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| Q: | My girlfriend is a faithful Lutheran and I am trying to get acquainted with your beliefs. I understand that you believe that the Bible is the divine word of God, unerring in any.htmlect, no matter how small. There are errors in the Bible though, the most obvious of which is the genealogy of Christ given in Matthew 1 and again in Luke 3. These are distinctly different which means that either the Bible can't be the perfect word of God in every detail or that God somehow got confused, which I refuse to believe. Another example is in Genesis where Jacob wrestles with and sees God, but John says that no one has ever seen God. Jacob says, "I saw God face to face." There is no way that that can be misinterpreted. Another contradiction is when Abraham marries his sister: In numerous other places this is listed as a sin but God gave His blessing. I don't wish to be rude in my questioning but I find many of your other beliefs reasonable and I want to clear this up for myself. I personally feel that the Bible could be of divine inspiration, but it is still written by imperfect human hands that were capable of error. I also don't feel that Jesus (Christianity) is the only path to God. I think God has sent many messengers to humans that all give the same message. I think that any prophet(?) that teaches according to the Bible is correct in God's eye. Hopefully you can give me a Lutheran (WELS) explanation of these issues. | ||||||
| A: | There are some difficult passages in the Bible, but none of the examples you list could be considered to be an error or even a significant problem to the Bible's claim of reliability. If someone says, "I told you a thousand times not to do that" and later says "I told you a million times not to do that," no reasonable person would regard that as an error or ask which is the literally correct figure and which is the error. They would understand that the identical point was being made by either assertion. There may be some questions about alleged contradictions which we do not have sufficient information to answer, but the great majority are easily explained. None of the questions you raised is a significant problem. Concerning the genealogies: Many people in Israel had two genealogies, one of their physical descent and one their legal descent. Because of an institution called levirate marriage a man who was the physical descendant of one man was the legal descendant of another. There are several places where this factor plays into Jesus' genealogies. The most common explanation of the two genealogies of Jesus is that Luke gives the physical descent through Mary and Matthew the legal descent through Joseph, Jesus' legal father. There are other possibilities, none of which involve error in the Bible. Concerning seeing God's face: the best answer to this is to read Exodus 33. There the same writer in the same chapter says both that Moses met God face to face ( v 11) and that Moses could not see God's face (v 20) and sees no contradiction in this. "To see God face to face" means to receive direct communication from him without an intermediary. This Moses could do. "To see his face" means to see his full, unveiled glory. No sinful man can do this and survive. The command against marrying one's sister comes from hundreds of years after the life of Abraham. One cannot break a law before it exists. Even if what Abraham did was wrong, it would not pose any problem to the Bible's reliability. There are many other examples in the Bible in which people did something God disapproved of, but which he made work out for their good in the end. God can bless us even in spite of our errors and sins. The real problem confronting you is the one in your last paragraph: the claim that Jesus is the only way to God. There are really only two religions in the world. One is the religion of works. It gives you a set of rules and says, "If you keep these rules, you will be in good standing with God." This religion comes in many brand names: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, but the principle is always the same. The other religion is the religion of free forgiveness by God's grace and mercy. It says you could never be good enough to pay for your sins yourself, so Christ had to pay for them for you on the cross. Since he has paid the full price of your forgiveness, there is nothing left for you to pay for forgiveness. The good a Christian does is not an attempt to buy God's favor. It is showing love to God for his free gift. This is the critical claim of the Bible that makes Christianity different from every other religion. A good book to read about this is The Cross and the Common Man by Herman Gockel. | ||||||
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