Spinal Tap apologetics: gospel accounts
I like to call well-meaning apologetics attempts to "straighten out" the diffeences in the gospels as "Spinal Tap" apologetics. Some will get the "turn it up to eleven" reference,
Daniel Kirk:
It is your pastoral responsibility to help people
recognize that the Bible we actually have, rather than the Bible of our
imaginations, is the word of God.
If you don’t give your people a
category for this kind of diverse Bible being the word of God, then you
will create a false sense of connection between a supposedly uniform,
univocal Bible and the Christian faith as such. So what happens when
they go off to college and take a Bible class at State University? What
happens when they get bored one Saturday and map out (or try, anyway)
the last week of Jesus’ life in each of the four Gospels?
Uh oh.
That’s
when they discover that the Bible isn’t what you led them to believe.
And if that imagined Bible is necessary for believing what God has to
say about Jesus and the Christian faith in general, then the latter are
apt to crumble as well.
Make no mistake, there are tremendous
pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But
one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where
media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a
single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have
actually been given.
full post
here
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