Mike Licona's Misrepresentation of J. I. Packer and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy 

Thank you for this. A lot went over my head, I fear, but I got the main gist. And your question at the end about Licona's view of God is exactly what I keep wondering.

Came here from Krista’s page. Thank you for this!

👍👍everything you said.

I think Mike went too far . I actually think recognising that the gospels are Greco Roman biographies is not a bad thing at all reason being it actually shatters the so called contradictions the skeptics bring up . Like the women at the tomb . If gospels are Greco Roman bios and the writes were just using telescoping (which was fine in that genre ) it shatters the objection and we even see later following the tomb writers give away that their were other women such as “we” in John . Mike took it too far though with the saints though.

I think that terms like "infallibility" and "inerrancy" make great slogans but terrible epistemology. As slogans, they're a great way to summarize saying, "I'm at a place where I'm going to take the words of the Bible seriously in moral matters." There's a whole series of conversations that roll out of that which are meaningful, important, and useful. But it puts statements like, "That's just the word of bronze age goat herders" out of bounds. I'd rather listen to inspired goat herders from the bronze age (however we parse both the truths and the errors in that) than the self-absorbed ramblings of a 21st century dictator with a doctorate. Even if we take the question of inspiration out and set that to one side for a comparative example, Euclid's Elements are still taken seriously as a foundation for mathematical thinking by mathematicians today, and it's between the age of the Prophets and the New Testament. Just a few years ago on the Numberphile RU-vid Channel, Dr. James Grime spoke about that and I found that interesting. So the idea of just decoupling or distancing ourselves from the text just for its antiquity or inconvenience or language or picking and choosing what's convenient for a political or personal cause is out of bounds. We may not like personally, it may say things that we find inconvenient theologically or, or it may be hard to reconcile politically, but we wrestle with it and we seek to understand it first and make what it means for us to do and seek a priority over personal preference or theological investigation or political commitment. As epistemology, these kinds of terms are used to shut down conversation and build pseudo-political parties. Taking the example of the saints raised with Jesus in Matthew, Licona notes that something like this that only occurs in one historical source are viewed skeptically by historians. I've known people personally that found that comforting, and the reasons are varied enough to not need to go into all of them, but to give two it assured one that I knew that he hadn't missed the resurrection and for another it helped to relieve anxiety that the resurrection would be temporary since we don't still have first century saints walking around. Others find the idea that Matthew might have included this as a rhetorical device to be very uncomfortable because then they fear that the whole thing is just one long rhetorical device, including the resurrection. Words like inerrancy and infallibility are pulled out when someone has one particular kind of anxiety to the detriment of those that have the other kind of anxiety. It's a way of saying, "If that's your anxiety, then get out of the church: only my kind of anxiety is welcome here." I personally find that unhelpful. For me, everything is open to question and criticism and investigation and scrutiny. My only allegiance is to the truth, and if the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy is used shut down conversations seeking truth just because it lessons one group's anxiety, then I have no use for it. Further, it creates pseudo-political divisions. It turns into a "I hold up inerrancy better than you do!" game. Then you get someone that really does run off the rails with it, really does hold it higher, and it turns into a "Oh, well, that doesn't count because…" game. The easy examples are the Hebrew Roots nuts that fixate on kosher dietary laws and Old Testament festivals and such. Then there are those that say we should start kissing each other when church starts. (Romans 16:16, 1 Corinthians 16:20, 2 Corinthians 13:12, 1 Thessalonians 5:26, 1 Peter 5:14, Exodus 18:7, 1 Samuel 20:41, Proverbs 24:26) or excommunicate anyone involved in a civil lawsuit with another Christian (1 Corinthians 6:5-7) and they've gone too far. But they're really just playing the same game, only they're committing to the bit a little more. They're holding things up as infallible that are inconvenient and uncomfortable, and criticizing those of us that say they're expressions of speech and cultural. That's the problem with these pseudo-political divisions: there's always someone willing to commit to the bit even harder than you are and they'll create a faction that criticizes you for not going far enough, then they'll turn it into a vehicle for abuse. Even among the Great Creeds, the Nicene Creed had to be tempered with the Definition of Chalcedon because there were those running off the deep end of Jesus's divinity to the exclusion of his humanity and the divisions or mixtures of his divinity and humanity. If even the greatest creed of all time could turn into a vehicle of abuse when over applied, I think there's room for humility in our own modern understanding of these important concepts.