Theologians Have Good Reasons for Believing that God Didn’t Say or Do What the Bible Clearly Says He Said and Did

A review of evangelical theologian and apologist Randal Rauser’s Conversations With My Inner Atheist, Part 4:

“Mia” (Rauser’s nickname for his doubts): In the vast majority of cases, it would seem like [God’s] biblical punishments end up looking like suddenly smacking a child because of some action they did last week; the punishment is completely disconnected from the specific offense.

Rauser: One response [to this perceived disturbing behavior by the God of the Bible] would be to take an antirealist stance toward those descriptions. …One would interpret those descriptions in a non-literal sense: that is, God did not literally punish people in that manner.

Mia: Sounds like you’re traipsing onto dangerous ground for a good evangelical Christian. God didn’t actually say what God clearly said? Keep going! I want to see how much trouble you get into on this one.

Rauser: …Theologians have very good reasons for reading the Bible in the ways they do because they draw on several sources when interpreting the Bible including their intuitions, their logical reasoning, and their experience. All that can lead to a perfectly defensible portrait of God, one that is quite different from the descriptions written down on at least some of the pages of the Bible. In particular, it can mean that the theologian ends up concluding that various actions attributed to God within the biblical narrative did not occur as described.

[emphasis, Gary’s]

–pp. 80-81

Gary: Let me translate: As long as you are a “theologian” you can read and interpret the Bible in any manner which you deem acceptable to your intuitions, reasoning, and experiences. If you are not a theologian, you are unqualified to draw your own conclusion about what the God of the Bible really meant to say…even if your conclusion is word for word what the Bible says!

It seems evangelicals have returned to the pre-Luther days of the Church, when it was assumed that only bishops and Church theologians were capable of understanding and interpreting what God had to say to humanity in his Holy Word.

You can read part 5 here.

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End of post.