How do we know that scripture is Inspired?

[Robyn_p]

Except that entering this relationship can only be done by formally joining the Church.
And formally joining the Church means to profess all those secular arguments as relevant, among other things.

Lucy, when you say joining the Church means professing all those secular arguments as relevant, do you mean apologetic arguments like the spiral argument and others?

Because you are not and never will be required to profess or accept any argument. All the Church asks of us is to believe her teachings, but HOW you individually get to the point where you can believe that Catholicism is true doesn’t matter. FWIW, not even Thomas Aquinas thought that we could prove that Catholicism was true through reason. He believed nothing the Church taught was contrary to reason and reason could answer non-believers objections, but that’s about it.

I am already reading it.

One of my main problems right now is what to do in the meantime while studying the CCC and other texts. Even in the most ideal case, I couldn’t formally become a Catholic in less than a year from now.

I don’t think I can wait that long to begin putting things into practice. My life right now is such that it requires courage under fire, so to speak. I need God now, not first a year or more from now.

If it were up to me, I would put a number of teachings, including those involving prayer and expressed reliance on God, into action now.

But I get told that I can’t refer to God as “Father” -

That means I also can’t pray the Lord’s Prayer. And probably the others also not.

You certainly can pray to God right now my friend. Pope Benedict isn’t saying there that only baptized people can say the Our Father. Remember, Jesus taught this prayer to people who weren’t baptized yet. And the Jewish people had already been calling God their Father for centuries before that.

What he is talking about is the change baptism makes in our soul, which enables us to call God “Father” in a new and unique way that we never could before. He’s not just our Father because He created us and protects us, but through baptism we are joined to Christ and are now “partakers of the divine nature” as St. Peter put it. Through grace we really share in God’s nature, and so He is now our Father in a more perfect and real way than before baptism.

But that in no way means you can’t pray to Him or have a relationship with Him until you are baptized. Just look at Cornelius in Acts 10. He was a Gentile who believed in the God of Abraham, but had never heard of Jesus or baptism. And yet, here is what the angel who appeared to him told him:

“Cornelius, your prayers and your almsgiving have ascended as a memorial offering before God” (Acts 10:4)

Cornelius’ prayers were not only heard by God (even though he wasn’t baptized) but those prayers were pleasing to Him. And as we see a few verses later, God even sends the Holy Spirit down on Cornelius’ entire household. Before being baptized.

So definitely pray right now. It will not be for nothing. God wants to be in a relationship with you, and prayer is the way to start that.

 

[Contarini]

You are aware of the fact that many non-biblical documents provide information about Jesus, right?

I’m not only not aware of it, I’m aware that whenever the claim has been made to me before, I’ve looked into it and found it to be bogus.

We have practically no independent sources for Jesus outside the Gospels. Josephus and Tacitus are pretty much it for reliable non-Christian references, and they add nothing to what the Gospels tell us, nor do they corroborate anything much beyond that Jesus existed.

So, let’s review what we can learn from hostile pagan and Jewish sources describing Jesus. We’ll do our best to discount the anti-Christian bias we see in the sources. Many elements of the Biblical record are confirmed by these hostile accounts, in spite of the fact they deny the supernatural power of Jesus:

You have to show that these sources are reliable as independent witnesses. And apart from Josephus you can’t do that. The Talmud was written centuries later. Its references to Jesus are most likely attempts to explain away what Christians claimed about him in a hostile way. There is no reasonable certainty that it has independent information.

But the bigger problem here is that your “establish the general reliability” method just doesn’t work. It doesn’t get you around the specific issues with Matt. 16.

Did the Christian Church rightly interpret it the NT? The Church WROTE the NT, so a better question would be, does the NT accurately reflect the beliefs of Jesus earliest disciples - and not the other way around.

Members of the first-century Church wrote the NT. . . .

Since hundreds of eyewitness were still alive at the time of the writing of the NT books, we may conclude that had any of the writers gotten their facts wrong, they would have been quickly corrected by the community who viewed Jesus as Divine and His words as the Words of God.

And how would we know that? Maybe they did and were written off as “heretics.”

Again, I’m arguing the skeptical case because you force me to it by refusing to back off from the ridiculous “spiral argument.” I think that there are good probable reasons to accept the general historicity of the Gospels. But that doesn’t get us to the acceptance of specific passages without faith. And the spiral argument claims not to need faith until the final step. That’s why it is a bad argument.

You are trying to make this a more general argument about historicity.

Edwin​

 

[Contarini]

I’m torn.

Do I really want to put in the time necessary at this point to respond fully to each and every one of the points you assert in your posts?

Or do I simply back away from the discussion because I can see that your views about what we know and don’t know, what we can know and can’t know with reasonable certainty are very different from my own?

I don’t know.

You made a couple of decent points here and there…yes, I should have chosen Alexander the Great instead of Julius Caesar, yes, I did not mention Matthew specifically when I was laying out the case for historical accuracy of the NT (though I think the extra-biblical evidence shows Matthew to be reliable, but no, I don’t think I have made all of the assumptions and errors which you assert.

Obviously, you have issues with the CA article - you managed to get that message across. I just don’t find your objections to it to be all that strong. And I find easier to place my confidence in both CA and the other authors with whom I am familiar than in you. No offense intended.

At any rate, I think I will retire from the field. Victory is yours if you wish to claim it. For my part, I will spend some time reviewing the exchange and preparing for the inevitable next round because thus far, I do not see that either of us is likely to change our position any time soon.

Well, I probably wasted my time too. I had some hope of getting through to you. But the power of the apologetics machine is too strong. I get it. It offers you certainty. Certainty is a lot more appealing than truth, and it masquerades as truth.

I shouldn’t try to shake your certainty. What I’m concerned about is the message you and others are sending to those who, like me, find certainty impossible and conventional apologetics an invitation to atheism.

Edwin

 

[Robyn_p]

Or maybe God wants me to stop posting on this forum and stop talking to conservative Catholics generally:shrug:

I hope not. I always enjoy your posts and have gained a lot from reading you.

These forums would be a lesser place without you.

 

[Randy_Carson]

Well, I probably wasted my time too. I had some hope of getting through to you. But the power of the apologetics machine is too strong. I get it. It offers you certainty. Certainty is a lot more appealing than truth, and it masquerades as truth.

I shouldn’t try to shake your certainty. What I’m concerned about is the message you and others are sending to those who, like me, find certainty impossible and conventional apologetics an invitation to atheism.

Edwin

Well, I would like to ask this follow-up in light of the above.

In our exchange, you spent a lot of time attempting to debunk much of the historical evidence for Christianity. From this, I can only conclude that you find such evidence to be of little to no value to the Christian or to the potential convert to the faith.

What is the basis for what you believe, why do you believe it, and how can you certain of it?

 

[Robyn_p]

What is the basis for what you believe, why do you believe it, and how can you certain of it?

He actually explained most of this in post #32 of this thread.

 

[Randy_Carson]

He actually explained most of this in post #32 of this thread.

Thank you, Robyn. I will go back to review it now.

 

[Randy_Carson]

1. Of course, much the same is true in the NT in the way Jesus’ followers responded to Jesus’ death. Perhaps more explainable given the OT precedent. (But again, there were lots of crucified Jewish messiahs. Why did the followers of only this one, as far as we know, make such an outrageous claim?) But at the same time, the evidence for the resurrection is pretty darn strong as evidence for ancient events, not to mention supernatural events, goes. We have multiple attestation, and the fact that the first witnesses are said to have been women is strong evidence for the authenticity of the story. It doesn’t seem like a story anyone in that culture would have made up. Now this isn’t evidence for the inspiration of Scripture directly but for the resurrection. But of course the two are tied together.
2. Historically, Scripture has functioned as the book of the Church. So just as the inspiration of Scripture can’t be discussed apart from evidence for the resurrection, so it can’t be discussed apart from the evidence for the Church. While I don’t think we can prove with certainty that the early second-century claims about early Catholic leaders being disciples of the apostles are true, these claims are fairly plausible, I think, to anyone not strongly biased toward skepticism. And more to the point, for all the evil the Church has done, it has carried a message of hope and redemption through the centuries that remains powerful and persuasive to many, including myself, today.
3. And that brings me to the subjective “burning n the bosom” that Keating treats so scornfully in the Catholic Answers tract. I think it’s indispensable, though not sufficient. The Bible is, to put it simply, compelling. It contains a spiritual landscape in which people can spend a lifetime and feed on. It has inspired saints and poets and reformers for centuries. Sure, it may just be a cultural artifact. But the specific name that those inspired by the Bible have used to describe why it is so significant is “divine inspiration.” That is to say, those who are moved and shaped by the Bible, in ways that have powerfully shaped the world we live in, say that this moving and shaping comes not just from human sources but from God. And I find that a plausible, though not a certain claim.

Now this is only the barest outline. The real reasons for believing anything important (and for not believing it) are always far too numerous to list.

I began by saying “specifically with regard to the Bible” and then wound up talking about other things. But I’ll let that stand. One of my problems with the kind of apologetics represented in the OP is the delusion that we should first prove Scripture and then prove the resurrection as one of the things that happened in Scripture. Partly that’s just a typical non-historian’s misunderstanding of how historical evidence works. Non-historians always seem to want to establish absolutely reliable texts and then believe everything they say. That’s not how historians work. We throw out nothing but doubt everything.

Edwin

Wow. I skipped over this previously because it was addressed to someone else, but I wish I hadn’t. I find far more support for my arguments in this post than anything you gave directly to me.

ESSAY QUESTION (25 points)

Catholic Answers wrote:

Further, Christ said he would found a Church. Both the Bible (still taken as merely a historical book, not yet as an inspired one) and other ancient works attest to the fact that Christ established a Church with the rudiments of what we see in the Catholic Church today—papacy, hierarchy, priesthood, sacraments, and teaching authority.

Do you agree that Jesus promised to build or otherwise established the Church? Or is the development of the Church of purely human origin? What is the basis for your belief? Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

 

[ericc]

For one source of such reasons, see my post above about being a step-child.

What else is there that is not specific to Catholicism, but is still Christian, and monotheisic?

What disputes do you mean here?
The Catholic Church has a process which non-Catholics can follow to resolve disputes with Catholics or the Catholic doctrine?

For comparison: I once looked into the teachings and practices of the Hare Krishnas. I had a dispute with one of the members. I heard that in such cases, one could turn to the member’s teacher. I asked this member about who his teacher was, so that I could take the matter to him. This member told me that if I have an issue with him, I should go to the police.

Would it not be the same with Catholics?

If I have a problem with a Catholic, whom can I turn to? Nobody except the police?

If I have a problem with the Catholic doctrine, whom can I turn to? The Catholics will most likely simply tell me that the doctrine is right, and that I owe it to God to accept it. As far as I’ve come to know Catholics, they won’t really explain anything. As far as I have seen, Catholics simply take for granted that one trusts or must trust the Catholic doctrine, and that’s that.

And from what I’ve seen, members of other religions function by the same principle. Buddhists tend to take for granted that people should trust Buddhist teachings. Muslims tend to take for granted that people should trust Muslim teachings. Hindus tend to take for granted that people should trust Hindu teachings. And so on.

For someone born and raised in the Catholic Church, such a refusal is indeed self-imposed.

But for those outside of the Church?

Although I don’t really hope that you will understand what I’m talking about.

But there is no need to be outside the Church! Everyone should be in the Church. Doctrinal disputes can be settled IN the Church. (You can’t settle anything outside the Church. There is this thing about membership…and recognition of authority.) Christ wanted everyone to be one as he is one with the Father.

But knowing this, unfortunately there are some who insist on certain behaviour (e.g.divorce, abortion, SSA) which the Church can not accept as it would be against Christ teachings. For those, it is not a dispute that can be settled. Yet they still want to wear that badge of Christ. For those they think the problem is solved by going outside the Church. The problem is not solved, the problem was merely migrated outside the jurisdiction of the Church. They excommunicated themselves. Worse some of those developed an anti-Church bias, always bad-mouthing.

By doing so, they deny themselves all the sacraments that can be made available to them while in the Church. Even if what they have done is sinful, the sacrament of reconciliation, is always available although the Eucharist may be off limits while the sinful situation existed. Sacrament of Extreme Unction is also available. In time of distress, just quiet sitting in the adoration chapel can be very helpful. But outside of Church, without such sacrament graces to strengthen them, they could fall victim to other sinful attractions. Because being your own judge and jury is intoxicating.

But for those that do not have moral doctrinal issues with the Church, it is a pity that they are watching from outside. Truly. The Eucharist, the Living Bread from Heaven, is that last item on your list not crossed out yet. And who can deny that having your sins absoluted by Christ himself is such a tremendous burden lightener. Those magical words : “I absolve you from your sins”

 

[Lucy107]

If a person is humble and truthful enough, he will recognize that he is truly fallible, even capable of evil. This applies to those in or out of religion. Now if a religion states things that are true, confirmed by objective reality more than other religions, and can back up what it states, then should one investigate this religion?

Per this, one ought to investigate Islam and Hare Krishna sa well. Because they, too, accuse people of “self-righteousness.”

He is the Way, there is no other.

Or Mohammad. Or Srila Prabhupada.

In the early Church, at least according to some sources, the Lord’s Prayer was not taught until pretty late in the initiation process.

I’ve read this too, in the notes in the study edition of the Bible in my native language.

The modern RCIA program has revived the practice of presenting the catechumens with the Prayer during Lent (though I’m sure not all parishes do this). Lucy may have deduced from this that she can’t say the Lord’s Prayer until she is baptized, which I do not believe is true.

I’ve read Pope Benedict’s text I linked to earlier.

 

[clem456]

…
Do you agree that Jesus promised to build or otherwise established the Church? Or is the development of the Church of purely human origin? What is the basis for your belief? Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

Isn’t this a false dichotomy? Isn’t a better question "Is the development of the Church a fully human endeavor? Fully human is different than purely or exclusively human.

We believe Christ established a fully human community, by virtue of his incarnation, his coming to live among us. We believe his promises are good and durable, and that his Church reflects this. I personally come to this faith through the living witness of a community, which witnesses to us the living Word of God himself. This witness is through Tradition, Scripture, and the living Church. This faith does require the acceptance of Christ’s historical presence, of course. He came to live among us in time and space. But as an argument for inspired belief, it is simply very inadequate and focused on the wrong elements of the faith.

Is the development of the Church a fully human endeavor? Yes, by definition. Scripture is the inspired word of God written in the full human condition, subject to the passage of time, translation problems, faulty memories, stories, metaphors etc… No author had a tape recorder or a secretary at his side as Jesus walked and talked. The human elements of Scripture are similar to the story your father told about your great grandfather from 50 years ago. Who wrote that story? How historically accurate are the details? (no I’m not equating inspired scripture to mere family stories, I’m just noting that this sort of thing is part of the fully human condition, and does not detract from inspiration.) Does the power contained in the story require full historical accuracy?
And here’s the big question,
from the standpoint of God’s life giving breath, is it really necessary for us to insist that scripture have full historical inerrancy? Is that even what God wants from us? Is God not able to breath life-giving truth as he wills, or is he confined only to our human abilities to relate his story? The authors of scripture are fully human beings, inspired by God to write what he wills. Inspiration is not the same thing as historical inerrancy. I believe this is the problem Edwin has with this conception of God’s inspiration. It does not present a very powerful God of faith.

Christ was the 2nd person of the Trinity / fully human Jesus of Nazareth. He enters into the fully human condition, with all it’s messiness, uncertainty, confusion. Note the Crucifixion, which is nothing like an appeal to certainty. If Christ wanted to appeal to historical certainty, wouldn’t he have said, “Grab your writing materials and record this now before I die…decades will pass and you will forget the details. Don’t wait until the year 60 AD to do this”.
He did not come to make us perfect dictation machines, but rather to have faith in him, that others might come to know him by our witness to his love, not because we can prove every detail historically.

 

[Contarini]

Well, I would like to ask this follow-up in light of the above.

In our exchange, you spent a lot of time attempting to debunk much of the historical evidence for Christianity. From this, I can only conclude that you find such evidence to be of little to no value to the Christian or to the potential convert to the faith.

What is the basis for what you believe, why do you believe it, and how can you certain of it?

Randy, I resist answering this question when you ask it, because the fact that you ask it is itself part of what I see as the intellectual dishonesty infecting your position.

The assumption behind such a question is “if this argument is bad there must be a better one out there.”

If you care about truth, then you have to look squarely at the argument without the assurance that there is a better one.

In other words, if you start from the assumption that Catholicism is true and are simply looking for the most plausible way to justify what you already know, then your appeal to the spiral argument is clearly dishonest. The spiral argument claims to start from a neutral historical inquiry. Clearly if you are so desperate to find some justification for Cathoicism, then you aren’t engaging in such an inquiry and it’s dishonest to claim that you are.

I do not believe that there is such a thing as neutral inquiry. We all start from biases, and that’s OK. But we need to learn to be critical of our own biases and the arguments we use to justify them.

I would recommend Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry as a good, clear exposition of what is wrong with the assumptions behind the spiral argument and most apologetics generally (he isn’t criticizing apologetics in that book, but secular rationalism–but as Lucy has pointed out, the apologetics offered in this thread are rooted in Enlightenment presuppositions, what MacIntyre calls “the encyclopedia tradition”). Also William Abraham’s discussion of hard rationalism, soft rationalism, and fideism in Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. (MacIntyre is Catholic, Abraham is Methodist, if it matters.) You are working from a hard rationalist position–Lucy appears to be a fideist. I’m a “soft rationalist.” That is to say, I think we need reasons for what we believe, but I don’t think we can give a straightforward set of arguments that proceed from point A to point C via point B and provide a compelling proof for our beliefs. Rational belief, in religion and other “big questions,” is all about multiple lines of evidence converging.

Ironically, this is part of the problem we’re having with the spiral argument. You believe that the historicity of the NT is overwhelmingly supported by all kinds of evidence, but of course you have trouble boiling that down in a succinct form. That is one reason why the spiral argument is bad. The premise on which it rests cannot itself be proven by the methods the argument is using. It’s not that there aren’t good reasons for believing in the historicity of Scripture, but that these reasons are many and of many kinds, and ultimately choosing to believe in them involves an act of faith. Which is also why the separation between historicity and inspiration is silly.

I am sorry for getting mad and taunting you. I was taking out my frustrations with my own relationship with Catholicism on you, as the representative of the kind of Catholicism I absolutely do not believe in. You didn’t deserve that.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Wow. I skipped over this previously because it was addressed to someone else, but I wish I hadn’t. I find far more support for my arguments in this post than anything you gave directly to me.

How? The entire point is that we can’t have confidence in the historicity of Scripture (the kind of complete confidence required by the argument) except on the basis of faith. There are rational reasons for faith, but these do not proceed through establishing the complete historicity of Scripture first. Nor do they proceed in a linear fashion.

ESSAY QUESTION (25 points)

Catholic Answers wrote:

Further, Christ said he would found a Church. Both the Bible (still taken as merely a historical book, not yet as an inspired one) and other ancient works attest to the fact that Christ established a Church with the rudiments of what we see in the Catholic Church today—papacy, hierarchy, priesthood, sacraments, and teaching authority.

Do you agree that Jesus promised to build or otherwise established the Church? Or is the development of the Church of purely human origin? What is the basis for your belief? Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

As Wright points out, it’s reasonable just on historical grounds to think that Jesus expected to have some kind of community of people who would carry on his work. (Much depends on whether we think that Jesus expected the world to end imminently, in our modern sense of the term.) I think that Matthew 16 is probably Matthew’s divinely inspired interpretation of the meaning of what happened between Jesus and Peter, but I think Jesus’ choice of the Twelve is historical and clearly represents the intention to found a kind of new Israel. I think that getting into the question of Jesus’ psychology beyond the limited extent to which historical inquiry allows us to reconstruct his aims and beliefs as a human being is probably a bad idea. That is to say, I don’t proceed on the assumption “since Jesus was God he must have clearly known X.” This is a great mystery and I don’t think we can speak about it cogently.

Either way, I certainly don’t think the Church is of merely human origin. I believe that it grew through the power of the Spirit, and as I said above I think it was clearly based on Jesus’ choice of a symbolic “new Israel” in the person of the Twelve and the commission that Jesus gave to them.

Edwin

 

[clem456]

Thought this was a pertinent passage from Verbum Domini:
Pope Benedict indicates the credibility of the Word requires witness (not exclusive of historical integrity, of course)

w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20100930_verbum-domini.html#_ftn120

The word of God and Christian witness

1. The immense horizons of the Church’s mission and the complexity of today’s situation call for new ways of effectively communicating the word of God. The Holy Spirit, the protagonist of all evangelization, will never fail to guide Christ’s Church in this activity. Yet it is important that every form of proclamation keep in mind, first of all, the intrinsic relationship between the communication of God’s word and Christian witness. The very credibility of our proclamation depends on this. On the one hand, the word must communicate every-thing that the Lord himself has told us. On the other hand, it is indispensable, through witness, to make this word credible, lest it appear merely as a beautiful philosophy or utopia, rather than a reality that can be lived and itself give life. This reciprocity between word and witness reflects the way in which God himself communicated through the incarnation of his Word. The word of God reaches men and women “through an encounter with witnesses who make it present and alive”.[323] In a particular way, young people need to be introduced to the word of God “through encounter and authentic witness by adults, through the positive influence of friends and the great company of the ecclesial community”.[324]

There is a close relationship between the testimony of Scripture, as the self-attestation of God’s word, and the witness given by the lives of believers. One implies and leads to the other. Christian witness communicates the word attested in the Scriptures. For their part, the Scriptures explain the witness which Christians are called to give by their lives. Those who encounter credible witnesses of the Gospel thus come to realize how effective God’s word can be in those who receive it.

This is a lot more challenging than a “proof” (for me anyway).

 

[ajecphotos]

I am no scholar and have not read 100% of the bible.

But, i do question at times if we can honestly say that the whole Bible is the Word of God?

Dont get me wrong, i really would like to believe that it is, 100%!

 

[Contarini]

I am no scholar and have not read 100% of the bible.

But, i do question at times if we can honestly say that the whole Bible is the Word of God?

Dont get me wrong, i really would like to believe that it is, 100%!

The whole Bible is the Word of God, but it must be read according to the Rule of Faith, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

That’s one of the many reasons why I think that apologetics methods claiming to begin with “treating the Bible like just any other book” are so pernicious. You can’t get from here to there.

Edwin

 

[Lucy107]

The whole Bible is the Word of God, but it must be read according to the Rule of Faith, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Which seems to imply that it must be taken for granted that the Bible is inspired.

That’s one of the many reasons why I think that apologetics methods claiming to begin with “treating the Bible like just any other book” are so pernicious.

Yes. It seems like a characteristically atheistic endeavor.

 

[Lucy107]

And I don’t blame the Church - she didn’t invest in me, she didn’t invest in my upbringing, so why should she care about me the way she does about her own children? She also doesn’t have the same rights over me the way she has over her own children.

Oh. That’s bold.

She represents some one who has all the rights over you.

God can take away my possessions. Since the Church is God’s representative, the Church can take away my possessions too …

God can take away my mind. Since the Church is God’s representative, the Church can take away my mind too …

God can kill me. Since the Church is God’s representative, the Church can kill me too …

 

[clem456]

Which seems to imply that it must be taken for granted that the Bible is inspired.

Yes. It seems like a characteristically atheistic endeavor.

In my process of reversion I came to completely doubt the scriptures. Not that I couldn’t fathom miracles and other wonders, or had a big issue with specific passage. I just didn’t see a compelling reason to give my assent to anything proposed therein. I doubted the authenticity of the whole.

What brought me back was experiences and relationships with other people, starting at home and extending to parish life. Plus, living an un-Christian life led to negative consequences which was itself a motivation to seek alternatives.

Long story, but what Christianity proposes “works” for me. It brings “the good” to my life and the life of others. As I began to experience this goodness, I began to trust it, to give my assent to it, to have faith in it. As I gave my assent to the propositions of Christianity, the scriptures became an integral part of that. The scriptures reinforced the development of faith.

If you would have come at me with “the scriptures are historically proven”, I would have dismissed it out of hand. (I did dismiss the scriptures for years without a second thought). I have a hard science background, and the “proof” of Christianity in the scriptures doesn’t begin to rise to a level of scientific or serious historical certainty. Sure, there is the element of historical record, but without faith it truly does not amount to much. The “cloud of witnesses” living the faith is important.
But everyone is different. I don’t dispute any of the elements of historicity proposed in this thread, I just don’t think the particular paradigm proposed shows a convincing path to faith. To a Protestant looking at Catholicism, that particular proposal might be effective. But I don’t see how the appeal to historicity can be at all effective for one who is a doubter.

Christianity is not a religion of the book, it is an invitation to a relationship.

 

[ynotzap]

Faith in Jesus as God-man and Redeemer of mankind trumps the endeavors of historians and witnesses to prove Jesus exists, and that the Bible is the inspired word of God. As I see it, this is by Divine Providence. As Jesus attests that it was by the Father that St.Peter was gifted with the belief that Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah. Also as I stated before, St.Paul in Eph 2;9 states that not by human works, but the grace of God so no one may boast, only in Jesus Christ who made it possible There is also the pre-eminence of Christ to consider Phil 3: 7-11, Col l:15-29.

If we could prove with certainty through the endeavors of historians, and through the endeavors of witness, then the fruit of their endeavors would prove Jesus Christ existed and even prove He was God then salvation would come not direct;y, but indirectly through man, then man could take the credit as co-partner with Jesus. and this would be blasphemous towards God, and a lie. It is impossible for man to save himself, for how can he if he doesn’t possess the power to over-come evil in himself and in the world?

Also assuming that a married couple lived a good Christian life, and they taught their children all they know so that they became christians through their parents, then the children would be grand-children of God because the faith was passed on through their parents who were initially, adopted children of God by their baptism. True Faith is never passed on, God only has adopted Children. The Divine Adoption happened when they encountered Jesus in their conversion from sin to Christ initially, a one on one encounter Jesus would then become expendable, for grace could be passed on by the parents, and this again is a lie and blasphemous. He alone is the Savior of Mankind, no one else. The Father would never allow this happen to His Son, for it is right and just to acknowledge Jesus for who He is.

The Bible speaks of man’s mortal enemy, Satan who is the leader of other fallen angels. I don’t only believe in their existence, I have experienced their existence and power over me physically, and mentally. I have experienced crucial truths of the Bible, and Jesus existence is the most crucial, the central figure upon which the old testament and the new revolve. I can not convince anyone, only witness, but I can point the right direction. To me the Bible is the Word of God, accepted by faith, as the Church teaches, but also it is living, testifying to the truth, also prophetical and also a history and as the Bible testifies, Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, and I can only say this by the power of the Holy Spirit, my faith has been confirmed for me.