There is substantial historical and textual evidence that the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20) existed very early in Christianity, long before our oldest surviving complete Greek manuscripts of Mark were produced.
The historical and literary evidence for Mark 16:9-20, is important because the longer ending is absent from two important fourth-century Greek manuscripts, yet it was apparently known to Christian writers nearly two centuries earlier. This means that the longer ending cannot reasonably be dismissed as a medieval invention or a passage created centuries after the apostolic period.
The central question is whether the shorter manuscripts preserve Mark’s original conclusion, or whether they depart from a textual tradition in which the original ending had been lost or omitted.
Irenaeus cites Mark 16:19 around AD 180
One of the strongest pieces of evidence comes from Irenaeus of Lyons, writing approximately AD 180. In “Against Heresies,” Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 5, Irenaeus wrote:
“Also, towards the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: ‘So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God.’”
Here in 180 AD, Irenaeus cites Mark 16:19. Irenaeus clearly identifies Mark as the author of these words. He identifies the text as being present at the end of Mark’s Gospel. His testimony predates Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus by approximately 170 years. Irenaeus was also associated with Polycarp, who had connections to the apostolic generation through his recollections of John and other eyewitnesses.
The historical importance of this citation by Irenaeus, in AD 180, as a prominent Christian writer, demonstrates, by evidence, that Mark was the known writer of this Gospel, and up to verse 19, this text was in Mark’s Gospel.
That is substantial and compelling evidence against the claim that the longer ending of Mark originated only in the fourth century or later.
Tatian’s Diatessaron provides another second-century witness
Near AD 170, Tatian, a Christian writer and student of Justin Martyr, composed the Diatessaron, a harmony combining the four canonical Gospels. This is important to our investigation of Mark’s Gospel because the surviving witnesses to the Diatessaron contain material corresponding to Mark 16:9–20.
Nicholas J. Zola published a detailed study in 2022 examining the evidence for Mark’s ending in Tatian’s work. He concluded that Tatian almost certainly incorporated significant portions of the longer ending. This gives us a second early line of evidence that the text of Mark 16:9-20 was validated by the early Christian church and widely circulating in the second century.
The overwhelming majority of surviving Greek manuscripts contain Mark 16:9–20
The manuscript evidence is extremely important.
Manuscript Approximate date Mark 16:9–20
- Codex Sinaiticus (א) AD 330–360 Absent
- Codex Vaticanus (B) AD 325–350 Absent
- Codex Alexandrinus (A) 5th century Present
- Codex Bezae (D) 5th century Present
- Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (C) 5th century Present
- Codex Washingtonianus
4th–5th century Present, with an additional interpolation
Byzantine manuscript tradition.
More than 99 percent of surviving Greek manuscripts of Mark preserve the ending, including verses 9–20. This majority is important as it gives us very early attestation that the text of Mark 16:9-20 was a part of the original document.
Codex Vaticanus contains a conspicuous blank column
One interesting fact of Codex Vaticanus is observed in the layout at the conclusion of Mark. The manuscript ends at Mark 16:8 and leaves an unusual blank column before Luke begins. This is significant because it may suggest that the copyist knew of an alternative ending but did not reproduce it. The blank column is a reasonable answer to the question of a longer ending for Mark 16:9–20 that was physically removed from Vaticanus.
Could the original ending have been lost from an early manuscript?
Yes. This is a possible historical explanation. Ancient books were copied by hand. If the final leaf of an early exemplar became detached, damaged, or lost, subsequent copies could reproduce an incomplete ending. In this view, an early copy of Mark lost its final portion, and subsequent copies ended at 16:8. This explanation makes sense because Mark 16:8 ends abruptly: “They said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8)
The narrative that comes before this abrupt ending anticipates a meeting between Jesus and His disciples in Galilee (Mark 14:28; 16:7), but no meeting is stated before verse 8. This raises the question of whether Mark intended to conclude his Gospel at that point.
There are three principal possibilities:
- Mark originally wrote verses 9–20, which were lost from one branch of transmission.
- Mark wrote a different ending that was lost, and verses 9–20 were supplied later.
- Mark deliberately concluded his Gospel at 16:8, and verses 9–20 were subsequently appended.
The first possibility is the conclusion that is most reasonable in consideration of the evidence presented in this essay so far. The second and third arguments are the often stated view of modern textual criticism.
Does the Greek vocabulary prove Mark did not write the longer ending?
Some critical scholars argue that Mark 16:9–20 differs from the preceding Gospel in vocabulary, syntax, and narrative continuity. This argument is more the opinion of those who assert it, rather than a finding proven by actual evidence.
For example, verse 9 reintroduces Mary Magdalene despite her having appeared earlier in the chapter. Of course authors often repeat persons, places, and events, an attribute of all biblical writers. I have published over 10 million words in my 52 books, and I often venture into different texts and styles, depending on my thoughts at that time. My writing style varies widely from those first written 30 years ago to the present day. Yet I am still the writer.
Every writer can vary vocabulary and style according to subject matter. The resurrection appearances and the instructions by Jesus to the Apostles vary substantially in subject throughout all the Gospels. Bruce M. Metzger discusses these issues in A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, second edition (1994), pages 102–106.
What Does the Evidence Prove?
The text of Mark 16:9–20 existed by AD 180. Established by Irenaeus, proving this text was an early-known attribute of Mark’s Gospel, proven by evidence.
The longer ending was already in wide circulation in the church long before Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, proven by evidence
The historical and literary evidence proves a strong argument that Mark 16:9–20 was present in the Christian textual tradition long before our oldest surviving complete Greek manuscripts.
Irenaeus is compelling because he identifies verse 19 as belonging to Mark’s Gospel around AD 180. Tatian states additional early evidence, and the overwhelming majority of surviving Greek manuscripts preserve the passage.
The evidence proves that Mark 16:9–20 belonged to an early form of the Gospel and was lost or omitted in the ancestry of some manuscripts.
A critic who claims that Mark 16:9–20 was unknown before the fourth century is contradicted by second-century evidence, demonstrating that these texts already existed in the historical record.
There Are 21 Primary Arguments That Atheists and Critics Assert Against the New Testament. See the Evidence that proves these assertions are wrong. See Them in:
“New Testament Apologetics” by Robert Clifton Robinson
Sources and Citations
1. Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies, 3.10.5, approximately AD 180. Explicitly attributes Mark 16:19 to the conclusion of Mark’s Gospel.
2. Eusebius of Caesarea. Quaestiones ad Marinum, Question 1, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 22, columns 937–940. Discusses manuscript evidence and the apparent discrepancy between Matthew 28:1 and Mark 16:9.
3. Jerome. Epistle 120, To Hedibia, Question 3. Discusses the longer ending and its absence from many Greek manuscripts.
4. Bruce M. Metzger. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994, pp. 102–106. An influential critical assessment of the manuscript, patristic, and internal evidence.
5. Nicholas J. Zola. “The Ending of Mark in Tatian’s Diatessaron.” Journal of Theological Studies (2022). Examines the evidence for the longer ending in Tatian’s second-century Gospel harmony.
6. James A. Kelhoffer. Miracle and Mission: The Authentication of Missionaries and Their Message in the Longer Ending of Mark. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/112. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000. A substantial investigation of the passage’s origins, theology, and early reception.
7. David Alan Black, ed. Perspectives on the Ending of Mark: Four Views. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2008. Presents competing scholarly interpretations, including arguments favorable to the traditional ending.
8. Nicholas P. Lunn. The Original Ending of Mark: A New Case for the Authenticity of Mark 16:9–20. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014. A detailed defense of the longer ending’s authenticity.
Categories: Robert Clifton Robinson
Your latest installment reveals something important about your argument. You have now clarified your position sufficiently that I can distinguish between a legitimate request for biblical evidence, an unsupported philosophical requirement, and a logical inconsistency in the way you apply that requirement.
There is also an important concession in your latest comments that significantly changes how I should answer you.
You write:
“My demand for proof of God using fallible teaching doesn’t mean I’m asking for proof of God using errant teaching. ‘Fallible’ doesn’t mean ‘errant’. It means subject to the possibility of being wrong.”
That distinction is correct. And because you have acknowledged it, I can no longer attempt to demonstrate that God used erroneous sermons to advance the gospel.
The central weakness in your argument is that you have repeatedly asserted that God might have rendered every first-century gospel preacher infallible whenever that person communicated divine truth.
But you have not demonstrated that this happened.
More importantly, you are attempting to transform the absence of evidence concerning a preacher’s infallibility into a reason to treat that preacher’s infallibility as a plausible default explanation.
Your statement:
“The fact that Paul says the Lord ‘gave to’ both himself and Apollos reasonably justifies an inference that the Lord gave to Apollos nothing less than he gave to Paul.”
This inference is not supported by 1 Corinthians 3:5.
The verse says:
“Who then is Apollos, and who is Paul, but servants through whom you believed, and each as the Lord gave to him?” (1 Corinthians 3:5, WEB)
Paul identifies himself and Apollos as servants through whom others believed. He does not state that both possessed identical spiritual gifts, identical apostolic authority, or identical guarantees against error.
In fact, Paul teaches the opposite concerning the distribution of spiritual gifts.
1 Corinthians 12:4–6 distinguishes varieties of gifts, ministries, and workings.
1 Corinthians 12:29 asks:
“Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all miracle workers?” (WEB)
The answer is no.
Therefore, your inference that God must have given Apollos the same degree of infallible teaching authority as Paul is not established by the passage.
God’s use of two teachers does not imply that both possessed identical authority or gifts.
Acts 18 is significant
Acts 18:24–26 describes Apollos as an eloquent man who was mighty in the Scriptures.
Luke also records that Apollos was:
Instructed in the way of the Lord.
Fervent in spirit.
Speaking and teaching accurately concerning Jesus.
Acquainted only with the baptism of John.
He was later instructed more accurately by Priscilla and Aquila.
The decisive point is that Luke describes Apollos as already teaching accurately while also recording that he required additional instruction.
Acts 18:26 says:
“…Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside, and explained to him the way of God more accurately.” (WEB)
This is evidence that Apollos was not operating with complete understanding of everything relevant to the Christian message.
It is not, by itself, proof that Apollos made an erroneous statement in a particular sermon. Nor does Luke explicitly say that converts were produced before his correction.
But the passage does establish that accurate Christian teaching and incomplete understanding could coexist in a teacher whom the biblical narrative commends.
That directly impeaches the assumption that a person must possess comprehensive infallible interpretive ability before accurately communicating divine truth.
The distinction matters: an imagined supernatural protection cannot be treated as an established biblical fact simply because it would preserve an argument.
Second Timothy 2:2 is a direct answer to his challenge
Paul writes:
“The things which you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit the same things to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.” (2 Timothy 2:2, WEB)
Notice the progression:
Paul
Apostolic instruction
Timothy
Receives and transmits the teaching
Faithful, capable teachers
Entrusted with the same teaching
Others also
Continuing transmission of the gospel
Paul does not instruct Timothy to identify individuals who possess an infallible interpretive faculty. He instructs him to entrust the teaching to people characterized by faithfulness and ability.
These are qualifications that can be examined and cultivated.
Second Timothy 2:15 likewise instructs a worker to handle the word of truth correctly. Verses 24–25 describe the Lord’s servant as capable of teaching and correcting opponents with gentleness. 
The language is that of instruction, training, responsibility, and correction.
You respond that Paul might have expected these teachers to receive infallible spiritual authority.
But that expectation is not stated in the passage.
Here is the crucial distinction:
Paul expressly commands the continuation of apostolic teaching through faithful and capable teachers. He does not expressly promise that every such teacher will possess an apostle’s immunity from error.
This does not logically exclude the possibility that some received special protection. It does, however, make the transmission of apostolic truth through ordinary, accountable teachers the natural reading of the passage.
There is one chronological qualification worth recognizing. Second Timothy 2:2 prescribes an ongoing teaching process; it does not independently document every later stage of that process occurring during Paul’s lifetime.
Its strongest value is establishing the kind of teachers Paul authorized, not supplying a dated account of their subsequent sermons.
Your demand for infinite certainty is his weakest philosophical argument
You write:
“If the threat is infinite, the certainty of the threat must also be infinite.”
This is not a valid logical inference.
The magnitude of a possible consequence does not determine the degree of certainty with which we can know whether that consequence will occur.
Consider the distinction:
Severity: How serious would the consequence be if the proposition were true?
Probability: How strongly does the available evidence support the proposition?
Epistemic certainty: How certain can a person reasonably be that the proposition is true?
These are different questions.
An extremely serious consequence may justify extremely careful investigation. It does not automatically establish that absolute certainty is obtainable or that anything less is irrational.
For example, medical decisions can involve life and death, yet patients must frequently act upon substantial but incomplete evidence. The seriousness of the consequence does not make infallible medical judgment a prerequisite for reasonable action.
If the Christian gospel concerns eternal consequences, that gives a person powerful reasons to investigate it carefully.
It does not establish that only an infallible interpreter can communicate it reliably.
Your argument confuses the seriousness of a proposition with the certainty required to rationally evaluate it.
Moreover, your requirement creates a further difficulty.
How would you recognize an infallible interpreter?
If you cannot identify an infallible teacher without using your own fallible judgment, then even the discovery of a genuinely infallible teacher would not automatically provide him with an infallible basis for recognizing that teacher.
You would still have to interpret the teacher’s statements.
The demand for infallibility does not eliminate his own dependence upon fallible reasoning.
Your accusation concerning sola Scriptura is mistaken
You repeatedly treat sola Scriptura as though it means: Every factual belief a Christian holds about God’s activity must be explicitly described in the Bible.
That is not the historic Protestant principle.
Sola Scriptura maintains that Scripture is the supreme and uniquely infallible written rule for Christian faith and doctrine.
It does not prohibit ordinary reasoning, historical investigation, linguistic analysis, or conclusions drawn from biblical principles.
For example, Scripture does not specifically discuss the modern printing press, yet Christians may reasonably conclude that printing Bibles can advance the gospel.
Similarly, Scripture does not identify a twenty-first-century missionary by name, yet a Christian may conclude that God can work through that missionary’s accurate proclamation of Christ.
Neither conclusion requires the missionary or printer to possess infallibility.
The appropriate answer is to establish that support from the New Testament rather than simply dismissing his question.
Your treatment of Peter and Paul introduces a separate issue
The critic argues that Peter’s conduct in Galatians 2 may have amounted to Judaizing, and he compares Peter’s behavior with Paul’s accommodation of Jewish customs in 1 Corinthians 9:20–21.
There is a significant distinction between those situations. Paul voluntarily accommodated Jewish practices in order to communicate the gospel without unnecessary cultural obstacles.
Peter, however, withdrew from table fellowship with Gentile Christians under pressure from the circumcision party.
Paul identified Peter’s conduct as inconsistent with the truth of the gospel because it effectively pressured Gentile believers to conform to Jewish practices.
In Galatians 2:14, Paul publicly challenged the implication of Peter’s behavior.
The issue was not simply whether someone outwardly observed a Jewish custom.
It was whether that behavior compromised the equality of Jewish and Gentile believers in Christ.
Paul’s missionary accommodation did not require Gentile Christians to become Jews. Peter’s withdrawal conveyed precisely the kind of distinction that Paul’s gospel opposed.
There are two propositions that must remain distinct:
Proposition A: God used teachers who were capable of making errors while they accurately communicated the gospel.
Proposition B: God used erroneous gospel statements themselves as instruments for advancing the gospel.
You are asking me to defend Proposition A.
Acts 18 and 2 Timothy 2 provide meaningful biblical support for that proposition. They do not provide an explicit statement that every nonapostolic teacher remained capable of error during every moment of instruction.
That final qualification is important. A careful argument should acknowledge that Scripture does not directly describe the precise extent of divine protection experienced by every first-century evangelist.
But your proposed alternative—that God bestowed temporary infallibility upon every teacher whose preaching He used—is likewise not established by those passages.
The difference is that the New Testament expressly presents ordinary believers learning, teaching, receiving correction, and transmitting apostolic truth. It does not establish universal infallibility as a prerequisite for that ministry.
This discussion has become tedious. I will end my comment with this final response.
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Category error: “the certainty of the threat must also be infinite” is MY standard of evidence. I never expressed or implied that this could be supported from the bible or from anything else. It is a completely personal subjective standard of evidence.
A person’s standard of evidence is not a deduction they draw from any fact. Therefore it is not subject to logical invalidity. My standard of evidence doesn’t take the form of, nor could it take the form of: Premise 1, Premise 2, and an argument that the Conclusion properly distributes the middle. Logical invalidity is totally impossible because logical invalidity doesn’t apply the question of whether a person’s standard of evidence is too high or too low.
If I require seeing a restaurant’s latest States health-inspection report before I will dine there, that is a subjective demand drawing from my personal ideas about how much risk I’m willing to take. It is not logically subject to possible logical invalidity.
If another customer with a lower standard of restaurant-health came along and said “Your requirement of seeing a restaurant’s latest-health inspection report before you will dine there, is not a valid logical inference”, you know perfectly well that they have committed a category error. How much risk a person thinks is acceptable or unacceptable is absolutely subjective. The degree to which a person takes precaution against food poisoning cannot possibly be an invalid logical inference.
Yes, I know you think the level of precaution I take regarding a risk of infinite danger is “too high”. But I would appreciate it if you stop using comments about “logical” invalidity to disguise your completely subjective disagreement with me.
If your interpretation of Romans 3:9-19 is true, you are as far from an objective truth robot as you can possibly get without becoming sub-human. If you don’t have the Holy Spirit to the intensely controlling degree you think biblical authors had when writing the originals of the biblical books, you might contemplate that it is only people who are filled with the Spirit to the point of infallible authority, who have any spiritual right to talk all dogmatically about how “wrong” somebody else is about this controversial stuff. A little more “this is my subjective opinion which could possibly be wrong” from you would be more consistent with your express admission to your own sinful imperfections, even if it means you’ll be missing the comfort that comes from hearing yourself pontificate all “godly” about “error”.
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Your latest response clarifies that your challenge concerns the period during which the apostle Paul was alive, rather than restricting the evidence to Paul’s personal teaching.
I accept that clarification.
Your challenge is whether Scripture supports the proposition that God used fallible Christian teachers to advance the gospel during Paul’s lifetime.
My answer is yes.
However, your argument contains a fundamental ambiguity that must be resolved before examining the biblical evidence.
You are treating two different propositions as though they were identical:
1. God used Christian teachers who were fallible human beings.
2. God used particular statements containing demonstrable theological errors to bring unbelievers to salvation.
The first proposition is well supported by Scripture.
The second is a narrower historical claim that requires different evidence.
You repeatedly move between these propositions, and when biblical evidence establishes the first, you reject it because it does not establish the second.
This distinction is essential because a fallible teacher can teach something correctly without possessing infallible teaching ability.
That is precisely the distinction your argument has failed to recognize.
Paul Identifies Apollos as Someone Through Whom People Believed
Consider 1 Corinthians 3:5–7:
“Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave to each one? I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.” (WEB)
This passage establishes several facts.
First, Apollos was a Christian teacher through whom people came to believe.
Second, Paul explicitly identifies Apollos as a servant participating in the advancement of the gospel.
Third, Paul attributes the spiritual increase to God.
Fourth, Paul distinguishes the human instruments from God’s work through them.
These are not speculative conclusions. They are explicit statements in the text.
Now consider Acts 18:24–28.
Luke describes Apollos as an eloquent man, mighty in the Scriptures, who spoke and taught accurately concerning Jesus.
Nevertheless, Apollos knew only the baptism of John.
Priscilla and Aquila subsequently explained the way of God to him more accurately.
This establishes that Apollos was a teacher whose understanding was capable of improvement and correction.
When these passages are read together, we have a Christian teacher who required further instruction and whom Paul nevertheless identifies as a servant through whom people believed, while God gave the increase.
This is biblical evidence that God worked through a teacher whose understanding was not beyond correction.
There is an important qualification: Acts 18 does not prove that Apollos preached a false gospel, and 1 Corinthians 3 does not establish that he made an exegetical mistake while evangelizing.
But neither passage requires us to conclude that Apollos possessed infallible interpretive ability.
Your argument depends upon treating the absence of a recorded error in a particular sermon as evidence that the teacher was incapable of error.
That conclusion does not follow.
Paul Rejoiced That Christ Was Proclaimed by Imperfect Preachers
Philippians 1:15–18 states:
“Some indeed preach Christ even out of envy and strife, and some also out of good will. The former preach Christ from selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my chains; but the latter out of love, knowing that I am appointed for the defense of the Good News. What does it matter? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. I rejoice in this, yes, and will rejoice.” (WEB)
These events occurred during Paul’s lifetime.
Paul acknowledges that some individuals preached Christ from sinful motives.
Their moral character and motivations were imperfect.
Nevertheless, Paul rejoiced because Christ was being proclaimed.
This demonstrates that God’s gospel could be proclaimed through morally imperfect human instruments.
It does not demonstrate that the message itself contained theological error. Indeed, Paul’s willingness to rejoice suggests that the substance of the proclamation remained recognizably Christian.
But it directly challenges any assumption that God can advance His purposes only through human instruments who possess personal perfection.
You may reply that moral imperfection is not identical to exegetical fallibility.
That is correct.
Nevertheless, if your argument concerns the necessity of infallible interpretive ability, you must establish that these preachers possessed such ability.
The passage does not say that they did.
Their successful proclamation of Christ cannot be converted into proof of their personal infallibility.
Acts 11 Describes God Working Through Ordinary Christian Evangelists
Acts 11:19–21 records that believers scattered by persecution proclaimed the Lord Jesus in Antioch.
Verse 21 declares:
“The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord.” (WEB)
This is one of the clearest examples of God working through Christian evangelists who were not individually identified as apostles.
Luke explicitly attributes divine assistance to their ministry.
The passage establishes that God used these believers to advance the gospel.
What it does not establish is that every evangelist possessed the same infallible interpretive authority as the apostles.
You insist that because Luke does not record an exegetical mistake during their preaching, I cannot describe these evangelists as fallible.
But this confuses the absence of an identified mistake with the possession of an inability to make mistakes.
Those are different propositions.
A teacher may deliver a completely accurate sermon while remaining capable of making an error in another sermon.
Accurate teaching does not establish infallible teaching ability.
To demonstrate that these ordinary evangelists were infallible, you would need positive evidence of that extraordinary gift.
Merely observing that Luke did not record an error does not establish it.
Peter Provides an Important Example of a Genuine Christian Teacher Who Required Correction
Galatians 2:11–14 describes Paul’s public confrontation with Peter at Antioch.
Paul writes:
“But when Peter came to Antioch, I resisted him to his face, because he stood condemned.” (Galatians 2:11, WEB)
Paul explains that Peter withdrew from fellowship with Gentile believers because he feared certain Jewish Christians.
Paul then states:
“But when I saw that they didn’t walk uprightly according to the truth of the Good News, I said to Peter before them all…” (Galatians 2:14, WEB)
Notice the significance.
Peter was an apostle.
He was personally commissioned by Jesus Christ.
He had proclaimed the gospel under the power of the Holy Spirit.
Yet Paul identifies conduct that was inconsistent with the truth of the gospel.
Peter’s example demonstrates that even an apostle was not personally incapable of error in every aspect of his conduct or judgment.
We must distinguish Peter’s inspired apostolic testimony from his fallible personal behavior.
Galatians 2 does not establish that Peter preached an erroneous gospel while evangelizing unbelievers. Paul’s criticism concerns conduct that contradicted the implications of the gospel.
The text refutes any suggestion that divine commissioning automatically makes the human instrument personally incapable of error.
If Peter himself required correction concerning conduct inconsistent with gospel truth, what biblical justification exists for presuming that every ordinary Christian evangelist possessed universal personal infallibility?
The text supplies no such justification.
Your Argument Commits a Category Error Concerning Infallibility
You repeatedly insist that because the New Testament does not document a particular Christian preaching an erroneous gospel while God used that preaching, you are justified in assuming that God used only infallible interpreters.
But this conclusion confuses three separate questions:
Was the teacher capable of making an error?
Did the teacher actually make an error in the particular proclamation?
Did God use the proclamation to advance the gospel?
These are not equivalent questions.
A teacher can be capable of error, deliver an accurate proclamation, and be used by God.
There is no contradiction.
In fact, this is precisely how ordinary Christian teaching can operate.
You have constructed a challenge that requires evidence of an actual exegetical mistake in a particular evangelistic message.
But that is not necessary to establish the broader proposition that God uses fallible teachers.
To establish that proposition, we need evidence that God worked through people who did not possess a demonstrated guarantee of infallible interpretation.
The New Testament provides that evidence.
Your narrower demand would be relevant if I claimed that Scripture explicitly records God bringing someone to salvation through a demonstrably false statement about the gospel.
I am not making that claim.
God’s use of a fallible messenger does not require God to approve or employ the messenger’s errors.
That distinction resolves much of your objection.
You Have Not Demonstrated That Every First-Century Christian Teacher Possessed Infallible Interpretive Ability
You repeatedly assume that every Christian whom God used to advance the gospel during Paul’s lifetime possessed infallible interpretive authority.
Where does the New Testament establish this?
Consider 1 Corinthians 12:29–30:
“Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all miracle workers? Do all have gifts of healings? Do all speak with various languages? Do all interpret?” (WEB)
Paul’s rhetorical questions emphasize that spiritual gifts and ministries were not distributed identically to every believer.
Not every Christian possessed the same spiritual office or ability.
Consequently, you cannot simply assume that the distinctive authority of an apostle belonged to every evangelist.
Ephesians 2:20 identifies the apostles and prophets as foundational to the household of God.
Second Timothy 2:2 instructs Timothy to entrust apostolic teaching to faithful people capable of teaching others.
Notice the qualifications Paul identifies.
They must be faithful and able to teach.
He does not say that every succeeding teacher must possess infallible interpretive ability.
This distinction is fundamental.
The New Testament differentiates the authority of the original apostolic witness from the responsibility of subsequent believers to preserve and communicate that witness faithfully.
Your argument repeatedly erases that distinction.
Your Appeal to Sola Scriptura Does Not Establish Your Position
You argue that because I affirm sola Scriptura, I must produce an explicit biblical statement supporting the proposition that God uses fallible Christian teachers.
But sola Scriptura does not mean that every legitimate theological conclusion must appear in Scripture as a single sentence using precisely the terminology demanded by a critic.
It means that Scripture is the supreme and uniquely infallible written authority by which Christian doctrine is tested.
Doctrines may be established through the necessary implications of biblical statements as well as their explicit declarations.
Consider the following biblical evidence:
* Acts 11:19–21 establishes that God worked through ordinary Christian evangelists.
* Acts 18:24–28 establishes that Apollos required further instruction.
* First Corinthians 3:5–7 establishes that God gave the increase through the ministry of Paul and Apollos.
* Galatians 2:11–14 establishes that even Peter could require correction concerning conduct inconsistent with gospel truth.
* Second Timothy 2:2 establishes that apostolic teaching was to be transmitted through faithful and capable teachers, without explicitly requiring their personal infallibility.
Taken together, these passages support the conclusion that God works through human teachers who are responsible for faithfully communicating His revelation.
They do not establish that every ordinary Christian teacher possesses the apostolic gift of infallible revelation.
Nor do they require that God approve every mistake such a teacher might make.
Your objection demands that Scripture explicitly describe an erroneous gospel statement that God used to produce conversion.
But that is a different proposition from the one I affirm.
You cannot invalidate my actual position by demanding proof of a stronger claim I have not made.
Your Argument From Silence Is Not Evidence of Universal Infallibility
Your reasoning can be summarized as follows:
The New Testament does not explicitly record an occasion when God used an erroneous gospel statement to convert an unbeliever.
Therefore, God used only infallible teachers during the apostolic period.
Therefore, Christians today should be expected to possess the same infallible ability.
Neither conclusion follows from the preceding premise.
First, the absence of a documented mistake does not establish that the speaker was incapable of mistakes.
Second, even if every recorded proclamation during Paul’s lifetime were doctrinally accurate, that would not establish that every preacher possessed comprehensive interpretive infallibility.
Third, even if some first-century evangelists possessed extraordinary gifts, that would not establish that every Christian teacher throughout subsequent history must possess identical gifts.
Fourth, your argument does not distinguish between the infallibility of God’s revelation and the fallibility of the person communicating it.
These distinctions matter because the New Testament presents Scripture as authoritative while repeatedly commanding believers to test, examine, correct, and teach carefully.
First Thessalonians 5:21 instructs believers to test all things and hold firmly to what is good.
First John 4:1 instructs believers to test the spirits because many false prophets have gone into the world.
Acts 17:11 commends the Bereans for examining Scripture to determine whether Paul’s teaching was true.
These instructions would be unnecessary as methods of discernment if believers were simply commanded to accept teaching only after proving that the teacher possessed personal infallibility.
Instead, the New Testament consistently places responsibility upon believers to examine claims according to the truth God has revealed.
Your Car Analogy Misrepresents the Nature of the Claim
You compare the statement that God uses fallible teachers with the claim that God wants you to drive a particular automobile.
But these are not equivalent propositions.
The claim that God wants a particular person to drive a particular automobile is a highly specific assertion concerning an individual divine intention.
Unless God has revealed that intention, a person should be cautious about claiming certainty concerning it.
The proposition that God works through fallible human beings, however, concerns a broad pattern repeatedly demonstrated throughout Scripture.
Moses, David, Peter, and numerous other biblical figures were fallible human beings through whom God accomplished His purposes.
Of course, their moral fallibility does not prove that their inspired declarations contained errors.
But it does establish that God’s use of human instruments does not require those instruments to be personally perfect in every respect.
More specifically, the New Testament identifies ordinary believers participating in the proclamation of the gospel and attributes spiritual fruit to God’s activity through them.
Your automobile analogy therefore does not address the actual biblical evidence.
It compares an unsupported claim about a particular private divine intention with a general theological conclusion supported by multiple biblical narratives.
That is not a valid comparison.
You Must Distinguish the Infallibility of God’s Word From the Fallibility of Its Human Messengers
The essential issue is the difference between the source of divine revelation and the person communicating it.
Second Timothy 3:16–17 states:
“Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (WEB)
Notice that Scripture is identified as God-breathed.
The text does not identify every person who subsequently explains Scripture as personally infallible.
Indeed, Scripture is described as useful for correction.
Correction presupposes that human understanding and conduct may require improvement.
The biblical model is not that every Christian teacher possesses an inability to err.
It is that God’s revealed truth provides the authoritative standard by which teaching must be examined.
A fallible teacher may correctly communicate an infallible message.
A teacher’s capacity for error does not invalidate every accurate statement that teacher makes.
And God’s ability to use that teacher does not require God to endorse the teacher’s mistakes.
The authority belongs to the revelation, not automatically to every individual who explains it.
The Central Logical Error in Your Challenge,
Your argument depends upon this inference:
Because God used Christian teachers during Paul’s lifetime, and because Scripture does not explicitly record an exegetical error in the particular gospel proclamation through which God worked, those teachers must have possessed infallible interpretive ability.
That inference is invalid.
The conclusion introduces a property—personal inability to err—that is not established by the premises.
You cannot infer infallibility from the absence of a documented mistake.
Nor can you infer universal apostolic authority from the fact that God blessed the proclamation of the gospel.
If you wish to establish that every Christian teacher whom God used during Paul’s lifetime possessed infallible interpretive ability, you must supply evidence for that claim.
The New Testament does not identify such universal infallibility as a qualification for Christian evangelism.
Your argument assumes it.
You asked whether the New Testament supports the proposition that God used fallible Christian teachers to advance the gospel during Paul’s lifetime.
No, not in the sense you described
First Corinthians 3:5–7 identifies Apollos as a minister through whom people believed and expressly attributes the increase to God. This does not mean he is perfect, but the Gospel message is perfect.
Acts 18:24–28 identifies Apollos as a teacher whose understanding required further instruction.
Acts 11:19–21 identifies ordinary believers whose proclamation of Christ was accompanied by the hand of the Lord and resulted in many people turning to Him.
Philippians 1:15–18 identifies imperfect human preachers whose proclamation of Christ Paul nevertheless rejoiced to see.
These passages establish that God worked through human messengers without requiring the conclusion that those messengers possessed comprehensive personal infallibility.
My position is that God uses fallible human teachers to communicate His infallible truth.
A fallible teacher can communicate the gospel accurately.
An accurate proclamation does not make its human messenger incapable of error.
And God’s use of that proclamation does not establish that the messenger possesses the unique authority of Christ or His commissioned apostles.
Your argument repeatedly confuses these distinctions.
The question is not whether God endorses false doctrine.
The question is whether God can use a human being who is capable of error to communicate truth.
The New Testament provides ample reason to answer yes.
If you wish to maintain that every first-century Christian whom God used to advance the gospel possessed infallible interpretive ability, the burden rests upon you to establish that extraordinary claim.
Until then, the absence of a recorded mistake in a particular proclamation cannot be treated as proof that its human messenger was incapable of making one.
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This will be my last reply on this topic. I have other topics I’d like to get your response on.
The challenge is to find biblical precedent for God using fallible preaching/teaching to advance the gospel.
You attempt to meet that challenge by reference to Paul’s comments about Apollos’ preaching. That doesn’t meet the challenge. First, your quotation from 1st Cor. 3 establishes that God used the preaching of Paul and Apollos. But it does not establish that such preaching was fallible at the time God used it (i.e., it does not establish your contention that God uses fallible preaching to further the gospel).
Second, v. 5 (“as the Lord gave to each one”) sounds like the Lord giving divine inspiration to each one…which sounds like the preaching Paul refers to was infallible.
Third, the fact that Paul says the Lord “gave to” both himself and Apollos reasonably justifies an inference that the Lord gave to Apollos nothing less than he gave to Paul. Assuming God rendered Paul’s gospel teaching infallible, we reasonably infer on the basis of the text that God gave no less to Apollos. In that case, God was using infallible teaching, which then fails the challenge to produce biblical support for the view that God uses fallible teaching to advance the gospel.
Fourth, You argue that by combining 1st Cor. 3 and Acts 18, we find that God was “giving the increase” to Apollos even before Aquila and Priscilla corrected him. That’s certainly a possibility, but I would render it unlikely with two arguments:
a) it would be foolish to insist that the only preaching Apollos ever did (and thus the only preaching of Apollos that Paul could possibly be referencing) was the imperfect stuff you find in Acts 18. Apollos likely continued preaching even after Aquila and Priscilla “explained the way of God more perfectly”.
b) upon the basis of my prior argument that the 1st Cor. 3 phrase “as the Lord gave” sounds like God inspiring Apollos equally as much as you think He inspired Paul (i.e., rendering their gospel-teachings infallible), the “possibility” that Paul meant God was also using Apollos’ fallible preaching is unlikely. If a Christian scholar can justify refusal to entertain another’s interpretation of a verse because that interpretation is arguably “unlikely”, so can I.
Fifth, you know that I will only accept infallible gospel teaching…yet you want to be accept your teachings which you freely confess lack infallibility. If you would show that my standard is unfairly high, you cannot do it by demanding that I just consider fallible interpretation anyway. That would be begging the question. I don’t know how you will solve the problem of the skeptic who accepts nothing but infallible teaching of the sort you freely admit you cannot deliver, but if such resolution is possible, merely offering your admittedly fallible interpretation of relevant biblical texts will not do the job. You commit the same error as the Catholic who quotes the Apocrypha to argue the unfairness of my demand that the Apocrypha be taught infallibly. Both are cases of begging the question. If I have boxed myself into a position that Christian apologetics cannot penetrate, it need not signify stupidity on my part…it may also signify that Christian apologetics isn’t quite as forceful as you think. We might be able to reasonably justify skepticism in ways that the bible will not help you overcome.
Strawman, I only presume the infallible teaching ability of Jesus, Paul and the NT authors because YOU do. If you were to give up that belief, my argument would instantly lose all power. I personally think the doctrine of infallible NT teachings is absurd. This whole exercise boils down my my attempt to show there is inconsistency between YOUR belief in sola scriptura, and YOUR belief that God uses fallible teaching to advance the gospel. You consistently fail to provide biblical support for the latter, despite being perfectly certain that it is true…which tells me that your commitment to sola scriptura is not strong. You will derive doctrine from the way the church evolved after 100 a.d.
Then you quote Philippians 1:15–18 and argue
That is irrelevant, as you believe Paul was a morally imperfect human instrument…yet you still insist he taught the gospel infallibly. You don’t need to find God using a morally imperfect human instrument, you need to find God using fallible Christian teaching about the gospel, i.e., the exact thing you believe to be true about yourself and the modern Protestant church.
This is one of your bigger errors: I’m not a Christian. I don’t get my ideas of reasonableness from the bible or Christianity. I’m not intellectually obligated to based my demand for infallible interpretation, upon proof that infallible interpretation is what the original Christians offered or demanded. The allegedly infinite danger of hell is entirely sufficient for me to reasonably and rationally conclude, on my own, regardless of whatever the bible might say, that an unbeliever’s demand for infallible bible interpretation is more reasonable than an unbeliever’s willingness to seriously consider fallible bible interpretation. If the threat is infinite, the certainty of the threat must also be infinite.
You then cite Acts 11:19-21, but that only shows God used them. It does not show that their teachings were fallible at the time God used them. God using “ordinary” people doesn’t prove anything. You think Paul was ordinary, yet you also think God made his teachings infallible.
But you are going in the wrong direction: It is YOUR burden to show from the bible, God doing what you seem to think God is doing today, i.e., using fallible Christian teaching to further the gospel. I would demand infallible interpretation even if the bible didn’t support it, because I’m not a Christian, and I get my ideas of reasonableness from non-biblical sources. That reality doesn’t do anything to help you establish your own burden in this discussion. I merely decided to use “biblical support” for my demand because I knew that it would eventually disclose an inconsistency between “I get all of my information about God exclusively from the bible” (sola scriptura) and “While Paul was still alive, God used fallible preaching to advance the gospel”. If you know that God uses fallible preaching to advance the gospel, you don’t know it from the bible, so the possibility that you have drawn theological authority from something outside the bible (i.e., your possible willingness to violate sola scriptura), remains.
If you believe fallibility was true about their teaching, that’s YOUR burden. The text says God used them, so the second you prove that their teachings in that context were fallible, you win the debate. Good luck.
True but irrelevant, all that matters is whether God ever actually does use errant sermons to advance the gospel.
You are answering a challenge that places the burden on YOU. It doesn’t matter if I am wrong in my own belief, you aren’t sustaining your burden to show divine use of fallible teaching, by pointing out that the bible refuses to leap from “accurate teaching” to “infallible teaching”. You consistently forget who has the burden here.
Then you cite Peter’s fallible beliefs/actions in Galatians 2. That only shows his beliefs/actions were fallible. It does not show that God used any such beliefs/actions to spread the gospel.
That implicates other problems that deserve their own exclusive forum. Galatians 2:14 has Paul describing Peter’s gospel teaching as “why do you compel Gentiles to live as Jews?” That turns Peter into a Judaizer. As far as the trifle that Peter’s conduct contradiction “implications” of the gospel, Paul was very duplicitous here, because the play-acting he accused Peter of, is precisely what Paul admitted he engaged in to further the gospel. See 1st Cor. 9:20-21. Nobody conscious of the biblical examples of Paul living out that principle has been able to explain how Paul could believe himself free of the law, act among Jews as if he believed himself under the law, and do all this without giving the Jews a false impression of his genuine theological convictions. I’ll discuss it with you all day every day, but not here, unless you agree to terminate the current debate.
Even assuming I am wrong in my own view, YOUR view is that God uses fallible gospel preaching to advance the gospel, and nothing in Galatians 2 expresses or implies that God used Peter’s fallible teachings or actions toward any such end. If you think God today uses fallible teaching to advance the gospel, and if you advocate sola scriptura, Galatians does not provide relevant precedent.
Your Argument Commits a Category Error Concerning Infallibility
Not much different from your own leaping from “God inspired the authors” over to “the authors must have written inerrantly”.
But does God in the bible ever use a non-infallible teaching to advance the gospel?
No, it was pure vanity on my part to show that what I believe about the situation is compatible with the bible. My reasonableness to demand infallible interpretation from today’s Christians would remain even if you proved that no such demand was ever required in the bible. But regardless, your focus on the problems in my own view doesn’t relevantly fulfil your own burden. You believe God uses fallible interpretation to advance the gospel, yet you cannot find any biblical precedent for it. This makes your commitment to sola scriptura suspect. Or may only mean that you have seen in the bible for years something that the bible doesn’t ever actually teach.
Exactly.
But that doesn’t become relevant until you first establish God has used them at all.
I don’t need to “establish” this, It is merely a reasonable inference I draw from your own assumption that Jesus, Paul and the NT authors along with various NT story characters, taught the gospel infallibly. Yet you talk about “establishment” as if a theory is lunatic unless it constitutes a logically necessary deduction from biblical evidence.
Let me guess, do you go around telling other Trinitarians whose eschatology you disagree with, that they haven’t “established” their view? Does this accusation have a history of causing them to reel back in frightful terror and go neutral on end-times stuff until it’s time for you to leave? I’m guessing not. Yet you constantly repeat “you have failed to establish…” as if you are a truth-robot that is unable to do much more than correctly point out error. Humility and accuracy would require that you make a change, and cease trying to imitate the dogmatic demeanor of people who actually were filled with the Holy Spirit and thus had a perfect excuse to hurl criticism as if it fell straight from heaven.
I’m not answering much more of your post because it is just more and more irrelevant focus on the problems in my own position. You need to find a bible verse or verses showing that God used fallible teaching to promote the gospel. You don’t fulfill that burden by pointing out how fallacious it is to leap from “no recorded mistake” over to “they must have been infallible”. My being wrong on that stuff doesn’t give you any breather whatsoever.
Strawman, I have explicitly stated that I do not require your proof to consist of a single sentence. That’s why I said I can understand how you get the Trinity out of the bible even though no single verse completely establishes it.
I agree, but point out that what constitutes “necessary implications” is fool’s paradise, because before you can get a logically valid deduction from a biblical phrase, you have to correctly understand that phrase in first place. After all, nothing good can come from a logical deduction based on an incorrectly interpreted biblical phrase. 2000 years of disagreement by Christianity’s scholars doesn’t prove there is no God, or that Christianity is false, it reasonably justifies an inference that most of the bible is fatally ambiguous in matters that go beyond merely banal statements about history. Like I told you before, if Christians disagreed on what the judicial opinion in Roe v. Wade meant, as much as they disagree on what the bible teaches (no, I’m not talking about secondary doctrine, but essential doctrine, i.e., Lordship Salvation v. Free Grace), you Christians would happily conclude that the judicial opinion in that Court case was fatally ambiguous.
Then your apostle Paul wanted his students to imitate his infallible spiritual authority, without themselves having the same infallible spiritual authority. Possible? Yes. Likely? No…unless you become a liberal, and argue that Pual wrote the pastorals in later life, and recognized that this whole business of being “filled with the Spirit” is nonsense, and there is no way, period, to continue Christianity except by non-infallible teaching. But you probably won’t invoke that exception.
I don’t care what the biblical passages establish, I only care that my demand for infallible interpretation is reasonable. Maybe you cannot answer that question without reading the bible, but I can.
You cannot invalidate my actual position by demanding proof of a stronger claim I have not made.
Agreed. What I demand is proof of a claim you do make…that God uses fallible teaching to advance the gospel.
Strawman: My demand for proof of God using fallible teaching doesn’t mean I’m asking for proof of God using errant teaching. “Fallible” doesn’t mean “errant”. It means subject to the possibility of being wrong. Thus infallible means not subject to the possibility of error.
Paul did not allow testing to see “if” he preached the truth. To disagree with Paul is to sin and be self-condemned (Titus 3:9-11).
In context, the “all things” refers to prophetic utterance. And fundamentalism would disappear if he meant “all things” literally, for then that would mean he wanted us to “test” canonical scripture, logically leaving ourselves as the final say in whether an alleged scripture is true scripture…a judgment call Paul likely wouldn’t allow.
These are merely instructions to enable the church to discern the infallible teachers from the fallible teachers. I don’t claim that the apostles went around demanding that their audiences blindly presume apostolic infallibility.
So is “God commandeth all men everywhere to repent…”
Then since you don’t claim God has revealed an intention that you drive a car, you are always cautious about claiming certainty concerning it?
Redundant
But you cannot show their teaching about any divine message was fallible. You continue asserting the existence of fallible people, but the question is whether such fallbility remained in effect during their preaching of some divinely revealed truth.
skip redundancies
Which supports the premise that most biblical stories about God getting angry at people for misinterpretation (Galatians 1:6-9) are false. If you use a toddler to change a flat tire, it is YOUR fault if the job never gets done right.
That’s not enough for me when the alleged risk is eternal conscious torment. Nothing in the bible expresses or implies you have the least bit of authority to “teach” me that my standard is unfairly too high. Especially when the foolishness reaches absurd levels, and Trinitarians start condemning each other to hell, such as in the Lordship Salvation controversy. If not even spiritually alive people can agree on the point at which error opens the threat of eternal conscious torment, you are a FOOL to seriously expect a spiritually dead person to manifest more accurate discernment.
Correct. But whether I “established” it depends on whether my criteria for reasonableness are reasonable, and whether my demand for infallible Christian teachers conforms to that criteria. Once again, my pointing out that central NT players were infallible, is purely vanity on my part. The reasonableness of my demanding infallible interpreters hardly “requires” that base that on some biblical pattern. Hell is a danger to me, and the only person in this debate who thinks the bible must be the final authority on avoiding danger, is you. But we haven’t discussed my criteria for reasonableness yet.
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Can a person possibly be reasonable to disagree with the historiographical conclusions drawn by a sinner who explicitly disclaims the special inspiration of God?
Or would disagreement with you signal that the opponent was on the level of fools who deny the existence of cars?
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Of course a reasonable person can disagree with my historical conclusions. I have never claimed that my research or my conclusions are divinely inspired or that I am infallible.
However, you are confusing two entirely different questions: whether a person has the right to disagree and whether that disagreement is justified by the historical evidence.
The historical reliability of the New Testament is not established by my personal authority, moral perfection, or divine inspiration. It must be evaluated through the documentary evidence, manuscript traditions, historical context, eyewitness testimony, and the established methods of historical investigation.
A person may reasonably challenge my conclusions by presenting relevant evidence, demonstrating an error in my reasoning, or offering a better explanation of the historical facts.
But merely observing that I am a fallible human being does nothing to refute the evidence I have presented.
Likewise, the existence of disagreement does not establish that all interpretations of the evidence are equally reasonable.
The question is not whether someone can disagree with me. The question is whether that disagreement can be sustained by the historical evidence.
If you believe my conclusions are mistaken, demonstrate where the evidence or reasoning fails. That would constitute a substantive historical argument.
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But could I be reasonable to refuse to accept bible-teaching from any Christian until they prove they both can and will interpret the NT infallibly?
This demand for infallibility might be impossible for you to fulfill, but by no means does that necessitate that the demand is unreasonable, for three reasons, we’ll do these one at a time: Do you believe that the gospel was taught infallibly by Jesus, taught infallibly in the words of Paul and taught infallibly in the epistles produced by the NT authors?
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First, how do you define, “infallibility?”
The strict definition is that nothing is wrong.
In this regard, evaluating the texts of the Bible, the following is true:
Biblical inerrancy is the assertion that the Bible is without error or fault in all its principles and teaching, or that Scripture in the original autographs does not affirm anything contrary to fact.
Some liken inerrancy to biblical infallibility; others do not.
Inerrancy means that the Bible tells us the truth. Inspiration means that everything God wants us to know about Him is in the Bible.
He breathed (theopnenustos) scripture to us (2 Timothy 3:16). Peter describes how this was accomplished: 2 Peter 1:20-21 “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”
The same God who has the power to speak the universe into existence (Ps. 33:6) also has the power to speak to us, exactly what He wants us to know about Him, and how we can have a relationship with Him.
He also has the power to preserve His word for every generation. It is important to understand that it doesn’t matter what people say about the Bible; it matters what the Bible says about itself.
Not All Of The Bible Is God’s Word, But All Of The Bible Is The Word Of God
Although this sounds like a heretical statement, it is true. The Bible contains the words of evil men, liars, demons, murderers, and the immoral.
The statement that “every word is God’s word” cannot be true. What is true is that God included His words, the words of evil men, and those of the righteous, to demonstrate the sin of man and describe for us how He intends to save those who receive the Savior He sent into the world.
The Bible is the Word of God in that it contains His principles regarding sin, evil, suffering, the nature of man, his need for salvation, and the Savior He provided for every person.
In this regard, the Bible is reliable. When God Himself Is Speaking, This Is Made Clear To The Reader By The Words:
“The Lord Said,” 217 times in the Old Testament
“Says the Lord,” 841 times in the Old Testament
“The Word of the Lord,” 250 times in the Old Testament
“God Said,” 43 times in the Old Testament.
There are hundreds of additional places where God is described as speaking, using various terms and descriptions. The point is that we can tell when God is speaking in the Bible, and we can also tell when it is men or women who are speaking.
There are also many places where men are either speaking or writing the words that God dictated to them in the Bible. When we arrive at the New Testament, we see that the writers of the various letters we read in the 27 books of the New Testament often used a scribe—someone who took dictation from the author and wrote their words for us to read.
In the case of Paul, he suffered from an eye disorder and required assistance in writing the various letters we see placed in the New Testament. This does not mean that Paul was not the author, only that he used an assistant to record his words.
We see an example where Paul used a scribe to write for him in his letter to the Colossians. At the end of this letter, the NLT version shows us where Paul is writing the text himself by the use of all caps: “HERE IS MY GREETING IN MY OWN HANDWRITING—PAUL. Remember my chains. May God’s grace be with you all.” ~Colossians 4:18
In the case of Luke, he was a well-educated physician, who took extraordinary steps to interview the various eyewitnesses who had firsthand knowledge of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
He then recorded their testimony in his Gospel and the Book of Acts.
Notice how Luke begins his Gospel account of Jesus: “Many people have set out to write an account of the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Luke 1:1-4: “Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write an accurate account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be sure of the truth in everything you were taught.”
Notice the statement: “Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning.” Here, we see that Luke intended to write a very orderly, accurate, and reliable account of all that concerned Jesus.
One of the world’s greatest archaeologists and historians, Sir William Ramsay, describes the accuracy and detail of Luke’s historical references, without a single error.
Dr. Ramsay believed that during his extensive trip through Asia Minor, he would find that Luke had made several errors in his descriptions that were recorded in the book of Acts. Instead, Ramsay discovered that Luke was “a historian of the first rank.”
This gives you a brief synopsis of what the Bible means by “infallible.”
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Yes, by “infallible” I meant “nothing is wrong”. Please answer the question: “could I be reasonable to refuse to accept bible-teaching from any Christian until they prove they both can and will interpret the NT infallibly?”
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If your question is whether the New Testament is accurate, I am certain it is.
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No, that’s not my question. I didn’t ask whether the New Testament is accurate.
I asked “But could I be reasonable to refuse to accept bible-teaching from any Christian until they prove they both can and will interpret the NT infallibly?“
Please answer that question directly yes or no…or admit that you cannot answer it directly.
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Essentially, what you are asking is “Would I be justified in refusing to accept biblical teaching from any Christian unless that Christian can first prove that they are capable of interpreting the New Testament perfectly, without making a single mistake, and that they will always do so?”
This comment contains a significant epistemological problem, it establishes an impossible standard of certainty as a prerequisite for accepting biblical teaching.
You are demanding infallibility rather than evidence. The words “both can and will interpret the NT infallibly” establish two requirements:
Can the Christian demonstrate the ability to interpret the New Testament without error.
Will the Christian guarantee that every interpretation they offer will actually be without error.
These are not ordinary requirements for demonstrating that an interpretation is correct. They demand that the interpreter possess something approaching divine infallibility.
The argument confuses the reliability of a text with the infallibility of its interpreter. A person does not have to be infallible to understand and accurately explain a historical document.
For example, historians who interpret the writings of Tacitus, Josephus, or Pliny are not required to demonstrate that they can interpret every statement in those writings without error before their conclusions can be accepted.
Their interpretations are evaluated according to the evidence, language, historical context, and reasoning supporting their conclusions.
The same principle applies to the New Testament. The fact that an interpreter is fallible does not establish that a particular interpretation is false.
Your argument is self-defeating if applied consistently.
The critic must also interpret the New Testament to determine whether Christians are interpreting it correctly. If the critic insists that no interpretation should be accepted unless the interpreter demonstrates infallibility, then the critic’s own interpretations must meet that same requirement. Otherwise, the critic is applying one standard to Christians and another to himself.
The New Testament does not require infallible teachers.
Acts 17:11 praises the Bereans because they examined the Scriptures daily to determine whether Paul’s teaching was correct.
Paul did not demand that his listeners accept his teaching merely because he claimed authority. The Bereans were commended for testing what they heard against Scripture.
Also, 2 Timothy 2:15 instructs believers to handle the word of truth correctly. This command presupposes the responsibility to interpret carefully, not the possession of personal infallibility.
The fundamental error of your comment is in your confusion of certainty about an interpreter’s inability to err with justification for accepting a particular interpretation.
A person can reasonably withhold acceptance of a biblical interpretation because the evidence supporting it is inadequate.
But requiring proof that a teacher will never interpret anything incorrectly is an entirely different proposition.
It makes the teacher’s supposed perfection, rather than the evidence for the teaching, the deciding factor.
You have constructed an argument that appears to be a rhetorical challenge designed to justify rejecting Christian biblical teaching unless the teacher can meet an impossible standard.
You are confusing the infallibility of an interpreter with the accuracy of an interpretation.
No historian, linguist, textual critic, or biblical scholar must demonstrate personal infallibility before their conclusions can be evaluated as true.
We determine whether an interpretation is correct by examining the evidence supporting it, not by requiring the interpreter to be incapable of error.
If your standard were applied consistently, you could not reasonably accept any historical or literary interpretation, including your own.
The appropriate question is not whether I can interpret the entire New Testament infallibly, but whether the evidence demonstrates that my interpretation of a particular passage is correct.
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On a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the greatest danger, how spiritually dangerous is it if I misinterpret biblical texts that you think establish Jesus’ deity, the bodily nature of his resurrection, salvation solely by grace, etc, etc,?
That’s not my problem: The demand for infallible interpretation arises from your view of the NT. You think Jesus, Paul, various teachers mentioned in the NT and NT authors all taught theology infallibly…even when they were interpreting the OT.
Better, you can’t produce any counterexamples in which the NT a) asserts that some Christian taught the gospel to unbelievers in a non-infallible way, and b) the context makes clear that God was using him to do so.
So my demand for infallible interpretation is nothing more than a mirror reflection of what you think God gave to the 1st century unbelievers who converted to the gospel. Every negative consequence that arises from this NT pattern is the fault of the NT, not the 21st century person who is simply trying to follow that allegedly “authoritative” pattern.
If your position is that at some point before the mid-second century, God withdrew the charis of infallible teaching ability/authority from the church, simply say so.
A question that Christianity’s best scholars have provided contradictory answers to for 2000 years. Trinitarian Protestant scholars who all affirm full biblical inerrancy, sola scriptura, sola gratia, the power of prayer, etc, still come away disagreeing with each other on “essential doctrine”, not merely on peripheral doctrine. Until the day you say the risks for misinterpreting the bible are mild, it is perfectly reasonable for me to view biblical interpretation as analogous to learning how to shoot a gun, and never being quite sure whether it is pointed toward me, or away from me when the trigger is pulled: bible interpretation is excessively dangerous.
I don’t understand why you disagree with completely obvious common sense: the more the dangers of “being wrong” increase, the more the wise man’s desire to be “correct” increases. Well? If I misinterpret the bible on the matter of Jesus’ divine nature, how dangerous is that? Do I risk a tax audit, a flat tire, the murder of my children….or an irreversible eternity of conscious torment?
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Your argument rests upon a premise that you have not established from the New Testament: that because Jesus and His apostles communicated divinely authoritative revelation, every Christian who subsequently teaches that revelation must also possess infallible interpretive ability.
These are two entirely different propositions.
Jesus promised His apostles that the Holy Spirit would guide them into the truth (John 14:26; 16:13). Paul affirmed that he received the gospel through revelation from Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:11–12). Neither passage establishes that every subsequent Christian teacher would possess the same revelatory authority.
You have also confused the seriousness of theological error with the epistemological requirements for discovering truth.
You ask how spiritually dangerous it would be to misunderstand the deity of Christ, His bodily resurrection, or salvation by grace. These are matters of profound importance. But the seriousness of a possible error does not establish that an interpreter must be infallible before his conclusions can be accepted.
An incorrect medical diagnosis can result in death. Does this mean that no physician should be believed unless he first proves that he can diagnose every disease infallibly? Certainly not. The seriousness of the consequences requires careful examination of the evidence, not an impossible demand for personal infallibility.
Your argument concerning first-century Christian teachers is equally problematic.
Acts 18:24–28 describes Apollos as a genuine and effective teacher who nevertheless required additional instruction from Priscilla and Aquila. He taught accurately concerning Jesus, but his knowledge was incomplete. The text demonstrates that Christian teaching could be genuine and useful without the teacher possessing comprehensive, infallible understanding.
Your demand that I produce an example meeting your two specially constructed conditions does not establish your proposition. The burden rests upon you to demonstrate that Scripture requires every teacher whom God uses to possess infallible interpretive authority.
You also suggest that I must believe God withdrew infallible teaching authority from the church sometime before the second century. But this assumes what you are attempting to prove: that such infallibility was universally bestowed upon Christian teachers in the first place.
The New Testament makes no such assertion.
Paul distinguishes spiritual gifts and ministries in 1 Corinthians 12. James warns Christian teachers about the greater responsibility they bear (James 3:1–2). Neither teaches that every Christian teacher is incapable of error.
Your appeal to disagreements among Christian scholars also fails to establish your conclusion. Disagreement does not logically entail that truth is unknowable. Historians, scientists, physicians, and legal scholars disagree about consequential matters, yet their conclusions remain subject to rational examination.
Finally, you have created a false dilemma between infallible biblical interpretation and eternal condemnation.
The New Testament teaches that salvation is God’s gift through faith in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:8–9), not a reward for possessing perfect theological comprehension. While Scripture warns against false gospels and rejection of Christ, you have not established that every mistaken interpretation of a doctrinal question necessarily results in eternal condemnation.
You are correct that the greater the consequences of error, the greater our responsibility to examine the evidence carefully.
But this actually supports my position rather than yours.
The New Testament itself commends the Bereans for examining the Scriptures to determine whether the apostle Paul’s teaching was true (Acts 17:11).
They were not told to establish their own infallibility before reaching a conclusion. They were commended for examining the evidence.
You have mistaken the need for reliable evidence for the need for an infallible interpreter.
The relevant question remains whether the textual, linguistic, historical, and contextual evidence establishes the truth of a particular interpretation.
Your inability to prove that an interpretation is false is not remedied by demanding that the person presenting it first prove himself incapable of error.
If you believe the New Testament requires infallible interpretation as a prerequisite for accepting Christian teaching, please identify the passage that establishes this requirement.
Until you do, your demand is a philosophical condition that you have imposed upon the New Testament, not a requirement that you have demonstrated from it.
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I normally don’t answer in point-by-point fashion, but your dedication to your fundamentalist viewpoint has apparently caused you to misconstrue much of what I say.
Strawman: I never argued what I believe about the matter is a “must”. I merely argue that I am reasonable to require of Christian teachers today the same level of infallibility you think Jesus, Paul and the NT authors possessed.
Strawman and Red Herring: I don’t know why you resort to something you feel more comfortable addressing: I didn’t support my thesis with those texts, they remain irrelevant. Just like texts from the Apocrypha would be irrelevant because I also didn’t use any of those to support my thesis.
No, I have not “confused” any such thing, I’ve disregarded the “epistemological requirements for discovering truth” because I’m assuming YOU are correct when you pretend that certain misinterpretations of the bible can send people to hell. The philosophical axioms are irrelevant, we are only talking about whether a person can be reasonable to make no move, when they are in a position that says certain moves they could possibly make, will result in permanently irreversible conscious torment.
Strawman: I never said the way I do things is a “must”. I’ve only argued that I can be reasonable to refuse to fallible exegesis then the looming threat is that I will endure permanently irreversible conscious torment.
Fallacy of false analogy: the danger of incorrect biblical exegesis is, according to you, greater than the danger created by incorrect medical diagnosis. The latter can only cause premature physical death at worst. The former supposedly leads to permanently irreversible eternal conscious torment, which is supposed to be worse than mere physical death. We are thus more reasonable to take far more precautions in obtaining verifiably correct diagnosis of “essential doctrine”, than we would in obtaining correct medical diagnosis.
Strawman: I never denied that Apollos could have conveyed “genuine and useful”. What I denied is your ability to show that God used Apollos’ preaching. If you are so sure that God “uses” imperfect preaching/exegesis today, then your adoption of sola scriptura requires that you ground that view in the scriptures. You can’t. Every time a biblical phrase implies god used a Christian to teach anybody anything, you are the one who says that teacher taught infallibly. You should be bothered that this “god-uses-imperfect-exegesis” doctrine is not in the NT, because by publicly professing sola scriptura, you tell the world and other Christians that you don’t hold a doctrine about God or his relation to sinners unless it can be supported with scripture. Well? Do ALL of your theological beliefs draw from the scriptures, or only some of them?
I never said it did. I said if you are so positively certain I am wrong, a sola scriptura advocate like you only thinks that way because he has several biblical phrases in mind. If you think scriptures are useful for “correction” (2nd Tim 3:16), then “correct” me with an actual scripture that expresses or implies a) god used a Christian to teach the gospel to others, yet b) that Christian did not possess infallibility, i.e., the exact two things you think necessarily characterize all Christian teaching that occurred after the 1st century.
Incorrect, I only claim reasonableness. I do not claim that your ancient religious texts “require” any conclusion. From your belief that Jesus, the apostles and NT authors taught the gospel infallibly, I’m reasonable to expect your god to be consistent and afford the same gift to Christian teachers after the first century.
Yes, that is reasonable. It’s no more fallacious than basing god’s modern-day hatred of homosexuality upon God’s ancient-day hatred of the same sin. I could possibly be “wrong”, but until you prove it, the reasonableness of expecting your god to be consistent in his ways almost goes without saying. If you are so sure God withdrew infallibility from the church at some point before the 21st century, why do you have such obvious qualms about citing the evidence?
I only told you what you believe: that Jesus, Paul and all NT authors taught the gospel infallibly. I also pointed out that you believe any NT stories indicating God used a Christian to teach the gospel, were cases of such teachers teaching infallibly.
When did your God start using imperfect exegesis to further the gospel? A sola-scriptura advocate like you is not allowed to have a doctrine about God unless he gets it straight from the bible. I’m still waiting.
Fallacy of Irrelevant Thesis: the NT also makes no assertion about “trinity”…yet you still put it together from various bits and pieces of the NT. You should have no problems if i do something similar, and get a doctrine of the perpetuity of infallibility from bits and pieces, especially since you hold a) the original Christians had this gift, and b) you consistently dodge your rightful burden to produce any NT counter-example.
And Genesis 1:1 doesn’t explain why Barnabas was called an apostle. The fact that certain portions of the bible don’t support my theory, is quite a useless observation.
Strawman, I never said Christian disagreement “logically entailed” anything. I argued that the existence of Christian disagreement on “essential doctrine” renders me reasonable to fear that the “examination” procedures you tout so much, are, in practice, not capable of disclosing verifiable truth. EVERYBODY in the Calvinist Arminian debate is appealing to the original Greek and the “immediate context”, and so does everything with something to say in the Lordship Salvation v. Free Grace controversy. This “examine the evidence” smugness you consistently recommended has a poor history of making essential doctrine the least bit “clear”. So I upgrade my standard from “examine the evidence” over to “get it straight from infallible interpretation”.
Fallacy of false analogy: No historian, scientist, physician or legal scholar alleges that if anybody misinterprets history, science, physics or the law, that person will experience a permanently irreversible conscious torment. Big difference. Wise people care more about the greater dangers.
Strawman, I never expressed or implied that eternal life hinged on possessing infallible interpretation. I argued that I am reasonable to demand infallible teachers.The only thing you can do to escape the dilemma is become a liberal, and quit saying false interpretatoin of the bible can send somebody to hell. You won’t stop saying that, so the dilemma will never go away.
If I’m presented with a genuine possibility that my misinterpretation of a bible verse could send me to hell, how much precaution I take in the effort to avoid that danger is not your call, it’s solely mine. I don’t mean you can’t express whatever you please, I mean that your own answer to the problem carries no authority or force upon the person who is confronted by this danger, like me.
Correct: I have established that every mistaken interpretation of “essential” doctrine necessarily results in eternal condemnation. Hence, the fanatical precaution I exhibit, and which you have in no wise refuted.
Under your logic, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are “more noble” than atheists, because JWs examine the scriptures daily…but what good will that be when they find themselves in hell? What solace are you asking me to take from the fact that the bible says the Bereans were more noble because they examined scripture? I examine scripture too…is that enough? Or does my low-Christology (i.e., my “misinterpretation” of scripture) void the goodness of scripture-examination and send me to hell regardless?
If you had a doctrine that says God will protect from hell the people like the Bereans for examining the scriptures, even if they end up adopting heresy, you’d escape this dilemma. But you don’t. If we found a manuscript from the 1st century saying the Bereans examined the scriptures after hearing from Paul and decided Jesus was not God, their being “more noble” for examining the scriptures would be completely pointless to you, and you’d still pontificate that they went straight to hell. Thus the reasonableness of demanding infallible interpretation. My willingness to examine the scriptures carries literally zero weight with your ultimately idealistic infinitely unfathomably holy God, who is apparently sending sincere scripture-examiners to hell every day because they adopted heresy.
Only because YOU say the reliability of the evidence will give me no protection from hell if I interpret that evidence falsely. Once again, your efforts to dodge the need for verifiably correct interpretation are abortive.
But I already told you that for 2000 years Christianity’s best scholars disagreed with each other on whether the “textual, linguistic, historical, and contextual evidence establishes the truth of a particular interpretation”. If Christians disagreed with each other about the meaning of the Roe v. Wade decision as much as they disagree on what the bible teaches about essential doctrine, would you say the judicial opinion in Roe v. Wade was fatally ambiguous?
Strawman: I never expressed or implied that your interpretation is “wrong”. I’ve only argued that I’m reasonable to demand exegetical infallibility from today’s Christians. If I’m facing the threat of hell, I’m certainly not going to presume that because I can’t “refute” the Trinitarian interpretation of John 1:1, I may as well go ahead, take a chance, and consider that interpretation to be viable enough.
You argue that because god hated homosexuality in ancient days, he also hates it equally in modern days. Using the exact same logic, I argue that because god saw infallible interpretation as necessary in ancient days, he also sees infallible interpretation as necessary in modern days. Both of us are presuming consistency in god’s nature and character. There is no biblical evidence that God ever departed from hating homosexuality, and there is no biblical evidence that God ever departed from seeing infallible interpretation as necessary for the church.
That philosophical condition is reasonable, though. How dangerous is hell? A little or a lot? How much effort should I put into ensuring I stay protected from that danger? A little or a lot?
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You Are Entitled to Exercise Caution, but You Have Not Demonstrated That Your Particular Precaution Is Reasonable
You repeatedly object that I have misrepresented your position because you are not claiming that Scripture explicitly requires every Christian teacher to be infallible. You maintain that you are merely reasonable to demand infallibility before accepting Christian teaching.
I accept that clarification.
Nevertheless, it does not resolve the fundamental difficulty with your argument.
There is an important distinction between having the personal freedom to establish a condition for accepting information and demonstrating that the condition is epistemologically justified.
You are free to refuse to believe anything unless it is communicated by someone who possesses infallible knowledge. You may also refuse medical treatment unless a physician guarantees that the diagnosis is infallibly correct.
But your freedom to establish these requirements does not demonstrate that they are reasonable methods of discovering truth or avoiding danger.
You have repeatedly argued that the possibility of eternal punishment justifies your demand for infallibility.
That conclusion does not follow from your premise.
The seriousness of an adverse consequence establishes the importance of avoiding error. It does not establish that any particular method of avoiding error is rational, effective, or even possible.
A precaution is reasonable when there is sufficient justification for believing that it will actually reduce the relevant danger, taking into account its costs and the consequences of refusing to act.
You have not demonstrated that refusing all fallible biblical instruction reduces your risk of misunderstanding the gospel.
You have simply assumed that it does.
Indeed, your proposed precaution may produce the very result you claim to fear. If the gospel is true, and salvation requires a response of faith to Jesus Christ, then indefinitely refusing to evaluate or accept its claims until an infallible human interpreter appears may prevent the very response Scripture calls for.
You cannot establish that inaction is spiritually safer merely by asserting that action carries risks.
A refusal to decide is itself a decision, and it does not automatically eliminate the consequences of being wrong.
Your position requires you to demonstrate not merely that theological error can be dangerous, but that refusing to act upon sufficiently supported theological evidence is safer than responding to it.
You have not established that proposition.
Your Argument About Eternal Danger Does Not Eliminate the Requirements of Rational Investigation
You write:
> “I’ve disregarded the ‘epistemological requirements for discovering truth’ because I’m assuming YOU are correct when you pretend that certain misinterpretations of the bible can send people to hell.”
This is perhaps the most revealing statement in your entire response.
You acknowledge that you are disregarding the epistemological requirements for discovering truth because you regard the possible consequences of error as exceptionally serious.
But the seriousness of the consequences is precisely why sound epistemology becomes more important, not less.
Epistemology concerns how beliefs are justified, how evidence is evaluated, and how we distinguish knowledge from mistaken conclusions.
You cannot rationally disregard these questions while simultaneously insisting that your overriding concern is avoiding false beliefs.
Suppose that two individuals offer competing interpretations of John 1:1. One concludes that the text identifies Jesus as possessing the divine nature. The other concludes that Jesus is a created being.
You cannot determine which interpretation is correct merely by emphasizing the consequences of choosing incorrectly.
The severity of those consequences supplies no information about the grammatical meaning of θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (theos ēn ho logos).
Neither does it establish which interpreter understands the Greek correctly.
The evidence must still be examined.
Even if someone appeared before you claiming infallible interpretive authority, you would still need to determine whether that claim was true.
How would you accomplish this?
Would you examine the person’s statements, historical credentials, alleged miracles, consistency, and interpretation of Scripture?
If so, you would once again be employing fallible human reasoning to evaluate evidence.
If you refuse to employ such reasoning, how could you ever distinguish a genuinely infallible teacher from an impostor?
Your proposed solution therefore does not escape the problem of fallibility. It simply relocates the problem from interpreting Scripture to identifying the supposedly infallible interpreter.
Unless you are yourself infallible, you cannot obtain an infallible guarantee merely by deciding to trust someone who claims to possess one.
This is not an irrelevant philosophical objection. It addresses the central mechanism of your proposed solution.
You Have Not Established That the New Testament Presents Infallibility as a Universal Characteristic of First-Century Christian Teachers
You repeatedly insist that because I accept the divine authority of Jesus and His apostles, I must also accept that every first-century Christian whom God used to proclaim the gospel taught infallibly.
But you have not demonstrated this from Scripture.
You are conflating several distinct categories:
First, Jesus Christ, whom the New Testament presents as possessing unique divine authority (John 1:1–18; Hebrews 1:1–3).
Second, the apostles commissioned by Christ, whose foundational witness carried a particular authority (John 14:26; 16:13; Ephesians 2:20).
Third, other believers who proclaimed Christ, instructed converts, and participated in the church’s ministry.
The fact that the first two categories possessed special authority does not establish that every individual in the third category possessed the same authority.
Consider Acts 8:4:
“Therefore those who were scattered abroad went around preaching the word.”
These believers proclaimed the message of Christ after persecution scattered the Jerusalem church.
The text does not identify every individual as an apostle. It does not assert that every believer possessed infallible interpretive ability. Nor does it establish that their proclamation was ineffective unless they possessed such ability.
Acts 11:19–21 is even more significant. Believers scattered by persecution preached the Lord Jesus in Antioch.
Verse 21 states:
“The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord.”
Here the New Testament expressly associates divine assistance with the preaching of believers who are not individually identified as apostles or infallible interpreters.
Does this passage explicitly state that one of these believers committed an exegetical error while preaching? No.
But that is not necessary to challenge your broader premise.
You must distinguish between God’s approval of the gospel being proclaimed and God’s certification that every individual proclaiming it possessed an unlimited capacity for infallible interpretation.
The former does not logically establish the latter.
Your requirement that I produce a passage explicitly combining divine assistance, evangelistic activity, and an identifiable exegetical mistake imposes a standard of proof that your own position does not satisfy.
Where does Scripture explicitly state that every unnamed believer in Acts 8 or Acts 11 possessed infallible interpretive ability?
It does not.
You are treating the absence of an explicitly documented mistake as positive evidence of infallibility.
That is an argument from silence.
The New Testament Provides an Especially Important Counterexample in Philippians 1:15–18
Paul writes:
“Some indeed preach Christ even out of envy and strife, and some also out of good will. The former preach Christ from selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my chains; but the latter out of love, knowing that I am appointed for the defense of the Good News. What does it matter? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. I rejoice in this, yes, and will rejoice.” (Philippians 1:15–18, WEB)
Notice what Paul acknowledges.
Some individuals proclaimed Christ from sinful motives.
Their conduct was not morally flawless. Their intentions were not wholly righteous. Nevertheless, Paul rejoiced that Christ was being proclaimed.
This passage does not prove that their doctrinal statements contained errors. Paul evidently regarded the message about Christ as sufficiently faithful to rejoice in its proclamation.
But it establishes an important distinction: God’s purposes in the proclamation of Christ are not necessarily defeated by imperfections in the human messenger.
You cannot reasonably move from the fact that God uses a person to the conclusion that every aspect of that person’s ministry must be infallible.
The New Testament itself does not make that inference.
An even clearer distinction appears in 1 Corinthians 3:5–7, where Paul describes himself and Apollos as servants through whom the Corinthians believed.
Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.
God’s action is distinguished from the human instruments through whom the message was communicated.
This passage identifies Apollos as a minister through whom people believed, and identifies God as the one responsible for the increase.
When read alongside Acts 18:24–28, where Apollos required further instruction, these passages provide substantial biblical grounds for affirming that God works through teachers whose understanding is capable of development and correction.
Neither passage demonstrates that Apollos preached a false gospel. Neither requires such a conclusion.
What they undermine is your unsupported equation of divine usefulness with comprehensive personal infallibility.
Your Argument About God Withdrawing Infallibility Assumes a Universal Gift That Scripture Never Establishes
You repeatedly ask:
“When did your God start using imperfect exegesis to further the gospel?”
You also suggest that Christians must identify a date when God withdrew the gift of infallible teaching.
This question presupposes that every teacher whom God used originally possessed such a gift.
But this premise remains unproved.
The New Testament presents the apostles as occupying a distinctive foundational position.
Ephesians 2:20 describes God’s household as:
“being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone.”
The image distinguishes the foundation from the building constructed upon it.
The apostles and prophets occupy a foundational role. Later believers are incorporated into the structure founded upon Christ and the apostolic witness.
Likewise, Jude 3 refers to “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”
Neither text supplies a precise historical date when particular spiritual gifts ceased. Nor does either, by itself, settle every debate concerning the continuation of miraculous gifts.
But they establish a biblical distinction between the original delivery of authoritative revelation and its subsequent preservation, proclamation, and explanation.
You have treated these as though they must be identical activities requiring identical gifts.
That is not demonstrated.
A teacher can faithfully communicate an authoritative message without personally possessing the authority to originate that message.
A messenger can accurately deliver a royal decree without being a king.
A historian can correctly explain an eyewitness account without having witnessed the event.
A Christian can accurately communicate apostolic teaching without being an apostle.
Your argument fails because it assumes that the authority of the original source must become an inherent, infallible attribute of everyone who subsequently communicates its contents.
That conclusion does not follow.
Your Appeal to God’s Consistency Is a False Equivalence
You compare your argument about infallible interpretation with the Christian conviction that God’s moral character remains consistent.
You write:
“Using the exact same logic, I argue that because god saw infallible interpretation as necessary in ancient days, he also sees infallible interpretation as necessary in modern days.”
But these arguments are not equivalent.
God’s moral character and His distribution of particular gifts or offices are different subjects.
Scripture presents God as unchanging in His character and faithfulness (Malachi 3:6; James 1:17).
It does not follow that God must employ precisely the same means, offices, miracles, or revelatory methods throughout every period of redemptive history.
Hebrews 1:1–2 explicitly describes differences in the manner of divine revelation:
“God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son…”
The same God communicates through different means at different times.
Consider Moses.
God commissioned Moses to perform extraordinary signs before Pharaoh. Does God’s consistency require every subsequent servant of God to possess Moses’ miraculous abilities?
Consider the apostles.
Acts 1:21–22 establishes historical qualifications for the individual selected to replace Judas, including association with Jesus’ ministry and witness to His resurrection.
Does God’s consistency require every subsequent Christian teacher to meet those qualifications?
Obviously not.
Divine consistency does not require identical distributions of spiritual authority.
Furthermore, your comparison presupposes the very proposition in dispute: that God considered universal infallible interpretation necessary for first-century evangelism.
You have not established that proposition.
You cannot use God’s consistency to perpetuate a requirement that you have not first demonstrated existed.
Your Understanding of Sola Scriptura Is Incorrect
You write:
“A sola-scriptura advocate like you is not allowed to have a doctrine about God unless he gets it straight from the bible.”
Properly understood, sola Scriptura affirms that Scripture is the supreme and uniquely infallible written authority for Christian doctrine.
It does not require that every legitimate theological conclusion be stated in one explicit biblical sentence.
Christian theology necessarily involves reasoning from the totality of biblical revelation.
The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is formulated through the relationship between multiple biblical teachings: the existence of one God, the deity of the Father, the deity of the Son, the deity of the Holy Spirit, and the personal distinctions between them.
But the reasoning must be valid, and the premises must be established.
You cannot simply assert that because Christians synthesize biblical evidence to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity, you are equally justified in synthesizing selected passages into a doctrine of universal first-century infallibility.
The question is whether the evidence actually supports your conclusion.
You have not shown that every Christian who preached the gospel in the first century possessed infallible interpretive ability.
Neither have you shown that God required subsequent Christian teachers to possess that ability.
Your argument depends upon assumptions that you repeatedly attribute to me without establishing them from Scripture.
Sola Scriptura does not mean that every doctrine must appear in a single explicit verse. It means that theological claims must be accountable to Scripture rather than imposed upon it.
Your proposed doctrine of perpetual infallible interpretation has not met that standard.
You Have Confused Doctrinal Error, Rejection of Christ, and the Grounds of Salvation
This is the most important theological problem in your argument.
You write:
“I have established that every mistaken interpretation of ‘essential’ doctrine necessarily results in eternal condemnation.”
No, you have not.
You have asserted that proposition, but you have not demonstrated it.
The New Testament certainly treats some theological errors as extremely serious.
Paul warns against a different gospel in Galatians 1:6–9.
John warns against denying the Son in 1 John 2:22–23.
Paul teaches that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is indispensable to the Christian gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:12–19.
These are not peripheral issues.
But the New Testament does not teach that every person who misunderstands an essential doctrine is automatically condemned, irrespective of the nature of the misunderstanding, the person’s knowledge, or the distinction between confusion and deliberate rejection.
Consider the disciples themselves.
In Luke 18:31–34, Jesus explicitly foretold His suffering, death, and resurrection.
Verse 34 states:
“They understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they didn’t understand the things that were said.”
The disciples failed to understand something central to the gospel: the death and resurrection of their Messiah.
Their misunderstanding was real.
Yet Jesus did not declare that their imperfect comprehension placed them beyond salvation.
Consider Thomas in John 20:24–29.
Thomas initially refused to believe the testimony concerning Jesus’ bodily resurrection.
Jesus subsequently appeared to him, provided evidence, and called him to believe.
The narrative portrays Jesus correcting Thomas rather than establishing a universal rule that every temporary misunderstanding concerning the resurrection automatically results in eternal condemnation.
Consider Peter.
In Galatians 2:11–14, Paul publicly rebuked Peter because his conduct was inconsistent with the truth of the gospel.
Peter’s behavior had serious theological implications concerning the relationship between Jewish and Gentile believers.
Yet Paul corrected Peter as a fellow apostle, not as someone whose error had automatically placed him beyond salvation.
These examples must be interpreted carefully. They do not establish that deliberate rejection of Christ is spiritually harmless, nor that all doctrinal errors are equivalent.
They do establish that the New Testament distinguishes between serious error requiring correction and a final, settled rejection of the truth.
You repeatedly treat these categories as interchangeable.
They are not.
The New Testament locates salvation in Jesus Christ, not in the believer’s possession of perfect theological comprehension.
John 3:16 promises eternal life to those who believe in the Son.
Romans 10:9 connects salvation with confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God raised Him from the dead.
Ephesians 2:8–9 declares that salvation is by grace through faith, not by works.
These passages do not make accurate doctrine irrelevant. They establish the basis upon which salvation is received.
You must therefore demonstrate, rather than merely assume, that every mistaken conclusion concerning a doctrine designated essential necessarily constitutes the kind of unbelief or rejection Scripture identifies as condemning.
You have not done so.
Your Jehovah’s Witness Example Does Not Establish That Biblical Investigation Is Useless
You ask whether Jehovah’s Witnesses are more noble than atheists because they examine Scripture, and whether such examination is useless if their conclusions concerning Jesus are incorrect.
You have again confused the value of a method with a guarantee concerning its outcome.
Acts 17:11 commends the Bereans because they received the message with readiness and examined the Scriptures daily to determine whether the things Paul taught were true.
The text does not teach that everyone who examines Scripture will necessarily reach the correct conclusion.
Nor does it promise that sincere investigation automatically guarantees salvation regardless of the conclusions reached.
What it establishes is that examining evidence is a commendable response to claims about divine revelation.
You ask whether that examination is “enough.”
Enough for what?
If you mean whether the act of studying Scripture automatically saves someone, the answer is no.
Jesus addressed this very issue in John 5:39–40. He told His opponents that they searched the Scriptures because they believed they possessed eternal life in them, yet those same Scriptures testified about Him, and they were unwilling to come to Him for life.
Jesus did not condemn the examination of Scripture.
He condemned the refusal to respond to the One to whom Scripture testified.
This distinction is essential.
The purpose of examining Scripture is not to accumulate merit through intellectual activity.
It is to discover the truth concerning God and His revelation in Jesus Christ.
Your argument assumes that because sincere investigation does not guarantee a correct conclusion, the investigation is therefore inadequate or pointless.
That reasoning would invalidate nearly every form of human inquiry.
The fact that a method does not guarantee success does not establish that the method lacks evidential value.
And the fact that a person can sincerely reach a mistaken conclusion does not establish that all competing conclusions are equally justified.
The New Testament Itself Warns Against Demanding Extraordinary Proof as a Precondition for Belief
Your argument is especially problematic because Scripture repeatedly describes people who demanded additional certainty while refusing to respond to the evidence already available.
In John 20:29, Jesus told Thomas:
“Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed.”
This does not condemn rational investigation. John immediately explains that the recorded signs of Jesus were written so that readers might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and have life in His name (John 20:30–31).
The distinction is between evidence sufficient to justify belief and a demand for a personally selected form of certainty.
Luke 16:19–31 provides another important example.
In the account of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man requests that Lazarus be sent to warn his brothers.
Abraham responds that they have Moses and the prophets and should listen to them.
When the rich man insists that someone rising from the dead would persuade them, Abraham answers that if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded by someone rising from the dead.
The passage does not teach that evidence is unnecessary.
It challenges the assumption that an extraordinary additional form of evidence will necessarily overcome a person’s refusal to accept existing testimony.
Your argument resembles this problem.
You have not demonstrated that the available evidence for the New Testament’s central claims is inadequate.
Instead, you have announced that no amount of fallible interpretation will be acceptable because you demand an infallible teacher.
But why should that demand be considered rational if the New Testament itself presents written apostolic testimony as sufficient grounds for faith?
John 20:31 does not say that the Gospel was written so that readers could wait for a future infallible interpreter.
It says the written testimony was provided so that readers might believe in Jesus Christ.
Your Appeal to Two Thousand Years of Christian Disagreement Does Not Establish That Essential Truth Is Unknowable
You cite disagreements between Calvinists and Arminians, and between advocates of Lordship Salvation and Free Grace theology.
These disagreements are real, and some concern important aspects of Christian doctrine.
However, your argument contains several problems.
First, you have not established that every disagreement among Christian scholars involves mutually exclusive conditions of salvation.
A Calvinist and an Arminian may disagree concerning the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom while both affirming the deity of Christ, His bodily resurrection, His atoning death, and salvation through His grace.
Their disagreement does not automatically establish that one of them has rejected the gospel.
Second, you have not demonstrated that every interpretation within a disputed subject is equally supported by the evidence.
The existence of disagreement does not eliminate the possibility that one interpretation is better justified.
Third, your argument confuses the existence of competing interpretations with the impossibility of rationally distinguishing between them.
The Greek text of John 1:1 does not become meaningless because Jehovah’s Witnesses and Trinitarian scholars interpret it differently.
The question remains which interpretation best accounts for the grammar, syntax, literary context, and relationship to the remainder of John’s Gospel.
For example, John 1:3 states:
“All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made.”
The text distinguishes the Word from the totality of created things.
John 1:14 identifies this Word as the One who became flesh.
John 20:28 records Thomas addressing the risen Jesus:
“My Lord and my God!”
These statements provide substantial evidence relevant to the question of Jesus’ divine nature.
A critic cannot dismiss that evidence merely by observing that some religious groups disagree with the orthodox Christian interpretation.
The existence of disagreement is a reason to investigate competing arguments, not a demonstration that investigation is futile.
Fourth, your comparison with the interpretation of Roe v. Wade fails to establish your conclusion.
Even when legal scholars disagree concerning the meaning or implications of a judicial decision, the proper response is to examine the text, reasoning, legal context, and subsequent interpretations.
The presence of disagreement may sometimes indicate genuine ambiguity. It may also reflect different assumptions, interpretive methods, or errors.
Disagreement alone cannot tell us which explanation is correct.
Exactly the same principle applies to biblical interpretation.
Your Argument Concerning Eternal Conscious Torment Does Not Demonstrate That Infallibility Is the Only Reasonable Standard
You repeatedly emphasize the possibility of “permanently irreversible conscious torment.”
You are correct that, within theological traditions affirming eternal conscious punishment, the consequences of final condemnation are extraordinarily serious.
But this does not prove your conclusion.
Let us grant, for the sake of argument, the following premises:
1. Eternal conscious punishment is real.
2. Certain beliefs about Jesus Christ are essential to saving faith.
3. A person can misunderstand biblical teaching concerning those beliefs.
4. Human interpreters are capable of error.
None of these premises establishes that refusing all fallible biblical interpretation is the safest or most rational response.
To reach that conclusion, you need additional premises.
You would have to demonstrate that accepting a fallible but well-supported interpretation creates a greater risk of condemnation than refusing to respond to the gospel until an infallible teacher appears.
You would also need to demonstrate that an infallible teacher can be identified reliably, and that the identification process does not itself depend upon fallible reasoning.
You have demonstrated neither.
Your argument effectively treats the possibility of error as though it renders every non-infallible conclusion unacceptable.
But that principle would make justified belief impossible in virtually every consequential area of human life.
You object that physical death is less serious than eternal punishment.
That objection does not resolve the logical problem.
The analogy with medicine concerns the relationship between the seriousness of consequences and the appropriate standard of evidence.
It does not depend upon the consequences being equal in magnitude.
Even an infinitely serious consequence would not, by itself, demonstrate that a particular proposed method of avoiding it is effective.
The severity of the danger cannot substitute for evidence that your precaution actually reduces the danger.
Your Position Creates an Additional Problem: You Must Decide Which Claimant to Infallibility Is Genuine
Suppose someone claims that the Roman Catholic Church possesses divinely protected teaching authority.
Another person claims that the Eastern Orthodox Church faithfully preserves apostolic truth.
A third claims that a modern religious organization is uniquely directed by God.
A fourth claims to possess a special revelation correcting the errors of historical Christianity.
Each may offer theological arguments for accepting its authority.
How would you decide which claimant is correct?
You cannot simply accept the first person who claims infallibility, because false claims of divine authority are possible.
The New Testament itself warns against false teachers and false prophets (Matthew 7:15; 24:24; 1 John 4:1).
Consequently, you must investigate the evidence supporting each claim.
But your investigation will necessarily involve interpretation, reasoning, and judgments that are not themselves infallible.
You would therefore face the same difficulty that you claim makes ordinary biblical interpretation unacceptable.
If you insist upon an infallible authority to identify the infallible teacher, you must then identify that second authority.
If the second authority must also be verified infallibly, the problem repeats.
Your proposed method produces an infinite regress unless you eventually permit some fallible act of judgment.
And once you permit fallible judgment to identify an allegedly infallible teacher, you have conceded the very principle you reject when Christians examine Scripture.
The question then becomes why fallible reasoning is acceptable when identifying an authority but unacceptable when examining the biblical text itself.
You have supplied no satisfactory answer.
Your Repeated Accusations of Strawman Arguments Do Not Resolve the Substantive Issues
You repeatedly label my objections “strawman,” “red herring,” and “false analogy.”
These terms have legitimate meanings in logic.
But merely naming a fallacy does not establish that one has occurred.
For example, you correctly distinguish your claim that demanding infallibility is reasonable from the stronger claim that Scripture explicitly commands everyone to demand it.
That clarification deserves acknowledgment.
However, the distinction does not eliminate the relevance of biblical passages concerning the authority and limitations of Christian teachers.
You are explicitly appealing to what you believe is the New Testament’s pattern of divine instruction.
Consequently, passages establishing the distinctive authority of the apostles, the distribution of spiritual gifts, and the limitations of ordinary teachers are directly relevant.
They are not red herrings simply because you did not cite them yourself.
Similarly, when you argue that God must continue granting infallible interpretive ability because He is consistent, passages demonstrating that God distributes different gifts and offices are directly relevant to evaluating your inference.
You cannot exclude contrary evidence by declaring that only the passages you personally selected are relevant.
Nor can you establish your interpretation of the New Testament by demanding that an opponent disprove a universal claim through a specially constructed counterexample.
Your thesis must stand or fall according to the evidence supporting it.
Your Central Assumption About Eternal Condemnation Requires Biblical Proof
You repeatedly attribute to me the proposition that every sincere person who adopts an incorrect interpretation of an essential doctrine will necessarily suffer eternal condemnation.
But that is not a proposition I have established, and it should not be assumed.
Scripture teaches that salvation is through Jesus Christ.
It also teaches that rejecting the true Christ and embracing a false gospel are spiritually serious matters.
Yet these statements do not justify collapsing every kind of doctrinal misunderstanding into the same category of culpable unbelief.
The New Testament distinguishes between ignorance, immaturity, weakness, deception, correction, and deliberate rejection.
Luke 12:47–48 distinguishes differing degrees of responsibility according to knowledge.
First Timothy 1:13 records Paul’s statement that he had formerly been a blasphemer and persecutor, yet received mercy because he acted ignorantly in unbelief.
These passages do not establish that ignorance automatically saves someone.
They do demonstrate that knowledge, intention, and culpability are morally relevant categories within the biblical account.
You must therefore be careful when claiming that every incorrect interpretation of essential doctrine automatically results in eternal punishment.
You are making a sweeping theological assertion that requires substantially more biblical support than you have provided.
Furthermore, the gospel does not present salvation as a reward for achieving perfect interpretive certainty.
Paul writes:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast.” (Ephesians 2:8–9, WEB)
If you transform salvation into something that requires a guarantee of infallible theological comprehension, you risk introducing a condition that Scripture itself does not impose.
The essential question is whether a person has truly believed in Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the gospel.
That question certainly involves truth about His identity and saving work.
But it is not equivalent to asking whether the believer has attained an infallible understanding of every theological implication of those truths.
Your Demand for Infallibility Does Not Follow From the Example of Jesus and the Apostles
You argue that because Jesus and the apostles possessed divine authority, it is reasonable to expect God to provide every subsequent generation with teachers possessing identical authority.
But this expectation does not follow from the historical circumstances described in the New Testament.
Jesus was not merely another interpreter of an earlier religious text.
According to the New Testament, He is the incarnate Word of God (John 1:1, 14).
The apostles were not merely ordinary religious teachers who happened to reach correct theological conclusions.
They were commissioned witnesses of the risen Christ, entrusted with proclaiming the foundational message of the new covenant.
Their historical position was distinctive.
You cannot reasonably infer that every subsequent teacher must possess identical authority merely because God originally established the gospel through uniquely commissioned witnesses.
The New Testament repeatedly directs subsequent believers back to the authoritative apostolic message.
Paul instructs Timothy to entrust what he has heard to faithful people who will be able to teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2).
Notice what the passage requires.
Faithfulness and the ability to teach.
It does not explicitly require that each succeeding teacher possess personal infallibility.
In 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul instructs Timothy to be diligent in handling the word of truth correctly.
The responsibility to handle Scripture correctly makes sense precisely because teachers must exercise care, diligence, and discernment.
If personal infallibility were the universal prerequisite for legitimate Christian instruction, your argument requires an explanation for why the apostolic writings repeatedly emphasize study, correction, testing, and careful handling of the message rather than commanding believers to identify infallible interpreters.
Your Argument Does Not Establish That Refusing to Believe Is Spiritually Safer Than Believing
You repeatedly describe yourself as someone who is unwilling to “make a move” because a mistaken move could result in eternal punishment.
But the New Testament does not portray refusing to respond to the gospel as a spiritually neutral position.
Jesus declares:
“He who believes in him is not judged. He who doesn’t believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only born Son of God.” (John 3:18, WEB)
John 3:36 likewise contrasts belief in the Son with refusal to obey Him.
These passages must be interpreted in their literary and theological context, but their basic implication is unmistakable: the New Testament does not present indefinite nonbelief as a guaranteed refuge from spiritual danger.
If you are evaluating Christianity on its own terms, you cannot consider only the risks associated with accepting an incorrect interpretation.
You must also consider the risks associated with refusing to accept a true interpretation.
Your reasoning has been asymmetrical.
You emphasize the possibility that accepting a mistaken theological conclusion could be disastrous.
But you give insufficient consideration to the possibility that refusing to respond to a true gospel could also be disastrous.
A rational evaluation must consider both possibilities.
You cannot establish that refusing to decide is safer merely by focusing upon one side of the risk.
The New Testament’s Solution Is Trust in Christ, Not Trust in an Infallible Human Interpreter
Your entire argument rests upon the assumption that the greatest protection against spiritual error is the possession of an infallible human teacher.
But the New Testament consistently directs attention to Jesus Christ Himself.
Jesus said:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.” (John 14:6, WEB)
Paul wrote:
“For I am not ashamed of the Good News of Christ, because it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes…” (Romans 1:16, WEB)
And John explained the purpose of his Gospel:
“But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31, WEB)
The New Testament presents the written testimony concerning Jesus as a means through which people may come to faith.
It does not tell readers that they must first obtain an infallible interpreter before they may reasonably believe.
The original apostolic testimony was preserved and transmitted precisely so that subsequent generations could encounter the message of Christ.
Your argument effectively makes the availability of an infallible modern interpreter a prerequisite for rationally accepting the message that the apostles committed to writing.
That requirement is neither established by the biblical text nor logically derived from the seriousness of salvation.The Questions Your Argument Must Finally Answer
Your position cannot be established merely by repeating that hell is dangerous or that Christian scholars disagree.
Those points are not sufficient to justify your proposed solution.
Your argument must answer the following questions:
1. Where does the New Testament establish that every first-century Christian teacher whom God used possessed infallible interpretive ability?
2. Why does divine assistance in proclaiming the gospel necessarily imply comprehensive personal infallibility?
3. Why should God’s unchanging character require identical distributions of spiritual gifts and authority throughout history?
4. How would you identify an infallible modern interpreter without relying upon your own fallible reasoning?
5. What evidence demonstrates that refusing all fallible biblical instruction reduces the danger of eternal condemnation?
6. Where does Scripture establish that every mistaken interpretation of a doctrine considered essential necessarily results in eternal condemnation, regardless of knowledge, intention, or other relevant circumstances?
7. Why should the possibility of reaching an incorrect conclusion invalidate the examination of evidence when the New Testament itself commends such examination?
8. If refusing to believe the true gospel also carries eternal consequences, how have you established that indefinite refusal to decide is the safer course?
These are not peripheral questions.
They concern the essential premises upon which your argument depends.
Until they are answered, your repeated insistence that your demand is “reasonable” remains an assertion rather than a demonstrated conclusion.
You Have Confused the Magnitude
of a Danger With the Rationality of Your Proposed Precaution
I do not dispute that eternal condemnation, if the biblical teaching is true, is an extraordinarily serious matter.
Neither do I dispute your right to investigate Christian claims carefully, question competing interpretations, or withhold judgment when you believe the evidence is insufficient.
I would encourage precisely that kind of serious examination.
What I dispute is your conclusion that the seriousness of the consequences makes it reasonable to refuse all fallible biblical instruction until an infallible interpreter appears.
You have not demonstrated that this precaution will protect you.
You have not demonstrated that Scripture requires or promises the kind of interpreter you demand.
You have not demonstrated that the first-century church universally possessed the infallibility you attribute to it.
You have not demonstrated that every mistaken understanding of an essential doctrine necessarily results in eternal condemnation.
And you have not explained how you could reliably recognize an infallible interpreter without employing the very fallible reasoning you consider inadequate.
The fundamental problem with your position is that you have substituted a demand for guaranteed certainty for the actual process of determining whether a claim is true.
The possibility of error is not evidence that a conclusion is false.
The absence of infallibility is not evidence that an interpretation is unreliable.
The existence of disagreement is not evidence that truth is inaccessible.
And the seriousness of the consequences is not evidence that refusing to decide is safer than responding to the truth.
Christianity does not require you to place your faith in my personal infallibility, or in that of any other contemporary Christian teacher.
It calls you to examine the testimony concerning Jesus Christ and respond to the truth that testimony communicates.
The apostle John did not write that his Gospel would be useful only if accompanied by an infallible interpreter.
He wrote that its testimony concerning Jesus was given so that readers might believe and have life in His name.
The decisive question is therefore not whether a modern Christian teacher can guarantee that he will never make an interpretive mistake. It is whether the evidence contained in the New Testament provides sufficient justification for believing its claims concerning Jesus Christ.
That is the question your argument has repeatedly avoided.
And no amount of emphasis upon the seriousness of eternal consequences can substitute for answering it.
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I’m going to provide another point by point response tomorrow, but for now:
If I asked you to support the proposition “God uses fallible imperfect teaching to spread the gospel”, you wouldn’t trifle that the proposition is framed in the negative, because you think the supporting evidence is overwhelming.
Please make the strongest argument possible to support the following proposition:
When the apostle Paul was still alive, God’s efforts to further the gospel in the world included his using fallible gospel-teaching.
Let me spell out what this requires, so that you don’t escape the problem with verbiage:
You must produce from the bible the following:
1) a passage expressing or implying that God used the teaching of any Christian to further the gospel (you already have it in Acts 11:19 ff)
2) a passage expressing or implying that the teaching God used, was fallible.
That is precisely what you believe true about the modern church: God is using that church to further the gospel, yet no Christian of today ever teaches the gospel infallibly.
So since you advocate sola scriptura, my asking you to ground your beliefs in scripture should be about as worrisome to you as if I had asked you to ground your belief that God loves the world…something you believe true about the modern world, but only because you believe it has clear biblical precedent.
This is not a challenge to show that any gospel-teaching in the days of the apostle Paul was effective.
This is not a challenge to show that any gospel-teaching in the days of the apostle Paul resulted in converts.
This is a challenge to supply positive supporting evidence for what you believe, without your commentary on what you think the opponent “fails to establish”.
This is not an opportunity for you to switch the burden of proof and fallaciously pretend that God’s use of imperfect teachers back when apostle Paul was still alive, is default-true until proven wrong.
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Your error, again, is in your premise:
“When the apostle Paul was still alive, God’s efforts to further the gospel in the world included his using fallible gospel-teaching.”
There is nothing in anything that Paul said or taught that is in error.
Everything Paul taught was guided by the Holy Spirit.
Your error is that you either don’t know this about scripture, or refuse to accept this truth.
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Once again, you have misconstrued the challenge despite my efforts to guard against it being misconstrued. My challenge was:
Then you replied:
My challenge did not express or imply that it was requiring that you limit your answer solely to what “Paul said or taught”. My challenge rather required that you limit your answer to God’s efforts to further the gospel “when the apostle Paul was still alive.”
You obviously believe that plenty of gospel-preaching Christians existed “when the apostle Paul was still alive.”
Now that you know my challenge only limits you to the days apostle Paul was still alive, and doesn’t limit you merely to what Paul himself taught, please answer the challenge directly.
Your advocacy of sola scriptura necessarily implies that you won’t find a viewpoint about God to be viable or worth defending unless you can support it from the bible. So when you push a viewpoint about God (such as “God uses imperfect gospel-teaching today to further the gospel in the world”) there arises a very serious problem when you consistently fail to support it with scripture.
I suspect the reason you don’t say “God wants me to drive the car I currently drive instead of some other car” is because that is likewise something you cannot sustain from scripture…especially if you deny Calvinism and thus remain open to the possibility that you are capable of actually doing something God never wanted you to do. The point is: you remain silent about possible truths about God that cannot be supported from the bible.
And as a good sola scriptura advocate, you think all claims about God that cannot be sustained from scripture are speculative at best, and heretical at worst, correct?
Well? You harbor a belief that God uses today’s fallible gospel teaching to further the gospel. Since you can’t support it from scripture, is that belief speculative, heretical, or both?
Your prior efforts to provide scriptural support have failed: Acts 18 doesn’t express or imply that God used Apollos’ errant preaching, and yet God’s using fallible Christian teaching is a critical aspect of the challenge. Acts 11 only says God used the preaching of various Christians…it doesn’t specify whether during such preaching those teachers taught fallibly…which is the precise nuance YOU need to show from the bible.
Your comment that I couldn’t prove such teachings were “ineffective” was irrelevant: I don’t hold that fallible gospel teaching is “ineffective”. I hold that the post-apostolic belief that God uses fallible teaching to further the gospel, cannot be supported from the bible. Yes, I’ll be redundant and say it again: I’m still waiting. If you can’t meet the challenge with a single bible verse, use all the bible verses you please.
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If you have banned me from replying, please say so. My comments began automatically posting a few days ago. Now, they disappear when I hit “reply”, and I don’t know if that means a glitch in the system, or that you banned me, or what. But I’ll take the chance that you are still able to see this message.
If I asked you to support the proposition “God uses fallible imperfect teaching to spread the gospel”, you wouldn’t trifle that the proposition is framed in the negative, because you think the supporting evidence is overwhelming.
Please make the strongest argument possible to support the following proposition:
When the apostle Paul was still alive, God’s efforts to further the gospel in the world included his using fallible gospel-teaching.
Let me spell out what this requires, so that you don’t escape the problem with verbiage:
You must produce from the bible the following:
1 – a passage expressing or implying that God used the teaching of any Christian to further the gospel (you already have it in Acts 11:19 ff)
2 – a passage expressing or implying that the teaching God used, was fallible.
That is precisely what you believe true about the modern church: God is using that church to further the gospel, yet no Christian of today ever teaches the gospel infallibly.
So since you advocate sola scriptura, my asking you to ground your beliefs in scripture should be about as worrisome to you as if I had asked you to ground your belief that God loves the world…something you believe true about the modern world, but only because you believe it has clear biblical precedent.
This is not a challenge to show that any gospel-teaching in the days of the apostle Paul was effective.
This is not a challenge to show that any gospel-teaching in the days of the apostle Paul resulted in converts.
This is a challenge to supply positive supporting evidence for what you believe, without your commentary on what you think the opponent “fails to establish”.
This is not an opportunity for you to switch the burden of proof and fallaciously pretend that God’s use of imperfect teachers back when apostle Paul was still alive, is default-true until proven wrong.
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You were not banned.
Comments sometimes go into moderation automatically. I didn’t see your comment for four hours after you posted.
Also, as in your case, your subsequent comments are redundant, restating the same points I already addressed, so I may not answer them all.
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