HT: Messy Christian

The Catholic Church in the UK has issued a teaching document that clarifies its position on the doctrine of inspiration of the Scirptures and the doctrine of inerrancy. While I suspect that this Times UK report of the issuance of the document has put a spin on to the tone and contents of the document, I do think that there is a distinction between those two concepts.

When you read the newspaper report, try to get past the journalist’s commentary (in the way the report is worded, for instance in the way it describes fundamentalists and the “rise of the Religious Right, especially in the US”), and just focus on these two issues:

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Often debates about the God center upon proofs or evidence, or the lack thereof, for His existence. It is well known that no one can provide evidence in the scientific sense that there exists such a being as the Christian God. Yet, everyone concedes that it is also impossible to disprove the existence of God. Many atheists suggest that this lack of proof does not preclude them from questioning the rationality of religious beliefs, since scientific rationalism has banished once and for all those superstitious beliefs in myths and fairy tales of the ancients, to which they classify religious beliefs of any kind.

This seems certainly the case for Nobel Laureate James D. Watson, whose Los Angeles Times opinion piece on “Why Darwin’s still a hotshotâ€? declares that religious bigotry prevented Darwin’s theory to be considered a law as it ought to be (if you cannot get to the page, email me (on this page) and I will send you a PDF version of his article). At least that was his argument for he thinks the evidence for evolution is as plentiful as there are for, say the law of gravity. Of course when he says this, he does not mean that evolution is a law in the sense that it is a repeatable and testable process. He is saying that evolution is a law probably in the sense that he considers it law-like in its explanatory power and in the statistical sense. He is probably incorrect to equate it with an indisputable law like gravity.

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Well, this is not going to be a philosophical treatise about just war theory. It is just a going to be a comment about a debate over at Phillip Johnson’s’s blog who argued that pacifism is unbiblical (HT: SmartChristian’s blog). Johnson’s support for this assessment is from Romans 13: 4: “For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”

According to Johnson, this verse provides scriptural justification for all governments to use force, gross and even fatal violence if necessary, to punish or prevent evildoers from continuing in their evil ways. So presumably, a government has the divine authority, even mandate, to strike out at another nation in declaration of war in order to prevent that nation or government from doing evil. (He doesn’t really say this, mind you, what he says is that it is the duty of a government to strike back in retaliation). This, Johnson says is “doing good” “as ministers of God.”

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