Matthew Flannagan finds it difficult to answer simple questions about the sufficiency of scripture

In reply to Christian philosopher Matthew Flannagan's blog piece, wherein he tried to dispute the liberal interpretation of hell, I asked him whether he felt simply quoting the bible was sufficient to discharge his obligation as a Christian to teach and refute error.  He replied in the negative, that proof-texting was terrible error, I responded that this is exactly what several NT authors do in their own treatment of the OT.

Matt then asked me to go waste somebody else's time, and I took that as his subtle way of asking me to quit stomping him down intellectually.  Here's how it happened.

barry
Jan 5, 2018 at 10:17 am
 Matt,
 Do you believe that the biblical wording is “sufficient” for Christian faith and practice?

 Matt
Jan 5, 2018 at 12:09 pm
 Barry, sorry, but I don’t know what you mean when you say that “biblical wording” is sufficient for Christian faith and practise? 

 barry
Jan 5, 2018 at 1:19 pm
 By “biblical wording”, I meant the words of the bible. 

 Matthew Flannagan
Jan 5, 2018 at 6:37 pm
 By “biblical wording”, I meant the words of the bible.
 Sounds to me like your equivocating, when a person talks about the words of the Bible, they often mean by that what the bible teaches. But it could also be a reference to the phraseology, used by biblical authors.
 I am still unsure what you mean. 

 barry
Jan 6, 2018 at 8:41 am
 Do you believe that merely quoting Luke 16:19-31 verbatim to an Evangelical Annihilationist, without adding any commentary or argument, is ‘sufficient’ to discharge your Christian obligation to refute error?

Peter S WilliamsJan 7, 2018 at 3:27 am Please get someone to copy edit this article. There are sentences that make no grammatical sense and this is unfortunately obscuring the content.

 Matt
Jan 8, 2018 at 12:49 pm
 Barry, No, Luke 18 is a parable and it comes in a section where Jesus is discussing money and greed. So simply quoting it wouldn’t suffice, you’d have to make the case that in addition to making a point about money and greed, Jesus intended in this parable to give an accurate description of what hell is like. I think that’s dubious.
 Generally just quoting a passage without taking into account the context or Genre is a terrible method. Its known as proof-texting and is widely disparaged. 

 barry jones
Jan 10, 2018 at 12:13 pm
 If “proof-texting” is is a “terrible method” and is “widely disparaged”, then do you accuse Jesus and some NT authors of using a terrible method? 

 Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14, without commentary…as if he expected his readers to just “get it”, despite the obvious fact that no surviving pre-Christian Jewish commentary describes it as messianic (i.e., there was great likelihood Matthew knew the unbelieving Jews he wrote to did not accept Isaiah 7:14 as messianic, yet he quotes it verbatim, plus nothing, as if he expected that the quotation, alone, would be sufficient. 

 And since patristic testimony on Matthew indicates he wrote also for non-Christian Jews and not just Christian Jews, this appears to be a case of a NT author expecting an unbeliever to “get it” through nothing more than “proof-texting”.
 Hebrews 1:6 quotes Psalm 97:7 as if the latter was speaking about God’s “Son”, but again, without commentary. If Clement and Eusebius can be trusted, then Eusebius at H.E. 6:14 reports that Clement explained “the name “Paul an Apostle” was very properly not pre-fixed, for, he says, that writing to the Hebrews, who were prejudiced against him and suspected, he with great wisdom did not repel them in the beginning by putting down his name.” 

 That is, Paul was addressing unbelieving Jews (i.e., who were prejudiced against him) and apparently expecting them to just “get it” without his further commentary despite how obvious it must have been that such unbelieving Jews did not understand Psalm 97 to contain any references to Jesus. So Paul’s lack of commentary when quoting the bible to unbelievers seems to constitute the exact proof-texting that you call “widely disparaged”. Paul wasn’t doing much different here than KJV Onlyists do when street-preaching.
 Paul in Hebrews 10:5-10 does even worse: Although the Hebrew of Psalm 40:6 says “my ears you have opened”, Paul here quotes the Lxx form which says “but a body you have prepared for me”. 

 Here’s the problem: Paul is speaking to unbelieving Jews (Clement, supra), and here, quotes to them not just the Lxx form they are unlikely to prefer anyway (their problem with the Lxx obscuring or corrupting the text goes back at least to Ben Sira’s grandson’s extended prologue to Sirach, saying the Greek translation doesn’t have the same force as the Hebrew original, and that such differences are “not small”) but a specific form of a verse that aligns much more closely with Paul’s thought that God prepared a body for Jesus, a thought utterly at odds with what the unbelieving Jews Paul was addressing would accept…and yet Paul does exactly nothing to justify to them his convenient preference for a controversial Greek translation that just so happens to make the incarnation of Jesus much easier to prove. 

 Worse, Paul characterizes this as what God does when he brings Jesus “into the world”, when in fact nothing close to kenosis can be found in Psalm 40. So not only is Paul refusing to justify to an unbelieving audience his preference for a controversial translation of the Hebrew, he is also refusing to justify why he thinks this Psalm has anything to say about God bringing Jesus into the world. 

 If Paul didn’t feel the need to academically justify his arguments to those who clearly didn’t agree with those arguments, why do you? 

 If Paul can be comfortable quoting to unbelieving Jews a version of Psalm 40 that they do not agree with, and feel no need to provide the academic justification for it, why can’t you be comfortable quoting Luke 16 to liberals who do not agree with you on what it means, and feel no need to provide them any academic justification for your particular understanding?
 In Luke 4:4, Jesus answers the devil by proof-texting from Deut. 8:4, again, no commentary, as if he thought the mere verbatim quotation of the scripture, alone, was sufficient to discharge the need to rebuke or correct those who are in theological error. 

 We would hardly find the NT justifying such “proof-texting” if the NT authors agreed with modern conservative Christian scholars that one’s obligation in preaching/teaching requires them to follow up their verbatim bible quotes with their own commentary. 

 It would appear then, that the NT authors find it far less needful to provide academic justification, than do modern day conservative Christians. 

 How could you go wrong making the change and imitating the NT authors’ more simplistic methodology? You quote Luke 16 verbatim to the liberals who say hell is mere metaphor, that’s it, and you allocate the job of overcoming their academic objections, to the Holy Spirit. 

 Yeah, you’d lose your standing as a Christian “scholar”, but it’s more important to you to align as close as possible to the apostolic method of teaching unbelievers/heretics, than it is for you to impress your modern peers with your ability to trifle about scholarly minutiae, amen?
  

Matt
Jan 10, 2018 at 2:21 pm
 Barry, I see you want to change the subject from the post again to ask me to exegete a swath of different passages you disagree with.
 But for the record there is a difference between proof texting of the sort you were mentioning and enthyeme.
 How could you go wrong making the change and imitating the NT authors’ more simplistic methodology? You quote Luke 16 verbatim to the liberals who say hell is mere metaphor, that’s it, and you allocate the job of overcoming their academic objections, to the Holy Spirit.
 This is mistaken on several counts, First, the phrase “hell” is a metaphor, Jesus isnt literally referring to the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem but using a well known apocalyptic symbol almost no one conservative or liberal denies this.Theologians such as Jean Calvin and Charles Hodge acknowledge this, are they liberals? Second, as I pointed out the passage in Luke you mentioned is a parable, so your just misreading the Genre. It would be like the someone quoting Nathans story about a sheep as a teaching on shepherding.

 Yeah, you’d lose your standing as a Christian “scholar”, but it’s more important to you to align as close as possible to the apostolic method of teaching unbelievers/heretics, than it is for you to impress your modern peers with your ability to trifle about scholarly minutiae, amen?

 This is just ironic, skeptics emphasis reason and science and complain that religion is thoughtless based on faith and not reasoned, then they complain that Christian scholars use reason and complicated arguments.
 You come in and demand I respond to your arguments and then complain I engage in argument. I suggest you waste someone elses time. 

 barry jones
Jan 10, 2018 at 3:21 pm
 Matt,
 I’m not changing the subject. You impugned “proof-texting” as “terrible error”, so it was a legitimate move on my part to confront your evangelical self with passages from your own bible where biblical authors are committing the same alleged “error”. And since you didn’t do much to oppose, apparently, that strategy was correct. 

 You refuse to say which instances I quoted are a case of the bible author employing enthyeme, so I guess that means you wanted me to guess which ones were doing that. I shall not play guessing games with you. 

 When I said the liberals view hell as metaphor, I wasn’t mistaken, your problem is that you think there’s a “mistake” merely because, like a jailhouse lawyer, you can capitalize on your opponents failure to speak in detailed qualified manner. I obviously meant that the liberals view hell as ONLY metaphor, that is, they deny there’s any literal aspect to it. But because I didn’t use the word “only”, you cry “mistake!”, as if I didn’t’ know the conservative position that agrees biblical hell is metaphorical in certain aspects. Stop being so quick to leap from somebody’s failure to qualify, over to “mistake!”. 

 You say you “pointed out” that the passage is a parable, but “pointed out” is not “argument”, and as such, you did not justify disagreement with other Christian scholars who say this story is real history and not parable, such as Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Intervarsity, 2006), p. 534?

 “skeptics emphasis reason and science and complain that religion is thoughtless based on faith and not reasoned, then they complain that Christian scholars use reason and complicated arguments.”

——-But that’s your problem: Your own bible condemns any effort you make to justify your treatment of scripture to unbelievers or heretics with academic argument. Therefore, when you make such argument, you can be condemned with your own bible as not living up to the more simplistic method advocated by NT authors. When you DON’T make academic argument, you might be living up to the more simple standard of NT authors, but the consequence is that nobody is obligated to seriously consider a position that has nothing more behind it except “proof-texting”. It is not my fault if you wish to uphold two contradictory standards of proof, the academic argument approved by modern scholars, and the proof-texting employed by NT authors.

 “You come in and demand I respond to your arguments and then complain I engage in argument.”

——-You wish to look good to modern people, thus calling for scholarly level argument, but you refuse to condemn the NT authors for their more simplistic argument via proof-texting.  It is not my fault if your attempt to serve two different masters makes it easy to condemn pretty much any scriptural argument you attempt.

 “I suggest you waste someone elses time.”

——Perhaps I was also wasting my time asking you to describe and source whatever moral yardstick you were using to justify saying torturing babies solely for entertainment is objectively immoral, given that you essentially disappeared after I pressed that matter.
 That you are wrong about me wasting your time (and wrong in your implication that this was my primary motive in dialoguing with you), all anybody has to do is check out my list of challenges to you in the last post over at http://www.mandm.org.nz/2017/10/richard-carrier-on-the-moral-scepticism-objection-to-divine-command-theory.html 

 When you are prepared to defend the matters those challenges attack, you know where I blog.
 https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/11/my-challenge-to-matthew-flannagan.html
 Conversing with you was fun and educational. Fare ye well.