One advantage of the blogosphere is the world that it opens up to one without lots of peers to dialogue with. And the peers in the blogosphere come in many more sizes and shapes than one would likely find in a faculty dining room anyhow. This makes for an (usually) enjoyable experience of education, with less of the formality that one sees in books and journals. When it’s not necessarily enjoyable is when one reads the slams by educated, otherwise respectable, individuals. I have “learned” that I must be a complete idiot to believe the Bible is a reliable historical record. And I have “learned” that I clearly have no idea how to interpret Scripture if I hold to a pre-tribulational, pre-millennial view of the end times. Of course these things are not new and fill many volumes of books. But one is more likely to be confronted with these “truths” on a daily basis in the blogosphere.<\/p>\n
Ultimately there is a single reason for why I hold to both inerrancy and dispensationalism: I believe the Bible means what it says. You don’t have to hold to inerrancy, but you cannot deny that Scripture presents itself as a factual, accurate, and detailed account of history. You don’t have to hold to dispensationalism (how I hate that word), but you cannot deny that on the face of it, Scripture describes a complex record of God’s dealings with Israel and the church and future, yet unfulfilled, promises for the ethnic descendants of Abraham. You don’t have to believe it, but you have to admit that this is the most natural reading of all of the texts.<\/p>\n
Let me say it another way: if you reject either of the above, you do so because of external factors. If you reject inerrancy, it is because you believe that something outside the text shows that it cannot be true. If you reject what is known as the dispensationalist view, it is because you believe that a few texts should externally control and re-define many other texts.<\/p>\n
I believe I am consistent, then, in taking the text literally. Many scholars reject both inerrancy and a dispensational eschatology and they are consistent also, I believe. I don’t deny that there are difficulties in believing that the Bible means what it says. But they are not troublesome. And compared with the massive difficulties that one encounters in the other approaches, I am quite happy to wrestle with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One advantage of the blogosphere is the world that it opens up to one without lots of peers to dialogue with. And the peers in the blogosphere come in many more sizes and shapes than one would likely find in a faculty dining room anyhow. This makes for an (usually) enjoyable experience of education, with\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}