Matt will be speaking on Moral Relativism this Sunday as part of Massey Presbyterian Church’s (“MPC”) night service. His talk will look at what it is, what reasons people have for adopting it and why we should be concerned about its pervasiveness in society. The style of talk is interactive so bring your questions.
After the service, MPC will screen the quarter final rugby match between the All Blacks and Argentina. Game snacks will be available for purchase; the proceeds will go towards our impending trip to America. Before the service, the MPC cafe will offer cheap meals (like mains around $3, desserts $1). So come along and make a night of it!
When: Cafe meals from 6.30pm – service starts 7pm, Sunday 9 October
Where: Massey Presbyterian Church, 510 Don Bucks Rd, Massey, Auckland
Cost: Free (unless you are purchasing food)
Facebook has an event page you can use to RSVP and invite others.
Tags: All Blacks · Events · Massey Presbyterian Church · Relativism · Rugby7 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
[…] Roll on 2011 and there is another Rugby World Cup. But things have changed in West Auckland churches. Within a couple of decades or so, the Christian attitude to Sunday which reigned in Christian parts of the world for a millennium and half has dramatically changed. If you attend Massey Presbyterian Church, for example, once the evening sermon by Matthew Flannagan is complete, you can remain in your pew and then watch …. […]
Be careful you are not given a hefty fine for using the Allblacks logo to gather money for your own financial gain.
Perhaps Mr. Flannagan can tell us how he somehow manages to pick out the parts of the bible that are moral while simultaneously ignoring the vile, immoral, barbaric, superstitious garbage that saturates so much of his ancient holy book.
How does his Jesus-brain know that slavery, stoning non virgins to death, animal sacrifice , genocide, infanticide etc., are wrong if it’s only by the grace of his bible writing sky-god that he has any morality?
If burning the carcass of a dead animal was once a “pleasing odor to the Lord”, why not do that today?
Is god just not that into burning animal intestines anymore? Was it just a phase, like impregnating virgins?
Truthover faith actually I have written on that issue in several places, moreover numerous other authors have as well, in fact the history of theology is full of discussions of the role the Mosaic law places in the life of the Christian believer, Paul wrote on the topic as well. So try and not play dumb and pretend no one has ever answered this question.
WHAT EXACTLY IS THE METHODOLOGY EMPLOYED BY INERRANTISTS WHENEVER THEY DEFEND THE “INSPIRED” TRUTH AND ACCURACY OF PARTICUAR PASSAGES OR STORIES IN SCRIPTURE?
AND, DOES THEIR METHODOLOGY HAVE LIMITS AS TO WHAT IT CAN AND CANNOT DEMONSTRATE THE “INSPIRATION” OF?
WHAT EXACTLY ARE THOSE LIMITS?
Inerrantists admit the possibility of so many different explanations (both in the historical realm and in the realm of imaginary invention that involves positing an endless array of improbable “harmonizations” of “difficult” passages with other biblical passages or with history or science) that one might as well take nearly any ancient book, from Homer to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and assert its “inerrancy” using the same “methods.”
And, is it true or is it not that depending on the situation or circumstances such things as mass slaughter, slavery, conbinage, polygamy, incest, executing married women who are discovered not to be virgins on their wedding night, animal sacrifice, and circumcision were all parts of God’s wonderful plan (some considered damn essential in that time and place), but when the situation or circumstances changed, such things were no longer part of God’s plan, and/or no longer considered essential?
Hi Ed
I remember you rasing the same claim on Randal Rauser’s blog. While Randal and I differ in our specifics on many things I suspect his overall approach to scripture and innerrancy is similar to mine.
Let me take as an example Alvin Plantinga’s position that
Plantinga understands inerrancy so that what the divine author of scripture teaches or affirms is authoratative. Plantinga is explict that accepting that the principle author of scripture is God has implications for how we should interpret scripture.
Accepting that the primary author of scripture is God “impels us to treat the whole more like a unified communication than a miscellany of ancient books” Second, “the meaning of a biblical passage will be given by what it is that the Lord intends to teach in that passage” and “we can’t just assume that what the Lord intends to teach us is identical with what the human author had in mind” (Alvin Plantinga argues in Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 384
Both these ideas are developed in more detail by Wolterstorff. In Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Wolterstorff defends an account of how the bible constitutes God’s word in terms of appropriation. William Lane Craig has adopted the same understanding. Both Craig and Wolterstorff affirms. “All that is necessary for the whole [Bible] to be God’s book is that the human discourse it contains have been appropriated by God. as one single book, for God’s discourse”.(Wolterstorff 54)
The idea then on the Craig Wolterstorff appropraition model is that God appropriates a series of human texts as his own. Reading the bible as the word of God therefore, means one must read the whole Canon as appropriated discourse. Wolterstorff proceeds to elucidate in more detail whats involved in interpreting a text as appropriated discourse. Explaining in more detail Plantinga’s points.
One is that one needs to read the bible as a single literary unit.
“Suppose some remarks… ‘you’ll get what I want to say if you take what Ruth said just now along with what michele said’ then to discern the appropriating discourse, we need to consider those two approriated pieces of discourse together as a unit”
Similarly, “to discern what God is saying by way of the Bible, we have to take these sixty six or so books together.”
Citing as an example an imaginary case where he appropriates the writings of another person, Wolterstorff goes on to argue ( Ibid, 205)
Wolterstorff suggests the same principle applies when God appropriates the “discourse by inscription” of another human being except that some of the fall-back options are excluded. “God does not unwittingly say things God never intended to say, nor does God misunderstand the discourse God appropriates
The upshot of this is that one cannot, in the vein of source critics, just offer a literal reading of one of the alledged sources behind the final Canon, and claim the human author of the source affirmed P therefore God does and because P is false the bible is not inerrant. Rather the critic must contend the most probable of all alternative interpretations, of the text taken as a whole, is that God is literally affirming P. The critic must contend that all other alternatives, are improbable so that the only other alternative is the fall-back option that God did not really appropriate the text.
Similarly in your case, its not enough to argue that the human authors who wrote the text had some primitive understandings of cosmology and this is reflected in their writing. What you’d need to show is that, the most plausible interpretation of Gods appropriating discourse is that God in appropriating the text intended to affirm this cosmology is true, and that the only other option on all the relevant evidence is that God did not appropriate the text.
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Actually I would not interpret those passages the way you do so I don’t grant the beginning assumption.
But to your basic point, in fact all you highlight is what is normal in applying moral principles in different situations. In NZ we have certain issues relating to our colonial history and the maori people which mean that we have laws and moral debate about a whole host of issues which one does not have in the US. For example do people debate the justice of Maori electrol seats in the US? Do you debate what is a just form of reparation for treaty of waitangi grevainces NO? Similarly, anyone who has worked in politics will tell you that what laws one should vote on depends to a large extent on the constitutents of the country. Raising the drinking age in NZ for example will given NZ’s culture of drinking be very different to lowering it in France which has a different culture. Does it follow from this that moral principles about fair representation, or repartions for broken treaties, or avoiding carnage on the roads or social violence associated with drukeness are all inessential matters? No