No. 6 I�m going to ask a question here that I suspect has also occurred to Nick, given his background. Why do we keep talking about inerrancy? Does that not make our outreach to people like scientists much more difficult? >>PROFESSOR ROLAND ZIEGLER: Yeah, David, that's a good question. And it's one of those things, when you try to reach people that you feel that's in a position that puts us somewhat in a ghetto. It's such a minority position. And how can we deal with it? How can you be a campus pastor and a firm six-day creation and be an anti-evolutionist? As a pastor once said, he was a Vicar in Palo Alto. And so in this congregation were all of these graduate students from Stanford University. He said: Well, I was green enough so that the first Bible study I did was on genesis. He didn't tell me how it went. But it kind of illustrates the dilemma. And now I feel if -- you know, that's -- it might be a harsh example. But it's what we say. We can go to Stanford University and do a Bible study and tell these biology PhD students how the world came about and how the origin of species really came to be. And you might feel uncomfortable and out of your field and out of your expertise and intimidated by these great brains and by this elite university. So give it up? Well, a lot of Christians, he has done exactly that. He has chosen to give up the idea of inerrancy because it seemed to be indefensible. Dogmatically it was possible because since the 18th Century a method originated that at its piece of position is a distinction between Scripture and the Word of God. Previously we talked about identifying these two things. And that's what was done throughout Christianity. Scripture is the Word of God. Period. A German ***Huanica Simla, who was a professor in Holland, he came up with the thesis that no, Scripture contains the Word of God. And that's of course the magical wand with which you then can avoid all of these questions. If Scripture only contains the Word of God, then everything that embarrasses you and seems to be not that important, you can push aside as irrelevant. Not the Word of God. Rather the word of man which kind of surrounds the Word of God. And ***Simla saw as the Word of God really the moral teaching. I said before, if you give up verbal inspiration, you end up with a Bible that strikingly resembles yourself. And Simla lived in the 18th Century. That's enlightenment time. What was the enlightenment all about? Well, it was about virtue, God and immortality. The kind of Masonic creed: Virtue, God and immortality. So all that other stuff like atonement, that's kind of embarrassment, too, you have the slaughter and execution and all of this blood. That's kind of barbaric, isn't it? We don't have sacrifices in our streets. Nobody is bringing a bull and cutting its throat and shedding some blood on some altar. We are too civilized for that. And we have too high of an opinion of God to think that this could be something that would be pleasing to God. It's much more spiritual now. We are spiritual. So Simla is one of those that gave up inerrancy with verbal inspiration. And what we see there is that the two are really connected. You can't have one without the other. And verbal inspiration really entails inerrancy. Because as soon as you say, "Oh, there are errors in the Bible," you have a standard by which you judge Holy Scripture, a standard of truth. Now, what might that standard of truth then be? Most of the time it is: Well, what everybody thinks is true. Especially in the scientific community. And in the rise of science through its phenomenal success in changing the circumstance of life for better in the 19th and 20th Century has endowed science with an authority which it never had before and which is just unquestionable. Just look at advertisements. They either appeal to your vanity -- well, vanity, sex or it's scientific. That's how you sell things. Oh, science tells you. And that settles it. So when science says, "Well, it didn't happen that way," well, too bad for Christianity. Either adapt or die. And so liberal Christianity chose to adapt. You acknowledge the hegemony of science and that they have the right to define what is true and not true. And you retreat in your religious province that becomes smaller and smaller. That's really what happened in the 19th and 20th Century. And then you have those who resist that and say: No. Scripture is true. Man can lie. But God cannot lie. And these are ridiculed by the mainstream as backwoods people. They are not quite up to snuff really with the progress of time. They survive in some remote areas where they also handle snakes or do other strange things. So in a way when you believe in verbal inspiration and inerrancy, oftentimes you feel a little bit marginalized. Well, that's an unhappy feeling. But it's better being marginalized and right than being with the mainstream and wrong. The inerrancy of Scripture is not something that is negotiable. Because again, if you do negotiate it, you lose Scripture as an authority. You lose Scripture as a norm. And you end up with being with yourself and with what everybody thinks. The question is: Is inerrancy defensible? And that's the realm of apogetics. Can you actually defend the claims of the truth of Scripture? And there are many, many books out there. And we're not having to get into any details here. But it can be defended. Now, there will remain problems. I won't say anything can be neatly resolved. I don't make that claim. But I uphold inerrancy as a consequence of verbal inspiration. If God really is the author, he will not lie nor deceive me. And therefore, I trust that his Word is inerrant. So that's an affirmation of faith. It's not something that I came priory. And it's also not something I have to prove to everybody. Because otherwise then you have this prejudice: Well, those conservative Christians or those LCMS Lutherans, well, they really think that you first have to believe the Bible before you can believe in Christ. That's of course really nonsense. Nobody ever said that. You always believe in -- first in Christ and from Christ then you come to trust the authority of Scripture. That's how it is. I mean, if you evangelize people, you don't tell them "By the way, God has this perfect book." You tell them "Hey, Christ; Christ died for your sins." You start with presenting the Gospel. And from the Gospel then people come to see that: Oh, Christ affirmed the authority of the Old Testament. From him comes the New Testament. It is his Word. And because I can trust Christ, I can trust these words. That's the natural way how it goes. Maybe that's also a difference how Lutherans affirm the authority of inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture than fundamentalists who seem to be on that track: Well, if I can't find a piece of wood on Mount Ararat, then I have proof of the inerrancy of Scripture. No, you don't. You might have proven the historicity of that story. And be assured someone will come up with an alternative explanation. And that will not make him believe actually in the truthfulness of Scripture. "That Scripture is true" does not simply mean that it is reliable. In the '50s you had the Biblical Theology Movement and neoorthodoxy, that is the theology of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. They made a big deal out of the idea that: Oh, well, the Hebrew concept of truth is really different from the Greek concept of truth. Hebrew ***imunad, that means the Word of God, is reliable. You can rely on it. You can trust in it. So that the Word of God is true is more something that has to do with the efficacy of Scripture. But it doesn't mean that it actually effectually happened. So what's the truth about the Exodus? Did actually the entire people of Israel walk through the Red Sea? Well, that's not what the story is about. The story is about that God will save you and save his people in a distressful situation. How many people actually walked through the Red Sea, if anybody walked through the Red Sea? That's not the point. The theology of the story is the point. And the latest manifestation or metamorphosis of such an approach was the archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden who was pretty liberal and who affirmed the virgin birth of Christ as a theological miracle, which means of course it didn't happen. Because afterall, science tells us how a human being comes into existence. So it's impossible. But it says something about Christ, that he's special. Okay. Now, you realize that if you define truthfulness in that way, it certainly is kind of very much different. And as somebody who is certainly not suspect of being a fundamentalist or conservative Christian, that is James Barr, who actually wrote a pretty nasty book against conservative Christianity -- he wrote in his book "The Semantics of Biblical Language," "It is simply not true that the use of ***alevia, that is truth, as translation with the background of the Hebrew emet removed its character as a semantic marker indicating the contrast true/false. So it's obviously not false. But the opposite would be unreliable, untrustworthy. "Examples have already been given from the Septuagint, Josephus and the New Testament where the census is precisely this. But this is perhaps more important to point out that this is a very frequent and one might say the normal sense in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, also. When the Queen of Sheba had seen Solomon, she remarked 'What I heard in my country about your words and wisdom was truth.' It is quite unfounded to suggest that anything about Yahweh as being true or as being the standard of truth is to be found here. "Numerous examples of the same kind could be cited. What the Queen of Sheba means, in fact, is very much what the English adjective true means to the ordinary English man today. Just like the Greeks speak of the First Century AD. Her interest is that the stories she has heard are not fictions or exaggerations but founded on fact." And if you put it like that, you realize that all these nice words about theological truth or reliability or factuality as not the issue are really kind of the efforts to camouflage that "Hey, these stories are made up. They never really happened. But you know, we still think they are somewhat important or they still have to teach something for us." And of course then you try to at least save some things. "Well, Christ really was on earth. And he really died. But his resurrection, of course we can't be quite that sure. But it does mean something." Like Jesus' case goes on. That's ***Hewitt Brown, a German theologian in the '60s, translated what resurrection means. Jesus' case goes on or the matter of Jesus goes on. That is not the same theological truth I draw from the resurrection. And so you again see that you can't manipulate it and retain actually the theological content. If you strip the Bible of factuality, you end up with a different theology. You end up with some form of a Gnostic theology. "But the Bible is inerrant" on the other hand doesn't mean it conforms to the standards of a police report or a textbook. Most of Scripture are tales. Very old tales in a different culture. And just a literary format follows different laws than, again, a textbook or a police report. So numbers are rounded when you give quotations. It's not like you do in a paper. You get out the book and make sure it's a verbatim quote and you footnote it. But it's more you quote out of memory. So these are not -- that does not mean that the Bible is inexact or that there are contradictions in Scripture. But just that it's not the accuracy and exactness in some respects that we expect from a modern book. Another reason why inerrancy was given up was that people thought: Well, Scripture contradicts itself. So you have to choose. The unity of Scripture was destroyed. And that's of course a death knell to the authority of Scripture, too. Then you choose your tradition. "Well, I like Paul quite well. I think he's a better theologian. Unfortunately I have to ditch Saint Matthew. Oh, well, what the heck." Or you come to the conclusion of Ed Kasemann who wrote an essay is the New Testament Canon, "The basis for church unity" and says: No, everybody can claim the New Testament if you're Roman Catholic, if you're Pentecostal, if you're Lutheran. It's all part of the truth. So you have to come up with a canon in the canon. Again, you have to select. Scripture itself can no longer be the authority. You select and then you come up with your selection, whatever it is. You know if you're Lutheran, hey, St. Paul. If you're a Catholic, oh, Ephesians or the pastoral epistles. If you're Appalachian, oh, Saint Matthew and in your interpretation. If you believe in predestination, Romans 9. So there are all these different theologies in the New Testament. What you end up is really that either a different god spoke through a Scripture or it's just a mess and those people have never really figured out what God actually says. So you sink into agnosticism. And one example is ***Ghett Liddleman whose books have always been published here in the states who evolved from a very liberal New Testament scholar to a non-Christian theist and is now a total agnostic. Because "The New Testament, it's a mess. It's a book full of contradictions, different theologies." And you have to face that, that this is really the logical conclusion of a denial of inerrancy. Fortunately many people who deny inerrancy do not go all the way. They have hesitations. They still have a lot of dogmatic traditions or just what they learned in Sunday school maybe that holds them back. There are pious feelings toward certain things in Scripture. And we can be thankful for that. But it's certainly not consistent.