Josiah Concept Ministries

I have consolidated, edited, and updated the preceding three parts of this series here. Since it has been a while in posting (mostly due to serious computer issues that have crippled my Internet access) it may help to familiarize yourself with what has come before this so that you will be up to date. As sometimes happens, in writing and researching this piece I have changed my mind about the necessity of no physical death prior to the Fall, I now believe that it is possible the Fall only brought on spiritual death. However, I am not at all convinced that God merely breathed a soul into Adam, who prior to that had evolved from the ground up (so to speak). I have made some changes in the articles to reflect this new conviction.

The seat of Mike’s argument is Romans 11, which he says is the model for God allowing changes to occur on their own without removing his meticulous sovereignty. Unfortunately, this is difficult to reconcile given its proximity to Romans 9, which is the premiere Bible passage teaching election/predestination and the Calvinist view of soteriology. The ultimate passage in meticulous sovereignty would never be placed right next to the ultimate passage for letting things go and coming back later to see how they worked out. Paul wrote the to the Romans his masterwork letter, and he plotted its structure far too carefully to let two such contradictory notions slide in side-by-side.

There is a way to reconcile these points with each other, and for that we need not go any further than our own logic. Read more »

James White notes:

Roman Catholic apologists across the board have repeated the “sola scriptura leads to anarchy, look at the 23,000, 25,000, 27,000, 30,000, 33,000 denominations it has spawned” line. But is there any merit to this argument? Or is it a wonderful example of just how shallow and untruthful Rome’s arguments are? To that topic I turn in my next blog entry. (source)

I would just like to point out that Dr. White is in no way exaggerating.  I’ve been an apologist for just over a year now, and those numbers that he crossed off are just for this past year alone!  A year ago, I was quoted 23,000 denominations on Jimmy Akin’s blog.  A few months later, another poster was quoted 27,000.  Now, Steve Ray and others are quoting 33,000 Protestant denominations.  Like Dr. White, I was going to examine this claim, but instead I’ll move on to other topics and let Dr. White’s refutation stand for itself.

I thought I’d link to this for more than one reason.  Commenter Brian Westley and I have been arguing over interpretations of Scripture in the comments section of this post.  Paul Pruett points out:

When you [Brian] say that Christians don’t agree on morality, I would have to agree with you if you simply include every person who calls themselves a “Christian.” This would include cultists, liberal Christians, and nominal Christians, among others. Once you begin to narrow it down to those who take the Bible seriously, accept the historic creeds (like the Nicene), and are actually committed to applying and living out their faith, then many of the differences flee.

While this comes dangerously close to being dismissed by use of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy that gets thrown in my face each time I try to refute Fred Phelps to atheists, Paul is shrewdly observing that there is, in fact, an orthodoxy that exists in Biblical interpretation.  Sola scriptura never means that we read in a complete vacuum, never looking to historical Christianity for an answer to a difficult passage.

It is easy for the Christian to see that the Crusades and the Inquisitions were aberrations, they were not called for in the Bible and they would never have been condoned by Jesus were He here on earth.  They were motivated by human desires, not by divine mandate.  If these aberrations, these dark marks on the history of Christianity, are easy for the Christian to spot, why does it become so difficult for the atheist to discern?  They, after all, claim intellectual superiority.

I thought that Brian could see that others see as Paul and I do: that there is an orthodox interpretation of Biblical passages.  Dr. White, in his essay, echoes the main points that Paul and I have tried to explain to Matt:

If a Christian believes the Scriptures a sufficient rule of faith, how does it follow that an abuse of such a sufficient source is an argument against its sufficiency? Such simply does not follow. The Scriptures can be perfectly suited to their purpose, but men are still sinners. Men are still imperfect. Men are still ignorant. And, most importantly, men still have their traditions.

. . . [A] large number of non-Catholic churches embrace all sorts of concepts that violate sola scriptura, so how can the principle be blamed for the actions of those who do not even believe in it? Obviously, it can’t be. In reality, those churches that specifically seek to profess, confess, and apply sola scriptura are significantly more united in their theology than those churches that look to some external, inspired/guided source of either interpretation or revelation.

See, Matt? We’re not the only ones who say this stuff!