How to prove the divine inspiration and infallibility of Sacred Scripture to an Agnostic Theist?

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Hi everyone. How does one go about proving the divine inspiration and infallibility of Sacred Scripture to an Agnostic Theist? My best friend is an Agnostic Theist. By this I mean that he does not know for sure whether or not God exists but he hopes that God exists. He has some Christian beliefs but he does not understand the Bible and believes that most of it is mythology.
 
Holly3278 said:
Hi everyone. How does one go about proving the divine inspiration and infallibility of Sacred Scripture to an Agnostic Theist? My best friend is an Agnostic Theist. By this I mean that he does not know for sure whether or not God exists but he hopes that God exists. He has some Christian beliefs but he does not understand the Bible and believes that most of it is mythology.
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I would use something written by a Catholic scholar in “popular terms” (not overly technical) as a reference to make sure you are both on the same page and both understanding what the Church says, A good example which addresses the questions you mention is *Biblical Fundamentalism - *What Every Catholic Should Know by Ronald D. Witherup, S.S., published by Liturgical Press. This inexpensive booklet is widely available and has the imprimatur and nihil obstat,

Another excellent source is *And God Said What - An Introduction to Biblical Literary Forms *by Margaret Nutting Ralph. This booklet is used in many Catholic adult education classes and addresses your questions also.
 
patg said:
I would use something written by a Catholic scholar in “popular terms” (not overly technical) as a reference to make sure you are both on the same page and both understanding what the Church says, A good example which addresses the questions you mention is *Biblical Fundamentalism - *What Every Catholic Should Know by Ronald D. Witherup, S.S., published by Liturgical Press. This inexpensive booklet is widely available and has the imprimatur and nihil obstat,

Another excellent source is *And God Said What - An Introduction to Biblical Literary Forms *by Margaret Nutting Ralph. This booklet is used in many Catholic adult education classes and addresses your questions also.
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Ah ok. Thank you for recommending these resources. I will see what I can do about getting them from the library or something. 👍
 
First you will need to prove the existence of God and then work your way to explaining the reliability of Christianity. But to say the very least you can not give 2 dollar answers for a 2 million dollar question. So please feel free to continue to ask questions in this thread as your friend would in a discussion.

First of all, I would explain the fact that we as humans communicate by talking, writing, and spending time with one another. That is how we are created. So, if we are created in that way, it only seems reasonable that our Creator would communicate with use in that manner, and He has. First of all God has communicated with us verbally, and sometimes He still does, but He certainly did with Moses, and the prophets. God has communicated with us through writing, we have the Scritpures. And God has also come down on earth and spent time with us, Jesus Christ who is God in the flesh.

But as for the Bible, my 1st approach would be the vast amount of ancient Bible manuscripts. We have over 5000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament alone. Over 10,000 ancient Latin manuscripts. Many many ancient manuscripts from various languages such as Coptic, Gothic, etc etc. We have Lots of ancient Old Testament manuscritps, just look at the Dead Sea Scrolls! That would be my first approach I would do in order to give him soemthing to think about.
 
Well the first thing you have to do is prove Catholicism, which requires you to prove Christianity.

Basically your general outline would be something like
A. Christianity is true because
B. Catholicism is the only true form of Christianity because <tons of excellent resources on this, as I’m sure you know>
C. Since Catholicism is true, and Catholicism holds the bible to be inerrant, the Bible is inerrant.

The hardest thing to prove would be A. but I think that I can give you some guidance. Understand that this is a VERY rough outline; it’s just something that might help to get you started, and it will require a lot of research to work. To prove A.:
i.) Morality is objective
ii.) This morality comes from god
- Explain how this morality is no accident of evolution because we’d just be constantly competitive otherwise, etc.
iii.) Therefore, the best religion will be the one that best fits our objective, universal morality.
iv.) Christianity fits our morality perfectly (compare Christianity to the moral teachings of other religions. Just a hint, Buddhism seems good and in some ways it is, but it is certainly inferior to Christianity because the focus of Buddhism is personal enlightenment: they practice charity but only as a means to a selfish end. Christianity is concerned with helping others because you love them. That’s not the best way to put it but it’s close. Don’t forget to point out that religious oppression and ecclesiastical corruption occur in spite of Christianity, not because of it.

BTW, just a little nit-picky thing, infallibility usually means the same thing as inerrancy but it’s become the preferred term for some liberal scholars while inerrancy hasn’t, so you might want to use that term just so you’re sure they know what you’re talking about.
 
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