ICBI Article 5

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I apologize for the delays in writing. I have been busy. I also want to thank a kind reader who sent me a very encouraging message today. It is greatly appreciated.

I’m going to continue our look at Inerrancy tonight with article 5 of the ICBI statement which reads as follows:

We affirm that God’ s revelation in the Holy Scriptures was progressive.

We deny that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever corrects or contradicts it. We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writings.

This is something I can agree with easily a well. I do hold that there can be seeming contradictions between the Scriptures, but those are more apparent and not real. It can be difficult understanding the relation between Law and Grace for instance. Or there’s the eschatological debate of “Is there a distinction between Israel and the Church?”

At the same time, we do realize we are not a religion like Islam with one book that came down very quickly in a relatively short period, but a book that has a written history consisting of around 2,000 years or so, depending upon what date is given to Job and the Mosaic writings.

Since I have mentioned Islam, it could be asked if we have the problem of abrogated verses. No. We do not. While we do not live under the Theocracy of Israel any more, we do still acknowledge a rule of God. There is debate over how that is displayed in the world today depending on your view of eschatology, but all Christians affirm we are not in a state where we have to offer sacrifices and such.

However, does that mean that the laws that were given about sacrifices are absolutely useless to us? Not at all. We may not have to undergo the Levitical system today found in Leviticus, but that does not mean that we can cut Leviticus out of our Bibles, and it’s not just because there are moral passages in there. The passages on how to offer up offerings are important as well since we can find images of Christ in them and we can learn about the nature of God, forgiveness, how great it is today, and about the history of Israel.

It is important to include that revelation on a normative basis has ceased. Some Christians do think God still does speak some today, but few would say it is normative and what is said should be written down and included as Scripture. This would also present a problem to groups like the Mormons who believe in a living prophet today and who believe in extra books being Scripture outside of orthodox works and it would be a problem for Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe the Watchtower is a continuing channel of truth today giving meat in the proper time.

So we conclude then that we can agree with article 5.

We shall continue next time.

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