Marginal Christianity

1.     An Inspired Bible does Not entail an inerrant Bible.   Inspiration tells us the Bible comes from God and reliably communicates his message to humanity. It does not dictate how God communicates his truth. Can God not use errors and idiots to speak his word to us? Asses and Assholes? Legends and myths? In other words, how God speaks his inspired word has to be determined inductively from the kinds of materials, sources, and speakers we find in it. Not deductively from a claim that if God is perfectly true, therefore his Word is perfectly true, true being understood as in a modernist historical and scientific sense (neither of which, ironically, were true of the times in which the Bible was written).    2.     The Gospels are NOT historical accounts that give us a chronological rehearsal of Jesus’ life and ministry.   Why do we have four gospels, then? And why do they not agree at numerous points? Were three or all fo...

A humorous follow-up to our last post on the “Rapture.”    

          Several responses to earlier posts in this series have asked about the concept of the “day of the Lord,” in particualr, the claim that this phrase does not always refer to “the” End of history and final judgment but rather to events within history.   Therefore, in this post I reproduce a section of an article “A Basic Introduction To The Day Of The Lord In The Old Testament Writing Prophets,” by J. Ed Komoszewski, Th.M. on “The Timing of the Day of the Lord” at http://bible.org/article/basic-introduction-day-lord-old-testament-writing-prophets .   In short, he identifies texts where the “day of Lord” is a past event and those where it is a future event.   He then shows how do kinds of passages can be close together in the same book and how they relate to each other when this happens.   After this section of the article, I’ll deal with the announced topic of this post, the so-called “rapture.”   I apolog...