not from sacred Scripture alone that the church draws her certainty about every­thing which has been revealed. … Both sacred tradition and sa­cred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence,” (Documents of Vatican H, p. 117).

This position, however, represents a long process of development in Roman Catholicism away from an earlier one in which scripture was granted clear primacy over all church tradition. Prior to the fourteenth century the church fathers and medieval theologians generally held that the Bible was the unique and sole source of divine revelation. Aquinas, for example, could state that “arguments from scripture are used properly and carry necessity in matters of faith; arguments from other doctors of the church are proper, but carry only probability; for our faith is based on the revelation given to the apostles and prophets who wrote the ca­nonical books of the scriptures and not on revelation that could have been made to other doctors” (Summa Theologica 1.1,8).

In late medieval theology, however, the theologians begin to speak of church tradition as that which authorizes scripture. Duns Scotus, for example, claimed that the “books of the holy canon are not to be believed except insofar as one must first believe the church which approves and authorizes those books and their con-tent.”22 This latter formulation represents a clear denial of what came to be known during the Reformation as the principle of the self-attesting authority and essential clarity of scripture.

Rent and later developments

In response to the challenge of the Reformers’ sofa scriptura principle the Roman Catholic position on tradition as it had de­veloped in the medieval church was officially formulated at the Council of Trent in 1546. “Following, then, the example of the orthodox Fathers,” the council declared, “it receives and venerates with the same piety and reverence all the books of both the Old and New Testaments—for God is the author of both—together with all traditions concerning faith and morals, for they came from the mouth of Christ or are inspired by the Holy Spirit and have been preserved in continuous succession in the Catholic Church” (Denz. 1501).

The position of Trent was reiterated by the First Vatican Council in 1870, called to bolster Catholicism against the challenge of mod­ernism. On the matter of revelation and tradition, this council declared that “this supernatural revelation, according to the uni­versal belief of the church, declared by the Sacred Synod of Trent, is contained in the written books and unwritten traditions which have come down to us” (Denz. 3006). Again, the reference to the “universal belief of the church” is an assertion that can hardly be sustained by careful historical examination of the patristic sources.

The Second Vatican Council (1963-65) attempted to soften the distinction between scripture and tradition as it had been devel­oped at Trent and at Vatican I. According to this most recent coun­cil, “Sacred tradition and sacred scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God. … Both . .. flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end” (Documents of Vatican II, p. 117).

Vatican II was faced with an intramural Catholic debate be­tween two opposing views of scripture and tradition, prompted by revisionist interpretations of the meaning of the Council of Trent.23 The “two-source” view held that Trent had really under­stood scripture and tradition as separate and independent sources of revelation; the “one-source” view held that scripture alone, as interpreted by the church’s tradition, was the sole source of rev­elation, and that this view had been the real intention of Trent. As Wells has pointed out, the revisionist “one-source” interpretation of Trent lacks credibility in that it is in fact quite new. For three centuries after Trent, Roman Catholics understood that council to support a two-source view. This seemed especially clear during the nineteenth century.24 Vatican II did not resolve the debate but left the precise relationship between scripture and tradition some­what open. It did, however, wish to claim both as forms of divine revelation.

Some recent Roman Catholic scholars—e.g., Karl Rahner (The Vatican Council) and Hans Kling (Justification) —have spoken of the Bible as the “primary” and “unique” source of revelation. While such expressions may signify a greater appreciation of the Refor­mational sola scriptura principle, their critical views of scripture and appeals to “church consciousness” as a source of theological authority prevent any simple identification of their views with those of the Reformers.

Characteristic Roman Catholic traditions

Three Roman Catholic traditions in particular are held to be divinely revealed doctrines essential for salvation and represent special obstacles for Protestant-Catholic relations: the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; the dogma of papal infallibility; and the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. All three dogmas lack credible biblical and his­torical support.

The way for the proclamation of the dogma of the immaculate conception in 1854 by Pius IX had been prepared years earlier. In an encyclical letter to the Roman Catholic bishops of February 2, 1849, Pius IX had expressed his own zealous veneration of Mary: “You know full well, venerable brethren, that the whole ground of our confidence is placed in the most holy Virgin, since God has vested in her the plenitude of all good, so that henceforth, if there be in us any hope, if there be any grace, if there be any salvation, we must receive it solely from her, according to the will of him who would have us possess all through Mary.”25

Pius IX officially proclaimed the dogma on December 8, 1854, at St. Peter’s in Rome, with over two hundred cardinals, bishops, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries present, declaring it to be a divinely revealed dogma, to be firmly believed by all the faithful on penalty of excommunication, “that the most blessed Virgin Mary, in the first moment of her conception, by a special grace and privilege of Almighty God, in virtue of the merits of Christ, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin.” Schaff describes the response of those present at the papal proclamation: “The shouts of the assembled multitude, the cannons of St. Angelo, the chimes of all the bells, the illumination of St. Peter’s dome, the splendor of gorgeous feasts, responded to the decree. Rome was intoxicated with . . . enthusiasm, and the whole Roman Catholic world thrilled with joy over the crowning glory of the immaculate queen of heaven, who would now be more gracious and powerful in her intercession than ever, and shower the richest blessings upon the Pope and his church.”26

For biblical support of the dogma Roman Catholic apologists cite Gen. 3:15; Song of Sol. 4:7; 12; and Luke 1:28, but none of these texts will bear the weight that is placed upon them. The citation of Gen. 3:15 from the Vulgate (“she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt assail her heel”) is based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew, which makes the reference masculine, not feminine. In the Catholic misinterpretation, which refers the “she” to Mary, it is argued that the enmity between Mary and Satan is an eternal one, which would not be the case if she had ever been subject to original sin. Poetic descriptions of the fair and spotless bride (Song of Sol. 4:7) and references to the “garden enclosed, and fountain sealed” are fancifully applied to Mary. The Vulgate of Luke 1:28, “Hail [Mary], full of grace,” is said to imply her immaculate conception. Schaff’s comment on this type of biblical interpretation is apt: “frivolous allegorical trifling with the Word of God.”27 The dogma is explicitly contradicted by texts such as Rom. 5:12, 18; 1 Cor. 15:22; and Eph. 2:3, which include all in original sin except Christ.

The dogma’s rootage in ancient tradition is equally weak. Au­gustine, who surprisingly believed that Mary was free from actual sin, did not believe that she was conceived without original sin. The heretic Pelagius was apparently the first to espouse the doc­trine. It was opposed by Bernard of Clairvaux, Anselm of Can­terbury, Bonaventure, Aquinas,28 the popes Leo I, Gregory I Innocent III, Gelasius I, Innocent V, and Clement VI.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the dogma was ad­vocated by Duns Scotus, the “subtle doctor.” During the medieval period the belief became common in the church that though Mary was conceived in sin, she was sanctified in the womb like John the Baptist, and thus prepared to be a pure receptacle for the Son of God. Others, however, held the view that Mary was fully sanc­tified only when she conceived Christ by the Holy Spirit, not at the time of her own conception.

After the fourteenth century the question of Mary’s relation to original sin became a point of controversy between Thomists and Scotists, and between Dominicans and Franciscans, the various parties charging one another with heresy. Schaff notes that four members of the Dominican order, “who were discovered in a pious fraud against the Franciscan doctrine, were burned [at the stake] by order of a papal court in Rome on the eve of the Reformation. The Swedish prophetess, St. Birgitte, was assured in a vision by the Mother of God that she was conceived without sin; while St. Catherine of Siena prophesied for the Dominicans that Mary was sanctified in the third hour after her conception.”29

Needless to say, such accounts do not bolster confidence in the credibility of the dogma of the immaculate conception. A candid examination of the exegetical and historical data reveals the in­adequacy of their claims.

The doctrine of papal infallibility, also proclaimed by Pius IX, was officially defined on July 18, 1870, at the climax of the First Vatican Council, meeting at the Vatican in Rome. The dogma as­serted that the Roman pontiff, when speaking from his chair (X cathedra) on faith and morals, is infallible, and that such defini­tions are irreformable and not in consequence of the consent of the church. The pope on his own authority claimed the authority to define new and binding articles of faith, apart from either scrip­ture or general council.

The arrangements for the Vatican Council had been carefully orchestrated by Pius IX to secure a vote in favor of infallibility. The pope had selected the committee members responsible for pre­paring the draft reports in such a way as to secure the pre­ponderance of infallibilist sentiment. A revised order of business issued February 22, 1870, changed the traditional procedure re­quiring absolute or at least moral unanimity in definitions of faith and substituted for it a new rule requiring a mere numerical ma­jority. The ancient rule of catholic tradition (quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est) was abandoned in order to secure a positive vote for infallibility despite the objections of a powerful minority. The pope also sought to control public opinion in Rome. Nothing was allowed to be printed in Rome during the council which opposed infallibility, while the proponents of the proposed dogma were given the full freedom to publish whatever they wished.

When Bishop Strossmayer, one of the most outspoken members of the opposition, during one of the debates criticized the prin­ciple of deciding matters of faith by mere majority votes, he was loudly interrupted by shouts from all sides of “Shame! Shame! Down with the heretic!” Other bishops leaped from their seats, rushed to the speaker’s platform, and shook their fists in Strossmayer’s face. The bishop was forced by the uproar to leave the platform.30

In a preliminary vote on infallibility eighty-eight bishops voted in the negative, including many distinguished for their learning and scholarship. Later, fifty-six of these and sixty others left Rome before the final vote was taken, rather than oppose Pius IX. As a result, when the final vote was taken on July 18, 1870, the new dogma of infallibility received an overwhelming vote of 533-2.

The procedural chicanery resorted to at the First Vatican Coun­cil reflects the intrinsic weakness of the arguments in favor of papal infallibility. The dogma is supported by the evidence of nei­ther scripture nor tradition. The evidence of church tradition and history is decidedly embarrassing to the dogma. The four great ecumenical creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, Chalcedonian, Athanasian) and the ecumenical councils of the first eight centuries have no references whatever to papal infallibility. In terms of the canon of true catholicity, “that which always, everywhere, and by all has been believed,” this lack of evidence alone is a decisive strike against the doctrine.

One of the most damaging pieces of historical evidence, how­ever, involves the famous case of Pope Honorius I (625 — 638), who was later officially condemned for teaching heresy by an ecumen­ical council. As Schaff has pointed out,31 Honorius, in two letters to his heretical colleague Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, taught ex cathedra the Monothelite heresy, which was condemned by the sixth ecumenical council in 680.32 This council was rec­ognized as valid by both the Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek) branches of the church. The council condemned and excommun­icated Honorius as a heretic, and the seventh (787) and eighth (869) ecumenical councils repeated the anathemas of the sixth.

Subsequent popes down to the eleventh century, in a solemn oath upon their accession to the office, endorsed the canons of the sixth ecumenical council and pronounced an anathema on the authors of the Monothelite heresy together with Pope Honorius, who had aided and abetted the doctrine. The Roman Cath­olic popes themselves for more than three hundred years publicly recognized the facts that an ecumenical council may condemn a pope for heresy and that Pope Honorius was actually and right­fully so condemned.

Schaff remarks that the case of Honorius is “as clear and strong as any fact in church history.”33 Attempts by infallibilists to claim that the records of the councils or the letters of Honorius are forgeries are simply desperate expedients, without historical cred­ibility, to avoid the weight of the damaging evidence. The decisive fact remains, states Schaff, “that both Councils and Popes for sev­eral hundred years believed in the fallibility of the Pope, in flat contradiction to the Vatican Council.”34

The doctrine of papal infallibility is also discredited by the fact that forged documents were used during the Middle Ages to ad­vance the interests and power of the papacy. The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, supposedly compiled by Isidore of Seville (d. 636), are now recognized to contain forged materials. The decretals contain letters of ante-Nicene popes, all forgeries; canons of councils, mostly genuine; letters from later popes, thirty-five of which are forgeries. The decretals were intended to help free the bishops from the authority of the secular powers and to exalt the papacy. These documents, unknown before 852, contain obvious historical anachronisms, such as the use of the Vulgate in the decretals of the earliest popes. The obviousness of these historical errors has led even Roman Catholic scholars to acknowledge their spurious nature.

The so-called “Donation of Constantine” was also used to ad­vance the claims of the papacy. This document, which was fabri­cated during the eighth or ninth century, probably in the Frankish empire, had a wide influence during the Middle Ages. According to this forgery, the Emperor Constantine supposedly conferred on Pope Sylvester I (314 — 335) primacy over the churches of Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, and dominion over all Italy, including Rome. The Donation made the pope supreme judge of all clergy. The document was apparently first used to support papal claims in 1054 by Leo IX, and was thereafter consistently used by his successors. The Renaissance scholars Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla demonstrated its falsity during the fifteenth century.

The biblical texts cited in support of papal infallibility are as unimpressive as the evidence of church history and tradition. Most commonly cited are Matt. 16:18 (“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”); Luke 22:32 (“I have prayed for thee, that thy faith may not fail”—paraph. of luv); John 21:15 —17 (“Feed my lambs…. Feed my sheep”). Of these, Matt. 16:18 is the most important.

With respect to Matt. 16:18, Protestants have seen the “rock” as Peter’s confession and ultimately as Christ himself. Peter acknowl­edges Christ as the “rock” or “stone”: “Come to him, that living stone” (1 Peter 2:4); cf. Eph. 2:20, the household of God “built upon the foundation of the prophets and the apostles [Peter not unique], Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.”

In Matt. 16:19 Christ says to Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Note, however, that the “power of the keys” is given to all the apostles, not just Peter, according to John 20:22-23: “He breathed on them, and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven” And according to Matt. 18:17-18 the power of excommunication is exercised by the church as a whole, not by a single individual.

While Peter was certainly eminent as a leader in the early church, Matt. 16:18 and the related texts teach neither Peter’s infallibility nor Christ’s intention to establish a succession of infallible teach­ers. Significantly, when the comments of the church fathers on Matt. 16:18 are examined, it is striking that not one finds papal infallibility in the passage. Sixteen take the reference to the “rock” to mean Christ; forty-four, including Chrysostom, Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine, understand the “rock” to refer to Peter’s faith or confession. The “unanimous consent of the fathers”—a hermeneutical norm for Roman Catholicism in matters of inter­pretation—is on this point simply nonexistent.

It is claimed that the popes, as the successors of Peter, are the true successors of the apostles. The “apostolic successors” of today, however, lack the essential qualifications of a true apostle, as specified in the New Testament. One must have been a witness to the resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor. 9:1, “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”; cf. Acts 1:21-22). A true apostle pos­sesses the power of performing miracles (2 Cor. 12:12; Rom. 15:18-19). The popes lack both qualifications.

The final Roman Catholic doctrinal tradition to be considered here is the dogma of the assumption of Mary into heaven. Pope Pius XII, on November 1, 1950, solemnly described what was be­lieved to be the crowning event of the Virgin’s life. In the papal proclamation Munificentissimus Deus the pope defined it to be an article of the Roman faith that the “immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” The language here teaches the perpetual virginity of Mary as well.

Belief in the assumption of Mary is reflected in apocryphal tra­ditions dating from about 400. The legend of the assumption was accepted as true by Pseudo-Dionysius and by Gregory the Great. Gregory relates the account thus: The apostles were assembled in the house of Mary to watch at her deathbed; Jesus appeared with the angels, received her soul, and gave it to the archangel Michael. On the following day the apostles were about to carry the body to the grave; Jesus again appeared and took Mary’s body up in a cloud into heaven, there to be reunited with her soul. John of Damascus relates the legend in yet a more elaborate form: Not only the angels but the patriarchs were present with the apostles at the deathbed; even Adam and Eve were there, blessing Mary for removing the curse which through them came upon the world.

As Hanson has observed, if the dogma involves belief in a his­torical fact, “it is a fact wholly unknown to the writers of the second and third centuries.”35 In other words, the dogma’s his­torical claims to be apostolic are nonexistent.

About the year 600 the emperor Maurice ordered the feast of the assumption to be celebrated in the Eastern church, fixing the date as August 15. About the same time Gregory the Great fixed the same date for the Latin church, where previously it had been celebrated on January 18.

At the First Vatican Council over two hundred bishops expressed a desire for a papal decree making the assumption an article of Roman faith. This desire was finally granted eighty years later by the pronouncement of Piux XII.

As to the possible biblical basis for this dogma, one Catholic scholar has admitted that there “is no explicit reference to the Assumption in the Bible.”36 Attempts have been made to relate the assumption to the doctrine of the resurrection, where sin and the sting of death are overcome in the victory of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:53-57). Mary, being free from sin, presumably “anticipated” the final resurrection victory of all believers in her assumption into heaven. Referring to Luke 1:28, “Hail [Mary], full of grace,” Pius IX suggested that the fullness of grace bestowed upon the Virgin was only finally achieved by her assumption. Perhaps Rev. 12:1, the description of the great sign in the heavens, a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and head crowned with twelve stars, has some reference to Mary as well as to the church. Mary as the “New Eve” in some sense shared in the re­demptive mission of Christ. “Christian intuition, guided by the Holy Spirit,” writes Langlinais, “gradually came to see that Mary’s share in Christ’s victory over sin began with her conception in a state free from all sin (the state in which Eve was created), and ended with her miraculous Assumption (an immunity from death and corruption which Eve enjoyed until the Fall).”37

Such references to the biblical data can have no claim to be recognized as serious historical-grammatical exegesis. “Christian intuition”—in this case, the vagaries of grass-roots piety—has led away from the teachings of the New Testament, obscured the su­premacy and uniqueness of the redemptive work of Christ, con­fused legend with historical fact, and placed the most serious obstacles in the path of Roman Catholic—Protestant relations. Evangelicals can learn much from a tradition of the patristic church, but can in no way compromise, in matters of doctrinal authority, the sola scriptura principle of the Protestant Reforma­tion. The Bible, and the Bible alone, must remain the final written authority for Christian faith and practice.

FOOTNOTES

  1. F.F. Bruce, Tradition Old and New, p. 168.
  2. Loserth, “Wyclif, John,” p. 463.
  3. E.g., it is interesting to note that the church father most frequently cited by Calvin in the Institutes is Augustine, the great exponent of divine grace and predestination.
  4. Recall the comments made in relation to James Smart’s The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church in Chapter 6.
  5. Priscilla Whitehead and Tom McAlpine, “Evangelical/Liberal Theology—a False Dichotomy?” p. 10.
  6. In the Harvard dialogue (1981) Kaufman prefaced his remarks by saying, “I am just speaking for myself.” This is indeed the Achilles’ heel of Protestant modernism: it speaks not by the authority of the Bible or tradition; it speaks merely “for itself.”
  7. Sidney E. Mead, “Protestantism in America,” p. 293.
  8. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, vol. IV, p.428.
  9. Ably pointed out by F. F. Bruce in Tradition Old and New.
  10. Robert E. Webber, Common Roots, p.22.
  11. Robert E. Webber and Donald Bloesch, eds., The Orthodox Evangelicals, 11.
  12. Thomas C. Oden, Agenda for Theology, xii.
  13. Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, 101.
  14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Puth and Method, 258.
  15. Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man, 31.
  16. Ibid., p.60.
  17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 116.
  18. Donald G. Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, I, p. 57.
  19. See G. C. Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, 89 —111; A. N. S. Lane, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey”
  20. David F. Wells, “Tradition,” p. 59.
  21. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, I, pp.108-9.
  22. Ibid., p.110.
  23. Ibid., p.115.
  24. Aquinas, however, did believe that Mary, like John the Baptist, was sanctified in the womb after the infusion of the soul.
  25. Schaff, Creeds, 1:124.
  26. Ibid., p.145, n.2.
  27. Ibid., pp. 178-80.
  28. The Monothelites held that Christ had only one will, the divine. The orthodox position is that Christ had two wills, a human and a divine—will being an attribute of the nature rather than of the person. The Logos, the second person of the Trinity, pos­sessed a divine will; Christ, possessing a fully human nature, also possessed a human will. The Monothelite heresy thus denied the full and true humanity of the Savior. If in the incarnation the Logos did not assume a full human nature, then the comprehen­siveness of the redemption of human nature has been compromised.
  29. Schaff, Creeds, 1:179.
  30. Ibid., 1:180.
  31. Hanson, Tradition, 238.
  32. W. Langlinais, “Assumption of Mary,” p. 972.
  33. Ibid., pp. 972-73.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berkouwer, G. C. The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, tr. L. Smedes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965.

Bloesch, Donald G. Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. I. San Francisco: Har­per, 1978.

Bruce, F. F. Tradition Old and New. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970.

Childs, Brevard. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Muth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward, 1975.

Gallup, George, Jr., and Poling, David. The Search for America’s Faith. Nashville: Abingdon, 1980.

Hanson, R. P. C. Tradition in the Early Church. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962. Kiing, Hans. Justification. New York: Nelson, 1964.

Lane, A. N. S. “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey,” Vox Evan-gelica 9 (1975):37-55.

Langlinais, J. W. “Assumption of Mary,” New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.

Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of the Expansion of Christianity, vol. IV. New York: Harper, 1941.

Leith, John H., ed. Creeds of the Churches. Richmond: John Knox, 1973.

Loserth, J. “Wyclif, John,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1912.

Mead, Sidney E. “Protestantism in America,” Church History 23 (1954):291-320.

Oden, Thomas C. Agenda for Theology. San Francisco: Harper, 1979.

Polanyi, Michael. The Study of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Rushdoony, R. J. Infallibility: An Inescapable Concept. Vallecito, Calif.: Ross House, 1978.

Schaff, Philip. The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. I. New York: Harper, 1877. Thiselton, Anthony C. The TWo Horizons. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980.

Webber, Robert E. Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978.

Webber, Robert E., and Bloesch, Donald, eds. The Orthodox Evangelicals. Nash­ville: Thomas Nelson, 1978.

Wegenast, K. “παραδίδωμι,” New International Dictionary of New Testament Theo­logy. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978. III, 772-75. (I added the PDF of this entire note for the Greek minded researcher)

Wells, David E “Tradition: A Meeting Place for Catholic and Evangelical Theol­ogy?” Christian Scholar’s Review 5 :(1975):50-61 .

Whitehead, Priscilla, and McAlpine, Tom. “EvangelicaVLiberal Theology—a False Dichotomy?” TSF Bulletin, Mar/Apr., 1982, pp. 8-11.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Zockler, 0. “Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910.

Okay, here is the Zacharias Ursinus quote from footnote #176


Zacharias Ursinus and G. W. Williard,
The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism
(Cincinnati, OH: Elm Street Printing Company, 1888), 117–118.


exposition

The term symbol or creed (symbolum) signifies in general a sign or mark by which one person or thing is distinguished from another, as a military symbol is a sign which distinguishes allies from enemies. The German has it: ein Feldzeichen, oder Losung. Or, it (symbola) signifies a collation or bringing together, as to a feast—zufammen schiessen. In the sense of the church, it signifies a brief and summary form of christian faith, which distinguishes the church and her members from all the various sects. There are those who suppose that this summary of our christian faith, as just recited, is called a symbol, or creed, because it was collated or formed by the Apostles, each one furnishing a certain portion of it. This, however, cannot be proven. It is more probable that it was so called because these articles constitute a certain form or rule with which the faith of all orthodox christians should agree and conform. It is called apostolic, because it contains the substance of the doctrine of the Apostles, which the catechumens were required to believe and profess; or because the Apostles delivered this sum of christian doctrine to their disciples, and the church afterwards received it from them. It is called Catholic, because it is the one faith of all christians.

We must here inquire, Why were other creeds, as the Nicene, the Athanasian, the Ephesian, and Chalcedonian, formed and received in the church after the Apostles’ creed? To this we would reply, that these are not properly other creeds differing in substance from the Apostles’ creed, but are merely a repetition and clearer enunciation of its meaning, in which some words are added, by way of explanation, on account of heretics, who took advantage of its brevity, and corrupted it. There is, therefore, no change as it respects the matter or substance of the Apostles’ creed in those of a later date, but merely a difference in the form in which the doctrines are expressed.

There are other weighty reasons which may have led and compelled the Bishops and teachers of the ancient church to form and construct these brief formulas of confession, especially when churches were multiplying, and heresies were springing up in different places. Among these reasons we may mention the following: 1. That all the young, as well as those of riper years, might be able to remember the chief points of christian doctrine, as thus briefly summed up and expressed. 2. That all might constantly have before their eyes the confession and comfort of their faith, knowing what the doctrine was on account of which they were called to suffer persecution. It was in this way that God formerly had the substance of the law and promises expressed and comprehended in a brief form, so that all might have a certain rule of life and ground of comfort continually in view. 3. That the faithful might have a certain badge or mark by which they might then and in all future ages be distinguished from unbelievers and heretics, who cunningly corrupt the writings of the Prophets and Apostles. This was also a reason on account of which those confessions were called creeds or symbols. 4. That there might be extant some perpetual rule, short, simple, and easily understood by all, according to which every doctrine and interpretation of Scripture might be tried, that they might be embraced and believed when agreeing therewith, and rejected when differing from it.

But although other confessions were formed, the Apostles’ creed greatly surpasses all others in importance and authority, and that for the following reasons: 1. Because almost the whole of it is expressed in the very language of the Scriptures. 2. Because it is of the greatest antiquity, and was first delivered to the church by apostolic men, either by the Apostles themselves, or by their disciples and hearers, and has been regularly transmitted down to the present time. 3. Because it is the basis and type of all the other creeds which have been formed by the consent of the whole church, and approved of by general synods, for the purpose of preventing and refuting the perversions and corruptions of heretics, by explaining more fully the meaning of the Apostles’ creed.

The truth of the other creeds, however, does not consist in the authority or in the decrees of men, or of councils, but in their perpetual agreement with the holy Scriptures, and with the teachings of the whole church from the time of the Apostles, retaining and holding fast to the doctrine which they delivered, and at the same time giving testimony to posterity that they have received this doctrine from the Apostles and those that heard them, which agreement is obvious to all those who will but give the subject a careful consideration. The power to give new laws concerning the worship of God, or to give new articles of faith binding the conscience, belongs to no assembly of men or of angels, but to God alone. We are not to believe God on account of the testimony of the church, but the church upon the testimony of God.