Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Revelation, Part 9.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

Having offered a defense of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, we began to look last time at how

we should respond then to biblical difficulties that would call this doctrine into question.

And we specified three different types of difficulties that one might confront. One would be inconsistencies

among the biblical documents themselves. A second would be factual mistakes where the scriptures

affirm one thing but we know from secular history or other documents that this is not

the case, or we think it's not the case.

And finally, what we might call ethical mistakes, where the scriptures teach things about our

moral duties that just seem wrong. It seems ethically in error and therefore couldn't

have been inspired by God. Now last time I suggested with respect to dealing with difficulties

that are in the category of inconsistencies, these are very largely reconcilable by understanding the genre of ancient biography

and the sort of latitude that historians had to use techniques like

telescoping, paraphrase, displacement, transferal of dialogue, and so forth.

And that when we understand these literary techniques that were common to ancient writing,

that we're not forced into brittle and artificial harmonizations of biblical accounts that seem to be at face value inconsistent

with each other. Such techniques lay within the parameters of a truthful narrative.

I also suggested that harmonization can be used on occasion when it's not overly artificial

or incredible and that finally in some cases we may simply have to say that we don't know

how two accounts are to be reconciled, but we simply hold the truth in tension

and hope that perhaps with further information we would know how these accounts are to be

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