answering the revisionists

Matt Kennedy makes some great points, in particular this novel and, frankly, brilliant point…

Infallibility

It is a common maneuver of revisionist agitators to find the most obscure and difficult passages from the New Testament or the Old Testament, adopt the most ludicrous/absurd interpretation of those passages, and then present them to the orthodox believer with an incredulous, “Certainly you don’t expect reasonable people to believe this?”

Setting aside for the moment Nyssa’s rather dubious claims to orthodoxy, this is precisely the tactic he has adopted under the guise of “intellectual honesty”. Here is the telling passage from his post,

However, if you are going to hold to a rigid doctrine of scriptural infallibility with honesty, then you have to say that women who speak in church and/or do not wear something on their heads, sin against God. This ridiculous conclusion is but one example of why I have rejected the conception of infallibity as it has been articulated by Matt.

If I am to “honestly” hold to a “rigid” doctrine of infallibility then I must go to absurd lengths; lengths to which no reasonable person would go.

The temptation is to delve directly into the exegetical task to demonstrate that in fact the bible is not absurd and that God does not teach women to cover their heads in worship. But that would be a mistake. I will come to the exegetical question in a moment.

First, it must be noted that the answer to this particular exegetical problem has absolutely no logical bearing on the question of whether the bible is infallible.

If Nyssa is correct and 1st Corinthians 11:2-16 represents an absolute and universal command to women of all churches everywhere for all time, then he has simply demonstrated that most quarters of the contemporary Church are in error. We need to start passing out hats

He has not demonstrated that the bible is in any way fallible.

Let God be true and every man a liar.

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